Iron Man (2008)

Now that it’s nearly 2010– a decade after 2000, a year I once contemplated with awe in Ms. Conyers’ Language Arts class because I would be as old as Sting– it’s time to screen all those films I missed almost 2 years ago. The oughts (00’s) were a crap decade. Expectations those of us of a certain age had quietly nursed have been cast to the side of road like the shuck of a blown tire and we now face a deeper, more insidious version of what Hunter S. Thompson memorably tagged “the New Dumb.” The spine of American-style capitalist democracy finally buckled and snapped with the 2000 election (a judicial coup which has been carefully rehabilitated as a minor glitch in the system long since redeemed by the following two rounds of voting); the millenarian contortions of the post-conservative right resulted in millions of dead, maimed, orphaned, widowed and displaced people; and neoliberalism– its policies responsible for the greatest economic cataclysm since Black Tuesday– seems to have retained a patina of credibility among those Americans who can’t be bothered to be minimally informed about current events.

Here in Babylon, where we speak only in declarative sentences and the rentier class rules with a demented arrogance usually reserved for Roman proconsuls sotted on lead-rich wine, it is a time for studious reflection– or, barring that, the season for catching up with pop cinema. Last week I screened Iron Man (2008) directed by Jon Favreau and starring Robert Downey, Jr., Terrence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges, among others. Howard plays an army colonel with an expansive portfolio including rather vague intelligence duties, a key role in military-industrial R & D, and public-affairs work. His friend, Tony Stark (Downey), a character who puts the 13 in PG-13– narcissistic, surrounded by cool toys, always primed with a wisecrack– has developed a new weapons system called Jericho (as in “Joshua fought the battle of”) which for no explicable reason he has gone to Afghanistan to demonstrate. This event provides the pretext for a condensed narrative on American military intervention in the form of a glib bromide any College Republican would be proud to dispense:

They say that the best weapon is the one you never have to fire. I respectfully disagree. I prefer the weapon you only have to fire once. That’s how Dad did it, that’s how America does it… and it’s worked out pretty well so far.

At this point in the film it is not clear that Favreau has any sort of satirical intent, an ambiguity which never quite dwindles. Instead, barring a conversion experience that leads Stark to question his involvement in the production of WMD, the film’s protagonist remains shallow and smug. With the exception of Obadiah Stane (Bridges)– a creepy weapons contractor and Stark’s business partner whose bald dome strikes a visual rhyme with Raza, the film’s central villain of color– the predicates of “military humanism” (i.e., altruism in the service of global hegemony) remain intact. Marvel at Stark in his gold and candy-apple red suit, defending hapless Afghan peasants from the depredations of Taliban/Al Qaeda thugs! Wince as that personification of military-industrial greed, Obadiah Stane, slams Stark to the ground while they battle to determine the fate of the world!

The original version of Iron Man, as he appeared as a comic book hero in 1963, confronted wily communist agents in the jungles of Vietnam. The anti-communist origins of the character continue to influence Favreau’s contemporary rendering, albeit in distorted form. The modest, liberalish critique of militarism expressed here is paved over by an unexamined, perhaps even unconscious, complicity with the most disruptive and destructive effects of the US’s enduring love affair with itself, American exceptionalism. But perhaps the most noxious moment in the film is when Stark returns to the States after 3 months imprisoned in a cave and informs his attractive but sexually benign assistant, Pepper Potts (Paltrow) that he wants “an American cheeseburger.” Cut to Stark munching a carefully groomed disk of antibiotic-laced beef and partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil with the Burger King logo prominently displayed. It’s tempting to locate the center of the film in this scene– Downey, Jr. demonstrating his thespian chops by consuming the culinary and nutritional equivalent of crack cocaine with apparent relish, the audience recognizing on a sub-verbal level that they too are eating this cheeseburger, gag reflex paralyzed, uncertain whether once it goes down it’ll come right back up– but that would misconstrue a cheap truth for critical insight. Suffice to say that part of Iron Man’s charm– as with much pop product, for better and worse–  is its garish disregard for anything other than itself. And like a Burger King cheeseburger this film has been painstakingly engineered for consumption.

This short article seems to resonate with some of the things Prof. Franks discussed in lecture today regarding the increasing porosity of borders in an age of globalization.

From the LA Times:

Drone aircraft will be used to nab illegal immigrants on California-Mexico border

December 7, 2009 | 7:33 am

Predator drones, the unmanned aircraft used by the U.S. military in the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones, will soon be employed to track illegal immigrants on the Mexico-California border.

The drone, which will be unveiled later today, will be operated out of the Antelope Valley by the military contractor General Atomics. The drones will fly above the border region with advancing electronic tracking equipment looking for illegal immigrants crossing into California.

According to the San Diego-based company, the drones will transmit information to U.S. authorities on human smuggles as well drug smuggling.

Such drones are already used on the border of Texas and Arizona.

Three things to note:

a) if in fact political boundaries are increasingly open to human migration or other demographic shifts, then there is clearly an effort on the part of nation-states to regulate those “flows.”

b) this particular effort uses military-grade hardware operated by a private company. Remember that one of the core tenets of neoliberal globalization (aka Empire) is the diminution of the public sector in favor of private “solutions.”

c. the mission of the drone surveillance includes not only “illegal” immigration– here described as “human trafficking,” which raises the specter of what in the 1910s was called “white slavery” (the traffic in young women, enslaved for nefarious purposes)– but drug interdiction. We could view this pairing of law enforcement mandates as a means of establishing an equivalence between them via reification– i.e. both dope and undocumented workers are a form of contraband.

finally,

d) the methods and technologies being used in foreign wars are now trickling into mainstream law enforcement in the US. If you recall the Pittsburgh demonstrations against the G8 earlier this year then you’ll no doubt remember that local police used a sonic weapon called an LRAD first deployed in Iraq. Now predator drones are cruising not only the US-Mex. international border, but between states such as Texas and Arizona. I think we can see this as a provisional confirmation of one of the remarks I made during last Wednesday’s lecture: that Empire disturbs the distinction between inside (domestic) and outside (foreign).

Here they are. If you have any questions about anything we’ve covered including the prompts for the final address them here so that everyone can benefit from your inquisitiveness.

AMS 1B / Fall 2009 Connelly, Franks, and Sansbury

Essay Questions for the Final Exam (in your Seminar Room)

One of the following three essay questions will be selected for the final exam, which will take place on Friday, December 11, 9:45 to 12noon, in our Seminar Rooms. The essay portion of the final will be worth 40% of the total exam grade.

Both the Beats and Weatherman (the Weather Underground Organization or WUO) criticized or attempted to revolutionize Cold War America. What is the form and substance of this criticism/attempted transformation of the social and cultural landscape of the United States? What were its results?

The struggle for democracy in America has pushed diverse Americans to claim membership in the People’s Club. Based on the readings and lectures, analyze this struggle for inclusion in the People’s Club. Have these struggles worked? Has the U.S. effectively become a democracy? In your analysis, focus on the post-World War II experiences of FIVE of the following overlapping groups: 1) African Americans, 2) Asian Pacific Americans, 3). Latino/as, 4) American Indians, 5) women, 6) gays and lesbians, 7) and the poor. Be sure to be specific enough to demonstrate you’ve done the reading and paid attention in class. Be sure to use the lectures, primary sources from Heath, and secondary sources such as Norton to back up your analysis.

Consider the post WWII women’s movement. 1) How does it compare with other “rights” movements? Other “liberation” movements? How do you explain the similarities and differences? 2) In what ways did the conflicts among women with different backgrounds and views hurt the movement? In what ways did they advance it? Draw on the lectures, the Norton textbook, and readings about post-war social movements for evidence. Be sure to use at least three of the following readings: Vicki Ruiz, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., selections from Sing a Battle Song, Audre Lorde, Combahee River Collective, and Gloria Anzaldúa.

Just a bit more on the Obama speech. Andrew Bacevich and Nir Rosen were on Democracy Now on Dec. 2. Bacevich, who self-identifies as a conservative and graduated from West Point in 1969, could with some justice be deemed a right wing anti-imperialist in the (small ‘r’) republican tradition while Rosen is a journalist who has spent extensive time in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

The link is here, but let me emphasize the following remarks:

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama also praised the United States as a country that has not sought world domination or occupation.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: More than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades, a time that for all its problems has seen walls come down and markets opened, and billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress in advancing frontiers of human liberty. For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for, what we continue to fight for, is a better future for our children and grandchildren and we believe that their lives will be better if other people’s children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama last night at West Point. Nir Rosen?

NIR ROSEN: Every empire has claimed it’s not an empire, it doesn’t want to occupy, it wants to help. Indeed, the American empire has done the same thing. The British in Iraq [in the early 20th century] were uttering the same things the Americans in Iraq were uttering in their occupation. Why do we have military bases all over the world if not an empire seeking to control much of the world? These days imperialism works in a different way. Maybe you don’t need direct physical control of every place, but you still have the physical force and the threat of violence. Indeed, I think we are actually a failure as an empire. We actually managed to make the Taliban look good. We took the most detested regime in the world, the Taliban, removed them in a matter of weeks and here seven or eight years later they’re more popular than ever. They’re stronger than ever.

AMY GOODMAN:Among who?

NIR ROSEN: Among the people in Pakistan and many Afghans, at least many Pashtuns. When I’ve been in Afghanistan you often hear non-Pashtuns expressing hostility to Americans. I have heard many Tajiks say, “Amreeka Dushman Islam”, “America is the enemy of Islam.” Nobody really wants the Americans there.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Professor Bacevich, your book is called “The Limits of Power, The End of American Exceptionalism”, responding to what Nir Rosen has said and President Obama’s last point about why we are in Afghanistan.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Yeah, I mean, I think the president’s sort of capsule description of modern U.S. history and our role in the world is extraordinarily important and the reason it is important is because that text could of been lifted out of a speech by Harry Truman, by John Kennedy, by Lyndon Johnson, by Richard Nixon, by Ronald Reagan, or by George W. Bush. This is the preferred narrative of American history, the way we prefer to see ourselves and, therefore, the narrative that we use to justify all that we do in the world. It is really telling and extraordinary that this president, whose background is quite different from all those other presidents that I just named, and who came to office promising to bring about change, it is extraordinary that he himself would embrace that narrative so uncritically. I think that is indicative of the extent to which whether there is going to be any change in Washington, it is simply going to be changes on the margins and that the Washington consensus, the status quo, is firmly in place.

Gareth Porter has an interesting take on the backdrop to Obama’s decision at Counterpunch.

And Jeremy Scahill has a recent article on the “secret” war in Pakistan at The Nation.

It usually feels a little weird to lecture on contemporary political issues and Wednesday was no exception. I’m painfully aware that as Ellen Meiskens Woods puts it:

“We are well prepared to view class power as having nothing to do with either power or class. We are educated to see property as the most fundamental human right and the market as the true realm of freedom. We are taught to view the state as just a necessary evil to sustain the right of property and the free market. We are taught to accept that most social conditions are determined in an economic sphere outside the read of democracy. We learn to think of ‘the people’ not in social terms, as the common people, the working class, or anything to do with popular power, but as a purely political category; and we confine democracy to a limited, formal political sphere. As the founding fathers intended, we think of political rights as essentially passive, and citizenship as a passive, individual, even private identity, which may express itself by voting from time to time but which has no active, collective, or social meaning.”

Politics don’t simply have to do with marshaling the facts. There is a powerful personal attachment to political ideology, something that runs so deep that political disputes can often become bitter and intractable. Confronting a room full of people who are in many ways in the earlier stages of their political development– I’m not trying to be condescending here but reflecting on my own development, which didn’t really get started until I was well into my 20s– with statements like “the US is an empire” runs the risk of alienating them completely.

Probably I wasn’t careful enough with my presentation. One remark I really ought to have made is that in order to get anywhere in analyzing the question of Empire a clear distinction needs to be drawn between individual acts and motives on the one hand and the larger “logic” or impersonal forces of collective (national, imperial) policies on the other.

The transcript of Obama’s much anticipated decision to send more troops to Afghanistan is out. You can find it here among other places. After a quick read I have only a few remarks:

1. Obama completely glosses the US role in the destabilization of Afghanistan and its direct responsibility for the rise of Al Qaeda.

2. Those of you who have read Woods’ essay will likely hear echoes of her criticisms of “democracy as the ideology of empire”:

And we must make it clear to every man, woman and child around the world who lives under the dark cloud of tyranny that America will speak out on behalf of their human rights, and tend to the light of freedom and justice and opportunity and respect for the dignity of all peoples. That is who we are. That is the moral source of America’s authority.

*    *    *

For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for – and what we continue to fight for – is a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.

3. He has totally rejected the notion of a political settlement which would include the Taleban.

4. Obama makes a vague gesture at increasing military aid to Pakistan though he does not specify what shape that aid will take. Predator drones?

5. Is it possible that the US will increase its “overseas contingency operations” in Somalia and Yemen?

Where al-Qaida and its allies attempt to establish a foothold – whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.

6. Despite the fact that only a few weeks ago James Jones suggested there were as few as 80 or 100 Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, Obama chooses to emphasize them as a threat.

You’ve got the reading, right? If not, you can download it from this link:

DemoAsIdeoOfEmpire

Cracking the Empire

Keywords:

1. Political terms, including euphemisms (marked with *)

Empire, obviously.

And collateral terms:

imperial, imperialism, colonial, colonialism, colonization, neo-colonialism, neo-imperialism (?)

militarization

democracy

ideology

*special administrative measures

*extraordinary rendition

*enhanced interrogation techniques (i.e., torture) including water boarding, shackling, hooding, stress positions

KUBARK

war on terror (GWOT, GSAVE, WW IV)

“overseas contingency operations”

geostrategy

neoconservatism

2. Economic

Globalization or Globalism?

neoliberalism (neoclassical economics)

IMF (World Bank)

WTO

private contractor (i.e. mercenary)

Blackwater (Xe) Titan, CACI, et al.

3. Military terms, including euphemisms (marked with #)

4th generation warfare

#shock and awe

#clear and hold

full spectrum dominance

depleted uranium

#collateral damage

smart (and– believe it– “brilliant”) weapons

MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast)

white phosphorous

#shake and bake fire mission (Fallujah)

cluster bomb

PUC (person under control): extremist/ militant/ terrorist

#“stop loss”

PTSD

black site

4. Cultural terms

haji

Taliban (“the students”)

Al Qaida (“the base” or “the database”)

Quotes:

“Modern democracies have been around for long enough for neo-liberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy– the ‘independent’ judiciary, the ‘free’ press, the parliament– and molding them to their purpose. The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to the highest bidder” (3).

– Arundhati Roy

“We know how people create enemies where none exists. We know, and have plenty of pictures to illustrate it, what happens in war when the target is not quite hit. We are familiar with the words for damage and casualties which we are told to accept as inevitable. We are used to the relatively small number of its own dead that the world’s number one ruling power has to count and mourn while the mass of enemy dead, including women and children, go uncounted and are not worth mourning.

“So now we wait for the new war and the old repetitions. This time new missile systems will be even more accurate. We can be confident about the choice of pictures from this looming war. The flow of images will be sanitized of every detail of horror. Familiar TV channels will be there to give us a new installment of war as soap opera, interrupted only by ads for consumers who are living happily in peace.”

– Gunter Grass

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

–anonymous Bush administration official, possibly Karl Rove.

“I ask our youngest citizens to believe the evidence of your eyes. You have seen duty and allegiance in the determined faces of our soldiers. You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs. Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself – and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country, but to its character.”

– GW Bush

“For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for – and what we continue to fight for – is a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.”

– Barack Obama, Dec. 1 2009

“No one likens September 11 to August 6. Instead, the analogy we hear over and over again is to Pearl Harbor, December 7, even though the experience of a sudden, horrific attack on civilians in an urban center seems, in fact, much more like the events of September 11 than the Japanese attack on a US naval base.”

– Amy Kaplan

“The United States was not attacked because we are free.  Bin Laden was not attacking the Bill of Rights.  We were attacked because the United–over here because the United States’ military and political presence is massive over there.”

– Pat Buchanan

“The war is part of an alibi every imperialism has given itself, a civilizing mission carried to the extreme, as it always must be.”

—Gayatri Spivak

“Even before September 11th, the US government had a military presence in 140 countries. The United States now has military personnel deployed in 156 countries. It has between 700 to 800 military bases around the world totaling more than 250,000 personnel with around 845,000 different buildings and equipments covering land surface of 30 million acres.

“The United States has long been involved in meddling with the affairs and influencing the domestic policies of the third world nations directly and indirectly. Some of the methods used for exercising influence over the subject nations include initially providing arms and aid, training foreign military leaders, conducting covert actions through the CIA and twisting arms through organizations like the United Nations. The procedure involves providing aid to the less developed nations through IMF and World Bank, funded by the West, that leads to the eventual inability of the  poor country to repay the loan. Part of the debt is forgiven the third world countries are asked to make laws favorable to the West. These poor nations are then bound to become subordinate to the loan providing nations.”

–Pakistan Daily, Aug. 21 2009

“[T]here are different types of empire and they maintain their interests in different ways. Argentina, for instance, was never a formal part of the British Empire but in the 19th century it was so dependent upon the London bond market that it was, to all intents and purposes, part of the Informal Empire.

“The end of the Cold War could have changed some of this. But rather than retreat, the US actually expanded. The world, famously, became uni-polar. In addition to its financial interests and leadership, the [Americans] maintained their network of bases around the globe. The message was clear: the US is prepared to intervene in any country on earth. Just as importantly, it maintained the capability of so intervening.”

– Alex Massie

“For years they had preyed on the Saracens, had taken nobody knows what spoils of gems, precious metals, silks, ivories– the cream of the cream of the East. That is history, sir. We all know that the Holy Wars to them, as to the Templars, were largely a matter of loot.”

–Caspar Gutman from Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon

“Ain’t r de Emperor? De laws don’t go for him.”

–Brutus Jones from Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones

“The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the Culture Industry.”

– TW Adorno

“God has… made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America…. We are trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace.”

– Sen. Albert Beveridge

“Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords… concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.”

– Eugene Debs

“Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!

skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic

industries! spectral nations! invincible mad

houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!”

– Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

“It is an illusion that imperialism will decay peacefully. Imperialism has meant constant war. Imperialists defend their control of the means of life with terrible force. There is no reason to believe they will become humane or relinquish power.”

– WUO, Prairie Fire

“War is the health of the state.”

– Randolph Bourne

“Detached from religion and at the same time purged of the doubts that haunted its classical exponents, the belief in the market as a divine ordinance became a secular ideology of universal progress….”

– John Gray

“The best time to invest is when there is still blood on the ground.”

– delegate at the “Rebuilding Iraq 2” conference in Washington, D.C.

Two Dates:

2/15/2003: Tens of millions of people worldwide protest against the impending invasion of Iraq, an event unprecedented in human history. They do not know that CIA teams are already in Iraq, having arrived in June 2002, laying the ground for US troops. Between January and April 2003, 36 million people demonstrate.

3/18/2003: The bombing of Iraq begins.

EMPIRE

What is Empire? Is the US an Empire?

Empire is a geopolitical term, which is to say that it attempts to describe power and space. Empire is of necessity larger than a state. It is an agglomeration of different territories under a single overall rule. This rule may be indirect. It may be exercised almost exclusively in economic terms. The Empire thus ruled might be described as “informal.”

Consider all the various polities and agglomerations that constitute social life: from that atom of society, the family, to villages, towns, cities, nations, regions, transnational groupings (EU, NATO, etc.) and finally to global capitalism, a process/logic/system under which almost everyone on the planet falls.

Empire is deployed very broadly to describe an economic/cultural/diplomatic/military formation, which is to say both a political entity that can be located in time and space as well as an ideology and process.

Empire has been widely discussed in recent years, and positions on that concept range from old skool Leninist denunciations to a self-identified right wing recuperation of Empire (“Empire’s a good thing”) to some fairly sophisticated theorizing along the lines of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Empire. One thing all agree upon is that the concept is rooted in the exercise of power– whether, as Max Boot might argue, for the good of us all or, as a writer like Arundhati Roy clearly thinks, as a form of dominating the surplus populations of the world.

Characteristics of Empire:

large territory, composite units, formed out of previously separate units, diverse, unequal, a relationship of domination, core-periphery, local administration, usually by colonized proxies, creation of hybridized practices and identities, flow-counterflow of people, plants, germs, goods, ideas, etc.

imperialism: as a process and a set of ideas. first used with regard to Napoleon III (1860s) and later with the policies of Disraeli, et al, who self-identified as imperialists.

JA Hobson’s Imperialism identified it as the pursuit of new investment spaces, an idea developed by Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which held that monopoly capitalism and imperialism were identical. This formulation was widely influential even outside Marxist circles, and gave rise to the notion that imperialism was largely a Western phenomenon. Still, others held that imperialism simply meant the domination or control of one people over others, particularly through the mechanism of the State, which allowed for a distinction between formal and informal imperialism. If the former signified absolute physical control then the latter indicated something less direct though still powerful.

In general, most people think of the latter, informal imperialism, when they employ the term Empire: a small group of nations dominates and exploits the rest of the world via state power, TNCs, World Bank, etc. The radical view holds that Empire is more or less synonymous with US foreign policy, which shares certain features with the formal colonialism of the 19th and 20th C. Not so direct. Instead, using client regimes, as well as economic, diplomatic, and cultural forms of control. Military action however is never as they say “off the table” as witnessed in Kuwait, Iraq, Kosovo, Panama, Grenada, Afghanistan.

Rise of the term colonialism. and its variants: postcolonialism. Colony, colonist, colonial, colonialist, colonize, colonization, etc. orig. colonus (‘colony’) meant a farming settlement. later, a place to which people migrated (plantation). Settlement is the key in this early sense.

Late 19th and early 20th C: the meaning of colony shifts to include all distant areas controlled by mainly European states. The term colonialism was coined as a direct attack on European exploitation. links to white racial hegemony.

alternatives: Chas. W. Mills: “global white supremacy as a political system”

colonialism and racial schemata are usually linked.

All of this gets fairly complicated, esp. when we look to historical precedent. The Dutch colonized S. Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries and the descendants of these colonials, the Boers, in turn became the object of British imperialist aggression.  Also, Palestine, a place whose inhabitants were dispossessed by the victims of European genocide. Or even the US, a nation founded by colonizers who gained their political identity via an anti-colonialist struggle with England.

Other, non-European examples: Indonesia in East Timor, Turkey in Kurdistan, Mongol Empire….

Robert Young’s work complicates the above ideas. From his Postcolonialism:

“both colonialism and imperialism involved forms of subjugation of one people by another” (15)

caravels were the key to colonization– sea-based empires no longer necessarily contiguous.

American style colonialism:

extraction of natural wealth, conversion of indigenes

“the militant Spanish drive for conversion to Christianity was an imitation of the Islamic Jihad that had been responsible for the Moors’ colonization of Spain” (16)

US: Pilgrims fled England, rather than acting on its behalf?

Empire precedes imperialism by several centuries as a category of human activity.

splitting empire into colonialism and imperialism.

the latter developed via the state for financial gain and ideological reasons, the former centered on settlement for the purpose of trade.

“colonization was pragmatic and until the 19C generally developed locally in a haphazard way”

imperalism bears scrutiny as a concept while colonialism need be thought of as a practice

Historical imperialism: Roman, Ottoman, Spanish on the one hand; late 19C Europe on the other.

Colonialism: 1) settlement 2) exploitation

French: colonization or domination. Brits: dominions or dependencies

a 3rd possible category: “maritime enclaves” (ie Guantanamo, Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Guam, Diego Garcia, Malacca)

OTHERING

Robert Young gives us further insight, this time into the creation of an Other, a Native who must either be saved or destroyed.

For Fanon, “imperialism initiated a process of ‘internalization’ in which those subjected to it experienced economic, political, and social inferiority not merely in ‘external’ terms but in a manner that affected their sense of their own identity…. material inferiority creates a sense of racial and cultural inferiority…. Colonization, he argues, also took place through language: under French domination the Creole language is rendered ‘inferior’ to French, and the colonized subject is compelled to speak the tongue of his/her imperial rules, thereby experiencing  their subjugation in terms of their own linguistic abilities and identity.”

But this process not only damages the colonized– it structures the colonizer himself. The colonized, as the colonizer’s Other, is intimately linked to his/her oppressor.

Other: a form of cultural projection of concepts which constructs the identities of cultural subjects through a relationship of power in which the Other is the subjugated element. In claiming knowledge about the Colonized (Muslims, barbarians, terrorists) this projection (this discourse, what Edward Said termed “Orientalism”) constructs them as its own (European) Other. Through describing purportedly ‘native’ (Muslim, ‘Oriental’, etc.) characteristics (irrational, uncivilized, etc.) Orientalism provided a definition not of the real ‘native’ identity but of the European identity in terms of the oppositions which structured its putatively innocent account. Hence, irrational Other presupposes rational Self. The construction of the Other in Orientalist discourse, then, is a matter of asserting self-identity, and the issue of the European account of the Other is thereby rendered a question of power.

Abdul Jan Mohammed characterizes the othering of the native this way: “If every desire is at base a desire to impose oneself on another and be recognized by the Other, then the colonialist situation provides an ideal context for the fulfillment of that fundamental drive. The colonizer’s military superiority enables him to impose his will, to otherize the native and thus gain recognition or acknowledgement. This is a narcissistic self-recognition because the colonizer doesn’t recognize or acknowledge the natives subjectivity independent of his relatinship tot he colonizer. The native is a recipient of the negative elements of the self that the European projects onto him.

not fulfillment but interminable dissatisfaction

constructing the native and angered that the native does not appear to be someone (a subject) other than that construct

‘the European’s alienation from his own unconscious desire…. The self becomes the prisoner of the projected image” Negated by the colonizer’s projection, the native onetheless constitutes a presence in his absence.

In addition to the hapless Native-as-victim/ Native-as-object of colonial solicitude and discipline we have the “extremist” or “militant” or “terrorist.” This is the Native gone mad. In the case of Al Qaeda, a kind of contagion from without, destroying the fiber of the host society. In the case of the Taliban, a benighted, barbaric element from within. The Islamic fundamentalist as the new menace, one who, like a zombie, is totally committed and impossible to reason with.

Notes on Ellen Meiksens Woods’s “Democracy as the Ideology of Empire”

“The association of imperialism and democracy seems to be a deeply rooted American idea, and many Americans firmly believe that this represents their country’s manifest destiny.”

At issue here is the seeming oxymoron of an empire of liberty or democracy. Jefferson actually used that phrase– ‘empire of liberty’– at one time to describe the mission of the United States.

We should perhaps emphasize the notion of mission as related to the myths of American Exceptionalism, capital P Progress, and Manifest Destiny in the context of Empire.

the “five fundamental truths” sound pretty good, though they are deeply invested in particular ideologies of the role of politics in society. The idea that “the basic subject of society is the human person”, for instance (versus a corporate person?) reflects a very Anglo-Saxon concept of the political realm as an aggregation of righs-bearing atoms.

Woods, however, is more concerned with this list of “truths” as a set of principles and their relationship to actions and realities.

“Just war”– a venerable western concept from the medieval era.

To continue: Bush admin. foreign policy seems to be transparently concerned with maintaining and even expanding global “hegemony” (in this context, rule or dominion).

Woods gestures at the strategic value of the Iraq/Afghanistan invasions. Such strategic benefits would not only include access to vital (and finite) natural resources such as oil or gas, but military advantage. Central Asia, as its name suggests, commands a view of the whole of the continent. Should there be crisis or conflict in Asia, US bases would allow a rapid US military response.

The key question: “How is it that freedom, equality, and universal human dignity can seem a convincing justification for imperialism and war?”

The quick answer, or at least its beginning: capitalism.

Woods begins by distinguishing between the status of people under capitalism, an economic system, and democracy, a political one. In capitalist democracies, every citizen is equal under the law though in terms of economic power there may be and in fact are great inequalities. Currently income inequality in the US is the highest it has ever been since records began to be kept. Globally, the situation is even more dire.

So a fundamentally hierarchical economic system can co-exist with what is ostensibly an egalitarian political structure. How so?

“[C]apitalism has created new, purely economic compulsions: the propertylessness of workers, which compels them to sell their labour power in exchange for a wage [or salary] and the compulsions of the market, which regulate the economy. Both capital and labour can  have democratic rights  in the political sphere without completely transforming the relation between them in a separate economic sphere; and much of human life is determined in that economic sphere, outside of the reach of democratic accountability….the idea that capitalists and workers alike are free and equal has become the most important ideological support of capitalism. Formal democracy, with its ideology of freedom, equality, and classlessness, has become one of the most effective mechanisms in sustaining and reproducing capitalist class relations.”

At issue here is a confusion or conflation of the freedoms promised by democracy and those which seemed to be implied by capitalism. After all, capitalists often speak of the “free” market as an economic ideal. Yet formal political liberties do not address us in our totality– the right to vote, speak at a rally (itself under threat of late– try keywording “free speech zone” sometime) etc. has no direct relationship to how we live or our economic well-being.

This contradiction, Woods argues, has only grown more opaque. With legal distinctions of status abolished, the facts of economic hierarchy– that there are some who have more than they could ever need or use and many who never have enough– seem to be obscured.

Such a situation is ideological in the extreme. As a general rule ideology is strongest when it is least visible. Ideology can go down to the very root of our identities as well. Criticisms of economic inequality are often met with the phrase “that ‘s just how it is”– in other words, as a fact of nature rather than a contingency of society.

“Ideologies of capitalist imperialism”

In this section Woods takes us from “the early days” to the present. Note the distinctions being established here: from a period of “outright colonial settlement” (what happened, for example, in British North America) to a phase of imperialism (Empire) which is less concerned with physical presence in space as a means of control or domination than with ensuring that capital remains free to flow in all directions. Empire, then, does not necessarily require people taking over new territories directly, though, as we shall see, Woods believes that the State as a political form and its military arm are vital to capitalism.

To return: Woods describes how theories of property undergird imperialism. Unoccupied land can be seized, a kind of theory of squatters’ rights (More). Even further, land that is occupied may be taken if its inhabitants are not making proper use of the land’s resources (Locke)– i.e., if not being exploited for profit in a market economy (for “the production of exchange value”).

Colonization thus acquired an ideological justification. It was alright to dispossess the native peoples of North America b/c they did not hold the same ideas about property that the colonists (colonizers) did.

“This was an application of capitalist principles, the principles of competition, accumulation, and profit-maximization by means of increasing productivity. It expressed a wholly new morality, in which exchange value took priority over all other goods, making possible the justification of everything from exploitation and expropriation to ecological destruction– all in the name of freedom and equality.”

As Woods notes, however, this ideological innovation soon required revision to keep pace with historical change. Eventually, colonization proved to be inefficient– insufficiently profitable. What she terms “the new imperialism… which really only emerged in the [second half of] the twentieth century” came about when direct control of native lands and populations was no longer required. It is important to emphasize Woods’ periodization of this phenomenon: she argues the new imperialism appeared post-1950, which is to say at exactly the same time that Africa and Asia were decolonizing. How do we make sense of this?

“The fully developed capitalist empire, which depends above all on economic imperatives, is basically the story of US imperialism.”

Woods evokes George Washington’s warning against “foreign entanglements” and may have the work of William Appleman Williams in mind when she refers to the US model of “a so-called informal empire, imposing market forces and manipulating them to the advantage of US capital.” Williams believed that in the 19th century the US had adopted a sort of “Imperial anti-colonialism” based on the principle that international trade should be as free as possible. The US itself, of course, made extensive use of tariffs to defend its growing economy. But other nations must be encouraged or, if need be, compelled to open their borders to trade and investment. This form of informal empire was summed up with the phrase “the open door policy” and is generally associated with US involvement in China: “the policy of the open door was designed to clear the way and establish the conditions under which America’s preponderant economic power would extend the American system throughout the world without the embarrassment and inefficiency of traditional colonialism” (Williams 50).

Back to Woods: Rather than obtain and maintain colonies, the US model  was “to police the global system to make it safe for the movements of capital.”

“How does one theorize and justify a non-colonial, non-territorial empire? How does one explain and defend exploitation of people and resources that requires no direct rule or territorial expansion, and where there is no need for personal rule or the seizure of property?”

New empire’s objectives:

“free access for capital… anywhere in the world”

which requires a system of sovereign nation-states

and does not mean a wholly integrated global economy.

Profit can only be extracted under uneven or unequal conditions. For example, Adidas’ plants in littoral China, the “special economic zones” where transnational corporations can produced commodities in conditions with weak workers’ rights and low pay.

“What global capital needs is not a global state but an orderly global system of territorial states, which maintain economic and political order within territorial boundaries and at the same time permit and facilitate the penetration of those boundaries by global capital, without presenting any dangerous challenges or competition.”

Woods returns to her last question: how justified?

First, deny the existence of Empire altogether in ways that are, to an extent, analogous to the ways that class hierarchy is concealed domestically. For example: Chinese teenaged girls are probably grateful to have even low paying jobs in hazardous or uncomfortable conditions. Nobody is forcing them to make running shoes. Or better yet: an impoverished nation isn’t forced to take IMF loans. Its citizens could, after all, simply starve. There are compulsions at work in this situation. A loan from the World Bank often entails what used to be referred to as “structural adjustments.” For instance, South Africa.

“There is an analogy here between citizens in a capitalist democracy and states in a global capitalist empire. The democratic polity is made up of formally free and equal civic individuals, just as the global order is make up of formally free and equal sovereign states. And just as citizenship tends to mask class domination in capitalism, legal state sovereignty tends to mask imperial ambition.”

But there’s more: we need to justify capitalism itself. Woods offers a general outline.

Global capitalism is like nature, neutral and inevitable (“that’s just the way it is”). This strategy is based on the notion of the inscrutable yet eminently just laws of “the market” and what Woods calls “technological determinism.” It is inevitable that capitalism triumph and blanket the planet.

Yet, as Woods, points out, this sense of the inexorable spread of capitalism will not produce a single global state. Globalization requires a variegated terrain to maintain profitable investment and exchange. Thus as capital penetrates the last reaches of global economic life, the nation-state remains the only viable political form. Such a geopolitical landscape, however, can lapse into crisis and “that requires political, military, and ideological supports that are not supplied by purely economic power.”

Thus the mission of the US and other nation-states is radically open-ended: to keep the world safe for capital. Because of this, the military apparatus is even more gargantuan than ever. “To put it bluntly, it needs an ideology to justify what amounts to a state of permanent war.”

Interference in other nations’ affairs for the benefit of capitalism must be concealed under the aegis of democracy. “The concept of democracy covers a multitude of sins, and it has become especially useful now that the old postwar imperial strategies no longer work.”

“as the long postwar boom in the advanced capitalist countries gave way to a long economic downturn, the development strategy gave way to neoliberalism, with its policies of ‘structural adjustment,’ privatization, and the complete vulnerability of subordinate economies to foreign capital and financial speculation.”

“talk of democracy is cheap and makes a useful rhetorical substitute, at least for home consumption in imperial capitals.”

the contradictions of democratic rhetoric/imperial practice:

practical support for oppressive regimes: Saudi Arabia, Colombia, etc.

working “the dark side”: Gitmo, black sites, extraordinary rendition, torture, etc.

domestic spying, preventive detention, conspiracy prosecutions

Set these abuses aside for the moment and focus on how the Bush regime justifies its policies. First, consider that the ideal of democracy espoused today is a pale shadow of what it once might have meant. Woods argues this is a peculiarly American conception of democracy, one that goes all the way back to the 18th century:

“its main purpose… was not to strengthen democratic citizenship but, on the contrary, to preserve elite rule in the face of an unavoidable mass politics and popular sovereignty.  The object was to depoliticize the citizenry and turn democracy into rule by propertied classes over a passive citizen body, and also to confine democracy to a limited, formal political sphere…. the did everything possible to make democratic citizenship compatible with… a hierarchy of economic interests.”

The “checks and balances” of the American political system were intended and indeed do function as a means of foreclosing the possibility of dramatic, radical socio-economic change.

“So here was a democracy whose essential purpose was to leave class domination intact, while maintaining democratic suffrage and other democratic forms.”

“Today, the USA represents the model capitalist democracy. It combines, in ideological conception and in practical reality, the formal sovereignty of the people with the substantive rule of capital.”

BUT “capitalism relies on the state to create the conditions of accumulation and enforcement that capital cannot create for itself.” In other words there is a division of labor between the state and economy, yet the economy depends in a meaningful way on the state for its conditions of success.

“The US idea of democracy, for all its undoubted benefits, especially in the constitutional protection of civil liberties… is designed to make politics subordinate to class inequality and differences of economic interest.”

“How the US Conception of Democracy Operates in Support of Imperialism”

“The essence of democracy as conceived in the USA is the coupling of formal democracy with substantive class rule, the class rule of capital. This involves a delicate conceptual balancing act between an assertion of popular sovereignty– government of, by, and for the people– and the dominance of capital, the subordination of politics to capitalist markets, and the imperatives of profit. Those of us who grew up in the United States are well primed to accept this tricky combination. We are well prepared to view class power as having nothing to do with either power or class. We are educated to see property as the most fundamental human right and the market as the true realm of freedom. We are taught to view the state as just a necessary evil to sustain the right of property and the free market. We are taught to accept that most social conditions are determined in an economic sphere outside the read of democracy. We learn to think of ‘the people’ not in social terms, as the common people, the working class, or anything to do with popular power, but as a purely political category; and we confine democracy to a limited, formal political sphere. As the founding fathers intended, we think of political rights as essentially passive, and citizenship as a passive, individual, even private identity, which may express itself by voting from time to time but which has no active, collective, or social meaning.”

The above is the necessary ideological grounding for the justification of imperial democracy. Woods then moves on to China and the Open Door:

“This doctrine began by asserting the territorial integrity of China, in other words its right to be free of foreign domination (!).

Again, the analogy between the citizen’s formal political freedoms and the nation’s sovereignty: nations have rights yet should be subject to a global capitalist order. The self-interest of each nation will produce an overall good for the world. In other words, China is free to do as she pleases so long as she does not seek to interfere with “economic imperatives.”

How does the US promote its own power imperially even as it appeals to “democracy”?

“two essential strategies”: limit the electoral process, evacuate the social content of democracy.

“the desocialization of democracy is the really crucial anti-democratic strategy, more important in the end than any electoral devices. The whole point of this strategy is to put formal political rights in place of any social rights, and to put as much of social life as possible out of reach of democratic accountability.”

Iraq, the Bremmer programs of privatization, direct investment. Cf. Shock Doctrine.

“The conceptual balancing act in the ideology of empire and democracy has depended on a particular division of labour between political and economic spheres…. But the old relation between political and economic power… is being disrupted…. The consequence of a globalized economy has been that states have become more, not less, involved in managing economic circuits through the medium of inter-state relations, and capital has become more, not less, dependent on organization of the economy by a system of many local states. This means that the division of labour between the economic and political is less clear-cut than it was.”

In other words, an opening: “local and national struggles are more important now than ever.”

Further Reading:

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

Johnson, Chalmers. The Sorrows of Empire.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine.

Lenin, VI. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Roy, Arundhati. An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire.

Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.

Woods, Ellen Meiskens. Empire of Capital.

Young, Robert J.C. Postcolonialism.

Today we discussed extra credit. Here’s the revised version:

1. If you make less than a B on one of your midterms you can bump your grade up a notch upon completion of 3 extra credit assignments.

2. You can enhance your seminar grade by the same measure if you complete 3 extra credit assignments.

There are two sorts of extra credit assignments:

1. The Civic Engagement Project. Go to a political event and write it up. 350-500 words. Examples of political events include a city council meeting, student goverment, a rally or demonstration, a political club or other organization (College Republicans, SQE, Socialist Workers’ Party– it doesn’t matter what the political content of the group is).

2. American Culture and History in Film. Write a smart, thoughtful film review (again, 350-500 words) on one of the following films, linking it to issues of American history and culture raised in this course:

Incident at Oglala

documentary about Pine Ridge Reservation, the shooting of 2 FBI agents, and the prosecution of Leonard Peltier.

Bamboozled

Spike Lee’s acerbic satire on African Americans and the media.

Full Metal Jacket

Stanley Kubrick’s blistering and humorous film about marines in Vietnam.

Why We Fight (2005)

Fairly recent doc on US militarism.

The Power of Nightmares

Adam Curtis’s doc. on the rise of neoconservatism and political Islam.

Thousand Pieces of Gold

Historical romance about a young Chinese woman’s experience in the frontier west.

Forbidden City, USA

doc. about a nightclub in SF featuring an all-AsianAmerican cast of performers. Circa 1940s.

4 Little Girls

More Spike. This one’s about a church bombing during the Civil Rights Era.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)

Pod people attack the USA! You can almost smell the anti-communist paranoia.

Norma Rae

A working-class heroine struggles to unionize the workers at her mill.

Weather Underground

This was assigned for class, right?

Banished

Amazing doc. about the racial cleansing of African Americans from their homes.

Matewan

John Sayles, one of the most interesting US film-makers alive, directs this story of striking miners in W. Virginia.

No Logo

A short doc. on consumerism featuring Naomi Klein.

Scratch (2001)

Q-bert! Beastie Boys! Turntablism!

American Dream

Barbara Kopple’s doc. on American labor strife.

Ethnic Notions

Marlon Riggs’s creative doc. on representations of black people. It’s virtually one long montage.

Strange Fruit

About the song and the man who wrote it and the woman who sang it.

Where Do You Stand?

More labor.

Deep Blues

Robert Palmer (RIP) interviews some down-home, collard greens-and-hominy blues artists.

George Washington (2000)

A compelling film about young kids in the US south.

Mai’s America

Great doc. about a young Vietnamese woman who comes to the US to go to school.

Wobblies

Solidarity forever.

Dig!

Award-winning doc. on two bands: the Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Crazy.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

doc. on the implosion of Enron.

There Will Be Blood

Based on an Upton Sinclair novel titled Oil, this film contains the memorable declaration “I drink your milkshake!”

Mystery Train

Jim Jarmusch’s love letter to Memphis, Tennessee and rock-n-roll.

Boulevard Nights

Late-70s coming of age flick about life in el barrio.

They Live

I showed you a clip for the the Adorno lecture.

Double Indemnity

We watched this already.

The Cradle Will Rock

An homage to the cultural ferment of the Great Depression.

North Country

Charlize Theron uglies up a touch to play a blue collar woman forced to confront entrenched misogyny in the workplace.

Lone Star

Another Sayles flick. This one’s a murder mystery and the Tex-Mex border.

All Over Me

Groovy coming of age film. Sexual identity, city life, punk rock.

Chan is Missing

one of the first US films that treats Asian American characters like real people rather than dragon ladies or coolies. Wayne Wang directs.

Glengarry GlenRoss

David Mamet, who is a great writer with questionable politics, wrote the screen play. “1st prize is a cadillac. 2nd prize is a set of steak knives. 3rd prize is you’re fired.”

Salt of the Earth

Black-listed for its lefty ideology. Miners on strike in New Mexico.

Manderlay

Lars Von Trier is a troubled, beautiful film-maker. When Roger Ebert saw this film he declared it “anti-American.”

The Eyes of Tammy Faye

doc. about a dotty, tenacious televangelist who watches her multi-million dollar tv empire collapse amid charges of salaciousness and excess.

Home Movie

doc. about people’s houses. one guy lives in a missile silo. pretty neat.

JUST ADDED:

Red Dawn

Nicaraguan paratroopers drop into the cornfields of Iowa! The commies are coming!

American Gangster

Denzel Washington as the title character. Enough said.

Hearts and Minds

Oscar winning doc. about the American War in Vietnam.

Ride with the Devil

My favorite Civil War film. Based on real people and events. Tobey Maguire looks like he’s about 12.

A history of US interventions from 1890-present.

A timeline of US interventions, 1801-2004.

Another timeline, from globalsecurity.org: