dimanche, 19 mai 2013
Les Russes vent arrière
Les Russes vent arrière
Ex: http://www.dedefensa.org/
Observons d’abord, puisque c’est aujourd’hui que Netanyahou est allé rendre ses devoirs à Poutine, à Sotchi-Canossa, que nous avons connu d’autres temps où des problèmes de cette importance et de ce domaine (livraisons ou pas de S-300 à la Syrie où se déroule une guerre qui concerne “la communauté internationale”) se réglaient avec les USA, et où un Premier ministre israélien, s’il avait quelque chose à dire à Moscou dans ce domaine, consultait d’abord les USA et s’en remettaient aux USA. Mais, aujourd’hui, les USA, c’est, disons, l’“isolationnisme-cool”. Alors, Netanyahou va directement voir Poutine.
...Lequel Poutine dirige une puissance qui prend de plus en plus de place au Moyen-Orient. Certains jugeraient que la Russie est en train de reprendre sa place au Moyen-Orient, du temps de la Guerre froide. Nous aurions tendance, nous, à aller plus loin que cela ; c’est-à-dire, envisager simplement que les Russes sont en train d’y prendre une place prépondérante, pendant que les USA s’effacent... Nous détaillons quelques faits qui semblent aller dans ce sens, directement en faveur des Russes, ou indirectement.
• La flotte russe s’installe en permanence en Méditerranée, retrouvant la place qu’y occupait le 5ème Escadron naval en Méditerranée, actif de 1967 jusqu’à sa dissolution en 1992. La décision de réinstaller une unité autonome russe en Méditerranée a été prise en avril et l’on a aujourd’hui des détails sur cette flotte permanente, qui aura son propre état-major, et qui disposera éventuellement de sous-marins nucléaires lanceurs d’engins. (Voir Novosti, le 12 mai 2013.)
«Russia’s Mediterranean task force will comprise 5-6 warships and may be enlarged to include nuclear submarines, Navy Commander Adm. Viktor Chirkov said on Sunday. “Overall, already from this year, we plan to have 5-6 warships and support vessels [in the Mediterranean Sea], which will be replaced on a rotating basis from each of the fleets – the Black Sea, Baltic, Northern and, in some cases, even the Pacific Fleet. Depending on the scope of assignments and their complexity, the number of warships in the task force may be increased,” Chirkov told RIA Novosti.
»The Russian navy commander also said nuclear submarines could be deployed in the Mediterranean, if necessary. “Possibly. In a perspective. They [submarines] were present there during the existence of the 5th squadron. There were both nuclear and diesel submarines there. Everything will depend on the situation,” he said.»
• Il est clair que l’affaire des attaques israéliennes contre la Syrie, puis la décision russe de livrer des S-300 à la Syrie ont resserré les liens entre la Russie et la Syrie. La même chose pourrait survenir avec l’Iran, si la vieille affaire opposant la Russie et l'Iran, concernant une commande iranienne de S-300 que la Russie a refusée jusqu’ici d’honorer à la demande du bloc BAO, était résolue dans le même sens (livraison de S-300 à l’Iran). De même, les Russes ont l’intention d’accélérer des livraisons d’armes à l’Irak, après le déblocage (voir le 27 avril 2013) de l’énorme contrat d’armes russes commandées par l’Irak. On retrouve bien entendu une ligne d’alliance Téhéran-Bagdad-Damas qui se fait selon une dynamique qui a notamment les allures d’un soutien matériel russe actif.
• ... Ce à quoi il faut ajouter désormais le Hezbollah. Des nouvelles sont répercutées, commentées et enrichies par Jean Aziz, journaliste libanais au quotidien Al-Akhbar et à la station TV OTV, dans Al-Monitor Lebanon Pulse du 12 mai 2013, à propos des contacts récents entre la Russie et le Hezbollah et les perspectives qui s’ouvrent pour ces deux interlocuteurs, selon une dynamique nouvelle de coopération. On observera, souligné par nous en gras, l’appréciation selon laquelle ces deux interlocuteurs parlent en termes d’équilibre général dans lequel la Russie serait désormais appelée à jouer un rôle prépondérant.
«For the second time in nine days, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah appeared in a televised speech, knowing that both appearances fall into the same political context — one that was previously discussed in this column to indicate three reasons behind the timing of the two appearances and speeches.
»The previous article detailed the first reason behind the appearance of Nasrallah, which was to confirm the religious tenets and the ideological justification of Hezbollah’s stance on the Syrian situation. The second reason was directly related to the political developments in Lebanon and its neighboring regions, starting with the visit of Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov to Beirut on April 26 and 28. The Russian minister’s visit to the Lebanese capital after Tehran and Damascus is not without meaning. Clearly, Russia, Iran, Syria and Hezbollah have been coordinating at some level and have tackled all the regional developments and stances taken in this regard by any of the elements of this new axis... [...]
»Meanwhile, sources in the know on the results of Bogdanov’s visit to the Lebanese capital revealed to Al-Monitor that the conversation clearly tackled the role of Russia in protecting the forces that are close to it in the region, as well as the importance of facing Washington and returning the balance to the global system in its Middle Eastern side at least. Moreover, both officials discussed the prospects of imposing the demarcation of the international spheres of influence in this region. In a clear and straightforward conversation, they brought up the different as well as matching ideological, economic, geostrategic and security-related interests of Moscow and local forces in achieving these goals.»
• Le dernier point concerne ce qui pourrait constituer un rapprochement entre l’Arabie Saoudite et l’Iran, manœuvre qui ne déplairait pas à la Russie, qui a de bons liens avec l’Iran et des liens qui ne sont pas si mauvais avec l’Arabie. La nouvelle est présentée par DEBKAFiles (le 13 mai 2013), qui suit désormais avec une hargne particulière l’enchaînement des épisodes marquant la dégradation de la position US au Moyen-Orient.
«Saudi Arabia has decided to explore dialogue with its great regional rival Iran for ending the Syrian conflict and assuring Lebanon’s political future, DEBKAfile’s Gulf sources report. They have given up on US policy for Syria in view of Russian and Iranian unbending support for Bashar Assad; his battlefield gains aided by Hizballah and Iranian Bassij forces; and Turkey’s inaction after Saturday’s terrorist bombings in the town of Reyhanli near the Syrian border which caused 46 deaths. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal took advantage of the Organization of Islamic Conference-OIC, in Jeddah this week on the Mali conflict for getting together Monday, May 13, with Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi who was in attendance.
»Our sources report that Riyadh’s first priority is to stabilize Lebanon through a Saudi-Iranian entente on political equilibrium in Beirut. The Saudis would next seek an accord with Tehran on the outcome of the Syrian civil conflict.
»The Saudi rulers have come to the conclusion, which the West and Israel have been slow to acknowledge, that since the Iranian-Hizballah-Syrian military alliance is pulling ahead in the Syrian conflict and chalking up victories, they had better look to their interests in Lebanon, which hinge heavily on the Sunni clan headed by Saad Hariri. If they wait till a victorious Hizballah comes marching home and grabs power in Beirut, protecting Lebanon’s Sunni community will be that much harder...»
Le même texte fait état du faible crédit accordé par les Saoudiens au projet de conférence organisée par les USA et la Russie conjointement, notamment à la lumière du peu d’enthousiasme que montrerait Obama pour la chose, – souligné, ce peu d’enthousiasme, par la remarque d’Obama lors de sa conférence de presse du 13 mai avec Cameron, concernant la “suspicion persistante héritée de la Guerre froide, entre la Russie et les USA” («“lingering suspicions between Russia and the US” left over from the Cold War»). Cette remarque est très singulière, dans la mesure où cette suspicion n’est nullement en état de persistance, mais plus évidemment une ré-invention des USA, à coup de lobbies, d’“agression douce”, d’accusations humanitaristes, etc., contre la Russie, alors que la Russie a au contraire depuis longtemps écarté cette sorte de suspicion dont parle Obama. La phrase d’Obama, qui pourrait étonner certains venant d’Obama, évoque plutôt une paranoïa persistante du côté US, cette paranoïa si naturelle qu’elle n’a nul besoin du souvenir de la Guerre froide pour se faire sentir, et qui s’alimente plutôt à une complexité psychologique dont les USA n’ont besoin de personne pour l’entretenir dans leur propre chef... Dans tous les cas, cette phrase et ce qu’elle évoque éclairent d’une lumière moins amicale l’“isolationnisme-cool” dont nous parle Stephen M. Walt, la lumière du désenchantement découragé devant ce qui est effectivement, bien plus qu’un repli tactique des USA, une position de plus en plus forcée devant son propre déclin et l’effondrement de sa propre puissance.
Dans ce cas, il est alors remarquable de voir, devant la perspective du possible échec de la tentative Russie-USA de cette conférence sur la Syrie, un pays comme l’Arabie envisager de se tourner vers l’Iran et, au-delà et par simple enchaînement, en partie vers la Russie, pour trouver une issue de stabilisation à un désordre qui échappe de plus en plus à tout contrôle des acteurs extérieurs. Si elle s’affirmait, cette dynamique ne laisserait ni la Jordanie, ni l’Égypte insensibles, certes... Dans cette interprétation, on note également une considération bien peu amène pour la Turquie dont les manœuvres effrénées de déstabilisation depuis près de deux ans conduisent à l’impasse du désordre sur son propre territoire, chose également reprochée par Obama à Erdogan. (Les USA sont notamment inquiets des grandioses projets turcs de rassemblement d’un Kurdistan, avec ses parties syrienne et irakienne, à cause des menaces que ce projet fait peser non seulement sur l’Irak, mais sur la Turquie elle-même. Mais Erdogan oppose à ces craintes une assurance sans faille de lui-même et de sa politique.)
Le constat est donc que, devant l’évolution de la situation en Syrie, le camp constitué par le bloc BAO commence à céder à des tendances de délitement dans tous les sens tandis que la Russie évolue d’une position centrale d’une possible médiation qui s’avère de moins en moins possible, vers une position d’organisatrice d’un nouveau rassemblement au Moyen-Orient à partir de ses liens avec l’Iran, la Syrie, puis avec l’Irak, le Hezbollah et, éventuellement, d’autres acteurs qui deviendraient des transfuges du camp BAO. Tout se passe comme si le désordre commençait à épuiser ceux qui ont contribué à le créer, avec un éparpillement de ce rassemblement hétéroclite, dont la Russie sortirait nécessairement comme acteur extérieur central au Moyen-Orient. Cela serait une rétribution logique, et juste si l’on veut, du rôle qu’elle a tenu jusqu’ici.
Il ne s’agit pour l’instant de rien d’autre que d’une perspective, et le désordre lui-même est loin d’avoir dit son dernier mot, et sans doute aura-t-il toujours son mot à dire dans le contexte de la séquence actuelle. Mais la tendance générale se dessine de plus en plus clairement, et elle s’affirme à partir du caractère d’insupportabilité du processus d’autodestruction du Système, qui bouscule ou emporte tous ceux qui ont misé dessus (sur le Système), avec certains cherchant d’ores et déjà à sortir leur épingle du jeu. Quoi qu’il en soit, il existe aujourd’hui la possibilité d’un intéressant renversement de situation qui donnerait au “printemps arabe“ une alluré inattendue ; cette possibilité, si elle est nécessairement caractérisée par le désordre évident au Moyen-Orient, le serait surtout, dans ce cas, par la hiérarchie des influences extérieures, avec la Russie revenant en force dans cette région et n’étant pas loin d’être en position de supplanter des USA de plus en plus amers, impuissants de leur incompréhension de la situation, bien plus fatigués que cool finalement. Dans ce cadre, il est possible que l’Israélien Netanyahou parle à Poutine de bien autre chose que de S-300, les Israéliens pouvant estimer eux aussi que leur choix exclusif du “parrain” américaniste devient discutable.
Effectivement, à côté de ces événements qui on leurs significations diverses et parfois surprenantes, on distingue l’apparition d’un phénomène d’épuisement psychologique, se traduisant par une dérive des politiques vers des orientations complètement imprévues. Cet épuisement psychologique est un facteur central de la crise d’effondrement du Système, comme nous ne cessons de le souligner, jusqu’à ses racines historiques fondamentales. Ce n’est qu’un paradoxe apparent si cet épuisement frappe les acteurs périphériques de la crise syrienne, plus que les acteurs directs, parce que ces acteurs périphériques sont directement connectés à la crise d’effondrement du Système. La position de force de la Russie, elle, tient évidemment à sa politique principielle, effectivement appuyée sur le respect et la défense des principes structurants, seul moyen d’échapper à cet épuisement causé par les forces déstructurantes et dissolvantes du Système.
00:05 Publié dans Géopolitique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : russie, syrie, levant, proche orient, politique internationale, actualité, géopolitique | 
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MICHEL ONFRAY contre les dogmes freudiens
Pierre Le Vigan
Ex: http://metamag.fr/
Michel Onfray et Sigmund Freund
Otto Gross
00:05 Publié dans Livre, Livre, Philosophie, Psychologie/psychanalyse | Lien permanent | Commentaires (1) | Tags : michel onfray, sigmund freud, freud, freudisme, philosophie, psychanalyse, livre | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
samedi, 18 mai 2013
The System Against Syria . . . & Russia
The Hollow Empire
The System Against Syria . . . & Russia
By Gregory Hood
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/
In the wake of the Boston bombing, there was some hope among the dwindling number of true believing conservatives that the long awaited Grand Alliance Against Jihad would finally come to fruition.
The news that Russian intelligence had warned [2] the FBI about Tamerlan Tsarnaev and subsequent raids [3] on Muslim “extremists” within Russia prompted a flurry of activity on conservative websites. The emerging motif within the American Right is that Vladimir Putin may be a sinister tyrant and anti-American (and a Communist from the KGB!), but he’s at least a serious and competent national leader who recognizes the threat of Islamic terrorism. The reaction at the grassroots forum FreeRepublic to the news that Secretary of State John Kerry was kept waiting in Moscow was laughter [4], rather than patriotic fury. As President Putin patiently lectures Barack Obama to the delight [5] of conservative chatterers, at least some of the hoi polloi of the American Right are dreaming about the Red Army and the 101st Airborne joining forces to romp through Grozny.
Keep dreaming.
The result of the Boston bombing will not be a Russian-American rapprochement. Instead, it will lead to an acceleration of The System’s efforts to encircle Russia, especially by increasing aid to “rebels” opposed to Russian ally and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
More importantly, it is the foreign policy experts of Conservatism Inc. that are leading the way. Senator John McCain, taking a break from his work pushing a nation-breaking amnesty as part of the “Gang of Eight,” is calling for “game-changing [6]” aid to the rebels in Syria. Senator Lindsey Graham is going further, calling for ground troops to secure supposed chemical [7] weapons.
Meanwhile, among the conservative press, the talking heads are sensing an opportunity to attack President Barack Obama for being “weak.” Charles Krauthammer repeatedly mocks [8] Obama’s impotence in the face of Syria crossing his “red line” by using weapons of mass destruction. National Review has called [9] for military aid to the rebels, but don’t worry, only the “secular,” non-militant ones. And of course, the Weekly Standard moans [10] that Obama has failed to “topple an Iranian ally,” but rejoices that our “strategic ally” Israel has begun bombing the country. If Conservatism Inc. has a core message, it’s that President Obama is not “strong” enough.
What makes it almost funny is that it’s Bashar al-Assad who explicitly laid out what is likely to happen. Assad warned that the West paid heavily for supporting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and it is now supporting it in Syria. The cost will come in the “heart of Europe and the United States.” This is precisely what happened in Boston, when years of extensive American support [11] for Muslim rebels in Chechnya evidently did nothing to endear Chechnyan immigrants to the American way of life, any more than tens of thousands of dollars in welfare.
The truth is that whatever one says about Bashar al-Assad, the opposition at this point in time is precisely who he said it was at the beginning – Muslim extremists allied with Al Qaeda, openly hostile to the West. Furthermore, Assad’s stubborn hold on power is fueled by his stalwart defense of minority communities within Syria, especially Christians. Finally, while the best the United States can say is that it has “varying degrees of confidence” that Assad used chemical weapons, the United Nations is hearing testimony that it was the rebels [12] who used sarin gas on civilians. Not surprisingly, it’s also the rebels who have heroically taken UN peacekeepers hostage [13], to the utter indifference of those who usually care about such things.
American hawks, led by the supposedly anti-jihadist conservatives, seem blithely unconcerned about all of this. Of course, we just saw this movie in Libya. The glorious Libyan revolution led to the outright murder of an American ambassador and other American officials. Only Congressional Republicans seem to care, and are widely mocked by the media for doing so. Muammar al-Gaddafi of course, was a largely secular dictator who had openly declared his allegiance with the United States during the War on Terrorism. This didn’t stop America from helping his enemies butcher him and anally rape his corpse with a knife. Today, Islamic radicals are far more powerful in Libya than they were before Gaddafi’s fall. Bernard-Henri Lévy, the “French” Jew who helped lead the effort to overthrow the government, is today banned from the country because he is a Jew [14].
It’s not about terrorism, or democracy, or even Israel. American foreign policy is already post-American, designed to break down any centers that show signs of independence from the international financial system of Wall Street and London. It is no coincidence that Gaddafi suddenly fell from favor when he began to move away [15] from trading oil in dollars. Syria also represents a territory that still has a degree of real independence from the global banking system. It is for that reason it must be broken. Geopolitically, Russia is the final target, as its large energy reserves and nationally conscious ruling class prevent it from being simply absorbed into the system of financial control that rules the West.
But what do American neoconservatives, the true believers of Empire, think about all this? On the surface, Barack Obama has actually strengthened the “jihad,” presiding over the fall of largely secular governments in states like Egypt, welcoming the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power, and actively continuing American military aid. Sure enough, accusations that Obama is naive at best and malevolent at worst are a largely consistent feature of the American Right’s take on his foreign policy. However, this paranoia about a Muslim Brotherhood caliphate supposedly uniting the Middle East misses the reality that these states are actually far weaker, and less independent, than they were previously.
A leader like Assad or Saddam Hussein is able to use his personality and ideology to make his regime the focus of loyalty among the population. In Egypt, while the Muslim Brotherhood has achieved political power, it has having a hard time [16] consolidating its rule. While Iran represents a unity of political, religious, and economic sovereignty under an ideologically oriented and permanent regime, Egypt is still up for grabs. Under the “open society,” the controlled media, civil society groups under the control of George Soros or the U.S. State Department, and an army of international activists are free to manipulate the system from the top down. Even if there are short term gains for so called “radical” Islam, the growth of sharia law in Egypt does not threaten the power of international finance, any more than the growth of sharia law in neighborhoods of Copenhagen or Denmark. What does threaten international finance is a nationally (or worse, ethnically) conscious people, united under nationally conscious leadership that is willing and able to wield state power.
On a global scale, Russia is leading this resistance. Putin’s decision to ban the “pro-democracy” groups and foreign activists responsible for the “color coded” revolutions in Eastern Europe marked his transition to an anti-American “bad guy” in the eyes of the media. Whatever his (many) failings, Putin insists on his idea of “sovereign democracy” and the survival of Russia as a self-conscious entity. This is echoed in Assad’s pronouncement that he has no alternative but victory, as if he loses, “Syria is finished” in the same way that Iraq today is simply a geographic expression. Talk of Islamization, terrorism, or who is “pro-Western” or “anti-Western” conceals the real agenda. In the world of the future, peoples are to have no collective existence, aside from a token form allowed to non-whites who are incapable of maintaining any real independence.
While it’s comforting to believe that the American Empire is on its last legs, there’s little to suggest that the geopolitical position of the United States is actually growing weaker. Serbia has long since fallen, stripped of Kosovo, and voted into the anti-European Union after an international propaganda campaign. Iraq has fallen. Syria is on the brink. Despite the drones patrolling entire regions of the world, the American military is actually remarkably restrained considering the country’s actual potential. The country’s current military expenditures of about 4.5 percent of GDP is well below [17] the 45 year average. If pressed, the United States could easily expand its military.
Patriotic American conservatives are the essential bulwark to this system. They fight the wars, as the combat arms and Special Forces are still overwhelmingly white. They provide the intellectual justification for interventions around the world. They salute the flag and promote the idea of the military as an honorable profession. Nonetheless, what is driving American foreign policy is something beyond imperialism, capitalism, or even the frenzy for white dispossession. We are moving towards an end game that is openly discussed and openly defended. That end game is precisely what was defined in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, the “Open Society,” rule by finance and media, worldwide, forever.
Such an agenda has nothing to do with any recognizable form of American patriotism, but this does not stop American conservatives from seeking to marshal what is left of the traditional American nation for one final democratic crusade. As Mitt Romney maintained, Russia is our “number one geopolitical foe.” Perhaps the most important reason that American conservatives must never be allowed to regain power is that they truly believe their own propaganda when it comes to foreign policy. After all, the only things the American conservative movement has to show for its unlimited control of the American government in the early 21st century are upper class tax cuts, and the Iraq War.
Where does leave the North American New Right? The system is anti-White, but it is more than that. As Noam Chomsky said [18],
Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist — just because its anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic — there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced — that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevent, and usually a nuisance. (Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky [New York: The New Press, 2002], pp. 88–89)
The critical divide between the System and those forces against it is the question of sovereignty. The System seems to break apart any collective identity or defense by peoples against the global power structure of finance and media. America is the iron fist that facilitates this transition, enabled by the useful idiots of the American Right. Israel, as the nationalist state of the “Chosen” is the one permitted exception, but even their ethnostate may be caught in the larger pattern and break down in the long term. In the end, Muslim or Christian, white or black, you will be assimilated [19].
Russia is not some lost ideal for the North American New Right, Putin is not some nationalist paragon, and Russian exports like the Fourth Political Theory are not some glorious path to victory for us. Nonetheless, the only geopolitical imperative that matters today is the ability of states and abilities to secure an independent existence from this system. Without this potential, even talking about ethnostates and White Republics misses the point. For that reason, states as diverse as Chávez’s Venezuela [20], Iran, and above all Syria deserve our attention. Breaking patriotic American conservatives away from their minders at Conservatism Inc. is a critical strategic objective. The Boston bombing is an opening.
Syria is not just fighting against Al Qaeda and hypocritical Zionism in defense of Christian minorities. It’s fighting in defense of the idea that peoples – any peoples at all – have the right to exist. White American conservatives [21] have to decide if they would rather be the vanguard of the Hollow Empire – or a people in their own right.
Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com
URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/05/the-hollow-empirethe-system-against-syria-and-russia/
URLs in this post:
[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/AssadPutin.jpg
[2] warned: http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2013/April/Russia-Warned-US-Boston-Suspect-a-Follower-of-Islam/
[3] raids: http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3013410/posts
[4] laughter: http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3016778/posts
[5] delight: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/04/vladamir-putin-lectures-obama-on-radical-islam-during-phone-call/
[6] game-changing: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/05/mccain-syria-rebels-aid_n_3218839.html
[7] chemical: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/04/28/mccain-boots-on-the-ground-in-syria-the-worst-thing-the-united-states-could-do/
[8] mocks: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/04/30/krauthammer_on_obamas_response_to_chemical_weapons_in_syria_chain_of_custody_what_is_this_csi_damascus.html
[9] called: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/347270/al-assad-crosses-red-line
[10] moans: http://www.weeklystandard.com/keyword/Syria
[11] support: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/chechens-and-american-hawks-an-interesting-alliance/
[12] rebels: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/05/us-syria-crisis-un-idUSBRE94409Z20130505
[13] hostage: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/05/07/4-un-peackeepers-detained-by-armed-men-in-syria/
[14] because he is a Jew: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/03/26/prominent-jew-banned-from-libya-he-helped-make/
[15] move away: http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/markets/item/4630-gadhafi-s-gold-money-plan-would-have-devastated-dollar
[16] hard time: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/70632/Egypt/Politics-/Hundreds-protest-Brotherhoodisation-of-Alexandria-.aspx
[17] below: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://blog.heritage.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/defense-spending-and-gdp.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2012/03/12/how-health-care-spending-strains-the-u-s-military/&h=340&w=750&sz=14&tbnid=vd4URV-1Uvml1M:&tbnh=63&tbnw=138&zoom=1&usg=__1QyLeRBzLPrBuUM4v-Fc78kZXBc=&docid=KVwmIU-HhnzHhM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=sLmLUeyrObO50QHSzoHYBg&ved=0CGAQ9QEwBg&dur=351
[18] said: http://www.newrightausnz.com/2005/11/28/big-business-as-a-supporter-of-anti-racism-noam-chomsky/
[19] you will be assimilated: http://alternativeright.com/blog/2013/4/30/resistance-is-futile
[20] Venezuela: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/03/two-cheers-for-chavez/
[21] White American conservatives: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/11/a-white-nationalist-memo-to-white-male-republicans/
00:05 Publié dans Actualité | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : actualité, politique internationale, syrie, monde arabe, méditerranée, monde arabo-musulman, géopolitique | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
Syrie : Israël joue avec le feu islamiste
Syrie : Israël joue avec le feu islamiste
Ils sont nombreux les « idiots utiles » des fous d’Allah
Jean Bonnevey
Ex: http://metamag.fr/
Une intervention contestable
Général iranien Ahmad-Reza Pourdastan
Carla Del Ponte et Rami Abdel Rahmane
00:05 Publié dans Actualité | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : politique internationale, israël, syrie, islamisme, rebelles syriens, proche orient, levant, monde arabe, monde arabo-musulman, fondamentalisme islamiste | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
vendredi, 17 mai 2013
Robert E. Howard & the Heroic
Robert E. Howard & the Heroic
By Jonathan Bowden
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/
Editor’s Note:
The following text is a transcript by John Morgan of a lecture by Jonathan Bowden, “Robert Erwin Howard: Pulpster Extraordinaire,” given at the 26th New Right meeting in London on Saturday, April 17, 2010. The audio is available on YouTube [2].
Unfortunately, significant portions of the audio were cut off at the beginning of the second and third segments on YouTube. For the purposes of publishing this essay in the Pulp Fascism [3] collection, I also removed some 2,300 words of digressive material. If anyone has access to a complete copy of the lecture, please contact me. Also, if you have any corrections or if you can gloss the passages marked as unintelligible, please contact me at editor@counter-currents.com [4] or simply post them as comments below. If and when a complete transcript can be assembled, we will publish it here as well.
I’ll be talking about Robert Ervin Howard. A while back, I had a talk about H. P. Lovecraft, Aryan mystic, and he was one of a triumvirate of writers who wrote for a fantasy magazine called Weird Tales, a pulp magazine; they were incredibly cheaply produced magazines in the 1930s, with quite good art, graphic sort of art, printed on cheap bulk newsprint paper which was very acidic and fell apart very quickly. And yet three writers, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Ervin Howard, and Howard Phillips Lovecraft have survived and been inducted into literature. I saw in my local library that Penguin Classics, or Modern Classics, the ones with the grey covers, now include Robert Erwin Howard’s Heroes in the Wind, from Kull to Conan: The Best of Robert E. Howard as a book. Penguin Classics, you see? So it begins as a pulp, and a hundred years later it’s redesignated as literature.
Howard is a very interesting figure. He only lived 30 years. He was born in 1906 and shot himself with a revolver in the head in his car, outside his home, when he was 30 years of age. We’ll get on to that afterwards. He wrote 160 stories, and the interesting thing about these stories is that they are pre-civilized in their settings, they’re barbaric, they’re ultra-masculine stories, and they deal with many themes which have been so disprivileged from much of mainstream liberal humanist culture that they no longer exist.
Howard had a range of heroes and wrote in most popular genres. He wrote to make money, but he began as a poet, and a poetic and sort of Saturnalian disposition influenced his work and his friendship, by correspondence, with Lovecraft, and to a lesser extent, Clark Ashton Smith, throughout his life. He was of Irish descent, and he was born in a town which became a boom town in the oil booms of the early 20th century in Texas. For those of you who don’t know, Texas is enormous. England fits into Texas twelve times, and Britain, eight times. He was born in Peaster, Texas, and spent some of his early life in a town called Brownwood, a quintessentially small-town American, which is the experience of most white Americans through the settlement of Western civilization in North America. The state capital, of course, is Austin, and you have the big cities like Houston, Dallas, and Galveston.
Now, Howard hated the oil booms, and what happened. When the oil boom happened to Cross Plains, a town of about 1,200 with a mayor and so on, morphed into a large, sprawling, lawless place of about 10,000. An enormous number of prospectors and drillers and criminals and people seeking easy money, all heavily armed of course, came in to Cross Plains. The town burst out beyond its limits in all directions. Oil was discovered everywhere. Fortunes were made, and fortunes were lost.
At the time he was born, lynchings were still in vogue right across the South and the ex-Confederate states. Everyone displayed and carried weapons openly. Sometimes the Rangers, as they were called, a man alone in the sun with a rifle, was basically all you had of semi-ordered civilization. People don’t realize how, if you like, wild and open certain parts of the United States were, certainly until the 1860s, 1870s.
The psychological experience of an intuitive and sympathetic and radically imaginative young man like Howard invests the tall Texan story, and stories of prospectors and ranchers and drillers in the oil industry, and Texas Rangers and Marshals and so on, with an added piquancy. His family supported the Confederacy in a previous generation, and he was mildly descended from certain Confederate commanders.
His attitude towards life is expressed in the stories, which is why they survived. The stories are like lucid dreams. You walk straight into them, and the action begins. Most of them were dreams, and in a way, most critics believe Howard’s an oral creator. He’s in the oral, folklorist, and narrative-oriented tradition. He’s a storyteller par excellence. It’s said he wrote at night, and he used to chant the stories to himself, which of course is a very old Northern European and Nordic tradition. It’s the idea of the skald. It’s the idea that things are illuminated to you, and you speak because you hear the voice.
He had a series of masculine heroes beginning with certain Celtic and Pictish/Scotch-Irish heroes such as Bran Mak Morn and so on; Conan, the hero that he’s most associated with, whose name, of course, is abstracted from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s middle name. Howard would take from all sorts of roots, many of which related to heroic, Celtic, Indo-European elements which he imagined to exist in his own past.
He was very influenced by G. K. Chesterton’s dictum at the beginning of the 20th century that myth is the commingling of emotional reality with what is understood to be fact. If you mix together eras and peoples, but you keep the emotional truth of the substance of what we perceive their lives to have been, then you can influence the present and the future. It’s noumenal truth, as Aristotle said 2,000 years ago, the idea that certain things are artistically and emotionally true irrespective of what you think about them factually.
His most famous series of stories, the Conan stories that he wrote pretty much towards the end of his life, were based upon a false yet true/factual world history, the so-called Hyborian Age that he created for himself. Maps of the Hyborian Age have been produced, and they are based upon a realistic sociology, ethnography, geological history, and a coherent view of economics. The country of Aquilonia that Conan ends up conquering at the end of the mythos is partly Britain. The Picts are partly the Scots, of course, covered in woad, barbaric, kept out by a wall, that sort of thing.
War is the dynamic of all of Howard’s fiction, and his attitude towards life was conflict-oriented. His stories are described as ultra-masculine and non-feminist stories. Unkind critics say that they’re Barbara Cartland for men, where all women are beautiful, all men are heroic, where magic works instead of science, and where force decides all social problems, and there is a degree to which the genre which he has founded, called sword and sorcery—of which one supposes J. R. R. Tolkien, an Oxford professor, is the senior representative in the 20th century—is an example of the literary and the heroic in contemporary letters. It’s interesting to notice that the early great texts of the Western civilization, Homer, Beowulf, are deeply heroic, and yet over time, the heroic imprimatur within our language and within our sensibility dips.
It’s said that boys aren’t interested in reading at school, and that 80 to 90% of those who do English literature courses in further educational colleges and universities, the tertiary sector, are women. It’s said that men don’t disprivilege literature, and it’s also said in the West that boys get bullied if they’re regarded, as Howard was when he was younger, as sissies because they read too much, and this sort of thing.
I think one of the problems is that literature that appeals to men is often not the concern of the people who run these sorts of educational establishments. If the sort of people that influenced Howard, people like Noyes, people like Robert W. Service, people like Byron, people like Kipling, people like the heroic imperialist literature of William Henley, who was the basis for Long John Silver in Treasure Island, and was a close friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, a man who could go from bonhomie to murderous rage with a click of your fingers, as Silver does in Treasure Island, of course, because he moves from extreme malevolence to a sort of Cockney paternalism in the same breath. Now, if this literature was normative much further down the social and the educational scale, one would imagine that boys and youngish men would be much more interested in literature as a whole.
Howard essentially sold stories from about the age of 20, certainly 19. He started writing when he was 9, and the interesting thing about him is that his stories are not really derivative. There are connections to enormous writers that were prominent at the time, principally Jack London, but Howard emerged fully-formed and had his own voice from the very beginning.
London’s a very interesting figure, because London’s often been associated, truthfully and yet forcefully, with the extreme Left. Trotsky, of course, wrote an introduction to his famous dystopia of American life called The Iron Heel, and yet London, as George Orwell intimated in one of his essays, was proto-fascistic, and was in many ways a Left nationalist, or even a National Bolshevik, or somebody who would be now described as a Third Positionist. London’s positions were those of socialism from the outside, but also a form of socialism, with and without quotation marks, that was Right-wing rather than Left-wing, and was both national and racial. The interesting thing about London’s discourse is the radicalism of the racialism. [. . .]
We had at the last meeting, or the meeting before last, a speaker from Croatia called Tomislav Sunić who wrote a book which I edited a long time ago, actually, called Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age. Among the very important points about that book is his recognition, as a European ex-Catholic in his case, of the Protestant fundamentalist nature of the United States. I think this is a crucial point to understand the United States. The influence of contemporary Jewry in the United States is due to the fact that it’s a Protestant fundamentalist country and many, many Americans really believe in their deep and even subconscious mind that the viewpoint that they are a self-chosen elect to rule by right, by divine imprecation, is so deep in their consciousness, the idea as Pentecostalists sing, that “we are Zion,” goes so far down that the difference between their identity and their group specificity and their militant patriotism and that of a small country in the Middle East, and people who didn’t begin to emigrate en masse into the United States until the latter stages of the 19th century, and only really began to have major socioeconomic impact, particularly culturally, in the first quarter to a third of the 20th century makes these things, to my mind, easier to understand.
Now, Protestant fundamentalism doesn’t seem to have scratched Howard very much, and yet one of his heroes is a Puritan called Solomon Kane, and Solomon Kane, who comes between Bran Mak Morn, Kull, and Conan, is in some ways his first major hero. Solomon Kane is very, very interesting because he’s one of these Protestant extremists of the 1620s—well, they’re set before—but that’s when the movement comes to power in the Cromwellian Interregnum in England, and yet stretches way back into the previous century, and yet in a strange way he’s an outsider, even in that movement.
Kane dresses all in black with a little white sort of a bib round his neck. He’s extraordinarily heavily armed, as most of the Puritans were, had a sword on either side, had pistols in the belts, had a knife in the boot, because you were fighting for the Lord, you see! “I am the flail of the Lord.” They had these endless quotes, largely from the Old Testament, but to a degree from elements of the New, which they would roll out on occasions when they had to justify what they were about to do, and that their instincts wanted to do, in a way that nothing could restrain them.
There’s a famous moment in Northern Ireland, when James Callaghan was Northern Irish Secretary under Wilson in the late 1960s, slightly sympathetic to Social Democratic, Catholic nationalism in Northern Ireland, as part of the local movement was then, but in a very moderate way, and then said in a concerned and perplexed way to the Reverend Ian Paisley, who softened a bit as he’s got older, and in turn wanted to be Prime Minister of Northern Ireland before he died, he said to Paisley that, “But we’re all the children of God, Reverend,” and Paisley said, “No! Nooooo!” He said, “We are the children of wrath!”
And that is the attitude of those Puritan extremists, loyal to the Old Testament in many ways. Men of a sort of always implacable fury, and elements of their dictatorship, under Cromwell of course, were increasingly maniacal. The banning of Shakespeare, our greatest writer. When an English national revolutionary movement bans the country’s greatest-ever writer, you do begin to think there’s something slightly wrong, don’t you, no? Similarly, the flogging of actors under the New Model Army in Newcastle for performing Shakespeare, these were the latter stages, these were the Buddhas of Bamiyan moments, weren’t they really, of these English revolutionaries of the 1640s, or what was really going on.
Now, the sort of Puritanism that Howard puts into this character is different, because Howard’s character, Solomon Kane’s a loner, a man who always fights for his own cause, but when he hears those almost voluptuous pagan stirrings in the background, it’s always Christianized, and it’s always put in a Protestant context.
Cromwell once had a phrase: “I disembowel you for Christ’s love.” And that’s what he said in the Putney Debates. When the parliamentary side won the Civil War, the whole New Model Army, which of course was a revolutionary army of that time—no brothels, no drinking; in the Royal army, you went to the back, and there was endless entertainment at the back of the battlefront. With the Puritan armies, there was none of that. You went to the back, and there was no drinking, and there was a chap ranting at you about whether you’d sinned that day.
It was less fun, but at the same time, when they raised their pikes together, not in a higgledy-piggledy way, or one bloke at the back didn’t want to, but they raised them together, as one unit. They would all chant, “God is our strength.” Cromwell understood as Shaw said early in the 20th century that a man who has a concept of reality that is metaphysically objectivist, a man who believes in something as absolute truth is worth fifty men. And that’s the type of revolutionary ideology that these people then had.
But at the Putney Debates, there was a debate about how the country should go, and Ireton and the other supreme commanders were there. Under Cromwell they committed regicide of course, they killed the King, so the future of the country was theirs. There was another tendency known as the Levellers, who in some ways of course were retrospectively the first socialists, so-called because they wanted to level down distinctions. There was an even more radical movement called the Diggers that came along later. But Cromwell told Ireton, “Either we hang them or they will hang us.” And that’s the Levellers. And at the end of the Putney Debates, the army moves aside, the Cromwellian regime has been established, and the Levellers are hanging on the trees. So Cromwell had got his way.
The importance of Protestantism to the United States, in a complicated way, is the reason why there has never been an extreme Right-wing movement of any great success in the United States, except in a localized way like the Klan to deal with particular circumstances at a particular time. America, you could imagine, is ripe for such a movement, as Australia always has been, and yet there has not been one, not really. Not a national movement. There were figures in the 1930s: there was the Silver Shirt movement; there were Father Coughlin’s radio broadcasts, which had all sorts of interesting ramifications in American life, as Catholic priest giving the radical Right to essentially a Protestant nation, which of course set up a cultural tension and contradiction in and of itself.
There are also interesting liberal counterparts to this. Most people remember Orson Welles’ treatment of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, when the Martians invade New York, and then he admitted it was a fiction retrospectively, and tens of thousands of ninnies leave New York because they think the Martians are landing. “Gee, they’re up the road!” And they get the pickup truck, and they go. And then they broadcast later that it was all a stunt and it was an artistic show, and people shouldn’t take it literally.
Welles deliberately did that to discredit Coughlin. He said afterwards, “We did it because too many people believed everything that fascist priest was telling them on the radio, so we proved them, don’t believe what you hear that comes out of the radio.” And that’s a purely sort of aesthetic response to the impact that sort of thing had.
Yet still movements lie there, Aryan Nations, National Alliance, these sorts of movements, very small, very isolated, geographically and in other ways. National Alliance was quite interesting because it morphed from Youth for George Wallace. That’s how it started, and then it took various transformatory steps until it emerged as a very hard-line group under the late Dr. William Pierce at a later date.
And this culture of extreme Protestantism—which contained elements which are to the Right of almost anything you’ve ever seen, mentally, psychologically, conceptually—seems partly, because, of its extreme individualism, to be incapable of generating radical Right mass movements. Most Americans still adopt a deliberately materialist, liberal humanist and individualist way of looking at life. They divide into two basic political parties that have switched over during the course of the last two centuries. Don’t forget in the 19th century the Republican Party was the party of the nominal Left, and the Democrats were red. The Democrats were conservatives who supported states’ rights—not the right to secede, but certainly the right to own slaves. The party led by a man who’s proud to have ex-slaves in his own family, the present President, would have actually, in a strange sort of way, not been able to join the Democrat Party in the 19th century, and yet the switch around, that you can vote in each other’s primaries, and that “Isn’t everyone a Democrat? Isn’t everyone a Republican?,” hence the meaninglessness of the names, adds to this sort of feeling that you get in the contemporary United States that all that matters is money and social success. America’s very important, because America, of course, dominates this country now culturally and geopolitically. We can’t almost do anything without them, and all the wars that we’re now dragged into are due to American hegemony.
But the repudiation of parts of American power should never blind ourselves to the cultural excellence of what many white Americans have achieved, both for their group and individually. If you actually look at all the radical Right literature, the alternative side of an isolationist and American nationalist posture, there is some great work there by people like William Gayley Simpson, who wrote an enormous book of over a thousand pages called Which Way Western Man? Again, without going on a tangent too much, he’s a very interesting man because he’s an ex-Trappist monk. He began as a liberal and an aching humanist whose heart bled for the Third World and who had all the correct sort of UN-specific attitudes, and gradually he changed step by step by step, and he ended up, if not a member then a fellow traveler, of the National Alliance. That is quite a change. That is quite a leap. But it is also true that tens and tens of thousands of educated Western people who are liberal-minded now will have to change their views, will have to begin to change their mindset in this and the coming generation if Western civilization is virtually not to slide off the cliff. [. . .]
Now, to return to Howard, Howard’s writing, by the end of his sort of period, and don’t forget that he was sort of mature at 22 and dead at 30, he produced 160 stories, 15, 16 volumes basically, and other fragments. There was an unfinished fantasy novel called Almuric, the early Celtic stories, Bran Mak Morn and the others morphed into Solomon Kane. There were associated Westerns and humorous stories. There were some detective stories, but he never particularly liked that genre, although his attitude towards life was hard-boiled. There were also some Crusader stories as well, and some slightly mythological stories about a sort of white man in the East called Gordon, presumably named after the Gordon of Khartoum, but actually an American, and these were the old Borak stories set in Afghanistan, where he goes native and fights along sort of inter-tribal and group-based and clan lines in that context.
Howard’s attitude toward politics is quite complicated and not entirely logical, and primarily emotional. He supported the New Deal because he believed the American economy had collapsed and something needed to be done. He argued strongly with H. P. Lovecraft, he was more of a “reactionary” in these respects, a classical liberal, didn’t like the Roosevelt and the people around him, didn’t like intervention in the market in that sort of Protestant, American way. He felt that you fail commercially, you suffer punishment, because God has chosen that punishment for you. Destiny involves sacrifice.
The irony is that the banks have been saved in the United States by Bush, costing trillions of dollars, but the metaphysic which founded the country would have allowed all of those banks to fail, all of those banks to fail and all those bankers to hang themselves and throw themselves off buildings. That happened in 1929, and then you rebuild quickly, because the pure, American, sort of Randian view is that capitalism is an insatiable animal and vortex of energy, and if people go to pot, if people lose everything they have, if as a trader, an insurance agent I vaguely knew years ago at Lloyd’s, lost all his money in the Names scandal, and goes there on a Sunday and unlocks the door and goes down to the toilets and sits there and drinks Domestos and kills himself and is found by the cleaners, Africans probably, on Monday morning, and his senior partner in Lloyd’s said, “Well, that’s capitalism for you.” And that’s it! What goes up goes down! This was the view that founded the United States
And yet the irony is, why have these Western politicians intervened, why have they saved these structures: few collateral damage moments, Lehman Brothers; they’ve charged Goldman Sachs with fraud. Well, that’s a bit late, isn’t it, really? And yet why have they intervened? They’ve intervened because of the voting danger. The fact that there are radical parties on the fringe of all Western societies, everyone knows who they are, that people could vote for in a major moment of fiscal/physical/moral/emotional distress, and the whole Western clerisy that’s bought into the contemporary liberal package knows that. Many of these parties are actually quite moderate in relation to the traditions they come out of, but they terrify the present establishment that often sees the more populist ones as just the start of something worse that’s coming behind, see?
And there’s also a certain guilt there as well, because these people are well aware of what’s happened to Western societies because they’ve been running them for 70 years. This idea it’s all an accident, “I didn’t really mean it,” and the turning of Western societies into a sort of version of Brasília, en masse with a tiny, little elite at the top that’s creaming most of the goodies off for themselves.
I’m not an egalitarian in any sense, but it’s interesting to note that this country’s slightly more unequal now than it was in 1910 in terms of 90% of all equity and all capital and all wealth is owned by the top 10%, and the top 2% of that 10%, and yet the society has changed out of all recognition, 1910 to 2010. Most Western people born in the first [unintelligible] part of the 20th century would not believe the transformation of the West just in a lifetime, basically, after they died. And it occurred because of the extraordinary wars, largely amongst ourselves, that we fought in the 20th century that also gave outsider ideologies like Communism their chance to vulture-like pick over the defeat and the carrion corpses of what was left.
The heroic attitude towards man and society that Howard’s work depicts exists virtually nowhere except as play and pleasure in computer games for boys and adolescents, in comic books and so on. The areas of life where that sort of ethos remains, the armed forces, the army, navy, and air force of most contemporary Western societies, particularly their specialist or elite forces, in Britain the Special Air service, the naval equivalent the Special Boat Service, and all of those novels, these Andy McNab sort of novels about the heroic and this sort of thing, which are lapped up by a largely male audience, largely male audience. Other than that, there is not really the imprimatur of the heroic in Western life, the extraordinary demilitarization of Western life, hardly ever see a policeman, hardly ever see soldiers. When do you ever see British forces? And that’s because they’re always outside the country as globalist mercenaries fighting American and Zionist wars all over the world. They’re never seen here, and many of their commanders don’t want them here, either, because they regard parts of British life as so irretrievably decadent that they actually want to keep their troops away from much of what’s happened in relation to the society. There are towns in Berkshire where a lot of the military stay, like Arborfield and these sorts of towns, where it’s quite clear there’s a sort of military zone and there’s a civilian zone. You all know what British towns are like on Friday, Saturday night: no police; they’re all in their vans; they’re all in the station; they’re at home; they’re filling in forms. They wear yellow bibs when they’re out, but when you want one, you can never see them, can you?
And a lot of our older people are, let’s face it, frightened to go into town and city centers on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, certainly after 6. And why is this happening? It’s partly happening because the concept that Howard’s fiction deals with, masculinity, has been completely disprivileged, completely demonized and rerouted in contemporary liberal life. Hostility to masculinity, certainly as defined, say, before 1950 is very considerable, and it’s had a very corrosive effect ideologically, aesthetically. Men can have their own pleasures in various zones, which are sort of sneered at and disprivileged, but the centrality of the heroic as a myth for life has largely gone.
The way to explicate something like Howard, as I did with Lovecraft before, is to maybe to concentrate on one of their stories. With H. P. Lovecraft I chose “The Dunwich Horror,” and with Howard I would choose “Rogues in the House,” which was published in Weird Tales in the early ’30s. One fantasy critic has called it the greatest fantasy story of the 20th century, but that’s just one individual’s opinion. It’s relatively early in the Conan series.
Conan is a northern barbarian, and because everything’s fused together in Howard, he’s got slightly Nordic, Germanic, and slightly Celtic traits. He’s an outsider, but he has a clean code of masculine barbarism. Civilization is always seen as slightly weak-kneed and sybaritic to Howard. And yet at the same time, barbarism has its own inner order.
Now, there are counter-factual and countercultural elements there that will be used by social anthropologists in a totally different context, like Lévi-Strauss and others, in the middle of the 20th century, but Howard means it in a different way.
There’s a Left-wing streak to Howard, as there was to London, a siding with the outsider, with those ruined by capitalism, by tramps. London’s book about the East End is one of the most extraordinary books about mass poverty before George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and “How the Poor Die,” were quite extraordinary works. A poor little hospital in Paris before any sort of socialized medicine, where those who were in the bottom 10%, their corpses were just thrown on the ground! And they died in agony, and they kick you away and put another one on top. This is how the poor die! And Orwell said to this chap in this hospital, “But look at the state they’re in!” And he said, “Well, they gave up slavery. Here’s another batch.” This was the attitude then. This is why things like the labor movement, even in the United States in an attenuated way, were created, to correct that imbalance as it’s seen from the bottom.
The far Right, of course, always wanted not the class war of the contemporary Left, but to socialize mass life in a way that preserved the traditions of the civilization of which we’re a part, that brought on what was excellent about the past and yet realized that the 50% of people who own no capital, the 50% of people who are largely excluded from all center-Right parties’ definition of patriotism, are part of the country, are part of the nation, fight the country’s wars for the most part when they’re asked to do so, and therefore have to be within the remit of social consideration in relation to education, health, and other matters.
My explanation for Howard’s support of the New Deal and that type of politics largely is along those sorts of lines. It’s the sort of apolitical chap who likes country and western in a Midwestern state and supports socialized medicine up to a point, as long as it’s not too costly, doesn’t like Obama, and supports our troops, you see. But it’s in a sort of apolitical zone which has got no real knowledge above that. Some of the instincts are right, but the ideological formulation in which that takes place is likely wrong, because even these wars—do you think Iraq was fought for ordinary white Americans? Do you think Afghanistan has anything to do with ordinary families living in Nebraska or Nevada or Kansas? None of these wars have anything to do with them at all. Even the Black Muslims have worked out that white gentiles largely are second-class citizens now in the society that they created. But that’s another story, and I’d just like to concentrate on Howard.
This particular story concerns Conan from the outside, Conan as perceived by an aristocrat and fop called Murilo. Howard’s a little bit of a Nordicist. He thinks southern Europeans are a bit foppish in comparison to northern Europeans. There’s a streak of this, and some of the society is seen to be Italy, Corinth, Zamora, but they’re not. But they seem to be Italy.
Well, there’s this Italian city-state that’s run by a corrupt priest called Nabonidus, who’s known as the Red Priest. These myths are set, these stories, mythologically encoded, are set before the beginning of recorded history and after the sinking of Atlantis, possibly a fantasy itself. So he sets them far back enough that he can do whatever he wants with them, but at the same time he can import a large amount of retrospective historical insight.
The interesting thing is the Machiavellianism of the politics of these stories. All of these societies are run extremely ruthlessly and are run completely for the power interests of the people in charge. The nationalities don’t really matter, but they are, if the gloves are off, as marauding and vengeful as their own leaders who they represent at a lower level. Truly Howard believes, with the Roman dictator Sulla, that when the weapons are out, the laws fall silent.
Now, Murilo is a courtier, a relatively corrupt courtier, in this city-state, and Nabonidus comes to him one day at a royal council meeting and gives him a small casket that contains a severed ear. And this is a warning, as it would be if a Renaissance prince in post-Medieval Italy, gave it to a rival, and it’s, “Clear off. Get out of the city-state as quickly as possible. I’m giving you one day.” And Murilo wonders what he’s going to do. He can flee, but he’s not a coward, why should he leave his own city? And in any case he’s got lots of rackets on the go, you know, so he wants an out, and he thinks, “I need to assassinate Nabonidus,” who runs the drunken King as a sort of priest/philosopher-king/leader of a native death cult within the city like a puppet master controls his dog.
So he needs a vassal, and he finds it in the prisons of the city where a young, heathen, northern barbarian has been captured and lays there in chains after various escapades and thefts, and this is a young man of 19 called Conan, who’s twice the size of a normal man. All Howard’s heroes are physically enormous, and all incredibly violent, although they all have an honor code of their own which is interesting, particularly towards the end of the story, what you might call an innate code of masculine morality and honor which is part and parcel of natural law.
The Social Darwinian view that was spread throughout mass culture, particularly these types of fictions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is not entirely true as all prisons and all armies testify, there’s a code of honor and morality even in very extreme male behavior. Rapists are always amongst the most disprivileged in any prison. Men who attack and feed on women, for example, in very all-male and male-concentric cultural spaces are always disprivileged, always disliked, and that’s because of innate feelings about how, in a very traditionalist way, what we call partly a sexist way now, men should treat women, and these things pre-date all modern ideas and are partly innate, and in some ways, because Howard is such an instinctualist, he brings these sorts of forces to the fore.
Now, Nabonidus wants Murilo to leave the city. Murilo hires Conan to murder Nabonidus. Nabonidus is [unintelligible]. Conan is in his cell sucking some beef off a bone, and besides, Nabonidus is an upper-class priest—so why not murder him for money, he’s an adventurer?—so he decides to go with Murilo on this plot. As always with Howard, a synopsis never does justice to the sort of the lucid dreaming of the story itself. Howard always said that he was there and that Conan was next to him like an old soldier dictating his stories, some of which will be tall stories as well.
Now, Murilo then hears that Conan has been captured because the guard that he bribed to get him out of the prison has been arrested on another offense. Conan’s actually escaped in another way and joins Murilo later. Murilo, desperate, a Borgia without any sort of a family fortune decides to murder Nabonidus himself, so he creeps up to his fortified estate, which is on the edge of town, described in this Gothic way—it’s dark, it’s sepulchral, it’s moonlit, there’s an enormous dog that roams the grounds.
Remember Conan Doyle’s stories? There’s always this enormous mastiff that the villain has that roams the grounds to bring people down, but Watson shoots on Holmes’ behalf usually at the end. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is extraordinarily amusing because the hound is covered with phosphorous to make it glow in the dark when it races after some poor chap who’s looking back, terrified, on a sort of West Country moor, and yet phosphorous is so poisonous that, the dog licks itself all the time, one lick and its dead. But these stories are metaphorical. They’re extreme exercises in the imagination. They’re not concerned with these pettifogging details of which critics make too much.
Now, Murilo creeps into the garden and, horror of horrors, what does he find? He finds the dead body of the dog, and it looks as though it’s been savagely mauled in a way by something he doesn’t understand, by some weird thing or ape or monster. He then proceeds into the house and finds much of it wrecked. Nabonidus is nowhere to be seen, and one of his servants, Joka, has been murdered.
Suddenly he gets into the inner chamber of Nabonidus’ villa, which is modeled on a Renaissance palace essentially, and he sees the Red Priest, so named because he wears this red cowl, sitting on a throne, made of alabaster, and everything’s heavy and ornamental, a bit like those Cecil B. DeMille films from the ’30s, everything extraordinarily overdone and luxuriant. And he creeps up to Nabonidus to stab him, and the figure turns, and it’s a were-thing, or a monster, something of the imagination. It’s not human at all, simian rather than human. And Murilo faints, and then the story closes.
This story’s in three acts. Traditionally, like a lot of Western drama, like Dante’s Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise, you’ve got this three-pronged triadic element, the thesis, the antitheses, the synthesis at the end. So that’s the first part.
The second part is Murilo awakens in dungeons or interconnected corridors underneath Nabonidus’ house, manse, mansion. He crawls along a corridor and somebody hisses, and it’s Conan. He’s come into the house to murder Nabonidus because Murilo’s going to pay him, and because he’s a member of a cult that he dislikes and so on. Murilo scents his hair, like the young aristocrats of his era, and Conan’s senses are so acute that he detects that with his nostrils, and that’s the reason he doesn’t attack him in the darkness.
They both decide to, they swear loyalty to each other—don’t forget this is an oral culture where bonds and legal sanctions are expressed orally. Howard despised the element of modern life where people say anything they want just to get their own way at any particular time. In pre-modern, say Nordic societies, the oath or something which is given verbally with strength is as binding as any legal document ever could be, even more so.
Conan and Murilo proceed looking for Nabonidus. They come out into the body of the house, which as I said resembles just sort of Renaissance, Florentine palace, and they see Nabonidus stripped, semi-naked and wounded, in a neighboring corridor, and they wonder what has replaced him up inside the house.
And what has happened, as he in a dazed way explains once he returns to full consciousness, is that his servant, who’s this ape that he’s taken from one of the outlying countries in Howard’s imaginary kingdoms, has supplanted him as the master in the house. Howard, to a moderate degree, believed in science, believed in evolution, it was very much almost a cult then, as was eugenics, and Thak as he’s called, this ape-man who wears the red because he’s supplanted the human he wanted to supplant, has thrown his master, Nabonidus, into the pit and has seized control of the house. Thak sits, waiting for them to come out of the pit because there’s a bell underneath there in the pits that they’ve crossed, a trap basically, and he knows humans are down there, and he’s waiting for them.
Nationalists emerge. There’s an interesting political element here, because Nabonidus is a very corrupt ruler and has the King in his thrall, so nationalists of the city-state—you could be a nationalist and of a city-state because it was the unit of civilization essentially, and a country would be city-states federated together. Attempts to assassinate Nabonidus in a way that Murilo wanted to, Thak deals with them. The story fast-forwards in a very filmic way, because Howard is a visualizer. The male brain is visual and always thinks in images. And these sorts of stories are extraordinarily cinematographical in their nature and their forward, pumping lucidity.
Thak senses that they’ve come up from under the ground, and there are interesting pseudo-scientific elements. The Red Priest, Nabonidus is a scientist and a mage and a magician combined. It’s Religion and the Decline of Magic in some ways if you view it academically. He has this construction of mirrors whereby from one room you can reflect light through tubes that contain small mirrors, and it ends up being able to look into another room, so you can actually look round corners, and they can see Thak, and he can see them.
Because he needs to dispose of the bodies of the nationalists who’ve come into the house, Thak disappears for a time, and Conan and the others seize their chance, and they go up. Nabonidus becomes terrified when all the doors are locked and he can’t find the weapons they need to fight against his servant who’s turned against him.
In the end, Conan has to face off against Thak in this quite extraordinarily violent scene. Howard was one of the most brilliant writers of physical force and conflict between men in the 20th century. There’s little doubt about that. It’s so immediate you’re almost there and it is essentially visual. Conan and Thak have this clash-of-the-gods-type of titanic duel with each other, much like a scene from Homer basically, Hector before the walls of Troy. Thak is done down in the end, and Conan, half-dead, is saluted by Murilo.
Nabonidus then tries to betray both of them, and Conan does for him, really, with a stool. He whips up a stool and throws it into his head, and he falls, and all Conan can say is, “His blood is red, not black,” because in the slums of the city they said the Red Priest’s blood was black because his heart was black, and Conan’s a barbarian and a literalist, you see. “His blood isn’t black.”
There’s an interesting moment when Conan is helped by Murilo because he’s so hurt and wounded in the fight with Thak, and he pushes Murilo aside and says, “A man walks alone. When you can’t stand up it’s time to perish.” That’s not an attitude you heard from the Blair government too often, is it? These are pre-modern attitudes, you see. As somebody on Radio 4 would say now, “But that’s a dangerously exclusionist notion. What about the ill, what about the weak?” And of course in that type of barbaric morality, the strong look after the weak, but only in an assent of being and natural law which is codified on the basis of the morality of strength. That’s what those sorts of civilizations thought and felt.
And the other interesting thing is that he looks down on Thak, this sort of beast, sort of man that he’s killed, and he says, “I didn’t kill a beast tonight, but a man! And my women will sing of him.” And there’s two cultural views of these sorts of things. One is to regard them as remarkable pieces of creative imagination. There is other is to sort of laugh and sneer at them, and think that they represent old-fashioned values that we’ve thankfully gotten rid of, or moved away from.
The stories, with the exception of the Kane stories, are all pre-Christian in the most radical of terms, and yet pre-liberal and liberal secular, which of course in the modern West is what’s replaced Christianity. I would say that contemporary Catholicism is rather like the Protestantism of yesteryear, and Protestantism has become liberalism, and liberalism has morphed, strangely, without the Protestantism that gave it a moral compass, into a form of cultural Marxism, and that’s what we have now.
And yet Howard’s stories are very, very interesting and very dynamic and very much appeal to an imaginative element in certainly a lot of men. The belief in self-definition, the belief in the heroic as a model for life, the belief in strength but with an honor code that saves it from wanton exercise in strength without purpose, and the beliefs that one is part of even a tribe or a community.
In the stories, Conan’s a Cimmerian. He’s from a northern group. He’s always introduced, he’s only got one name, he’s so primal, he doesn’t have any other names. Conan. Like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, he only had one name. Heathcliff, he doesn’t need any other names. He’s just a force, you see? A force of the female imagination, which is what he is. And in a strange way, the way in which he’s described in that novel by Emily Brontë is very similar to the way Conan’s described, but Conan’s a bit more beefed out, a bit more muscular.
Many films have been made, many TV series have been made, there’s a Conan industry in the 20th century. What Howard would have thought of all that no one knows. He’s there, possibly on a slightly lower tier, but with Tarzan and Doctor Who and James Bond and these other iconic sort of mass popular fantasy figures. Yet in all of them, certainly in this sort of material, there’s a truth to experience, there’s a vividness, there’s a cinematographical and representational reality, and there’s a concern with courage, masculinity, and the heroic which is lacking from most areas of society, and there’s also an honor code, a primitive morality if you like, which goes with it and gives it efficacy and purpose.
The other thing which he differentiates in this type of literature is respect for the enemy. When Terre’Blanche was murdered, I noticed liberals on the BBC giggling and sort of laughing and thinking it was all a jolly joke. These are people who are against the death penalty and believe that murder’s a terrible infraction against human rights, jurisprudence, and all the rest of it. But the sort of cultural space that this work comes out of respects the enemy. Kills the enemy, respects the enemy, which of course is a soldier’s emotion. Many who’ve fought in wars don’t disrespect the enemy. They know what they’re like. British soldiers who’ve fought in the Falklands, American soldiers who’ve fought against Islamist militants, and even some of the militants themselves when they’ve fought against Western warriors, understand the code of the soldier and the code of the warrior on the other side. But many of these men are spiritually, fundamentally similar men in a way, born in other groups.
Men will always fight with each other, and they’re biologically prone to do so. How, in an era of mass weapons of destructive warfare, some existing and others not, that is to be worked through. It is a part of the destiny of the relationship between groups and states. But the hard-wiring that makes men competitive and egotistical and conflict-oriented is ineradicable and irreducible, and modern liberal societies which are based upon the idea of inclusionist love without thought of conflict are sentimental to the point that they will fall apart, bedeviled by their endless contradictions.
And I personally think that if you inculcate yourself, with a bit of irony and estrangement, from some of the elements of the culture of the heroic that certainly subsisted as mainstream cultural fare in our society before 1950, you have a different attitude towards what spews out of the telly every evening, and you have a different attitude towards the sort of culture that you’re living in, and you have a different attitude towards great figures in your own group and even in others, and you have a different attitude towards yourself and the future.
I give you Robert Ervin Howard, 1906 to 1936, a man who walked alone but spoke for an element, not just of America, but what it is to be white, male, Western, and free.
Thank you very much.
Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com
URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/05/robert-e-howard-and-the-heroic/
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[3] Pulp Fascism: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/04/forthcoming-from-counter-currents-pulp-fascism/
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Evo Morales zet USAID aan de deur
Evo Morales zet USAID aan de deur
door Walter Lotens
Ex: http://www.uitpers.be/
Ter gelegenheid van de 1 mei-viering pakt de Boliviaanse president Evo Morales nu al enkele jaren uit met een verrassende mededeling. Meestal ging het om de renationalisatie van een bedrijf dat in de jaren 1990 was geprivatiseerd. Dit jaar ging het om een bericht van een heel andere orde. Morales deelde mee dat zijn regering beslist had om de USAID (United States Agency for International Development) het land uit te wijzen. Wat gaat er schuil achter deze beslissing?
In zijn uiteenzetting zei Evo Morales dat er “geen gebrek was aan Amerikaanse instellingen die blijven samenspannen tegen ons volk en vooral de nationale overheid. Daarom gaan we deze dag aangrijpen om aan te kondigen dat we hebben besloten om USAID eruit te gooien.” Hij richtte zich vervolgens tot zijn minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, David Choquehuanca, en vroeg hem om de Amerikaanse ambassade in kennis te stellen van zijn besluit. Het Boliviaanse staatshoofd koppelde de uitzetting aan een recente opmerking van de Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, John Kerry, die Latijns-Amerika 'de achtertuin' van de VSA had genoemd. Kerry maakte de opmerking toen hij probeerde Amerikaanse Congresleden te overtuigen van het belang van de regio, en te vertellen dat: “Het westelijk halfrond is onze achtertuin. Het is van cruciaal belang voor ons.”
In het verleden heeft Morales al eerder gedreigd de USAID uit het land te zetten. Hij zei dat de programma’s van de organisatie “meer politiek dan sociaal” zijn. Het Boliviaanse staatshoofd beschuldigde de organisatie ook van het “manipuleren” en “gebruik maken” van vakbondsleiders. Het aan de deur zetten van de USAID moet, aldus Morales, begrepen worden in het kader van “het nationaliseren van de waardigheid van de Boliviaanse bevolking. ”
USAID zegt de beslissing van Morales diep te betreuren. “Degenen die het meest zullen worden gekwetst door de beslissing van de Boliviaanse regering zijn de Boliviaanse burgers die hebben geprofiteerd van onze samenwerking in het onderwijs, de landbouw, de gezondheid, alternatieve ontwikkeling, en het milieu,” zei de organisatie in een recente verklaring.
USAID, hulp of controle?
Wie en wat zit er achter die United States Agency for International Development? De geschiedenis van de USAID gaat terug naar het Marshallplan onder president Truman voor de heropbouw van Europa na de Tweede Wereldoorlog en voor hulpprogramma’s aan ‘arme landen’. “Vanaf 1961,” zo schrijft Rubén Ramos in het linkse Rebelión, “is de USAID het belangrijkste US-agentschap voor inmenging in onze landen”. Sindsdien heeft USAID meer dan 200.000 miljoen dollar militaire en economische ‘hulp’ verstrekt aan landen van Latijns-Amerika om de eigen belangen te verdedigen. Die ‘hulp’ werd verstrekt onder de vorm van leningen, technische bijstand, noodfondsen en, vooral, militaire en politieke steun onder de vorm van spionage, destabilisering en waar nodig gewapende interventies. Rubén Ramos: “Programma’s en projecten rond democratie, landbouw, handel, economische ontwikkeling, onderwijs en milieu werden ontwikkeld in landen van de Sub-Sahara, Azië, Latijns-Amerika en de Cariben, Eurazië en het Oosten om, onder het mom van humanitaire bijstand, de kapitalistische ordening te vrijwaren.” Daarvoor werd en wordt nauw samengewerkt met ngo’s, inheemse organisaties, universiteiten, Amerikaanse ondernemingen - meer dan 3500 - , internationale organisaties, maar ook Noord-Amerikaanse en Europese ambassades.
De USAID heeft haar hoofdzetel in Washington-DC maar beschikt zowat overal ter wereld over haar eigen werkarmen. Zo heeft de USAID in Peru een eigen vertegenwoordiging en een eigen website om de wereld in te lichten over de steun van de VS aan Peru.
De USAID-projecten bieden volgens hun woordvoerders alternatieven aan voor de illegale cocateelt, zij trachten een constructieve dialoog op gang te brengen tussen lokale gemeenschappen, de regering, burgercomités en de private sector. USAID ondersteunt ook privaat-publieke samenwerkingsverbanden. Rubén Ramos: “Wat niet gezegd wordt is dat deze interventies in de eerste plaats bedoeld zijn om de neokoloniale dominantie te continueren en om de sociale vrede voor buitenlandse ondernemers te garanderen.” Van bij haar ontstaan heeft de USAID nauw samengewerkt met de US-regering en met de grote internationale organisaties. Een kwart van de organisaties die door de USAID worden gesteund zijn van christelijke origine en vertonen soms een sekte-achtig karakter. Ook ngo’s en coöperaties, belangrijke delen van het maaatschappelijk middenveld, worden door de USAID ondersteund. Volgens Ramos kwam in 1970 nog 70 procent van de buitenlandse hulp van de regering, maar vandaag is dat nog slechts 20 procent en komt het leeuwenaandeel van de bedrijfswereld. Het kan zeer instructief zijn om eens een kritisch oog te werpen op hun officiële website www.usaid.gov.
Bolivia versus USAID
Al jaren gonst het in Bolivia van de geruchten dat de Verenigde Staten op een stiekeme manier proberen de regering-Morales te stabiliseren. In de zeven jaar dat Evo Morales nu aan het bewind is, kwam het geregeld tot aanvaringen met de VS. In 2008 werden de Amerikaanse ambassadeur Philip Goldberg en andere diplomaten uit het land gezet en werd als reactie daarop de Boliviaanse ambassadeur Gustavo Guzman uit Washington terug geroepen. Intussen werden de diplomatieke contacten tussen beide landen hersteld, maar er is nog geen nieuwe uitwisseling van diplomaten tot stand gekomen.
Jake Johnson, een onderzoeker verbonden aan het Centre for Economic and Policy Research, heeft een aantal documenten kunnen inkijken waaruit blijkt dat ook al vóór Morales aan de macht kwam, pogingen ondernomen werden om de MAS-politiek te ondergraven. In 2008 publiceerde ABC News enkele uitspraken van een Amerikaanse onderzoeker die benaderd was door de Amerikaanse ambassade in Bolivia om informatie door te spelen over Venezolanen en Cubanen die in Bolivia verbleven. Peace Corps volunteers hadden ook dergelijke vragen gekregen, maar die aantijgingen werden tegengesproken door Amerikaanse woordvoerders. Wikileaks heeft in 2009 berichten onderschept die bedoeld waren om de nieuwe grondwet, opgesteld onder Morales, in een ongunstig daglicht te stellen en ook om de MAS in diskrediet te brengen voor de presidentsverkiezingen van einde 2009. Uit een ander bericht uit 2006, net na de verkiezing van Evo Morales, blijkt dat ambassadeur David Greenlee kennis had van het feit dat vele USAID-economische programma’s tegen de politieke richting ingingen die de regering wilde inslaan. Volgens Jake Johnson was er ook een compleet gebrek aan transparantie voor wat betreft de bestemming van de hulpgelden.
Het is voornamelijk vice-president Alvaro García Linera die herhaaldelijk heeft gewezen op de kwalijke invloeden van USAID en andere ngo’s voor het huidige Bolivia. Hij beschuldigde de USAID ervan steun te hebben verleend aan ngo’s die de inheemse volkeren en natuurorganisaties einde 2011 hebben gesteund in hun verzet tegen het aanleggen van een weg door het TIPNIS-gebied. (zie Uitpers nr.134 en 136) Dat heeft in die periode geleid tot een dieptepunt in de populariteit van Evo Morales die zich verplicht zag een aantal toegevingen te doen en enkele ministerwissels door te voeren. In 2012 wees Linera nogmaals met de vinger naar de USAID die hij ervan beschuldigde geld uit te geven om de regering-Morales te beletten de TIPNIS-weg aan te leggen.
Het maatschappelijk middenveld
Het is dus vooral Álvaro García Linera, een linkse socioloog, die in Bolivia het wantrouwen ten aanzien van het maatschappelijk middenveld vertolkt. Hij schreef er onlangs een boek over met als titel Geopolítica de la Amazonia, Poder Hacendal-Patrimonial y Acumulación Capitalista.
Enige nuancering rond dit standpunt is hier toch zeker op zijn plaats. Bolivia moet op eigen (staats)benen staan en zich niet laten beïnvloeden door Noord-Amerikaanse mollen die via ngo’s aan stemmingmakerij in Bolivia doen. Dat is de houding van de regering-Morales, maar daarnaast is er ook middenveld actief dat een belangrijke rol speelt in de Boliviaanse politiek. Het is trouwens door de nieuwe sociale bewegingen dat Evo Morales zelf aan de macht is kunnen komen.
Wat is de motor van het maatschappelijk leven? De vrije markt of de staat? Dat was de vraag die zich tussen 1985 en 2006 in Bolivia stelde. Er is intussen nog een belangrijke derde speler opgedoken die niet zo goed past in dat schema en dat zijn precies die nieuwe sociale bewegingen, die, naast oudere spelers als de vakbonden, mee het maatschappelijk middenveld gaan bevolken. Die bewegingen van onderuit zijn een nieuwe, krachtige, maar soms onberekenbare factor. Hoe verhouden die nieuwe sociale bewegingen waaruit de MAS, de nieuwe partij van Evo Morales, is gegroeid zich tot de huidige Boliviaanse staat? Schakelen zij zich in het proceso de cambio in, zoals het in Bolivia wordt genoemd? Is er sprake van onderlinge samenwerking of eerder van een spanningsveld tussen de verzuchtingen van onderuit en de leidinggevenden van een nieuwe plurinationale staat in opbouw? Anders gesteld: geeft Evo Morales invulling aan de regeringsslogan gobernar obediciendo (gehoorzamend (aan het volk) regeren)?
Dat zijn ook de vragen die de Antwerpse econoom Johan Bastiaensen bezig houden. Samen met enkele medewerkers onderzocht hij hoe nieuw linkse regeringen in Latijns-Amerika - Bolivia, Ecuador en Nicaragua - omspringen met initiatieven van microkredieten die ontstaan in het maatschappelijk middenveld. (1) De onderzoekers constateren dat microfinanciering, hoewel het macro economisch niet zoveel voorstelt, toch ontzettend veel mensen bereikt. Voor 2008 gaat het in het totaal om ongeveer 13 miljoen leningen voor een totaal bedrag van 13,9 miljard dollar en 13,4 miljoen spaarrekeningen met een spaarvolume van 9 miljard dollar.
Bolivia is een pionier in microfinanciering. Bijna een derde van het geldverkeer gaat via microfinanciering die bijna zeventig procent van de Bolivianen bereikt.
Toch bestaat er volgens de onderzoekers een eerder ambigue verhouding tussen die sector en de MAS-regering. Ogenschijnlijk zou er geen vuiltje aan de lucht mogen zijn, want de reden van bestaan van een linkse regering en van microfinanciering is dezelfde: de levensvoorwaarden van de armsten en uitgeslotenen verbeteren. Ten dele kan die ambiguïteit te maken hebben met wantrouwen ten aanzien van buitenlandse ngo’s, zoals de USAID, maar ook ten aanzien van internationale organisaties als het IMF en de Wereldbank die eerder een neoliberale politiek promootten, maar nu ook microfinanciering zijn beginnen ondersteunen. In 2011 zag ik in de grote steden van het land de ene protestbetoging na de andere. Bolivianen hebben een strijdtraditie en eisen gemakkelijk de straat op. Wil Morales de kritische ondersteuning van de nieuwe sociale bewegingen behouden dan zal hij inhoud moeten geven aan gobernar obediciendo.
“De hoop voor Bolivia is dat de echte brandstof voor verandering niet het gas is of de regering, maar het Boliviaanse volk zelf. In de woorden van Néstor Salinas die zijn broer verloor in de gasoorlog van 2003: “Regeringen komen en gaan, maar de herinnering van het volk blijft.” Dat schrijft de Amerikaanse activist Jim ‘Jaime’ Shultz, die jarenlang in Cochabamba woonde en het proceso de cambio van nabij heeft gevolgd.(2)
Nieuw links in Latijns-Amerika heeft afstand genomen van het verticale en centralistische voorhoedemodel, maar is nu op zoek naar een nieuwe grammatica van links waarin de realisering van een meer participatieve democratie moet voorop staan. In die nieuwe politieke grammatica zal Evo Morales ruim rekening moeten houden met de nieuwe sociale bewegingen.
Bolivia en Ecuador
Niet alles wat op dit ogenblik in het Boliviaans maatschappelijk middenveld beweegt, is geïnspireerd vanuit de Verenigde Staten. Laat dat duidelijk zijn. Er zijn ook kritische krachten van onderuit aanwezig die niet op een hoopje met het ‘yankee-imperialisme’ mogen worden gegooid. Dat refrein klinkt soms wat te simplistisch en kan zelfs politiek geïnspireerd zijn om de MAS-positie te versterken. Schouder aan schouder tegen een gemeenschappelijke vijand ageren om de eigen innerlijke tegenstellingen te kunnen overbruggen is een beproefde strategie. Toch mogen we zeker niet blind zijn voor de slagschaduw van de Verenigde Staten die weliswaar minder dan enkele decennia geleden, toch nog steeds aanwezig blijft in Latijns-Amerika en dan zeker in die landen die een totaal andere koers beginnen varen. Het zal dus wel niet toevallig zijn dat zowel het Bolivia onder Morales als het Ecuador onder Rafael Correa in botsing komen met de Verenigde Staten.
Ook tussen Ecuador en de Verenigde Staten is de spanning om te snijden. In april 2011 volgde Correa het voorbeeld van Evo Morales en zette de Amerikaanse ambassadeur Heather Hodges aan de deur. De reactie kwam prompt: de Ecuadoraanse ambassadeur Luis Gallegos werd door Washington persona non grata verklaard. Aan de basis lagen alweer berichten van Wikileaks die op 10 juli 2009 werden overgenomen door de Spaanse krant El País. Wikileaks maakte een rapport van Heather Hodges bekend over zogenaamde corruptie binnen het nationaal politiecorps onder leiding van generaal Jaime Hurtado die door Rafael Correa werd aangesteld, wetende dat Hurtado corruptieve handelingen stelde. Dat was een nummertje vuilspuiterij eerste klas. Wikileaks berichtte ook dat de VS over informatie beschikte die alleen van binnen het politiecorps kon komen. De VS beschikten binnen de UIES (Unidad de Investigaciones Especiales) en binnen de antinarcoticabrigade al geruime tijd vóór Correa over haar mannetjes. Het is wel duidelijk dat de VS boter op het hoofd hadden, want de Amerikaanse ambassadrice verwaardigde zich niet te antwoorden op de grond van de zaak omdat het ‘over gestolen documenten’ ging. In een persmededeling deelde de Amerikaanse ambassade in 2011 mee dat Ecuador in 2010 nog 70 miljoen dollar ontving waarvan 18 miljoen naar antinarcotica activiteiten ging, ongeveer 4 miljoen naar ‘democratie’ en good governance, ongeveer 10 miljoen voor economische groei en 450.000 dollar voor de bestrijding van terrorisme. En dat zou allemaal wegvallen.
Op eigen benen
Een zelfde chantagetactiek werd ook gevolgd door USAID bij de uitwijzing uit Bolivia. De financiële steun van de Verenigde Staten zou kunnen wegvallen en dat zou pijn gaan doen voor de kleine man, zo beweert de organisatie. In 2008, voor de uitwijzing van de Amerikaanse ambassadeur, bedroeg de USAID-steun nog 131 miljoen dollar voor Bolivia. In 2011 was dat nog maar 96 miljoen dollar en na de regeringsbeslissing van Morales zal dat bedrag nog wel verder afnemen.
Zal dit een erge aderlating betekenen voor Bolivia? Als we naar de macro economische gegevens van dat land in de laatste jaren kijken dat moet men dat kunnen opvangen. Verlies van USAID-gelden zou jammer zijn, maar niet onoverkomelijk. Zeven jaar op rij, de regeringsperiode van Morales, scoort Bolivia goed. Er wordt ook een groei van 5,5 procent verwacht voor 2013. Volgens Boliviaanse gegevens heeft Bolivia sinds het nationaliseren van de energiesector in 2006 meer dan 16 miljard dollar geïncasseerd.
“Zeven jaar voor de nationalisatie, van 1999 tot 2005, bedroeg dat totale bedrag slechts een twee miljard dollar,” zei minister Juan José Sosa. Investeringen in de energiesector verdrievoudigde tussen 2006 en 2012 van 1,8 miljard tot 5,2 miljard dollar. Dat maakte het staatsbedrijf YPFB onlangs bekend.
Hoewel er nog een lange weg af te leggen valt, zijn die cijfers toch bemoedigend. Ze maken dat Bolivia minder afhankelijk wordt van USAID’s en andere organisaties die niet alleen geld, maar vooral stokken in de wielen komen steken van een staat die zich probeert los te maken van de neoliberale dictaten waaraan het tot vóór Morales onderworpen was.
Noten:
(1) Florent Bédécarrats, Johan Bastiaensen en François Doligez, Coo-optation, cooperation or competition ? Microfinance and the new left in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 33, No 1, pp. 143-161
(2) Jim Shultz en Melissa Crane Draper, Dignity and defiance, stories from Bolivia’s challence
to globalization, Berkeley, 2009, p. 114.
00:05 Publié dans Actualité | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : politique internationale, bolivie, amérique du sud, amérique latine, usaid, impérialisme, amérique, affaires américaines | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
ETRE OU NE PAS ETRE AVEC LES GLOBALITAIRES ?
ETRE OU NE PAS ETRE AVEC LES GLOBALITAIRES ?
Le dilemme des incertitudes chinoises
Auran Derien
Ex: http://metamag.fr/
La stratégie du choc : le livre et le film
00:05 Publié dans Actualité, Affaires européennes | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : politique internationale, économie, europe, affaires européennes, chine, asie, affaires asiatiques | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
jeudi, 16 mai 2013
Savants nazis : les Français et les Anglais se sont servis aussi
Savants nazis : les Français et les Anglais se sont servis aussi
« Les quelques privilégiés qui connaissaient l’existence
du Bureau des Projets Spéciaux du général SS Kammler,
admettaient qu’il constituait l’instrument
d’étude et de mise au point le plus avancé du IIIe Reich »
Entretien avec Louis-Christian Gautier, auteur de Le secret de l’anti-gravité. À l’ombre du IIIe Reich et de la Nasa (éditions Dualpha)
propos recueillis par Fabrice Dutilleul
Vous abordez un sujet délicat : l’appropriation par les Américains et les Soviétiques des savants du IIIe Reich à la fin de la IIe Guerre mondiale…
Il n’y a pas qu’eux : Britanniques et Français se sont aussi « servis ». Tous les Alliés s’emparèrent des savants du IIIe Reich et s’approprièrent ainsi tous leurs travaux, recherches… et découvertes ! Parmi ces prises de guerre figuraient les recherches sur la gravité, effectuées par le général SS Hans Kammler qui rendait compte directement et uniquement au Reichführer de l’Ordre noir Heinrich Himmler.
Comment avez-vous été amené à écrire ce livre ?
À la demande du rédacteur en chef de la défunte revue Aventures de l’Histoire. C’est un fouineur qui m’a adressé un ouvrage qu’il s’était procuré je ne sais comment, dont le titre pourrait approximativement se traduire par : « À la recherche du point zéro, le périple d’un homme pour découvrir le plus grand des secrets depuis l’invention de la bombe atomique. » Si, dans mon adolescence, je prenais un certain plaisir à la lecture des romans de science-fiction – en particulier ceux de Peter Randa, père de mon éditeur auquel j’en profite pour rentre hommage – je suis devenu depuis un historien « pur et dur », et c’est d’abord en rechignant que j’ai entrepris de traduire le document de référence, mais je ne prends pas parti au sujet des théories exposées.
Les chercheurs américains refusaient de reconnaître cette science révolutionnaire…
En effet, les Nationaux-socialistes eurent une approche de la science et de l’ingénierie totalement différente de celle des autres, car leur idéologie était également basée sur une vision du monde différente.
La gravité constitue la plus importante source d’énergie potentielle. Un engin qui l’utiliserait pourrait atteindre la vitesse de la lumière. Les Américains ont-ils maîtrisé toutes les technologies tombées entre leurs mains ? C’est ce que chercha à savoir le Britannique Nick Cook, journaliste aéronautique réputé. Son enquête le mena ainsi jusqu’aux terribles camps de concentration qui furent en quelque sorte le « moteur » de la production de cet « État dans l’État », comme Speer avait qualifié la SS. C’est en leur sein que travailla le Bureau des Projets Spéciaux du général Kammler. Les quelques privilégiés qui en connaissaient l’existence admettaient qu’il constituait l’instrument d’étude et de mise au point le plus avancé du IIIe Reich. Pour le constituer, on avait écrémé tout ce que le pays possédait comme chercheurs de haut niveau, sans se préoccuper s’ils avaient ou non des liens avec le Parti. Une fois recrutés, ceux-ci étaient soumis à un secret rigoureux et leurs activités protégées par des spécialistes du contre-espionnage appartenant à la SS.
Au fil de la lecture, on se passionne pour cette véritable enquête policière…
Il faut suivre l’auteur britannique dans l’espace et dans le temps. C’est aussi la personnalité de celui-ci qui, dans le cadre de la « critique externe » du document, a suscité mon intérêt : Nick Cook était consultant aérospatial à la revue Jane’s Defense Weekly. Or, le Jane’s est une référence internationale en matière de défense et d’armement. Un de ses collaborateurs ne pouvait être un fumiste intégral. Mais je dis et répète que je me refuse à prendre parti : j’ai abordé le sujet d’un point de vue strictement historique.
Vous ne prétendez donc pas révéler le secret de l’anti-gravité ?
Pas plus que celui des Templiers, ni l’emplacement de leur trésor, sujets sur lequel j’avais jusqu’alors le plus publié.
Le secret de l’anti-gravité. À l’ombre du IIIe Reich et de la Nasa de Louis-Christian Gautier, 216 pages, 23 euros, éditions Dualpha, collection « Vérités pour l’Histoire », dirigée par Philippe Randa.
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11:46 Publié dans Entretiens, Histoire, Science, Sciences | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : entretien, physque, gravité, anti-gravité, allemagne, seconde guerre mondiale, deuxième guerre mondiale | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mercredi, 15 mai 2013
Lyon: Conférence de Tomislav Sunic
Lyon, 25 mai: Conférence de Tomislav Sunic
00:05 Publié dans Evénement, Nouvelle Droite | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : lyon, france, événement, tomislav sunic, europe, affaires européennes, occidentalisme | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook