With excruciating slowness, I am calming down.
I don’t know if that’s a good thing overall. I do know that when I think of you my reader, I fret a lot, about being such a downer all the time, and about beating you over the head with my intermittently justified outrage. Thus–I hope that regardless of whether my trend toward calm is an absolutely good thing, that it’s a bit of relief for you at least.
Out of the corner of my eye, while watching an unrelated video, I saw a headline from the AP. It read in full: “Israeli police beat pallbearers at journalist’s funeral”.
I didn’t search out the article. The headline alone, coming as it did from a theoretically neutral source like the AP, was enough on its own.
There can be no possible justification for the act it describes. But I’m not foaming at the mouth about that; I’m not even all that angry.
There’s more resignation than anger in me right now, and today’s post is an attempt to try to explain why.
I’ll start by laying down this familiar recent track. Like you, I am a citizen of the Empire.
This Empire of ours, using the pronoun advisedly, is six percent of the world population and that population uses forty percent of the world’s resources. The Empire’s foreign policy is to keep things rolling along in the direction of that brutally tipped ratio. The domestic policy is to keep you and I happy or even proud about it, and locked in the belief that we deserve it, because … freedom or something … It doesn’t matter. All that is truly necessary is that from time to time, you find your lips moving and forming words like, “Yeah, I know we’re not perfect and I know we have a lot of problems in this country, BUT …”
You are so free, to end the statement any way you like.
But all that is just recapitulation.
I watched a journalist truly dear to me, Aaron Mate’, interview another actual and serious journalist, Seth Something, about This War We’re In. (When I say ‘we’re at war’, these aren’t my words, but the recent words of highly placed Democratic politicians, for what that’s worth.) The Seth guy is not out on the radical fringe like myself or Mr. Mate’. The interview showed he was much more toward the thoughtful center, unabashedly slamming Putin for invading, even while acknowledging the US role going back years, and so on. I think you might like hearing him–he represents a perspective that is midway between my extremism, and the kind of extremism that tries to sell you on the 40 billion being a good thing, while holding up Zelensky as some kind of manly savior-hero of his good and faultless country of innocent white people.
Anyway. This isn’t about Ukraine. The interview sobered me, pushed this deadly calm deeper into me.
But the ground for that sobering was laid by something I’d watched earlier:
Again, we have a very centrist source, laying out some very simple historical facts in a very rational way.
Before learning them, should you choose to, ask yourself: Why did Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait in 1990?
According to conventional wisdom, it was because Hussein was an evil madman bent on expanding his own little Empire. Perhaps that sounds familiar, in the modern context.
After learning them, you will be well placed to understand what Kuwait is to this day–surely “a sovereign state” per the standard of fact employed by the strict neutrals of Wikipedia. But much more besides. It was and is the invented creation of an empire, designed from scratch to be a power projection point “in the region”, and to keep the 40 or 50 percent of our world’s wealth flowing hard to the West. To look out, don’t you know, for Our Interests. Let’s say, our money, our freedoms.
But in order for Kuwait to be invented, it had to first be crudely carved off the haunch of the beast called Iraq, and then given away to a single family down there who were willing to play ball with the British.
Over the useless objections of an Iraqi king with no army or power.
Leaving Iraq with no deepwater port. Leaving what remained of Iraq to be artificially composed of three completely separate groups who hated each other.
By design, to keep them weak and divided. (Here you must shake your head gravely and sagely, muttering: Ah, them damn people’ve been killing each other for thousands of years; pass the damn pretzels.)
There are many, many other such “sovereign state” power projection points in this world. I could name you a couple of big ones, but let’s diplomatically leave that as an exercise for the reader.
We’re speaking here, as the title of the linked article puts it, about The Mechanisms of Western Domination.
The colonial mentality is often thought of as something we’ve outgrown, something that died out with our racist grandfathers, something icky and irrational.
No, my darling.
It is a living breathing killing thing and it is directly responsible for the magnificent Standard of Living we so cherish in The Land of Opportunity.
The Mechanisms of Western Domination directly make possible that glad lucky feeling in you, to have not been born in some shitty somaliland.
Those places are the exploited places, robbed of anything valuable and left to die. By the Exploiters.
By Winston Churchill and Barack Obama, in my name and your name.
The glad lucky feeling was planted deliberately in us. Someone must have been looking out for us, no? Was it god?
Secretly and truly, it was the opposite of god.
I have no interest in convincing you that Saddam Hussein was a great guy, a patriot, a freedom fighter. Nor his updated Russian replacement either. Nor that either of their invasions were ultimately morally justifiable.
I just don’t see any meaningful difference between those invasions and the Iraqi one, the Afghani one, the one in Vietnam or Korea or god help us Grenada.
I don’t see any meaningful difference between an invasion with tanks, or a regime change project of any bold or secretive kind–let’s incite a revolt here, assassinate a leader there, redraw a map, rig an election, bring down the mighty justice hammer of sanctions.
For the Empire, maintaining the 6:40 ratio is a question of By Any Means Necessary.
They need for you to believe that those means are just as necessary to your personal life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness as they are to Monsanto’s quarterly profits, or the maintenance of a billionaire oligarch class.
Maybe you do believe it. Maybe it’s even true in some twisted way.
Most people do believe it.
For many of them … it is true, in the way of a necessary lie.
And that’s why I’m calm today.
Because so long as they do, so long as It Is … there’s no real hope for this world.
My calm is resignation to these facts.
Yelling about them changes nothing and only makes my head throb and my heart break.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.
Upton Sinclair said it before any of us were born.
“His salary” depends not only on his remaining uneducated about some Mechanisms. His salary also depends on the great machine of inequality, on a network of power projection points, on robbing Iraq blind and shooting it when it objects.
Madeline Albright said half a million Iraqi kids flushed down the shitter was worth it, and this is exactly what she meant. It was worth it because it paid her salary, and maybe ours too.
The world is indeed full of bad people. I acknowledge the fact.
Calmly now.