A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  May 11

  Has there ever been such a chilling launch to a re-election campaign? I take the kickoff to be April 27, when Obama produces his long birth certificate at a White House press conference. He says it’s time to abandon such idle distractions and face the big, serious issues. He knows something we don’t—that serious issue number one is a killing.

  The Navy SEALs are on standby, primed with Obama’s orders for the summary assassination of Osama bin Laden. There’s cloud cover over Abbottabad, so bin Laden gets an extra couple of days puttering around the house listening to his old speeches. William and Kate won’t have to share Saturday’s headlines with the head of Osama.

  Had all gone well, Sunday’s newspapers would have been freighted with the news that Muammar Gaddafi had been killed in the course of a NATO bombing strike on a “command and control” site in Tripoli. It had been on the cards from day one; indeed, on April 29 the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service leaked an accurate forecast to Rex, a Russian online news agency, whose Kirill Svetitsky quoted an anonymous source within the intelligence service: “There will be an attempt to kill Muammar Gaddafi on or before May 2. The governments of France, Britain and the US decided on it, for the warfare in Libya does not proceed well for the anti-Libyan alliance.”

  The April 30, 2011, bombing attack, made in the direct aftermath of Gaddafi’s call for a cease-fire, was not burdened with fancy talk about Article 51. UN Resolution 1973, which simply established a no-fly zone, was the sole legal pretext for targeted assassination.

  Obama is certainly not the first US President to have taken a keen interest in assassinations. We could start with the bid on Zhou Enlai’s life just before the Bandung Conference in 1955. Then we could move on to the assassination of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1961. The Kennedy years saw the first of many well-attested CIA efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro.

  In his Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Bill Blum—one of Osama’s favorite authors—has an interesting list of US targets, starting in 1949 with Korean opposition leader Kim Koo and going on to Indonesian President Sukarno, Kim Il-sung of North Korea, Mohammed Mossadegh, Philippines opposition leader Claro Recto, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Norodom Sihanouk, José Figueres Ferrer, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Gen. Rafael Trujillo, Charles de Gaulle, Salvador Allende, Michael Manley, Ayatollah Khomeini, the nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate, prominent Somali clan leader Mohamed Farah Aidid, Slobodan Miloević …

  In sum, assassination has always been an arm of US foreign policy, just as in periods of turbulence, like the ’60s, it has always been an arm of domestic repression as well. This is true on either side of the executive order President Gerald Ford issued in 1976 banning assassinations. “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination,” stated Executive Order 11905, now inoperative.

  May 13

  Pinko terror-symps and the “rule of law” gang may cavil and whine at the lack of legal propriety in the execution of Osama, but it’s not cutting much ice with liberal America. For long years what might be called the “progressive” segment of American voters have chafed at Republican gibes that their guy Obama is a wimp, all the more irritably because deep down many of them thought the charge had some merit.

  It’s wondrous what two expanding bullets to the head of an unarmed man will do. The chorus of approval for the SEALs covers the liberal spectrum. The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill exulted, as did Gary Wills on the New York Review of Books site, with an ecstatic paean, “The President’s Crack Team,” concluding, “we should keep in mind what superb things can be done by our Navy Seals. And we should keep somewhere in the back of our minds a remembrance that the one ultimately pulling the trigger … was the President of the United States.”

  May 20

  The French are for the millionaire. The Americans are for the maid. Among the French, three out of five think the IMF’s former managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has been framed. Here in the US there’s not been a reliable poll, but public sentiment is clearly against Strauss-Kahn, amplified by self-congratulation that America is a nation of laws, a maid’s word as potent as that of a millionaire, in contrast to the moral decay and deference to the rich prevalent in France.

  The French, for their part, stigmatize America as a puritanical, omnipotent imperial police state, whose intelligence agencies are efficiently capable of any infamy. But even as they charge that Strauss-Kahn was set up, the French press is rather weak on identifying or even suggesting the precise mastermind or group working to destroy a man who might have been the French Socialist Party’s candidate, evicting Sarkozy from the Élysée Palace.

  May 27

  Was there ever a nation so marinated in hypocrisy as America? At home and abroad President Barack Obama trumpets Uncle Sam’s virtues and dispenses patronizing homilies to other nations on how to behave themselves and honor freedom and democracy. This last week it’s been Europe’s turn to hear these self-righteous preachments.

  A couple of weeks ago Secretary of State Clinton attacked China, contrasting untiring efforts by the US to encourage human rights around the world, at a time when the Chinese “are trying to stop history, which is a fool’s errand. They cannot do it. But they’re going to hold it off as long as possible.”

  A week earlier Obama signed an expanded trade pact with Colombia where in 2010 fifty-one Colombian labor organizers were murdered, many of them by government-sponsored death squads. As Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO remarked, he doubted the trade agreement would be moving forward if fifty-one CEOs had been killed.

  If there’s one state in the Middle East where the US surely has clout it’s Bahrain, which just happens to be the base for the US Fifth Fleet. While Clinton was wagging her finger at China, details were surfacing of the ferocious repression of Bahrain’s Shia majority by Bahrain’s Sunni rulers, backed by Saudi troops.

  Masked squads raid Shia villages at night. At least twenty-seven Shia mosques and religious meeting places have so far been wrecked or bulldozed flat. If this was Libya, Clinton would trumpeting the repression as further justification for NATO’s onslaught. Not so in Bahrain. Peter Lee recently described the repression in the country: “In one sequence, a Human Rights Watch representative directs the reporter’s attention to a crime scene that has come to symbolize the worst excesses of Bahrain’s riot police: the place where a young man, Hani Jumah, was beaten. Apparently, he was not a demonstrator; he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time as riot police swept the area. The camera pans on the bloodstained floor of a deserted construction site as the HRW staffer relates with forensic detachment: ‘We found fragments of his kneecap … we also found one of his teeth.’ And you’re left to wonder: how does someone get beaten so severely a piece of his kneecap is dislodged from his body? The young man was taken to the hospital for treatment, then got disappeared from the hospital. His family was summoned to retrieve his body four days later.”

  Amid Obama’s grandiose eloquence about freedom, he has effectively excluded Palestinians from his supportive embrace and, amid meaningless verbal froth, collapsed yet again in the face of Israeli intransigence, and the lobby. US diplomacy, supervised by Obama and Clinton, will of course be dedicated to efforts to hold back history while strong-arming the UN into attempting to do the same.

  June 16

  Here’s Trotsky on Céline—“Louis-Ferdinand Céline walked into great literature as other men walk into their own homes. A mature man, with a colossal stock of observations as physician and artist, with a sovereign indifference toward academicism, with an extraordinary instinct for intonations of life and language, Céline has written a book which will survive, independently of whether he writes other books, and whether they attain the level of his first. Journey to the End of the Night is a novel of pessimism, a book dedicated by terror in the face of life, and weariness of it, rather than by indignat
ion. Active indignation is linked up with hope. In Céline’s book there is no hope … Decay hits not only parties in power, but schools of art as well. The creative methods become hollow and cease to react upon human sensibilities—an infallible sign that the school has become ripe enough for the cemetery of exhausted possibilities—that is to say, for the Academy … Céline will not write a second book with such an aversion for the lie and such a disbelief in the truth. The dissonance must resolve itself. Either the artist will make his peace with the darkness or he will perceive the dawn.”

  I like the cemetery of exhausted possibilities. Put it next to Robert Browning’s lines in “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”:

  What’s the vague good o’ the world, for which you dare

  With comfort to yourself blow millions up?

  We neither of us see it! we do see

  The blown-up millions—spatter of their brains

  And writhing of their bowels and so forth,

  In that bewildering entanglement

  Of horrible eventualities

  Past calculation to the end of time!

  Round out the funeral bouquet with this, from Adorno: “The injunction to practice intellectual honesty usually amounts to sabotage of thought. The writer is urged to show explicitly all the steps that have led him to his conclusion, so enabling the reader to follow the process through and, where possible—in the academic industry—to duplicate it. This demand not only invokes the liberal fiction of the universal communicability of each and every thought and so inhibits their objectively appropriate expression, but is also wrong in itself as a principle of representation. For the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar.”

  From Minima Moralia—and as succinct a critique of the culture of the internet as one can find.

  June 29

  How many nails does it require to whack down forever the coffin lid on European social democracy? Lenin, outraged in 1914 at the sight of Social Democratic parties across Europe rallying behind their national flags and voting war credits to unleash the horrors of World War I, would have been caustically unsurprised just over a century later at the current spectacle in Athens.

  Here, last Wednesday, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou won a no-confidence vote for what Michael Hudson describes as a program for national suicide, which can only be thwarted by a national referendum. The confidence vote was to ram through an austerity package, amounting to over €78 billion, against the furious protests and resistance of the Greek people. Around €28 billion of the total is to be raised through spending cuts and increased revenue, while €50 billion will be raised through the privatization of state enterprises.

  It really is a bit rich to hear preachments from Germany about the importance of paying debts. Ninety percent of all Germans oppose a bailout for Greece on the grounds of the latter’s aversion to paying reparations for its supposed profligacy. Never has a country flourished more mightily than Germany from flouting reparations and debts.

  Albrecht Ritschl, a professor at the London School of Economics, points out in an interview in Der Spiegel that Germany welshed on loans from the US to pay the reparations levied by the Allies after World War I. After World War II, a divided Germany was excused reparations to countries such as Greece that it had invaded. Under a 1953 treaty, the issue of reparations was on the table after reunification in 1990. But, Ritschl says, “With the exception of compensation paid out to forced laborers, Germany did not pay any reparations after 1990—and neither did it pay off the loans and occupation costs it pressed out of the countries it had occupied during World War II. Not to the Greeks, either.” Ritschl reckons Germany was “the biggest debt transgressor of the twentieth century.”

  July 18

  On August 2, the United States could start defaulting on its obligations as the Tea Party crowd in the House of Representatives refuse to raise the debt ceiling.

  America is in love with Apocalypse. It always has been. Every couple of years someone says the End Is Nigh. When I came to America’s shores in 1972 Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth had just been published and sold thirty million copies over the next twenty years. Lindsey wrote, rather presciently, that the Antichrist would rule over a ten-nation European Community through the 1970s until the Rapture—scheduled for the 1980s—and the Second Coming.

  Not many people here really think the US government will shut down on August 3. The fight over the deficit is one of those American ceremonies, as embalmed in ritual speech and gesture as an English coronation.

  August 4

  Of course he blew it. Whether by artful design or by sheer timidity is immaterial. He blew it. Two days before the United States was officially set to default on its debts on August 2, Barack Obama had the Republicans where he wanted them: All he had to do was announce that he’d trudged the last half mile towards a deal but that there’s no pleasing fanatics who reject all possibility of compromise, who are ready and eager to shut down the government, to see seniors starve and veterans denied their benefits. So, Obama could proclaim, he was invoking the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution that states that the “validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.”

  Obama could have done that, but he didn’t. At the eleventh hour and the fifty-fifth minute he threw in the towel, and allowed the Republicans to exult that they’d got 95 percent of what they wanted: cuts in social programs, a bipartisan congressional panel to shred at its leisure what remains of the social safety net, no tax hikes for the rich, no serious slice in the military budget.

  August 10

  What’s a riot without looting? We want it, they’ve got it! You’d think from the press that looting was alien to British tradition, imported by immigrants more recent than the Normans. Not so. Gavin Mortimer, author of The Blitz, had an amusing piece in the First Post about the conduct of Britons at the time of Their Finest Hour:

  It didn’t take long for a hardcore of opportunists to realise there were rich pickings available in the immediate aftermath of a raid—and the looting wasn’t limited to civilians.

  The looting was often carried out by gangs of children organized by a Fagin figure; he would send them into bombed-out houses the morning after a raid with orders to target coins from gas meters and display cases containing World War I medals. In April 1941 Lambeth juvenile court dealt with 42 children in one day, from teenage girls caught stripping clothes from dead bodies to a seven-year-old boy who had stolen five shillings from the gas meter of a damaged house. In total, juvenile crime accounted for 48 percent of all arrests in the nine months between September 1940 and May 1941 and there were 4,584 cases of looting.

  Perhaps the most shameful episode of the whole Blitz occurred on the evening of March 8, 1941 when the Café de Paris in Piccadilly was hit by a German bomb. The cafe was one of the most glamorous night spots in London, the venue for off-duty officers to bring their wives and girlfriends, and within minutes of its destruction the looters moved in.

  “Some of the looters in the Café de Paris cut off the people’s fingers to get the rings,” recalled Ballard Berkeley, a policeman during the Blitz who later found fame as the “Major” in Fawlty Towers. Even the wounded in the Café de Paris were robbed of their jewellery amid the confusion and carnage.

  The riots in London last week started in Tottenham, an area with the highest unemployment in London, in response to the police shooting a young black man, in a country where black people are twenty-six times more likely to stopped and searched by the cops than whites. As the Daily Mash puts it: “Many of these kids are less than two miles away from people who get multi-million pound bonuses for catastrophic failure and live in a culture where the material excess of people who are famous for nothing is rammed relentlessly into their faces by middle-brow tabloid newspapers. And of course later today the looters will be condemned in Parliament by a bunch of people who stole money by accident.”

  September 7

/>   The protesters outside the White House have furled their banners and headed home. Now the Obama administration will decide whether to issue a presidential permit for the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline extension—a $7 billion project to bring heavy, “sour” crude oil extracted from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, down through Montana and the Plains states to refineries on the Gulf Coast, notably in Port Arthur, Texas.

  Even as the protesters savaged the scheme as a fearsome environmental disaster, the State Department issued its final environmental impact statement on August 26. Not surprisingly, it was favorable to the project, furnishing such nuggets of encouragement as “analysis of previous large pipeline oil spills suggests that the depth and distance that the oil would migrate would likely be limited unless it reaches an active river, stream, a steeply sloped area, or another migration pathway such as a drainage ditch.”

  There’s no national need for the Keystone XL extension. But money talks, of course. Obama received $884,000 from the oil and gas industry during the 2008 campaign, more than any other lawmaker except John McCain.

  September 8

  America’s problems are huge: fourteen million Americans officially looking for jobs—about four job seekers for every job vacancy; 8.8 million part-time workers since the recession began; roughly 2.6 million people too discouraged even to look for a job: total—about twenty-five million people needing work or more work and an economy that is creating no new jobs.

  As the economists Randall Wrey and Stephanie Kelton point out, “Business will not hire more workers until it has more sales. Consumers will not spend more until they’ve got more jobs.”

  You can find America’s future in blueprints minted in business-funded think-tanks thirty to forty years ago at the dawn of the neoliberal age: destruction of organized labor; attrition of the social safety net; attrition of government regulation; a war on the poor, fought without mercy at every level. Last year the New York police stopped and questioned 601,055 people, predominantly blacks and Hispanics, and the numbers were up 13 percent for the first six months of this year.