Impressions on Africa

-- a short assignment in a class, i was supposed to write what my pre-class impressions on Africa were ---


Africa awakens inside of me the demons of my mind – the demons of Marx, Malthus, Hobbes, conquest, genocide, and eugenics. For all the pain and anguish there are no clear cut answers, only gut-churning emotional impulses. How does one account for such a large scale failing of human endeavor? Blame it on the people, the conquerors, the neo-imperialist investors, or perhaps by into the non-linearist myth that they never even tried to modernize and “civilize” – none of it fits just right.

My father flew out of N’djamena the night al Qaeda blew up the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1997. He was working for Esso/Exxon as the communications director for their Saharan oil drilling project. The two pieces of memorabilia from Chad he keeps on his desk are an ancient but giant 10-megabyte hard drive he pulled out of a working computer there, and a picture of himself in front of a company Cessna surrounded by fifteen militiamen armed with rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles taken as he went to examine a desert satellite Earth Station. He flew out of the State’s as a mildly racist Kentucky-bred white male born to the upper class in middle of the 1950’s; he flew out a hardened eugenist of a time seven decades past. This was his only way to rationalize the grinding poverty and misery he saw in one of the poorest countries on Earth.

My second my lucid memory of Africa is inside of a French hotel room watching the BBC report as their headline the first African “world war,” which was the violence surrounding Mobuto Sese Seko’s demise. It was at that point that I understood the difference between American news media and the rest of the world’s news. Not every nation produces enough wire reports to talk about itself for an hour every night on every network, and nor does sub-Saharan combat have the same appeal or glamour that a thirty-six hour celebrity marriage does.

“National” division to weaken and conquer again was the Western response the anti-colonialist movement. Perhaps all that ended was the occupation. The white man drew borders in the African mans land not on tribal, historical, geographic or religious realities but rather on where on white army met another. Outside of Egypt and the Horn, African countries will never transcend merely being states instead of nations. This weakness, coupled with the events at Bretton Woods, made the new colonial masters: the banks. It was always wealth and relative power against other Europeans that the colonialist wanted out of Africa, but the latter involved occupation and became too bloody and costly to endure – so “civilized” man left at the same time, but left behind them a dependency trailing back to their colonial masters.

Overheard conversation of Africa is awash in Malthusian beliefs that AIDS is nature’s way of taking care of a surplus, that is to say useless, population on the planet. Academic lectures on international security skip over Africa, attributing what goes on there to some Hobbesian nightmare of the state of nature not worthy of the same time given to more civilized and courtly means of killing one another with shinier weapons. Sub-Saharan Africa is the holocaust of our time – the one truth that refutes even the best political or socio-philosophic theory.


Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Africa AIDS Malthus Hobbes Congo

The Saddam Capture and Psy Ops

If something seems to good to be true, it probably is. As such, some interesting wire reports are coming out about the Saddam capture. Basically, what they are saying that what really happened was that a Saddam was staying in Tikrit, his home town, and was ratted out by a tribe who had a daughter raped by his son Uday. They turned him into Jamil Talibani's PUK Kurdish Pesh Merga, who then worked out a political deal with the Americans. They then drugged him and put him in the "rat hole" for the Americans.

My feeling is that US Army psychological warfare teams* couldn’t have created a better story of the capture of Saddam, which means it’s likely that they did. Everything about the capture perfectly resonated the feelings that the US wants to push onto the Arab world: resistance is futile. Even the Lion of Babylon, the man who defied American power for over a decade, was found in a hole amongst rats looking like an Arab Ted Kazinsky when his card was finally pulled.


Here’s an interesting excerpt from an interview with Bush:

MS. SAWYER: Was he sedated? And was it designed to humiliate him?

PRESIDENT BUSH: No, I don't--first of all, I don't know if he was sedated or not. I mean, that's a question you'd ask the folks in the field.

Secondly, it was designed to reflect the truth and to show--and to show the world that this barbaric person was found in a hole, hiding, cowering...

So what makes me give credence to this particular claim from the Kurds? Well, US brass and Ahmed Chalabi made several mentions of help from the Kurdish militia, but what kind of help could the Pesh Merga really offer US Special Ops? There is no comparison between a US Navy SEAL and Kurdish mountain fighter. So just what kind of help was it?

I don’t know that if this is true it will amount to a scandal. The Bush administration, armed with the mind of Karl Rove, knows how to manage image. Ever notice those little banners behind Bush with a few key words reinforcing his message? Will the American public really care that the Bush team lied about how they captured Saddam when they really don’t seem to care that no WMD has been found?

It worries me how much control this administration has over information. If you remember, the Afghanistan War was reported only as a series of Pentagon and White House press releases. The mainstream press has not given proper skepticism to the words of Bush (whereas the alternative press has never given proper credit to the truth and wisdom to any of Bush’s words). The networks need to work around being the advocater of this Administration, while still reporting on it's agenda.

* Psychological Warfare is an integral part of any modern military. Psy Ops specialists are masters of perception and deception. Their most infamous work was building a mock armored battalion out of wood along the Kuwaiti border in 1991 to feign a direct invasion instead of the left hook through Iraq that actually took place. They also arrange for soldiers only over six feet tall to guard the Korean DMZ. They’re also in charge of propaganda and publishing and help in crafting press releases and press conferences. It was recently uncovered that Psy Ops was sending letters to the editor to local news papers and forging the names of troops as the signatories.


Links:
DebkaFILE - Very pro-Israeli hawkish site
Republicons - Obviously a bit partisan
More as I find them


Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Iraq Saddam Hussein Capture Bush staged Pys-Ops Pyschological Warfare

Progress

I know it’s been forever sense I last posted. Contrary to expectations, I’ve been very busy throughout the break making new friends and catching up with old ones. It’s been a blast so far and I’m only a week and a half into it – I still have New Years in New Orleans to look forward to. This is going to be a far less formal post than normal, being that this is not a Spinnaker submission.

___________________________

My thoughts lately have been more abstract than usual, crunching the problem of justifying my linear progressive political thought. Linearism is the idea that we’re going somewhere - that progress in thought and material is making mans lot somehow better than it was before. I confronted a mad genius about a month ago who challenged my thoughts on civilization and what progress really is. Mr. Vorchek was himself an anarcho-primativist. Though I wasn’t very impressed with his Ænemiac embrace of tearing down Western modernity for fear of failure, he did stir some thoughts that I had been dormant for awhile.

The two toughest questions stirred were thus: Is life truly better now than it was a decade, century, or millennia ago? And where are we going, what is this grand and noble vision?

To answer the first question, we must get to its root. What do we mean by better off? We could take Jeremy Bentham’s direction, and simply conclude that man’s lot can be gauged through his happiness. I don’t feel that qualitive judgments on our existence should be answered with hedonism. One of the core problems with this approach is that we’re measuring an absolute gain over time and not relative gains. Happiness is relative by nature. I do not find that our psychotropic-loving modern man is much happier than his ancestor of old.

So what then is an appropriate measuring stick? Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but I think the Greeks were on to something with there constant pursuit of the nature of justice. Being that we’re measuring these qualities absolutely, let us look at the advance of mankind over the past century both mentally and physically. Physically, one must look no further than the fields of medicine. Over the past century, we’ve watched the development of vaccines for Polio, Malaria, Influenza and other ailments that severely crippled and painfully killed off huge quantities of people bring these ailments under control. Government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Intergovernmental Organizations (IGO’s) like the World Health Organization stop epidemics in their tracks, like SARS last summer.

Mentally, Western Man is freer than ever. Though some like Foucault would argue that this freedom is all illusion, the very fact that I’m able to post online and have a friend across the Pacific read these ideas so that she can spread them into a “communist” country if she sees them fit speaks to one of the greatest virtues of the information age. Ideas are allowed, and do, spread like wildfire. A century ago, we were just beginning to harness the technology of relaying small messages across the Atlantic about events on either side of the lake. Common man could not spread his thoughts without getting published, where today almost anyone literate (provided they attend and use their free public education) can find a library with free internet access and self-publish just as I do.

In absolute terms, man’s general lot has improved enormously in the past century. His happiness has not. Mothers in Westernized nations don’t have to deal with high infant mortality rates, paralyzed and ostracized children with Polio, and Malarial mosquito’s. This does not mean that the pain of man has been alleviated or that new problems haven’t arisen, it’s only that problems that have solutions today are fixed. Relatively, we measure our lot not with our Great-Grandparent’s but rather with the Jones’s, our next door neighbor, which is why relative happiness will not increase with absolute gains.

To answer the second question, where are we going, I worded a horrible answer at the time. “Have you ever seen Star Trek? Imagine that, minus the interstellar travel and aliens,” was the best answer I could think of. What I meant by the answer was that in the fictional world of Star Trek, most of the problems of the industrial revolution had been resolved and mankind didn’t need to worry about the next harvest, having a roof over ones head, clothes on ones back, and consequently crime wasn’t an issue. This is not to say that men did not suffer, that spouses were always faithful, that parents and children did not die, or and that crime was never committed and that all were happy and none sad. Man would still judge his lot based on his fellow man, but by and large the plaques of the 20th century were solved. Wars, pain, and sadness still went on, but the reasons for sadness were far less severe than our reasons are today. Just AIDS is a horrible epidemic, wiping out a third the population in some African nations and affecting something like 1 in 40 Americans, it doesn’t hold a candle to bubonic plaque’s suffering.

The problem with primitivism thought, beyond that it is utopian in it’s own right, is that it goes contrary to human nature. The difference between humans and other extinct humanoids was that man was able to step outside of genetics to evolve. Unlike any other animal on earth, we don't need an extra chromosone to go from fires outside a cave to nuclear fission reactors. We were able to make tools, shelter, and clothing and improve upon them as necessity dictated. This continues today. We will find the cures for the diseases that ravage our people, we will find ways to alleviate grinding poverty, and we will work to educate children and adults. If nothing else, societies will do this to keep their competitive advantages against other societies.

For all its shortcomings, I have not lost faith in Western Civilization and the idea of progress that brought us where we are. My idea of progress has been refined over the past few weeks though. I don’t really feel that there is any one utopia that we ought to follow, but instead there are injustices to be alleviated. The essence of linear thinking in politics is problem solving and achieving goals, and there is nothing wrong with that. We will march on.

Tags: Treyopia Current Events Politics Foucault Civilization Anarcho-Primativism

The Democrats....

Many people are asking me whom I support in the 2004 Democratic Primaries. Well, I’ll give you a short history of my political thought on this subject and bring you where I am today. First I was adamantly pro-Dean. I believe the only one who can take on Bush is going to have to be tough, someone who cuts the chase and tells you how it is, someone who won’t sugarcoat and meander around all the important issues. I also liked Dean because from all reports, he was a very moderate governor – fiscally conservative, but still had his social priorities straight – like health insurance for all children in the state. He also seems to know how to mobilize otherwise politically apathetic voters.

Then Dean seemed to be pandering farther and farther to the isolationist left. I don’t mind at all that he didn’t support the war in Iraq, and didn’t pull a Kerry by supporting it just so it’d look better on the campaign trail. But he started talking about repealing “every cent” of the Bush tax cut, balancing the federal budget even when the economy is sinking, and supported withdrawing US troops from Iraq to be replaced with international troops. To me, all of these are really bad ideas. Not only are they bad ideas, but they’re unelectable ideas. One cannot expect to get voted into office under the promise of taking back at least $200 from almost every American family.

So I then threw my conditional support to Clark, someone who just recently joined our fair party. He’s a four-star general, which is about at tough as it comes, and an intellectual as well. He even taught economics at West Point, which is not exactly a bad trait for a President. He seemed to hold all the best traits of Dean, but also seemed very electable. Who better than a former NATO commander to refocus the war on terror, and not sound like a hippy peacenik by opposing the Iraq war?

Well, my support for him has fizzled. I still think he’s the most electable of this motley ensemble. But he’s come out against financing the rebuilding of Iraq, which is a terrible idea. Even as an ardent fighter against this war, it is our mess nonetheless and I believe we need to clean it up – no matter what the cost. This is war, and this is the price of war. Furthermore, he stumbles around – he flip-flopped on his position on Iraq. Now I hear he supports a flag burning ban amendment to the Constitution. Wow... (not that I support flag-burning, but a Constitutional Amendment?! When we learn out lesson about prohibitive laws against the citizenry in the Constitution)

Most of the Democratic candidates, Lieberman aside, are in pure reactionary mode. They want to revoke and undo everything that Bush has done in his 3 years thusfar, and that’s just empty rhetoric. I want substantive ideas, not regression. We need to work with what we have, not pretend we’re going to pick up where Clinton left off in 2000. The fact of the matter is Bush has changed the course of America in his 3 years, and doing a 180 in reaction wouldn’t be more disasterous than his own foreign policy.

I don’t fully support any of them. I almost trust Bush better with foreign policy now, simply because he’s obviously contained/preoccupied – if not humbled – and will more than likely not embark on any more “regime change” adventures in the Middle East. He broke it, he needs to fix it. I honestly would feel very queasy about handing Iraq over to Dean, who will muddle it up worse by withdrawing under fire. One does not withdraw from combat because of a 2/10ths of a percent casualty rate. That’s a surefire way to ensure the war on terrorism is skewed towards to Jihadist.

Dean is right that the Democrats lost the mid-term elections because they did not distinquish themselves from the Republicans. Bush-lite is not a viable option for a Democratic presidential candidate who wants to win the general election, but it unfortunately like only the Anti-Bush will win the nomination. We Democrats need to learn some lessons from the the Republicans - find leadership, create a solid agenda and push it hard , let the American public see these leaders push and explain this agenda, and maintain tighter party discipline.

Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Democrats Primaries 2004 election Dean Kerry