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.