Press Action ::: Radical Double Blackmail

Monday, September 06, 2004

Radical Double Blackmail

By Jordy Cummings

The other night, rattled with insomnia, I switched the television to “Law and Order - Special Victims Unit,” one of Dick Wolf’s many franchises on an important propaganda service of a police state—the cop show. Despite its propaganda purpose, I admit enjoying what GK Chesterton calls “detective fiction,” whether in the forms of film, literature, or rarely, television. The very monistic dialectic of the experience of the reader/audience as well as the “agent,” be he a cop, a detective or somesuch, at best becomes one. The archetypal story involves as much accident as revelation, and as a rule, should depend on some degree of emotional manipulation.

Within 10 minutes, I had to turn off the television in disgust, at the abject and crude propaganda, made well before 9-11. Investigating the murder of a man who had been castrated after his brutal death, the police found that he was a “Serb” (spoken in tones of racist indignation now reserved for Arabs) who had been guilty of 58 rapes of Muslim women before escaping to America. Knowing how stories of Serb paramilitaries were abused to justify the destruction of Yugoslavia, I had to, as noted, turn off the television in disgust.

Though always politically involved, I was heavily involved in the small, pathetic antiwar movement during the Balkan adventure. I must admit that part of my solidarity with the Serbs has to do with their singular braveness among Eastern Europe’s peoples in saving Jews and Roma during Hitler’s adventure. Inside Serb boundaries, less Jews were killed than any other Eastern European statelet. In other words, there was a kernel of nostalgic nationalism...more on this as I move on.

As Cockburn and St. Clair’s Imperial Crusades shows in spades, the current epoch of American Empire, like World War 1, started in the Balkans, without a concern for human rights abuses on any side, or for the Canadian peacekeepers from the Princess Patricia Light Brigade killed by Croatian allies with no charges being brought … In short, more than any of the former Yugoslavs, I saw—and still see that Serbs were the scapegoat for a far more complex process. In doing so, however, I succumbed to what the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek refers to as “double blackmail.”

A hypothetical definition of double blackmail would be as follows. Power says something right in order to do something wrong. Counterpower (wherever there is power, there is opposition) asserts that not only the wrong action was wrong but the “Something” that was right is also wrong. Counterpower thus misallocates its intellectual resources, and sometimes makes horrible mistakes by ignoring nuance and creating a binary opposition. Or in more folksy language, power is the boy who cried wolf.

This can be applied in any situation, whether macro or micro. Let us imagine a manufacturer who claims rightfully that “they need those jobs in China” (they do) so his moving her factories there is an enlightened act, part and parcel of globalization, he is not to blame for the market, etc. The labor movement often responds by asserting that “outsourcing” and perhaps even the Yellow peril is to blame for the situation. As Doug Henwood has pointed out, there is a qualitative difference between Nike and others subcontracting their labor to sweatshops and automotive, technical and other high-skilled operations moving to areas where the labor force has achieved some social gain and is thus less expensive for the corporation. Henwood also challenges the “anti-corporate” side of anti-capitalism, suggesting that TNCs are in reality a qualitative and democratizable alternative to the previous bourgeois model of national economies and “firms.” Henwood also points out that European TNCs are less likely to outsource because even with what the business press considers high-labor costs, the workforce has social gains and is educated.

In other words, the mechanism that created this era of capitalism are the forces of neoliberalism, deregulation and free trade, along with the gutting of the welfare state. France and Germany never bought into the Thatcher-Reaganism, and their workforce is thus not suffering from the problem of outsourcing. In fact, for the growing world of migrants, France and Germany, along with Canada and a few other countries, have come to be considered far preferable to the United States. There is more work… Now one can hardly blame an American worker out of a job for feeling vindictive toward the Chinese guy who has his place on the assembly line. But union officialdom and even John Kerry talk about “exporting American jobs” and somesuch, as if labor itself were some American concept. Gone is talk of international solidarity, or even of organizing, Wobbly style “one big union.” It is not about “American jobs,” it is about selling one’s labor or bio-power. We all bleed red, pun intended, in many directions.

So succumbing to double blackmail, American labor can concentrate on talking about “outsourcing” and not about organizing the disorganized—particularly computer-based workers (the cybertariat) of all sorts—in America, as well as the vast amount of migrants. And of course campaigning for Kerry. Aside from within the SEIU, there haven’t been many large American labor gains in some time. One wonders how John Sweeney would react if there was talk about creating a vast union within the military and intelligence services, some of the most underpaid and overworked Americans. American Labor’s charisma may be returning, as some have noted, but the people will see, if that charisma is abused, China-baiting rhetoric and other things that may well be used geopolitically, not to say their scandalous brief involvement in the anti-Chavez movement. And the bosses get richer.

The double blackmail that caused me to turn off that shitty cop show was my untainted sympathies with the Serbs. I realized in a sense that part of my radicalism was not based on the internationalism that I am herein preaching, but on subsuming my sense of opposition to the old model of “solidarity” dictating ranks-closing. The fact is, while America’s destruction of the Balkans is a fact, it was surely helped by ultranationalism on all sides, that Russia took advantage of as well. Within the context of that ultranationalism, Serbs did indeed commit atrocities, though not as bad as the Neo-Nazi Croats, but I am digressing. My point is that radicals do not often acknowledge the central truth in their opponent’s argument, arguing against that central truth as opposed to going against the tangentials.

While he was often incredibly crude, Christopher Hitchens’ argument in favor of the “Mess-O-Potamia” adventures was quite simple, and often inarguable. Even if it is imperialism in its most brazen form, with a vast criminal racket of American corporations looting Iraq, everything we say it is, life may experience a slight improvement. When the shit clears, in a few years, because of world attention, etc. Iraqis will be better off than they were, at least under Saddam plus sanctions, if not pre-sanctions Saddam. Reading “Raed” and other Iraqi bloggers, seeing the gains made by the opposition (that is created by power just as opposition creates power and so forth) and by various left groupings, there can be some qualified agreement with this sentiment.

The antiwar movement spent far too much time arguing with this perspective, which is just as intellectually bankrupt as the “win without war” Todd Gitlin position that “we had Iraq contained.” This haute-bourgeois metropolitan liberalism is without not only substance, but content or thought. It is neither Marxist nor pacifist, socialist nor Quaker. They simply opposed the war for the wrong reasons, liberal corporatists who see America as a beacon and a good empire that overstretched itself in Mesopotamia. On the other hand, neocons, duped as they were, were in favor of the wrong thing for the right reasons. Beyond the Straussian hoobajoob is a genuine idealism against tyranny, and Saddam was a tyrant. Everyone should rejoice with the fall of a tyrant and those of us who opposed Saddam in the eighties and opposed the sanctions in the nineties can rejoice at that simple “positive collateral damage” without hypocrisy, as Chomsky points out.

The war on Iraq should best be understood not as a war against Iraq. It should be understood as the first punch in a unipolar fistfight between the United States and world order as we know it. Beyond the intelligent use of neocons and other fully indoctrinated theorists, Iraq was simply an easy target and perhaps a way to solve the problems shown in “The End of Suburbia.” It was a beginning stage of inter-imperial rivalry. It was a war against the opinion of the millions who marched on Feb. 15, 2003. It was a great big “#### you” to us. So one should fully acknowledge that in certain situations, life may be better for the Iraqis, and even go far enough to say that Kurds cannot be blamed for even taking Zionist help (they should know about Israeli knifes twisting in Kurdish backs by now, but they do need protection after all.) These are decisions made in situations with which we have no familiarity. The real crime is the crisis of global capitalism, causing all sorts of irrational behaviour, like using the scion of an old CIA family to turn capitalist headquarters into a quasi-fascist police state.

After reading for a while, I still couldn’t sleep, and again turned on the television. It was a clearly propaganda produced special on Afghans listening to American pop music. Instead of only taking the offensive propaganda value of the medium, I fell asleep wondering whether the guys with new disc-men preferred the smooth vocals of Jay Z or the husky bark of Ludacriss.

Jordy Cummings, editor of Pure Polemics, lives in Toronto and can be reached at yorgos33ca@yahoo.ca.

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