Maintaining Vigilance

Tangled up in the web of dividing lines that separates ‘being’ and merely just getting by. Max Horkheimer wrote that, “Anybody who doesn’t want to talk about capitalism shouldn’t bother to talk about fascism.” Memorial Day thoughts reflect decisions previous soldiers accepted before entering battle. The traditional soldier tended to be a man obedient to his father or fatherly figured commander. There was never enough questioning why should one fight on the behalf of older men in charge of a structure system that may just protect a small elite’s commanding height. 

A corrosive nominalism, where irresponsible fathers measure norms on sons’ obedience, echoes the ‘existence preceding essence’ of limitations. George W Bush following his father’s command and his father’s father’s command to plunder resources and wealth in oil, steel, and industrial might.  Somehow during the age of Prescott Bush, there were robber barons like Rockefeller, Carnegie, JP Morgan, and Mellon. Today, we still have robbers of wealth and careless leaders dropping soldier’s lives under the press for war and recession, known as Exxon, Mobil, Monsanto, and Goldman Sachs, et al. “While Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein makes an estimated $250,000 a day, regular Americans are losing their jobs and homes at the highest rate since the 1930’s … and yet Goldman Sachs used taxpayer money to give its senior executives a staggering $44 billion in mega-bonuses between 2008 and 2011” (Occupy Wall Street).  

This doesn’t seem right. “Narrow devotion of ‘corporate-economics’ forfeits responsibility for greed and self gain” and this is at the heart of today’s blind experience. Maria Mies emphasizes that to better understand human potential “a new perspective requires, first that we - step back, pause, and take a panoramic view of the reality that surrounds us,” - create a broader world-view that is not totalized by dominant groups, whether they be corporate, economic, religious, conservative, fundamental, socialistic, secular, racial, ethnic bias or especially patriarchal (Mies). Such hierarchal, exploitive polarized extremes limit larger inclusive human dignity. Not merely a singular universal but a hybrid complex of broad acceptances that allow one’s open ‘being’ in the world and not coercive obedience.

Ato Sekyi-Otu reflects that “the center of the World Capitalist system, historical materialism has officially shared Nietzsche’s sardonic claim that the idea of ‘common good’ is a catachresis” to hoodwink the masses (Sekyi-Otu).  The elite body’s use of war in order to strengthen their material situation and make gains at the expense of the people, such a public who tends to do the bulk of the battle, while the well-off sit in luxury, seems a memorial of lost energies. Activists and intellectuals have continually failed to awaken reason over patriotism and this will persist. How to convince soldiers on either side of the battlefield puzzled and emotionally drained Tolstoy, Gandhi, and others. Retired veterans have shared that story countless times when new soldiers run off to war disregarding the warnings of forgotten, homeless vets.

This is a crisis in spatial dichotomy, “a crisis in identifying forms of separation and subjugation, inequities and iniquities" (Sekyi-Otu).  The image of blindness that Ato Sekyi-Otu mentions in his study Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience notes Plato’s quote “The World of our sight is like a habitation in prison”. The color-line, the sexual-identity line, the gender-line: all are dark caves that hinder  and limit a more ‘subjective self’.  A maintained vigilance allows a continually changing of false ‘fixed positions’. Supremacy is outdated just as colonialism. Sekyi-Otu points to Merleau-Ponty’s body ‘spatiality’: Man’s being-in-space limited by visual and physical barriers: Blindness. Restless imperialism and greed is a for-itself dead end. It never accepted differences, only conquest. Coercion: “one cannot begin to compel another to use a space in a certain way unless he has already restrained the other from using space in alternative ways” (Sekyi-Otu).

When the ex-president of Liberia was sentenced this past week, May 2012, Charles Taylor finally admitted that he was guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Paul Yeenie Harry, a journalist for AllAfrica News stated, Taylor made the call in his first post-verdict special statement he read before judges of the Special Court for Sierra Leone Wednesday. He said he agreed with the judges' statement that the April 26 historic judgment reinforces the new reality that Heads of State will be held accountable for war crimes and other international crimes, that with leadership comes not just power and authority, but also responsibility and accountability, and that no person, no matter how powerful, is above the law (Yeenie Harry).

Taylor then boldly compared the crimes of George W Bush and how the ex-president of the US admitted to torture tactics. Taylor stated that if he was on trial for such atrocities then shouldn’t George Bush stand beside him on trial too? This double standard of an International Court proves its lack of global legitimacy.  

The failure of imperialism, alluding to Sartre’s reflection is the “privilege of seeing without being seen,” which is impossible. One cannot childishly rant out the negatives of one civilization without responsibly self-critiquing one’s own negative flaws. This alludes to Horkheimer and Adorno’s negative dialectics. Frantz Fanon, according to Sekyi-Otu, reaches for an  ‘abortive dialectic’, which is to say an epiphany of decolonization. For Fanon, “History, which is neither objective nor ever quite subjective, in which the dialectic is contested. The divided world of compartments would fair better without false compartments. The ability of sight hinders purity that leaves sight more blind than the physical condition. That is why the esteemed image of a ‘true’ justice is represented in the Greek statues of a goddess blindfolded.

Spatial positions of Decolonization are part of the drive to “step back and overcome totalitarianism in its many forms” whether it be corporate, economic, religious, patriarchal, or other. “Decolonization is the veritable creation of a new humanity. In this sense decolonization is an exercise in revolution of repetition” (Sekyi-Otu). Maintaining vigilance, as Trotsky promoted in a similar dialectic of ‘permanent revolution’ allows one to remain alert and ready from coercion. The use of Socratic questioning helps one remain stern and erudite. 

Why is it important to protest NATO?

In Chicago this past weekend, May 20, 2012, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has just wrapped up a two-day summit. The issues on the table for most public ears were issues ranging from the Afghanistan War, Missile Defense Systems, and Syria.

NATO is a relic of the 20^th Century Cold War propaganda. Depending on which history textbook and from which country students studied in, the relevance of NATO’s purpose for existence ranges from pro-democracy rhetoric to US puppetry over European nations to Soviet watchdog, from aggressor to savior. But the Cold War is over. World War II is over, but the ripple effects of World War II politics still scars foreign policy, especially since the war-industrial complex is a profit builder for corporate monopolies that dominate the weapon industry.

When the Cold War ended, NATO should have dismantled. However, rather than dismantling, NATO began absorbing and pulling in former Soviet blocked nations. Still to this day, Russia is nervous about NATO expansion.

Every time NATO drops a missile or a bomb they use the US military monopoly Lockheed and Martin products. Lockheed and Martin seem to irresponsibly profit every time NATO or the US enter war activities. They also tip their weapons with Uranium. Uranium may create a visual shiny gloss on its weapon sitting at the base, but when such a weapon rains down on places such as Kosovo, Bosnia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc, the immediate impact is sudden death to innocent casualties and the future impact after the explosion creates generational loss. Depleted soil, cancers such as leukemia, environmental and health impacts are still killing soldiers and civilians in each country that NATO has touched down on.

When NATO dropped bombs on Kosovo and Bosnia they killed as many people as the Serbian military leader Milosevich had in his genocidal rein. Soldiers who from either side cleaning up after the 1990’s conflict were exposed to high levels of radiation and many KFOR soldiers years after duty were diagnosed with leukemia when no previous family history to the cancer occurred. While soldiers received special attention, civilians who survived the atrocities of the conflicts continue to get ill with limited support services from NATO or Lockheed and Martin for the aftereffects of uranium exposure.  One can only imagine what will be noticed in Libya in the near future?

Since NATO is a Cold War relic intended for Europe, the relic should it choose to exist out of contradictions should have remained in its regional space. When conflicts in Afghanistan and Libya arise, these violent acts of war prove NATO’s true capacity for only adding fire and atrocities. Fighting fire with fire does not create speedy ends to conflicts, but instead historically increase the death toll and generational impact. NATO should not stray into areas that are outside its domain. This creates the image of imperialism and global policeman, not a humanitarian concern. If it chooses to be an exclusive club of capitalist align western powers, than it must remain in its initial domain.  Any involvement in Africa or greater Asia is a regional double standard.

On May 20, 2012, part of the protests of the NATO Summit in Chicago included Veterans Against War, an activist group, who during Sunday’s protest threw their medals of honor for serving in the Iraq War over the security fence of the summit reflecting frustration and disappointment. The symbolic act was a milestone in former soldier disillusionment with the conditions of war.

A month previous to the NATO Summit, Chicago hosted a more significant summit for world peace. The 12th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates occurred in April 2012. At the summit key speakers included the Dalai Lama, Jody Williams, Muhammad Yunus, Frederik Willem de Klerk, President Jimmy Carter, and Mikhail Gorbachev.  One of the most reflective and important panel discussions included Willem de Klerk, who was the final prime minister of apartheid South Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union, and Jimmy Carter. The message that these former leaders shared was that the world is in crisis and that great power has the opportunity to put away military might. They each have historically proven that there is another way to solve problems of violence than with adding additional force.

NATO could learn from de Klerk and Gorbachev. They each had been in the highest position of power in their respective regimes and saw a path to change history for more peaceful approaches. South Africa’s former leader worked with Nelson Mandela and knew that the oppressive force that controlled Southern regions of Africa, which included present day Namibia, could not continue. He could have chosen a path similar to former Yugoslavian leadership and chose a violent end; but de Klerk showed charisma and responsibility. He had the power at the time to make positive change and he did.

While William de Klerk found peaceful ways to end apartheid, former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, chose an equally powerful means to achieve peace during the Cold War and did not resort to weapons of mass destruction. He took power and realized that another way was possible than to continue an oppressive system. At the Peace Summit in Chicago, Gorbachev spoke about the current need to change the global system that should be more inclusive. When asked about NATO he said "They should consider actually abandoning the whole project, not immediately liquidating NATO but gradually" (ABC News). Both key men are experts in seeing a failed system when there is a failed system in South Africa and the Soviet Union. Now both men see that the current state of the corporate global system is a failed system, and they believe another, more inclusive world is possible.

NATO is a relic from the Cold War and is outdated. It continues to get involved in conflicts outside of its own domain, and this does not necessarily lead to more peace; but instead, this has historically instigated additional atrocities adding higher unnecessary death rates, environmental degradation as catastrophic as Chernobyl, and risks the health of future generations with the continual push for violent means. The bottom line for NATO is the pockets of companies such as Lockheed and Martin who irresponsibly profit every time NATO drops US made bombs and missiles.     

Re-Capturing the Clear

The sense of ‘normal’ never positioned itself so limitedly as today. This is a continual retort throughout history; Helene Cixous, the Algerian French philosopher, pursues the ‘incomprehensible’. The more the globalized manifestation of a false ‘universal’ forced by extremist, conservatives, and the corporate branding of identity, the farther their clarity spans away from an ‘innermost sense of self’.

Along the lines of Edouard Glissant’s need for ‘Opacity’ and Gloria Anzaldua’s ‘Tolerance of Ambiguity’; the continual historic push to have to name all, brand all, and define all, seems a fundamental swallowing up of the unclear. Fear of anything that is misunderstood because religion, government, or big business doesn’t have a dime on it leads activists and progressive thinkers to push back.

The Sociologist Maria Mies best states that there is a current need to “re-create an innermost subjective human essence” that is expressed and preserved. In her manifesto Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale, she promotes the idea that “Nature is always linked to its social dimension. Human nature cannot be understood if we separate its physiology from its history; … Women/men’s interaction with nature and each other” are historically bound not merely limited to a set mystified nature (Mies).  A false sovereign authority is obsessed with clarity, lines of separation, hierarchy, and exploitation: an unhealthy claim all end all.  

The radiation of Capitalism and Colonialism over the past two centuries has worn down the sense of ‘self’ outside of the parameters of false sovereign authorities. But this is not new. Neither Jesus nor Marx differentiated between male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, race, tribe, or background; and the interpretations that others claim to uphold to such revolutionaries have been put to improper use. What constitutes as ‘Maleness’ and ‘Femaleness’ are “not biological givens but rather results of a historical process” (Mies); History has drowned the essence of self as reality has shown that forces of might mass-against individuals.

 

Finding the words to reflect this, leads to intentional confusion. For some, there is a Holocaust Memorial in our souls. Nazism is no longer pinned down to a specific location. But it is ‘an idea of elimination’: a false sense of destroying life that does not agree with the aggressive suppressive shareholders. Fascism is not unique to a single gene pool. One must also remember that the Nazi genocide was not just a destruction of 6,000,000 Jews, but also included 20,000,000 Russians, hundreds of thousands of Muslims, Homosexuals, and Gypsies (Roma people), among others.  Fascism has existed in societies from the United States to Kenya to Japan. Any denial of this or justification for mass murder and injustice would be irresponsible.

Overcoming this historic acceptance of man’s nature requires an existentialism of the highest morality. The postcolonial intellectual from Ghana, Ato Sekyi-Otu, has found a positive approach to utilize Frantz Fanon in his Dialectics of Experience.  Ato Sekyi-Otu brings to the forefront Fanon’s statement, “To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in the whole social structure being changed from the bottom-up.” The theoretical revolt involves re-capturing forbidden spaces, oppressive bondage that has inhabited radically separate and unequal zones (Sekyi-Otu). This form of existentialism parallels Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. “Unleashing the human being” and releasing possibilities of human existence, which history has imprisoned in a Sartre-like fashion or nearly a Kerouac journey, can span away from false absolutes.

During the week of May 7, 2012 the United Nations Headquarters in New York hosted the Eleventh Session of the Permanent Forum of Indigenous Issues. Attending were voices from countless indigenous groups. The UN recognizes nearly 370 million indigenous groups in over 90 countries. Meeting with individuals from Sami in Norway, Lakota in the US, Australian Aborigines and Amis of Taiwan, one could see how much emotional stress still actively oppresses ignored minority groups. One woman from the Yupik community in northern Alaska, Vi Waghiyi, spoke of the continual irresponsibility of the US military and Environment Protection Agency (EPA) in allowing an abandoned Cold War military base to remain an environmental threat to the local communities, as the toxic waste pollutes the native lands on the St. Lawrence Island. Such negligence is global, and leads to continued tragedy.

In the past month, I’ve read three novels, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, Helene Cixous’ Promethea, and Assia Djebar’s Fantasia. One Nigerian and two Algerians, where one has spent her life mostly in Paris and the other mostly in Algeria. The romanticism of the self in a brutal world is reflective in the novels. The understanding here is that Superiority has indeed a weakness, especially the weakness of irresponsibility.

Helene Cixous’ novel runs along the contours of her philosophy about the ‘incomprehensible’. Her narration batters upon a duel between her self and her subjective self. She cannot embrace pure action without thought, nor can she stop at this time from Descartes-like self-reflection: “For the time being I cannot do without H (Helene). I do not yet have the mental courage to be only I. I dread nothing as much as autobiography. Autobiography does not exist. Yet so many people believe it exists. … When I say ‘I’, this I is never the subject of autobiography, my I is free. Is the subject of my madness, my alarms, and my vertigo” (Cixous).  The sense of a free self is just out of reach, a mindset that beholds an animal like a squirrel caught in the moment, because her sense of I is caught in the misleading enlightenment that has limited her action. She brings this sense of opportunity for the self to transcend historic and societal limits when the narrator exposes that the idea of woman-ness is just yet again another fabrication on her identity; “I would like so much to be a woman without giving it a thought. I would like so much to be free the freest of free women: so free that I would even be liberated from the painful sensation of being-liberated. … I would like to be so freely free that I would never even think to myself: ‘How free am I!’ because it is just something that I would be” (Cixous). Being-in-itself in a way so surreal or abstract that parallels Nietzsche’s dilemma, Sartre’s ad nauseam, or Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’.

Cixous’ ‘incomprehensibility’ and grasping of a self away from the social mechanism placed on individuals in a highly Western society is her solution to nihilism. Solving nothing, but the pondering inner battle of who am “I” outside of gender, race, ethnicity, and one-dimensional consumer desiring-machine.  Unlike Helene Cixous’ primarily self-internal reflection, the realism of Ken Saro-Wiwa and Assia Djebar’s novels thrust characters into the violence of history. Each individual character and author had been exposed to the harsh realities of Colonialism and civil war. The entire act of war and annihilation of life proved to be outside forces overtaking life to a useless end.

Ken Saro-Wiwa was a Nigerian novelist and activist. He was quite outspoken in his voice against injustice and corruption.  A member of the Ogoni ethnic minority, living at a time of British colonial end, the Nigerian Civil War, and neocolonial corporate exploitation of oil resources. Since he challenged the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Corporation publicly regarding the company’s reckless irresponsibility to the environment and the local community, the lack of clarity of his death points to the company’s stress on the government to solve the problem. The Nigerian government executed Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995.

In his vivid novel, Sozaboy, Ken Saro-Wiwa reflects on the Nigerian Civil War. Like soldiers from Nigeria used for British exploits to fight in World War II, the stigma of imperialism had tarnished the diverse tribal culture of the West African region. The British used Indians in South Africa, Kenyans in Europe, and among other tactics, the character in the novel was convinced to seek a life as a soldier because the image of previous Nigerian soldiers used to ‘seek out Hitler in Burma,’ romanticized the image a soldier brought to his community. The sense of Self that the character was preparing for was based on lies, and hence his awakening to the irrationality of war taught him the lesson only too late. The character speaking in broken English, as the author’s specific intention used ‘rotten’ English to express the literature, notices the horrors of not just Civil War and British atrocities, but how the refugee camp is no life for anyone: “Because, true true as Zaza have talked, this camp is proper human compost pit and all these people they are calling refugees are actually people that they have throw away like rubbish” (Ken Saro-Wiwa).  

The harsh realities of the refugee camp in Africa are deeper than any philosophical theory. A sense of self cannot be imagined. The postcolonial reflection has not yet incorporated the ideas of refugees who remain in the camp indefinitely without opportunity. However, the incorporation of the sense of ‘self,’ struggling through apartheid and colonialism has been written down. Steve Biko noting Frantz Fanon stated: “the consciousness of the self is not the closing of a door to communication … we shall watch as time destroys his paper castles and know that all these little pranks were frantic attempts of frightened little people to convince each other that they can control the minds and bodies…” of others (Biko).

Assia Djebar’s novel Fantasia brings together the parallel controls of the French atrocities in Algeria alongside the oppression of Islamist men bullying Muslim women.  Her awareness of the self is trapped among quasi-freedoms, so her narrator must fight alongside both fronts. She notices the actions of the French against the Berber tribe not paying taxes or the corpses of the Ouled Riah tribe “laid out in the fresh air side by side, without distinction of sex or rank … denuded by the silence which enfolds them” (Djebar). 

Unlike Cixous, Djebar is oppressed via the immediacy of her surrounding reality. Away in Paris, perhaps Cixous had the luxury to escape the bloody battle. But for Djebar, she could not escape, “the silence of my solitary confinement feeds this monologue which is disguised as a forbidden conversation. I write to get a grip on these beleaguered days” (Djebar). The promise of freedom, perhaps a freedom that Cixous knew all too well, the pipedream for Assia Djebar’s narrator need to use the pen and write in order to get a grip on reality. “Algeria is a woman who is impossible to tame. A tamed Algeria is a pipedream; every battle drives further and further away”; just as the French attempt to tame Algeria; the Islamists, the Moors, and the Ottomans attempted to tame the women. Every limited exploit of identity led further and further away from a subjective self oppressed via history.

Yet even in the US in 2012 women are facing the backlash as Conservatives attempt to strip away the freedoms women such as Margaret Sanger fought for, and even to suppress the identity of homosexuality as a crime, rather than a human right. The recent backlash in the States reflects how far we have yet to come. A free sense of subjective self, an essence, yet to be defined echoes Fredrik Nietzsche’s “Human All too Human.” Cixous’ narrator in Promethea wants to imagine a world where one does not have to give self a thought because one would not have to imagine a self if it had not the fear that someone else would be imposing or exploiting another’s ‘will’. The choice is to simply just ‘be’ regardless of orientation.