Nomads

"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." -Nietzsche 
For the past few months I've been reading an epic historical work called 'Empire of the Steppes' which covers several thousand years of nomadic migrations. I'll spare you the pages of notes I've taken documenting the rise and fall of innumerable empires and even more incalculable wars; I fully recognize that such things interest few people. What I thought would be interesting to most people is the authors defense of nomadic barbarity towards sedentary people. After recounting the staggeringly violent life of Ghengis Khan she says he did none of it out of cruelty or anger. It was the result of a fundamentally different point of view. One that saw cities and agriculture as an opposing way of life, one that bred weakness, decadence and slavery.
 City after city, empire after empire, fell to the horde of the great Khan, and all were burned and slaughtered if they resisted, which most did. If not for the intervention of one of his advisers it is probable that he would have had his troops kill the entire population of Northern China, burn the cities, destroy the irrigation system, and let the whole area revert to its natural state; which is exactly what he had done to Eastern Iran. This foreign policy seems ruthless beyond understanding but we must remember that virtually every empire he conquered started the war, he just finished it with a decisiveness no one was ready for. Often they would ride away from a ravaged area long enough for those who had hidden to come out, only to have a rear guard return to finish the rest off.
 While reading about these tumultuous times I found my mind wondering if this seemingly irresistible human tendency towards killing on a large scale was all motivated by the same thing- ignorance of the other.
The nomadic hordes of Temujin were more cunning and effective than brave. Their tactics and weapons almost always ensured they suffered very few casualties relative to what they inflicted. Through discipline and experience they were able to trick enemies into doing exactly what they wanted and when the moment was right they would destroy the opposing army in its entirety.  When America sends our soldiers, pilots and robots to kill in the exact same areas that the Mongol horsemen once rode we do it in a similar way. Our weapons and tactics make us largely invulnerable to our foes and our strategy seems to our enemies to not go beyond death and domination. Also like the hordes of the great Khan, we travel far from our homes to wage war upon people whose way of life we are incapable of understanding. As complex, populated and technologically advanced our way of life is, at our core we seem to have not changed at all.

  

Returning to America

A comrade in consciousness once told me that American's hate their culture so much they make a new one ever 10 years. I have spent a fair amount of this decade outside the borders of the USA, and so whenever I come back it always seems like I have a lot of catching up to do. For such a far flung Imperial power that takes an interest in telling just about every other country on earth what they should do, we are a remarkably insular nation. There is a logic, or perhaps lack thereof, that is truly unique which I would argue is virtually incomprehensible to an outsider, and to be fair, largely indefinable to the inhabitants. I will not seek to unravel that mystery here, but merely to appreciate how odd the land I come from truly is.
  I think it's safe to say that all places on earth are idiomatic to varying degrees. The thing about America that has struck me of late is the casual insanity of it all. I get the feeling more and more that people here are alienated in such a profound way that they have somehow developed an inbuilt immunity to modernity. Maybe its the rapacious consumer culture, or the incalculably hypocritical nature of American politics, could even just be that in our society its ok to just not give a flying fuck and so a preponderance of people here don't. In all likelihood, it is surely a synthesis of many things that makes this place so peculiar. It is an odd mixture of fear, respect and bewilderment that we illicit in the rest of the world. I feel genuinely fortunate to have become a historian in such a place and time, for I feel that never will I ever get to the bottom of this rabbit hole.
  Within my first 12 hours of being back in the USA a gang banger ran up on my cousin and I as we walked to his car in a not that bad neighborhood in LA. He was so twisted on drugs that comprehending his purpose was difficult at first as he asked random disjointed questions and stared wildly at us. Once we started walking away he started shouting his gang affiliation and asking us if we wanted to get shot. My cousin, who has lived in LA for over 10 years now, very calmly just said no, we didn't have any problem and continued walking away seeming almost bored with the whole situation. Once it was over he told me that this sort of thing happens all the time and that you just get used to it. In a country where anyone can have a gun and be crazy enough to use it on a complete stranger for absolutely no reason, one just has to take shit from people like that or carry a gun oneself with the understanding that if you pull it out you need to shoot to kill. No other economically developed country has such an ethos and is probably a large part of why the world must acknowledge our military dominion in so many places on the planet.
  While the gun debate in Washington manages to sink to even more asinine depths of lunacy it seems ever more likely that denial will continue to be the backbone of this country. How does this nation think it can have a dialogue about this issue when one side claims guns are essential to our freedom and the other side seems unaware that we owe everything we have as a nation to their use? An old frontier saying said 'God created man, but Colonel Colt made them equal'. That is bullshit on both accounts, but it does speak to the reason guns are so central to the psychosis that is American identity. You may not be able to afford much here, but chances are you can get your hands on a gun, and that what ever comes of that you will feel more powerful. Also, if you can believe in an all powerful God creating mankind you can surely believe that a pistol will make you free. Having said that, I would like to close with two quotes by religious men about this issue:
 "All human strength vanishes when confronted with firearms. A man is dead before he sees what's coming." -Martin Luther (1569)
"our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim; by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is the one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing; by allowing these developments, we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes." -Martin Luther King Jr. (1963)

The Trail We Traverse

For a historian, the passage of time is a sacred thing. It is a thread that weaves all humanity together into this baffling tapestry we call the present. Like walking a trail in a complete wilderness, one must take careful note of ones path so as to avoid walking in circles and also to insure that you can retrace your steps if you go the wrong way. I would never presume to say humanity is lost, but I would argue that we are not taking very careful note of the trail we tread. Here are some things that I think are worthy of contemplation.
1) The decision to alter our world has lead to the majority of land (and also the oceans) of earth being affected by human activity to varying degrees. This has lead to an exponential increase in population roughly corresponding to how much of the earth we have devastated to create what we want. If we don't come to some sort of consensus on how many humans is desirable and how many is disastrous it is very probable that we will kill every ecosystem on the planet after a few dozen more trips around the Sun. Considering we don't yet know how to produce something complex as a functioning ecosystem, destroying the ones we have is a rather dubious decision that at the very least we should be conscious of making.
2) The prevalence of doublethink as a fundamental aspect of social structures and thought is a development that not only deserves disciplined discussion, but also introspective analysis. "To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them both to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then to promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself- that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed." I can't speak to life in the poorer portions of planet earth, but I can say with as much certainty as any human can say anything that doublethink is a fundamental part of life in America and Europe. The ability of America to claim it is preserving peace by waging war, or maintain international order by violating international law, speaks to the truth of this. Consider how every crises in Capitalism seems to spring miraculously from nowhere, even though the exact same thing has been happening for hundreds of years now. The maze of madness that is the modern financial system is a dungeon of doublethink that is so cavernous and crazy we only accept it because it is almost impossible to understand it. We should think deeply on this turn in the trail before we forget the way we came.
3) What sort of a planet and people do we want? Honestly asking this question and then acting accordingly seems like the best hope for us humans. If we can start a dialogue based solely on answering this one question, I think we would find that we all have a workable similarity in our answer. Sure some want injustice, ignorance and intolerance, but they don't have to openly admit it because people seem to be pathetically passive as long as they are fed and entertained. If this simple question became the basis of political discourse I think it is conceivable that we could quickly transcend mountains of bullshit that has confused our course for centuries. Some might say its absurd to hope that we can change what is dubbed 'human nature'. That claim would require that you completely disregard all of history and the phenomenal changes that have transpired in human society therein. Perhaps if we tried we could make people that not only learn how to live without destroying biodiversity, but also break the ages old rule of oligarchies.
These three ponder points are what have been bouncing around in my brain this first week of 2013. What once was a trail is now a road and thus seems to tell us where to go. All I hope is that whatever fate is in store for us we at least measure our steps, be conscious of the trail we take and all the ones we do not.

Swaying in the wind

"One impulse from a vernal wood
may teach you more of man
Of moral evil and of good
than all the sages can."
-Woodsworth
Always good to remind myself that I am only approaching true knowledge, or truth as some call it, when I start to realize that my ideas and opinions are just the wind that blows through the branches of my mind. I was raised around far more trees than people, and if I am grateful of anything in my life, it is this. As the tree grows stronger, the more weathered my bark becomes and the deeper my roots go, the easier it is to just let the wind howl.
How ferociously it does wail though. This has been a mighty year in the annals of human hysterics. As is always the case, I am impressed that more people didn't die and that the planet hasn't suffered a complete environmental collapse; which I reckon is good. Surely won't be much longer before our 7 billion strong species is visited once more by our longtime travelling companions of war, famine and plague. Probably best to just enjoy the interregnum and not feel too guilty about the ease with which I can live, for this too shall surely end.
The centuries since Capitalism's development have been fascinating, and if nothing else have given me the means to record my thoughts and share them with perhaps a billion people with little effort. Someone told me lately that humans are something nature has to live with and capitalism is something humans have to live with. I think this is a good way of looking at it. After much internal turmoil I have settled comfortably into my role as historian and human, no longer feeling the need to worry about the fate of all things. It is enough for me now to just to watch and learn. Perhaps this year I will finally master these symbiotic skills of observation and contemplation to finally become a truly tall tree.

All I can know is what the world does show
The more I grow, the more the wind does blow

Centrifuge Century

Some days when I do my daily rounds of the news it seems things spin so fast that some sort of social atomic fusion is bound to take place. Perhaps it already is doing just that. Here is a bit of mental buckshot at whats crackin' currently:

  Things in the Eastern Congo have started to escalate substantially. This region has been in complete flux since the Great War of Africa (1998-2003) when 5 nations and innumerable factions fought over controlling the mineral rich region. A few months ago a group named M23 broke away from the Congolese Military (mind you it really doesn't deserve the name 'military', more like militia levies) and started kicking ass and taking names. The leader of Neighboring Rwanda, Kagame, made emphatic arguments that he wasn't funding these people, but considering all the facts, he almost certainly is. The area is rich in gold, tin and tantalum, and economically is far more integrated into the economies of Rwanda and Uganda than the Democratic Republic of Congo. Having said all this there are hundreds of thousands of displaced people living in the region and the UN's largest peace keeping/ Humanitarian mission is primarily located here. When the M23 forces took the largest city of the region they behaved relatively well for African forces (aka not killing, raping and stealing everything they see), which once again indicates they are taking their orders from Rwanda. After a few days in control of the city and the UN army located at the local airport doing jack shit they mysteriously decided to leave, with absolutely no apparent military reason. Reports have also started circulating that long assumed oil reserves in the region are indeed existent. This is probably the most disturbing situation in the world that I'm aware of, but it has some competition.

    In Egypt President Morsi has been dealing with a fairly serious amount of opposition to his decision to give himself unlimited powers until a new constitution is decided upon. Given the intransigent opposition of the Mubarak era judiciary this is quite likely to be never. It is encouraging to see that the people on the street aren't buying into the old democracy-makes-everything-ok shtick and refuse to let anyone install themselves as a new dictator. When considering this country up until  last year held the record of longest uninterrupted tradition of autocracy in history, this is pretty damn impressive they are sticking to the whole civil government based on democracy concept. Good luck Egyptians, your probably doomed given the human tendency towards Oligarchy, but here's hoping you can pull it off.

   Back in the USSA Obama seems to have located his testical satchel, and finding it intact has concluded that showing them off would be a fun thing to do. Accordingly, he has told the press and the Republicans he is willing to go 'over the fiscal cliff' if they won't raise taxes on the rich. This cliff he speaks of is one of Congresses most hilarious pranks it has pulled on itself to date (right up there with the Civil War, ceding the power to declare war, and impeaching Clinton for a BJ). Basically they have made it so that if they don't compromise (which neither side will) then automatic spending cuts will be enacted, which will utterly sodomize the economy and poor Americans. Why, might you ask, have they decided upon such a daring and dangerous course of action? In short they are myopic fucktards whose parties are controlled by their fringes and whose voting base is correspondingly idiotic. This would be a lot funnier if America wasn't the unchangeable hegemon of earth due to its truly unparalleled obsession with military might and it's resulting intimidation of living things. Given this fact, the idea of America slitting its own economic throat is a little less humorous and a situation that would scare the living shit out of the rest of the planet if they weren't caught up in their own petty melodramas.

   Speaking of which, Syria is still fighting a full blown war among its various ethnic, religious and political factions. Shit just got even more complicated because the US labeled the leading rebel group, the Al-Nusra Front, a terrorist organization. In addition to this, Congress (how they find time for this amidst the posturing and bullshitting I know not) has started getting more turned on about the idea of letting our jets and missiles join the fun. You must understand that for a country that has spent so much on its military and genuinely believes itself to need to lead the world, it is really hard to stay out of a real war. This is especially true when that war is connected with one of your favorite make believe enemies, Iran. Luckily for the regime of the Assad Clan Russia is sticking with Bashar, so the US can't just send in the drone armadas just yet, but considering the fact that Iran has captured yet another American robot in its airspace, who knows.
  A lot of other stuff is going down, but I'm running out of time to type about it and at some point it all just flows into the great shit sea of insanity and therein is lost among the incalculable stank of past human behavior. It's one hell of a show, and the idea that we might write ourselves into such a completely impossible situation that the curtain must fall simply because all the actors have slain one another is a bit sad; but it is also a bit funny.
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." -Mel Brooks

wind in the sales

I think this video is absolutely the best microcosm of America, and indeed late consumer capitalism, that I've seen since good ol' W landed on a aircraft carrier to announce that he had successfully conquered Iraq. Now, to most people this video is probably just embarrassing or depressing, which are completely understandable emotions. For me however, it is the punchline for a rather long historical joke.
You see back in the 70's the capitalist class in America decided that they had had just about enough of this unionized middle class labor bullshit and got working on ways to pay less money to workers. This was done through a variety of means that are by no means novel or even unusual. In the 80's it was moving manufacturing whenever possible from the staunchly unionized Mid-West and North-East to the less organized South and West. This did a lot for wage repression, as did labor saving advances in technology, but some thought it hadn't done enough. So it was that in the 90's globalization was utilized to use labor in foreign countries with no real regulations, and then import back into America under the guise of 'free trade' and thus essentially break the back of the blue collar middle-class in America.
There was one glaring problem with this strategy however, their simply wasn't a market for the goods if you didn't have people making enough money to buy them. Middle-class America was the cash cow of the century for Capitalists, but by repressing wages the milk had gone sour. Luckily the financial sector came up with a rather cunning solution- extend credit to the consumer class so they can buy and then commodify that debt so as to be able to trade it. Doing this also gave the financial sector the sort of leverage they needed to start doing some truly daring speculative trading in futures that essentially allowed them to invent profit through creative use of economics.
Where did all this lead? It lead to the video you see here. The once mighty American working class is reduced to fighting over ritualized sales on shitty products made by horribly paid workers half way around the world. All purchased with credit cards or the equally unsubstantial American dollar, that as another form of wage repression is worth less every year. So strange how the dreams we dream become reality and then that reality becomes a nightmare.
"All the perplexities, confusions, and distresses in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as
from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation." -John Adams in a letter to Jefferson (1787)

Crises in Capitalism

"For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer." -John Maynard Keynes (1931)

Today I would like to talk about economics and how it is affecting the world in which we all live. The financial meltdown of 2008 can now be seen in hindsight as merely the beginning of the drama that is still being played out today. As a direct result of this crises we have seen the collapse of several regimes in North Africa and South-West Asia as the economic pressures eventually erupted and flowed like lava onto the streets. It has also led to serious disruptions in the EU which could very well cause the dismantling, in part or in whole, of this economic union. Even in the most die-hard epicenter of Capitalism, America, there was an anti-capitalist movement that although utterly ineffectual did at least raise the issue of economic injustice.
For a world order that has been specifically oriented around the concept that capital needs to flow freely, it is fascinating to see the public's response to the reality of our economic system. People get angry when they don't know what to do, and this is why so many people are so upset about this crises. They seem to have some vague understanding that someone somewhere is profiting from all this, yet they are still powerless to challenge these shadowy figures, or to even understand how it is all happening. Just to be clear, I don't think I have the answer, but I do think I understand the question- Does anyone have a better idea?
Before that question can be posed, I think there needs to be a serious attempt at reality studies. By this I mean that deciding what are the most irrefutable desires of humans (ie liking being alive and disliking suffering) and if these can be met better by another economic order. Given the insatiable nature of human desire at present it seems probable that this system is best at mass producing consumables and distributing them. It is profoundly naive to assume that we can change our current order without taking the incredibly difficult task of inventing a new system which will be more appealing to the majority of earths humans. As a historian it is amusing to me that people are willing to organize for perceived political issues but are unwilling to organize themselves in order to engage in alternate economic activity. We are creatures of habit I suppose, but as a wise man once noted, the world is a "system in perpetual search for novelty". 

Anarchy among the Arabs

One thought came to my mind today as I watched some people attack symbols of US authority across Northern Africa and South West Asia, where did they get all these US flags to burn? I think the answer is obvious; they are importing the same ones from China that they sell in the US at prices anyone can afford. Whoever the hell is running these countries is pretty damn lucky they have a US and Israel to blame, not to mention the fortuitous supply of flags to burn. In a way I feel like the Americans are being used as a patsy for the iniquities and cruelty of the wealthy. Granted American’s are probably more violent than most peoples, but I don’t think it’s fair to say we are significantly worse than any other group of hominids. In my mind the American people have been played and pawned for the purpose of making the world safe for capital; and they are just too damn arrogant to admit it. In this plot the Muslims, and particularly the Arabs, have been cast as antagonists. What I would like to discuss in this essay is why these people, roughly a billion souls, have found themselves in this role. Like most interesting questions there is a quick answer and then there is the truth, I will be attempting the latter.

      Muhammad successfully unified a large portion of the Bedouin living in the Arabian Peninsula in the late 7^th Century. Historically speaking, this was quite an accomplishment. These tribes were fiercely independent by tradition, but much as the Mongols rallied around Ghengis Khan, they would follow the banner of victory far beyond their ancestral homelands. Unlike the Mongols however, the followers of Muhammad were not only establishing an Empire, but also a religion. In my opinion this faith was designed to be acceptable to the contumacious nature of the Bedouin. A big part of this was that under Islam there would be no intermediaries between the believer and God. For this and several other reasons I would argue that Islam has never really been an ‘organized religion’, but rather a 1300 year long debate about the meaning of the poetry and life of Muhammad, as well as social norms and morality. One of these interpretations which I find particularly intriguing is that by submitting to God you are thereby renouncing all allegiance to worldly authority. There is no ‘give unto Caesar’ passage in the Quran, and this no doubt is why Islam fractured with such record breaking speed just a few decades after the Prophets death. 

Regardless of the various schisms Islam went through, the faith and the empire spread none the less until Dar-e-Islam stretched from the Hindu Kush all the way to the Atlantic by the 9^th Century. During this period there was a blossoming of learning and economic development that was arguably the most advanced civilization seen in the West since the Romans. People often forget the relatively tolerant nature of Islam throughout history prior to the modern era. It was for this reason that scholars, poets, engineers and all other manner of useful people flocked to the great cities of the Muslim world. This period constituted one of the most stable and prosperous times for the region, which was followed abruptly by the arrival of Turks, Crusaders and Mongols, all of which wrought incredible destruction. Perhaps the greatest city of its time, Baghdad, was razed to the ground by the Mongols in 1258. The Christian Crusaders slaughtered the population of Jerusalem and a fairly large portion of Palestine. It was apocalyptic times for Muslims, and one that altered substantially the course of Islamic Civilization

After this period of upheaval the Turks established their Empire and ruled the majority of the Muslim world all the way up until World War I. This is important I feel because it meant that during the period of full blown European Imperialism, when the rest of the world was being violently dominated and made the property of European States, everything from Persia to Morocco was essentially left alone. Of course the domination of the planet by Europeans had its consequences, perhaps the most important of which was the end of the ancient Silk Road as the primary trade artery in the Hemisphere. During these centuries of Turkish Despotism the non-Turkish Muslims living under their rule chaffed under the decadent Ottomans, bidding their time for when they could once again be the masters of their own fate. The ability of Lawrence of Arabia to essentially mimic Muhammad’s feet by mobilizing an army of Bedouin to tear apart the Ottoman Empire speaks to the fact that these people were just as fiercely independent as they were in the time of the Prophet, and just as willing to rally to the call of Jihad. So it was that after the War the Europeans did what for them was perfectly natural and logical, they divided the lands up as they saw fit and installed various leaders (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq) or took up direct colonial control (Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine). This was the quickest and perhaps most unexpected of all European land grabs, and one that certainly took the Muslim world by surprise. 

     It is hard to overestimate the incredible importance of this period to collective psyche of the Ummah in the Near East and North Africa. They had hated the Turks, but since they had converted to Islam and had ruled them for many generations, it was familiar. Going from this archaic model to the mechanized megalomania of late European Imperialism is a shock that I would argue the region is still reeling from. What had been fairly isolated was now once again a central and integrated part of the modern world order. With this came a flood of ideas, technology and people that opened the region to things it had little experience dealing with, all of which was imposed by the non-Muslim overlords in Paris and London. It is not hard to imagine that what followed was cultural chaos on a large scale; and that has continued right up to the modern day. The countries invented in 1918 have amazingly stayed largely intact, especially when we consider how arbitrary their borders are and how unbelievably horrible their leaders have been. Now in their defense, the West did a lot to support these regimes and gave them the military means they needed to keep their populations in line; as well as the creation of Israel which has done more than anything else to ensure some semblance of legitimacy. So it was that even with this rapid transition to modernity, the tradition of violence and institutionalized injustice was clearly continued under the various new governments, furthering the inherent distrust already deeply ingrained through centuries of lessons learned. 

   Its understandable how Westerners have a hard time understanding that history is factor for the Arabs, and that this is the primary reason they hate the West, not religion. In a rather ironic way the modern Muslim extremist has become something of a mythological character of  evil and cruelty, all the while Blackwater Inc. can have a Christian orientation and send troops to Arabs lands with the right to shoot anything in sight. I think the simplest and most likely answer is that in order for the West, Capitalism, the Elite, whatever, to have any sort of moral legitimacy they need an other against which to compare themselves. Given the sort of absolutely amoral and destructive nature of late consumer capitalism, this isn't really possible within the realm of reality without being ridiculously hypocritical. Luckily by demonizing the worlds largest religion requires no reality whatsoever, it can be done by simply manipulating the facts around a false narrative that claims Muslims are violent and dangerous. At this point it is virtually impossible to differentiate between the lie and reality, which is basically a win for all who want people fearful and obedient. One thing to consider though, all revolutions are based on food shortages, and prices keep climbing throughout the region. Add to this the tradition of the Arabs to not expect or need anything from their governments, and all this makes for a volatile situation that is much bigger than Israel, Iran, Oil or any other singular thing. The scariest possibility for me is that the uprisings will continue, the corrupt and impotent regimes will fall, and then the West will 'cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war'. All because at this point in history, as a group, Arabs are Anarchists by nature and Westerners are Imperialist.