End Time
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It is not clear how voluntary many of the prisoner drops over Sulawesi were in actuality. The penal colony’s natural environment started, and remained brutally savage. Those who managed to survive rapidly formed competing, highly militarized, territorially based gangs, with a sprinkling of super survivalist solos in their midst. What was not anticipated was that, in forcing hundreds and then thousands of superbly criminal minds to survive together against a purposefully hardened natural world, not to mention each other, the Celebes prison colony might go beyond mere survival to take up their old occupations, with a vengeance.
Sulawesi became an outlaw zone; a high tech, high energy nexus practicing maximum black market economies. Conventional contraband—drugs, weapons, high value stolen goods—were incidental to the stolen technologies, purloined scientific discoveries, hot software, and black market data bases which flowed in and out of the Celebes. Not a few surprises were beginning to emerge, what with the formation of Celebes Research and Development by an uneasy coalition of Sulawesi gangs two years after Suharto’s death in 2003. And the military junta that took power after the death of Indonesia’s President-For-Life was entirely too terrified to take any action against the outlaw zone in their nation’s midst.
Of course, the Sulawesi gangs are cosmopolitan enough to keep the Indonesian government monetarily well greased. The US government, in spearheading the drive to replace a now laughable Development Corporation security with UN forces, does not expect such an action to have much affect on the outlaw zone. So the Pentagon plans for more forceful contingencies. In the meantime, the Sulawesi gangs continue their subtle incorporation of the Indonesian banking system into their financial laundering schemes. And, in the meantime, a number of nations still continue to routinely drop their criminals over the Celebes. It is rumored that Sulawesi took a strong interest in the bomb-grade riemanium stolen by anti-war activists in the U.S. San Francisco Bay Area in 2007...
PART TWO
BABYLON BY THE BAY
NINE
Excerpted from the Introduction to
‘New Romantic’ Historiography: 2001-2004: A Survey
by Allen Meltzer
Published 2005 by University of California Press
(Electrostraca #: SH/H-005-995-384-4581)
THE “NEW ROMANTIC MOVEMENT
The project of history, circa 1972, was mundane at best; limited to the task of determining what constitutes an historical event, historical cause-and-effect, historical fact and evidence, and like questions. Having long abandoned the nineteenth century labor of trying to determine patterns or cycles of development in the historical record, historians at the end of the twentieth century felt increasingly adrift. The pace, scope and magnitude of seemingly inchoate change all around the globe after 1972 was the basis for the historians’ unease, which built until the publication in January, 2002 of Jerome Stachniw’s monograph, “An Interstitial Approach to Post-Soviet Histories,” breached the levees of a conventional historiography already at flood levels.
A number of scholars and academics devoted to the Muse Cleo began a scramble for new vocabularies, paradigms, and models to adequately explain the apparently escalating chaos in world events; what many increasingly described as a world interregnum. This broad tendency in the discipline of history was immediately and derisively termed the New Romantic movement by its critics which, like most epithets, became the loose movement’s humorous, unofficial moniker. Historians unwilling to stand pat with micro-history and cleometrics, and unwilling to try fitting events and dynamics procrustean-style into “outworn” historical theories and categories, in fact used several options to challenge historiographic orthodoxy. Existing historical models and methodologies, such as Marxism, were radically overhauled in order to describe and analyze new conditions, as San Liu accomplishes with her CyberMarxist series of histories and as is the case with the “World War Three” interpretation of Jawarah Chandler Krishnamurti. Inherently transhistoric or nonhistoric concepts were adapted to historical reality as Ngobo Nyere does to create “secular millenarianism.” Or an entirely original system for describing and analyzing historical events and dynamics was attempted, as is the case with Stachniw’s interstitial history and Bartlebee’s cyberhistory.
In point of fact, most New Romantic historians do all three. This new interest in historical patterns, stages and cycles—albeit from unusual, often ingenious perspectives—has enjoyed a prodigious publishing record in the last three years, and as a consequence, individual pieces in the wealth of histories written through 2004 are sometimes difficult to precisely categorize. The call for a change in the researching and writing of history, this challenge to conventional historiography championed by the discipline’s New Romantics, has yet to have any substantial impact on the History Establishment. Nor has one or another of this new movement’s historical interpretations yet inherited the international revolutionary mantle of Marxism. Such ambitions depend solely, and ultimately upon how history plays out in the next two or three decades; the exact force which brought the movement into being in the first place.
In the interim, this volume’s collection of essays attempts a critical survey of the New Romantic historians, offering an appreciative but, in the end non-believing appraisal of this wide ranging movement to date. History has been reinvigorated by the debates introduced from New Romantic challenges to orthodoxy, and this survey purposefully avoids the movement’s more self-revelatory sentiments, such as those expressed in this quote from San Liu’s introduction to History Loops, Bartlebee’s three volume history of the 1998 Third World economic collapse:
We [members of the European Delgado Circle] felt like aboriginals— Amerindians from the Great Plains, Africans from the veldt, or Asiatics from the steppes—who had grown up in one very small corner of our world. After the collapse of our civilization’s greatest enemy, we had naively come to expect that all of the world was becoming the same; green, peaceful, and accepting of the enlightened stewardship of our people. Then, upon climbing a nearby hill, we realize that, in fact, most of the world around us is in flames. A few areas have so far avoided the avaricious fires, and select areas such as our own are actually verdant; this greenery due to waters stolen from the rest of the grassland around us. Our people, far from husbanding the world, actually contribute to the scorched earth we now witness, all the while remaining secure in our rich, artificial oasis..
In contrast, this collection of historians emphasizes the dry, academic discussion of assumptions underlying historiographic methodologies and structures. A strong effort is made to describe and present excerpts from the often highly theoretical manifestos of the better known New Romantic historians, not only in relation to each other as intellectual history, but also as social history against the background of the vast social upheavals worldwide that they attempt to describe and interpret. For while much is made of the “audacity” and “originality’’ of New Romantic historical interpretations, in turn considered “flamboyant” and “dishonest” by their critics, what is often overlooked is the global context that gave rise to this tendency in the project of history to begin with; an historical context that influenced how individual New Romantic historians chose to question established historiography.
The focus of this work is historiography, the writing of history. How and why the writing of history changed from the end of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first cannot be understood, however, without a knowledge of historical events over the past thirty years. And while frequently it is difficult to objectively summarize events so close in time, contrary to the New Romantic spirit it is possible to describe them in conventional terms without doing them much damage. Indeed, the historically steeped World-System School of sociological analysis (Amin, Arrighi, Frank, Wallerstein, et. al.) has produced a credible description of world dynamics, without the sturm und drang reveled in by New Romantic historians. The summary of the historical context to New Romantic historiography that follows draws
upon World-System insights, while insisting that the last thirty years can demonstrate an overarching theme; that being the growing obsolescence of the nation-state in world-system dynamics.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT TO “NEW ROMANTIC MOVEMENT A) WORLD SYSTEM, 1972: By 1972, the capitalist world-system comprised a fully developed, industrialized, prosperous capitalist core of nations dominated by the United States, and including western Europe and Japan; a developing, industrializing, struggling semi-periphery of nations in eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.; and an undeveloped, imperialized, destitute periphery of nations over the rest of the world. What was termed the socialist world, or bloc, actually straddled semi-periphery and periphery, which by 1972 had become the fracture line for the socialist camp’s Sino/Soviet split. In no way did the socialist bloc stand outside of the capitalist world-economy. The structure of the nation-state and the national economy, so instrumental in the capitalist core’s affluence, the semi-periphery’s development, and the periphery’s aspirations, was already demonstrating limits.
B) BEGINNINGS OF REGIONAL CAPITALIST CONSOLIDATION: The United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark joined the European Economic Community in 1973, insuring that eventually a supranational entity, a “United States of Europe,” would emerge to create a Common Market out of formerly warring nations. The knitting together of western Europe into a federal community inspired the supersession of the nation-state in a wave of regional capitalist consolidation across north America, eastern Europe, and Asia. The United States, Canada and Mexico signed a North American Free Trade agreement in 1992, later called the Continental Trade agreement, the same year western Europe’s Economic Community dropped most internal trade and customs barriers. Both north American and European consolidation continued through the 1990’s, despite the protectionist turn to the former and the initial failures of Maastricht in the latter.
C) BEGINNINGS OF THIRD WORLD COLLAPSE: The United States withdrew from Vietnam in 1975 and thereafter matched the cry of Two, Three, Many Vietnams” with the reality of two, three, many civil wars. The US, USSR and PRC initiated the disintegration of the nation-state in the Third World periphery by pitting one Third World country against another (Iraq and Iran), sponsoring guerrillas and contras in their opponent’s client states (Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique and Nicaragua), and promoting brush war, civil war and virulent factionalism (Lebanon, Kampuchea, and Ethiopia) through their “superpower” struggles. In truth, the nation-state was no longer a sufficient instrument either to pull a poor Third World country into successful industrialization and economic development, just as it no longer guaranteed a core country’s continued economic prosperity and well being.
D) COLLAPSE OF SOVIET COMMUNISM: The years from 1989 through 1992 were pivotal in the nation-state’s demise. Soviet hegemony and Soviet-style communism collapsed in eastern Europe by 1989. In 1991, the Soviet Union deconstructed, to reassemble as the decentralized, ineffectual Commonwealth of Independent States, formally non-communist and several republics shy of the former Union. The collapse of Soviet power from 1985 to 1991, and the subsequent degeneration of the former Soviet territories into civil war, social chaos and barbarism presented a dangerous political, economic and social vacuum. It heralded a partial collapse of the socialist bloc, of the “socialist world” alternative to capitalist development for the Third World to emulate, eliminating the most developed sector of the socialist camp. As such, it contributed to the sense that “things fall apart, for the center will not hold” in the world at large. The specific dynamics in the sundered “socialist world” are worth noting:
1) EASTERN EUROPE: National and ethnic conflict proved to be the motor force for problems in this region after 1989, resulting in civil war (Yugoslavia), separation (the Czech/Slovak velvet divorce), encroachment (Serbian, Albanian, Greek and Bulgarian dismemberment of Macedonia), unification (Germany’s tumultuous reunification), incorporation (Rumanian annexation of Moldova), and warfare (Serbia and Albania, Hungary and Rumania, Slovakia and Hungary). Eastern European instability had two direct consequences by the twenty-first century. Both the shotgun unification of Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, Slovenia and Croatia into a European Economic Commonwealth by the European Economic Community, and the tacit acknowledgment of Greater Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Albania as a partial, if unstable buffer to the whirlwind of violent upheaval further east, undermined the nation-state paradigm.
2) COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES: The former territories of the Soviet Union have become an immense charnel house for far more complex reasons, beginning (a) with national/ethnic conflicts more fractious than eastern Europe’s. If a national republic could declare its independence from the Soviet Union, then a national minority could seek its sovereignty from its mother republic. Secessionist movements (Moldova from the CIS, Cossacks in the Ukraine, Tatars in Russia), civil wars (Georgia), pogroms (anti-Jewish/anti-Armenian massacres across Russia and Ukraine, 2000) and incorporations (Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia) were rife, further complicated by civil war within civil war (secessionist Volga German/Tatar wars within Russia, 1999-2000). Border disputes and international conflicts festered throughout the former Soviet imperium as well, occasionally flaring into armed skirmishes and open warfare (Polish, Byelorussian, Russian altercations; Uzbeck-Tajik tribal wars, ongoing Russian-Ukrainian Black Sea quarrels with armed hostilities 2003 to present), (b) Russian attempts to maintain a position as the region’s strongest power lended greatly to the international and ethnic tensions (abortive intervention in Moldova, quiet pressure on Ukraine, strong arm tactics in the Baltic states, clandestine efforts in Georgia). Russian government intervention abroad ostensibly on behalf of foreign Russian minorities, and ever more authoritarian methods to repress internal secessionist movements to delay civil war at home, reflected the Great Russian imperialism known all-to-well by the peoples of the region since Tsarist times. Other contributing elements to this disintegration proved to be (c) the failure of western aid to materialize in any appreciable quantity and the collapse of the region’s economy (lines for basic necessities, rationing, unemployment, black marketeering, currency fluctuations, harsh winters, poor harvests), not to mention (d) the economic stranglehold held by regionally based mafia monopolies (St. Petersburg/Moscow gang wars, 2000-2001). In turn (e) as former Soviet bureaucrats became the de facto owners of business and industry in many of the new nations of the CIS, the working classes in the independent republics gained a wildcat trade unionist militancy that took on unruly syndicalist, councilist and anarchist directions (1999 Russian All-Workers General Strike). Beneath all of these currents ran another, sometimes contrary, but equally disruptive flow; (f) that of vestigial Soviet power. The Soviet military, formally divided up among the independent republics, remained staunchly Stalinist in its conservative upper echelons, with the entire military resistant to post-Soviet realities. The Communist Party, outlawed in some republics, barely tolerated in others, and the mainstream of politics under a different name in still others, was by origin a cellular, clandestine, conspiratorial paramilitary organization with dictatorial and internationalist aspirations. It absorbed disaffected elements of the secret police and, after the 1993 putsch which permitted then Russian president Yeltsin to assume dictatorial powers, the party continued an underground organizing principally in the post-Soviet military, fractions of the Party taking advantage of troubled times and a regional economy in ruins, using assassination, military putsch and red terror to further political instability and social chaos as precursors to Party takeover and a “second Soviet Revolution” (unsuccessful February, 2000 coup d’état in Russia, Ukraine and four other republics). Finally, (g) the presence of nuclear weapons arsenals (Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia and Khazakstan), (h) the spread of a virulent youth counter culture encouraging drug abuse, nihilism and social desertion, and (i) the expiration of the Volga River and Lake Baykal ecologies, choked by industrial pollution (1999-2000), must be factored into any eq
uation that attempts to explain why the territories of the former Soviet Union disintegrated into brutal civil war. The post-Soviet crisis in the nation-state, culminating in the “Time of Troubles” (1999-2002), contributed directly to the Chinese 2003 invasion of western and eastern Siberia to settle long standing border disputes with Russia; an undeclared war that drew in Mongolia, and is rumored to have escalated from conventional to ABC warfare.
3) REMNANT SOCIALIST BLOC: China’s difficulties in absorbing Hong Kong (1997-1999) and ongoing internal strife, Vietnam’s continuing war in Kampuchea, North Korea’s problematic development of nuclear weapons, Cuba’s stubborn atrophy under Castro’s geriatric rule, Peru’s auto-genocide after PCP/Sendero seizure of power (1999-2003), the problematic return of Sandanista rule to Nicaragua (1998), the Angolan government’s final pyrrhic victory over UNITA (1997), and Mozambique’s off again-on again civil war amply demonstrated that the remnant socialist camp was not immune to instability and chaos. The socialist bloc’s desperate retrenchment and consolidation in supranational alliance, brilliantly engineered by China’s post-Teng leadership at the 2002 Azanian International Conference on Socialism with the negotiation of the Azanian Compact of Mutual Socialist Assistance and Trade, helped protect these regions from being savaged by the holocaust enveloping the former Soviet Union and most of the Third World, nothing more. In turn, the mixed economies to most of the severely authoritarian socialist regimes in the Compact, the terms of which invited core capitalist penetration in gradually opening markets and liberalized foreign investment, seriously eroded the remnant socialist bloc’s claim to be a qualitative alternative to capitalism for a Third World in flames.