Atheist Meditations

A tank just drove down the middle of my street. I looked out the window - stupidly, I suppose - I was in shock. A soldier sitting on the tank pointed his weapon at me, I stopped looking out the window. The nice people in military uniforms are on my television instructing us not to leave our homes until further notice. That's the only T.V. station, and they cut off my internet last week.


Alright, that didn't happen to me yet this week, but it happened to somebody today in Burma.

I'm finding my melancholic humors a bit stirred from the contemplation required in that first paragrab. If I suddenly switched bodies with a similar Burmese soul . . . that's not very fun thoughts. Being an Idealistic sort I'm sure I would have been at those protests, cheering on the actions of those Buddhist monks. ( men of religion, it is true, but this atheist holds a special exemption for the intellectually complex variants of Buddhism; I perceive those Burmese monks
on a pedestal of awe and respect) Just like China after Tienanmen Square, they are going to round up just about everybody they think had something to do with the protests. Just having been active on the internet will surely be a flag for Burmese Security Services that have been tasked with gouging out the eyes, tongue, and heart of this Demonstration Movement.

As they take you into custody, that's when you have to come to grips with the fact that The Suck will not end until they say so. It may well last for the remainder of your life.

Perhaps I'm a tad preoccupied with imaginings of atrocity, since I spent the morning reading the Wikipedia entry for List of War Crimes. Surprising how many just involve a village and a few dozen men and boys. Rounded up by invading soldiers and executed. That's the sure way to crush a resistance or stifle an uprising.

I'd intended to base this post around Sovereignty. The underlying principle of much modern international law whose conceptualization dates at least as far back as 1513 when Niccolo Machiavelli wrote. The Ruling Class, whether it is a sociopathic dictator, a group of military leaders, or an infighting club of capitalist elites; they do what they like within their own borders. Hear anybody talking about invading Burma and charging those 'Generals' with crimes against humanity? Why not? Where is the George W. Bush who connived so relentlessly to get our nation to overthrow Saddam and give the Iraqi's a chance at peace and democracy? You want to talk about a people who would greet us with flowers as liberators: we should invade Burma.

The contrast between Iraq and Burma are dramatically salient.

From what I understand Burma actually does have exploitable oil resources. Yet that is China's backyard and we have learned from the Korean and Vietnam wars not to mess with China's backyard. The Middle East, however, is territory we have declared our long term interest in. I think you could argue that WWII was decided by who controlled the Middle East.

The first rationale for invading Iraq was the fantasy that Saddam possessed 'Weapons of Mass Destruction.' That meant that he could finish the Holocaust with the push of button, America had to preemptively act. That's how the Bush Administration hoped to dance around the war crime of 'war of aggression', which, not too long ago when we were trying war criminals at Nuremberg, our nation described as "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." (Wikipedia, "War of Aggression")

Now it is completely obvious that the majority of international commentators, the U.N.A.E.C., and progressive news sources in America were saying all along was completely right. The notion that Iraq was producing 'WMD' during the U.N. inspection regime was absurd. Not only that, but we now have a shitload of evidence that Bush's marketing campaign to hype the threat of Saddam knew that the WMD case was phony and intended it merely as a means of 'selling' it to the public. They knew they were promoting bunk intelligence, and they combined that with a policy of devastating any skeptics (remember Valarie Plame?)

Now those same spinarbeiters want to tell us that the main motive in attacking Iraq was to liberate Iraq from the evil Saddam and 'provide an example of Arab Democracy that would soon bring about the reincarnation of civility to that backwards people.'

Saddam was a bad person, no doubt about that, but that couldn't have been the reason to invade. Or else we would have a carrier battle group in the in the Bay of Burma right now.

Labels: current events, Iraq War, Realpolitik

This Wednesday's Wall Street Journal had an interesting article in the lower center of their Front Page. I'd provide a link, but WSJ is all into the registering of readers, and I'm not down with that shit. Here's a summary:

Colonial-Era Ties to Africa Face a Reckoning in France

"On the evening of March 4, 10 French paratroopers" dropped near a militia controlled airstrip in the Central African Republic, 'ambushed the rebels, killing several and reclaiming the airport for the government."

"In France, neither the public nor the parliament was informed of the attack for three weeks." This action was run by the 'Cellule Africaine' a three-man office. The 'Cell' has had their dick in African affairs for over fifty years, in the bland words of the WSJ; "has overseen France's strategic interests in Africa, holding sway over a wide swath of former French colonies. Acting as a general command, the Cell uses France's military as a hammer to install leaders it deems friendly to French interests. In return, these countries give French industries first crack at their oil and other natural resources." Plus, of course, "The Cell's close ties to oil giant Elf Aquitaine, whose top executives were jailed on corruption charges . . ."

Wowsers. This is not the sort of reporting one gets to see very often. I'd hazard that this article made it into the conservative press for two reasons. First, the country in question is France, a nation state that has been heavily characterized by the U.S. Right's propaganda. Secondly, some of the Journal's readership already understands how the world works - they have ideological structures in place to allow them to ignore injustice and suffering in the Third World - or, they lack the critical thinking skills that would permit one to extrapolate this example to our own society. Even at newspaper as prestigious as the Wall Street Journal, at least half the readership is retarded.

So a French President come into power, and the head of the secretive Cell, comes to visit in the still of a Parisian night. Tells the President what the Cell can do for him. They know Africa. They know who has the power, who is vulnerable, and have an extensive understanding of how to utilize force their effectively. They are already tight with the powerful oil and other industries to which so much of the French economy is dependent. They understand the ways that things can be done to protect/enhance the profits of said industries. The President doesn't need them to tell him how pleasing France's largest oil company is good for his Presidency.

This is realpolitik, an level of understanding of how asymmetrical power almost invariably plays out with our species. It seems that when a technologically/militarily superior group encounters a group that cannot rise to meet the level of threat, the dominate group will never voluntarily stave off the exploitation and violence. Anyone who has studied history or global politics beyond the community college level has to grapple with realpolitik. Powerful men, when facing no serious oversight, will seek to utilize the full extend of their power.

We can learn a lot about why France is still a member of the G-8 from this article. Most powerful economies don't function without submissive satellite states from which resources and wealth are extracted. We can also gleam a bit about the natural sprouting of corruption inside a secretive and dangerous 'Cell.' How quickly before someone who routinely bribes foreign official or organizes coups against foreign governments begins to loose respect for his own nation's jurisprudence?

I'm not sure what's going on in France these days, but if the Cell is facing any sort of 'Reckoning', than the level of informed political discourse must be light-years ahead of anything our own pundits and citizenry are capable of. How shameful. This Cell has not done anything worse than Iran-Contra, or the Iraq/Oil Crusade, but neither of those are actually understood by more than five to ten percent of our population. Most will have their brains cease activity before they ever move beyond jingoism and the mere repetition of slogans.

I pity them, so of course I also pity us. Yet nothing will change the fact that realpolitik be the law of the land. There is nothing new under the sun.

Labels: Realpolitik