Attention U.S. Voters...

Does anyone anywhere still think this is "Change you can believe in"?

War! (Huh! Good God, Y'all!) What is it good for?

Just ask Haliburton et al.

Shock: War Criminal Cashes In

New Labour's "ethical foreign policy" reaches its inevitable conclusion.

House of Cards?

Buzzflash are certainly on a roll these days in terms of quality interviews. One of the best can be found here, an interview with investigative author Craig Unger on his latest book, The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future. Check it out!

Local Republican Backlash Against Ron Paul

Just as Ron Paul gathers momentum nationally among grassroots Republicans, at local level in his own home district the populist Texan presidential and Congressional candidate is beginning to suffer a backlash from the usual cast of unrepentant warmongers and religious fanatics who make up the GOP core in the nation's Bible Belt. The reason? His criticism of the conduct of the Iraq War, which apparently "undermines the troops", of course.

Information Landmine's favourite part of the article illuminates GOP extremism quite succinctly:

"[One of Paul's local opponents] is gathering endorsements of local officials, embarking on a fundraising effort and hoping his record on the Friendswood council makes an impression with GOP primary voters. At the city level, he pressed for property tax refunds and advocated stopping the funding of water conservation education kits for fourth-graders so the money could instead go to a Pearland pastor for sexual abstinence education for junior high school students."

We do indeed live, as per the traditional Chinese curse, "in interesting times".

Ron Paul Gathering "The Big 'M'"

As in "Momentum", judging by his unexpected ability to fundraise. This deluge of funds is, it's claimed, largely coming from the growing base of grass-roots Republicans and other conservatives who, having got the US into the political, economic and military tar pit that is Iraq, now want to get out.

The War on Terror meets the War on Porn

The same conservatives who brought you the "they hate our freedom" mantra are going a step further to show who really hates our freedom. And while the Muslim Taleban may not be able to impose their standards of morality on free-born US citizens, the Christian Taleban both can and are doing so every day in more and more ways. That those supposedly fighting for our freedom - the troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan - are those whose own freedom is being smacked down the hardest is both ironic and ludicrous but, sadly, unsurprising in a country that's been ruled by fascists for the past six years.

In response to this nonsense, Information Landmine encourages all right-(but not right-wing) thinking people to do their patriotic duty by downloading or buying as much pornography as possible - consensual, adults-only material, of course - and sending it to friends and family in the military. By brightening their day and taking a stand for liberty at the same time, this will show who the real patriots are who support the troops.

The War Takes Its Toll at Home

Little-known Stat of the Week: 17 US war veterans per day are choosing to take their own lives as Bush's criminal folly grinds on remorselessly.

The "Wild Man of Theory" tries to get all sensible

I have a confession to make: I want to be Slavoj Zizek. Ever since watching the man lay a philosophical smack-down on Francis Fukuyama's thoughts about human nature using little more than a families-at-Christmas anecdote and a Kinder egg (seriously), Zizek's been filed in my mental dictionary as the very definition of intellectual cool. He also ran for the presidency of Slovenia and had his own Channel 4 show – The Pervert's Guide to Cinema – in which he discussed, among other things, Hitchcock, faeces, The Matrix and how ridiculous he sometimes felt when having sex. If academics were rock stars (and some think Zizek's blurring the divide), he'd be a cross between Captain Beefheart and Led Zeppelin.

As the human nature/Kinder egg sample suggests, the man has an uncanny ability to make convincing connections between between spectacularly disparate ideas. Just as you're starting to wonder if this is the point at which he's finally lost it and should be sectioned forthwith, he supplies you with the missing detail of his argument that makes it all make sense. The brilliance of being Zizek in my own personal fantasy, then, was that you could get away with saying just about anything and, with credentials like that backing you up, who'd be there to gainsay you? Worryingly, this seems to have recently occurred to him too. I searched and searched his latest article in the London Review of Books for the relevant missing detail, but I just don't get it.

The whole thing begins with another of those big speculations about what exactly “the left” is meant to be for after the collapse (or transformation) of state socialism, and a big list of the various strategies employed. The concern is that none of these really show a way to run a properly left-wing government – if a nominally left-wing party gets into power, it'll just end up doing what the right-wing party would have done anyway. If you're backing Labour you might as well be backing the Tories.

So far so normal. The question for those who consider themselves to be even further left than New Labour is what to do in the absence of much political representation. As Zizek tells it: “The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm’: the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control.”

He's not impressed. The whole resistance idea, seems, for Zizek, to be the political equivalent of closing your eyes, putting your hands over your ears and screaming “I can't hear you.” Worse than this, it lets the government feel good about themselves – they may not be doing much about social justice, but at least they've got people to talk about it: “These words simply demonstrate that today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics exist in a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the state does the work of running and regulating society.”

So, to re-cap, so long as anarchists, post-modern leftists and what-have-you are refusing to engage with the state, they're just burying their heads in the sand in a particularly counter-productive way. They achieve nothing, and the state gets to look good while it goes about it dastardly business. What is needed is some engagement, either in the form of the seizure of state power (the Hugo Chavez route) or, if you can't manage that, through realpolitik: “The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands”.

This argument, in all its Guardian-reader-bashing glory, might actually make a certain amount of sense. Burying your head in the sand is certainly a bad idea, and people who want to get things done should probably avoid doing it. The devil of course, is in the small detail of what, for these purposes, actually counts as burying your head in the sand. What sort of activities does Zizek have in mind when he talks about these anarchic agents complicitously doing all that ethical thinking?

And this is where it all goes to shit, because the big example of this resistance-as-surrender, the irresistible case that shows all those alternative types why they should stop living in communes smoking dope and start writing angry-but-beautifully-crafted letters to their MPs is... (wait for it)... the Anti-War protests. Yup. The crazy, pie-in-the-sky, “infinite demand” that all these loopy types made was that Britain and the US not start a war that hadn't been approved by the UN, was going to take an unbelievable toll in terms of human life and national budgets, was unlikely to achieve any of its stated aims (and yes, that was pretty obvious at the time) and that served no credible defensive purpose:

“The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of this strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’”

This has me baffled. If requesting that we not go to war without something at least approaching a reason counts as an unreasonable demand, what the hell is a reasonable one? More to the point, it's not like no-one tried things Zizek's way. Right up until the start of the thing, people were pushing some pretty “strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands” along the lines of wanting to see some credible evidence that Iraq was a threat to anyone. Didn't change a damn thing. So, on the evidence of the war, the result of the contest between lunatic anarchists and Zizek's crafty pragmatists is 0-0.

Zizek's other evidence seems to do even less to help his case: “So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it?”

Leaving aside whether the interesting issue of when the Democrats assumed their place on the radical left, the answer would have to be "Well clearly not." But smarter men than me have suggested that part of the solution to their woes might be to stop being so “strategic” and occasionally take a stand on fucking principle (respect to Lessig for the first post linked there, by the way). Ron Paul, on the Republican side, took exactly this attitude and is doing much better than anyone gave him a chance of. If we're lucky, Barack Obama looks like he might do the same. John Kerry's campaign was doubtless amply populated with folk crafting their “strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands”.

Carter the Unstoppable Sense Machine

Jimmy Carter proves once again why he is the most responsible and statesmanlike former US president of this author's lifetime. Go Mr. Peanut!

Courage and Cowardice

It's a shame that, with the exception of the Dixie Chicks and punks like Fat Mike and Jello Biafra that nobody in the mainstream listens to, it seems to have fallen to a previous generation of musicians to tell it like it is about our fascist regime:





One sign of hope, however, is that this stuff actually appeared on CBS and NBC, which wouldn't have happened a few years ago when the Bush regime was in its ascendancy. No doubt, though, it will still be labelled by the usual suspects as "a cowardly attack on America/the troops/the 'Commander-in-Chief'/etc.".

On another note, the great Alexei Sayle once remarked on the bitter irony that mainstream Hollywood's "courageous" stand against the Vietnam war, as evidenced by films like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and Platoon, only happened years after the war itself had ended. Information Landmine expects a similar avalanche of films illustrating the pointless madness of the Iraq misadventure to begin appearing circa 2013. Stock up on the popcorn in a few years' time.

US Government arm-wrestles with itself. Loses.

Making my way through the Shock Doctrine, and s far it seems to be confirming my initial impressions: lots of good, revealing and indeed shocking journalism, but the attempt to tie it all together isn't really working for me.

Anyway, was interested to find this little "disaster capitalism" tid-bit via way of the Against Monopoly site. Apparently the US Army is so fed up of having private security companies lure away its troops that it's making new recruits sign "non-compete" agreements, stating that they won't just sod-off and work for Blackwater after they've completed basic training. That's a pretty damning indictment of privatized war from the people who brought it to you.

For once, we actually agree 100% with Dick Cheney

Too close to the truth for comfort

Retired Gen. George Washington Criticizes Bush's Handling Of Iraq War

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Revolutionary War veteran noted that while Hussein was a tyrant, that alone did not justify a "conflict that seems without design or end."

A New World Order, indeed!

One of the key tenets of the security structure within the modern International Political Economy has been the state's exclusive claim to "legitimate" violence. However, with the state increasingly having been taken over and dismantled by its ideological opponents on the right over the past quarter century, it should come as little surprise that the authority to wield force and inflict violence "legitimately" should be yet another thing that has been outsourced to the private sector.

Unsurprising, it may be. But whether it is a good thing or not probably depends on which side of the political spectrum one comes from, as well as which end of the assault rifle. What does seem clear to Information Landmine is that, so long as corporations and their allies remain in the ascendency over the public sector and the common good it exists to defend, we're likely to see a lot more of this kind of thing in future. For worse or for worse.

Ron Paul

This is the guy who makes the Republican debates worth watching, for me at least. He's basically a Libertarian who's running with the Republicans on a tax-cutting basis, and his answer to more or less everything (except, apparently, immigration and abortion) is to get rid of government and let the market deal with it. The difference is that he walks the walk on this policy, and understands that things like the military industrial complex also constitute a big intrusion of government into the economy. While I obviously don't agree with everything he says, the guy's been something of a hero of mine since he spoke on the House floor about the Eurodollar theory of the Iraq war. You can read the full speech here, but this pretty much gives you the flavour of it:

"Our whole economic system depends on continuing the current monetary arrangement, which means recycling the dollar is crucial. Currently, we borrow over $700 billion every year from our gracious benefactors, who work hard and take our paper for their goods. Then we borrow all the money we need to secure the empire (DOD budget $450 billion) plus more. The military might we enjoy becomes the 'backing' of our currency. There are no other countries that can challenge our military superiority, and therefore they have little choice but to accept the dollars we declare are today’s 'gold.' This is why countries that challenge the system-- like Iraq, Iran and Venezuela-- become targets of our plans for regime change."

Quite.

The smell of victory is now accompanied by the sound of freedom

Col. Kilgore is alive and well and is apparently serving onboard the USS Eisenhower these days. Or at least that's the first thought that came to mind when I read the final two paragraphs of this article.