posted 01-10-2004 06:32 PM            

quote:

---

The Arabs are in league with the Martians.

---

posted 01-11-2004 03:04 PM            

It is an article of mine from April 1991, a reaction to the first Gulf War of Bush senior, and it is called "Fighting the Martians". It was published in the last number of the 'Sanity' magazine of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

'Sanity' was closed down just four months before the August 1991 Moscow coup against Gorbachev, with the result that the polemic with E.P. Thompson that went on after the coup on the subject of whether the international anti-nuclear movement should call for total unilateral Soviet nuclear disarmament, remained in the realm of private correspondence (those were pre-internet days).

If Sanity had still existed in August 1991 and if Ben Webb had still been the editor, you can be sure that the dispute would have been public.

Anyone interested in the morbid details can read them at http://www.diplomatictimes.com/hddf/hddf/ftlnosintro.htm

Anyway, here's the Martians article from the last number of Sanity:

Fighting the MARTIANS

The “New International Order” that President Bush is hoping to achieve through his war against Iraq is being built on the ruins of two alternative political conceptions. The first is the democratic and socialist Europe which Eurocommunists, socialists and many ecologists hoped could be shaped. The second is the two-state solution to the Palestinian problem that the PLO had made possible with its recognition of Israel.

‘In September 1990, representatives from 247 Wisconsin companies gathered in the Grand Milwaukee Hotel to attend the Fifth Annual Defense Contracting Workshop. The Procurement Institute co-Chairman opened the meeting with the words: “Thank you, Saddam Hussein.” The crowd cheered.’

from In These Times

The Gulf War, to quote the American journalist Diana Johnstone, has been ‘a war to prove that war works, that war is possible, that war is the future. It is the triumph of Henry Kissinger’s life work: to enable the US to overcome the inhibitions of nuclear deterrence and take up war as a normal instrument of foreign policy. It is the expression of a technological culture in which mastery of inert objects – missiles, electronic guidance systems, satellites – is so overwhelming that it allows leaders to dispense with the less quantifiable and more subtle science of human understanding.’

The European peace movements, including, CND, have been caught with their pants down by this war. Those who persuaded themselves on August 2 that the best policy was to support ‘the UN and international law, not the Americans’ saw the ground disappear from under their feet in November, as both the UN and international law became obvious instruments of – the Americans. The choice then was to be consistent and support the war or to be inconsistent and oppose it. Many have decided in favour of consistency.

There are two sides to the equation of the Gulf War: In the Middle East Saddam Hussein has instrumentalised the struggle of the Palestinians in the same way that Bush has instrumentalised international law, to justify a premeditated policy of war. In the United States, Europe and Israel particularly, the PLO has come under attack from all sides for its decision to support him. But the PLO really had no choice other than to do what it has done. It is under the same threat on its ‘left’ – from Islamic fundamentalism – as the European Left is on its right from Eurocentric fundamentalism.

Both of these systems can be used as instruments of warfare – they correspond to deep-rooted prejudices in the populations influenced by them.

Bush’s new order aims to lock Europe and the Muslim world into a new form of bipolarism, fuelled by mutually reinforcing hatreds and incomprehension. In Eastern Europe the same effect is achieved relatively simply through the activation of traditional nationalisms. In this context of universalised fear and loathing the technologically-oriented ‘rationality’ of the United States assumes the appearance of tremendous superiority. Those who suffer its effects, by having their homes bombed to pieces, their cities ruined, the social fabric of their communities destroyed, are invited to worship the same god in the hope that one day it will choose to favour them because of their moral superiority.

It is said that among the nationalists in the distant province of Lithuania some resentment is being felt that Kuwait should qualify so much more readily for Western ‘help’ than their own country, simply because of its oil.

It is a widely-shared notion. The idea that this is a war for oil seems to be as popular in Europe as is the idea in the Middle East that it is a war for Zionism. It is basically the ‘old-fashioned’ sections of the Left in Western Europe that see the war as a war for oil. But the idea seems to have considerable support in Eastern Europe also, where decades of Communist domination have schooled entire populations in economism.

Anyone with strong enough nerves to watch television will have observed that the official mass media line is precisely to attribute to the opposition the idea that the war is all about oil. ‘No blood for oil’ is what we were supposed to say if we went to demonstrate against the war. Yet by doing this we provided a role model for the soldiers themselves. Military personnel watching CNN and seeing the anti-war demonstrators shouting ‘No blood for oil’ were told much more effectively and persuasively why they were there than if their own officers said to them: ‘Fellers, you’re here to die for cheap gas.’

As an official justification, ‘Blood for oil’ was not suitable. The state still had to surround its bloody operations with an aura of idealism and high-mindedness. It had to talk about international law and the United Nations. The suggestion that some Americans should be prepared to die ‘so that others can drive to work alone’ was still perceived as excessively cynical.

As an unofficial justification, however, it was perfectly acceptable. A CNN journalist asked one such character in Saudi Arabia why he thought he was there: the answer was ‘Do you have a car’?

There is a nihilistic and sado-masochistic romanticism about the idea of killing and being killed for oil that fits in well with the popular psychology of the masses brought up on American cinema violence and high-tech sexual fantasies. Such a mentality will not feel in any way threatened or undermined by a political opposition which tells it that the war was not waged for the freedom of Kuwait but for oil.

Further on oil…oil is relevant to the motivations of the United States to the extent that it wants to see the profits for oil-producing states such as Kuwait invested in the American economy. (A joke on Wall Street ran that Kuwait , ‘a banking system without a country’, was the perfect partner for the US, ‘a country without a banking system’.) One such form of investment is to buy American products, which nowadays means primarily weapons.

The Americans also want to be able to claim to the Japanese and the Europeans that they are ‘protecting the world’s oil supplies’ and thus are entitled to demand protection money, in the form of a tax on each barrel of oil imported, or in the form of lump sum payments.

It is not easy to see why Japanese and European capital should be more willing to pay vast sums of money to the United States than to pay possible smaller amounts to the various Saddam Husseins, Gaddafis, etc. in the form of somewhat higher oil prices. What is at stake is not the inevitable needs of capitalism so much as the needs of a specific – American – capitalism that has to compete with the less militarized and more energy-efficient capitalisms of Europe and Japan. Bush’s ‘new world order’, if it comes to pass, will be the embodiment of specifically American priorities.

The Muslim interpretation of the war – that it is a war for Zionism – is an interpretation that is stigmatized as anti-Semitic if advanced by any Western spokesman whose voice is deemed worthy of being taken seriously. Anyone expressing bewilderment that the question of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union should have been the number one item on the agenda at the Malta summit will be accused of being a conspiracy theorist.

It is indeed a depressing spectacle, looking at the two great twentieth-century intellectual currents that have influenced Jewish people, Zionism and Marxism, to see in 1991 how total has been the victory of the former over the latter.

After Hitler and the Holocaust, it was difficult for Marxists to argue as they had previously done that the Jews did not need their own state. The Labour Zionists of Ben Gurion appeared to have found the historically correct balance between socialism and nationalism. This impression was strengthened when the Soviet Union was the first to recognize the new state of Israel.

Later, with the periodic Mid-Eastern wars involving Israel, with the persistence of Israel’s problems with the Palestinians, and with Arabs generally, it became clear to all that the Zionist project involved a built-in logic of violence and instability that was only getting worse with the passage of time. The PLO’s final acceptance of Israel’s right to exist in exchange for the chance of building a Palestinian state on the West Bank should have provided the basis for a settlement with the Israelis. It did not.

It is important to understand the evolution of Palestinian views since the days when they were led by the Mufti of Jerusalem. Their initial stance towards the Zionist settlers had been to treat them, in accordance with Muslim tradition, as Jews, i.e. as a religious group. Later they were forced to recognize them as a nationality, and as masters of the Israeli state. When the PLO, by recognizing the right of the state of Israel, implicitly accepted the Jews’ right to national self-determination, it was intellectually indefensible for the Israeli government not to reciprocate. It was similarly indefensible for “the West” not to oblige it to reciprocate: if the view that the current war is being fought for Zionism is simplistic, like the ‘war for oil’ explanation, it is understandable in human terms.

The militaristic intransigence of the present Israeli regime, and the inability of the PLO to find a new strategy after playing its last card of recognizing Israel, have logically led to the discrediting among Arabs both of the PLO and of the European-inspired system of secular nation states.

In Iraq, the only political forces which can benefit from the defeat of Saddam Hussein by Bush would likewise be Islamic fundamentalists. Amid the ruins of the country which they vainly tried to ‘modernize’, the Iraqi people will be very open to the message that their humiliation at the hands of the infidel comes as punishment for their attacks on Iran and Islam. Nobody will be sorry about what happened to Kuwait.

Of course Bush has prepared a trap for the PLO, just as he prepared a trap for Saddam Hussein. Although much weakened by its defeats of recent years, the PLO has continued to enjoy the advantage of being committed to a democratic mode of operation, containing different tendencies with full political rights. It has also been attached to a discourse, which, unlike that of Islamic fundamentalists, is comprehensible in the West. It has enjoyed good relations with the non-chauvinistic minority in Israeli Jewish society. All this is now threatened.

It is said that during the Reykjavik Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, shortly after making his devastating (for Europeans_ proposal that he was prepared to agree to the destruction of all US and Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles if in return the Soviet leader would give his seal of approval to the Star Wars project, the President of the United States confided to his Soviet counterpart that the problems of humanity would probably never be solved until Earth dwellers were forced to unite in the face of a threat from outer space. Gorbachev’s reply has not been recorded for posterity, but since nobody cares what Gorbachev thinks any more anyway, perhaps it doesn ‘t matter.

The Greek-Parisian intellectual Cornelius Castoriadis did have an answer: he said in a recent interview that if Martians invaded the Earth and the Americans went to war with them, the ‘progressives’ he so much despises would support the Martians.

But that misses the point, in a way – the Martians, after all, have always been among us. And now that Communists have grown tired of being ‘the Martians’, it seems that Muslims are obliged to take over the role. They have no voice but to accept it, but ‘we’, the non-Martians, do have a choice. It is ‘we’, after all, who make the movies and assign the parts – black hats, white hats, Martians, earth-dwellers, and extras. And we can help to stop the reel.

posted 01-19-2004 12:21 PM            

11. Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz believe our forces will be greeted with flowers when they arrive.

10. Once we kick the ass of the mythological god of war, the rest of the planets in the solar system will fall peacefully in line.

9. Running out of places to not find bin Laden, Anthrax killer, CIA agent name-leaker, etc..

8. Secret video shown Saturday morning reveals that Marvin the Martian is a brutal military dictator.

7. Owes Gore a Coke on the whole "global warming" thing.

6. If there was water on Mars, their might have been life. If there was life on Mars, then there must be dead things. If there are dead things, there might be fossil fuels.

5. The invasion will pay for itself through the sale of Mars' ample reserves of Mars bars.

4. Mars is the front line in the war on imaginary, interplanetary terror (Mars Attacks! (1996), Clinton failed to respond).

3. As with Iraq, Halliburton pitched the invasion (see Salon.com).

2. Mars itself is an intermediate goal, the ultimate prize is the natural gas of Uranus.

1. As Condi said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be the earth shattering ka-boom of the Illudium Pew-36 Explosive Space Modulator."

posted 01-19-2004 12:36 PM            

By Gil scott Heron (the revolution will not be televised)

A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey's on the moon.
I can't pay no doctor bills but Whitey's on the moon.
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still while Whitey's on the moon.

The man just upped my rent last night cuz Whitey's on the moon.
No hot water, no toilets, no lights but Whitey's on the moon.
I wonder why he's uppin me. Cuz Whitey's on the moon?
I was already givin' him fifty a week but now Whitey's on the moon.

Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
The junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
And as if all that shit wasn't enough:

A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell but Whitey's on the moon.
Was all that money I made last year for Whitey on the moon?
How come there ain't no money here? Hmm! Whitey's on the moon.

Ya know, I just about had my fill of Whitey on the moon.
I think I'll send these doctor bills
airmail special....
to Whitey on the moon.

posted 01-19-2004 12:39 PM            

By Hawkwind

( - House/Brock/Calvert/King - )

Shoals of dead fish float on the lakes,
but Uncle Sam's on Mars
And science is making the same mistakes,
but Uncle Sam's on Mars
No one down here knows how to work the brakes,
but Uncle Sam's on Mars

Uncle Sam's on Mars, Uncle Sam's on Mars, Uncle Sam's on
Mars, he's on Mars

Layers of smoke in the atmosphere have made the earth
too hot to bear
The Earth might be a desert soon, America has left
the Moon

Uncle Sam's on Mars, Uncle Sam's on Mars, Uncle Sam's on
Mars, he's on Mars

He's digging for dreams in the red sand
He's got his bucket and spade in his left hand
He's digging for dreams
He's looking for life

What's he doing out there?
He's looking for life
Looking for life
There may be life out there

-------------------------------------------------------

(Nixon to Armstrong - July 21st 1969
I'm talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room in the White House.
And this certainly must be the most exciting telephone
call ever made here on Earth. I just can't tell
you how proud we all are. For every American this
has to be the proudest day of their lives. And
for people all over the world, I'm sure they too
join with us in recognising what a tremendous
achievement this is. For one priceless moment
in the whole history of Man......

------------------------------------------------------------------

MacDonalds Hamburger
Construction works
And he's looking for life
Looking for life to wipe out
He's looking for life to stamp out
He's looking for life to grind out
He's looking for life, so mind out