Hype accelerates for the Boris collaboration with Ghost’s Michio Kurihara.
Boris & Michio Kurihara – Starship Narrator 320k 9.5mb
Boris & Michio Kurihara – Shine 320k 10.8mb
[LP via rapidshare]
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Another massive US deployment in Iraq, Blair defends an ‘interventionist’ (!) foreign policy. What’s your motivation? SF-based Retort collective argue it’s spectacle and capital:
“…what haunted American leaders [in Vietnam] – and what led them to continue the carnage long after it had ceased making strategic sense – was the prospect of defeat, coupled with mutinous barracks and a riotous home front, becoming a worldwide televised image of failure. As it now haunts them again, from the back streets of Fallujah, Najaf and Baghdad” (2005: 89).
This vein runs deeper into the structure of the state and the logic of ‘intervention’:
“Regardless of the tactical details of various invasions, occupations and retreats, the US empire has followed a long and consistent strategic path – centered on and driven by military engagement – to force regional penetration and exploit the existing or resulting “weak states”. And throughout this history, certainly no less so over the past several decades, what passes for “peace” has prefigured – has been structured to prefigure – an endless series of wars.
We want to emphasize here how the reality of permanent war renders inadequate the notion of “peace” as an oppositional frame or strategy, and puts paid to the purported difference between an American state in the hands of a “war party” as opposed to a “party of peace”. Let us put our case conditionally: Unless the anti-war movement comes to recognise the full dynamics of US militarism – to understand that peace, under current arrangements, is no mare than war by other means – then massive mobilizations at the approach of full-dress military campaigns must inevitably be followed by demoralization and bewilderment.” (ibid: 93-94)
Inverventionism assumes and thus perpetuates a global order which can never hope for peace but rather pacification of “rouge”, “weak” or “failed” states. Notice how states only recognise states – as if geo-politics was a giant football league. All other arrangements of people (religion, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality etc.) are irradicated in the face of statehood and a very specific understanding of statehood at that – hierarchical bureaucrats in the service of trans-national capital. To keep (say) oil revenue within national boundaries is not something to be encouraged in a state (Senor Chavez). Co-operative and potentially co-operative states must be defended against rival arrangements (jihadism) which seek to organise people differently. To quote Blair:
“On the part of the public [a collective term implying a mass social contract with the state], they need to be prepared for the long as well as the short campaign, to see our participation alongside allies in such conflict not as an atavistic, misguided attempt to recapture past glories, but as a necessary engagement in order for us to protect our security and advance our interests and values in the modern world” (2007).
These are our values? Whose values? What about the value of peace? “what passes for “peace” has prefigured – has been structured to prefigure – an endless series of wars.” (Retort 2005: 93)
But I ramble, Blair’s starting point is that power (potency) is something to be cherished. This is entirely consistent with the trajectory of his reign as Labour party leader – from his appointment he jealously coveted political power, overthrew the Conservatives, proceeded to relocate Labour Party HQ to its present position opposite MI6 and set up a cartel of advisors to manipulate corporate media. The logic is: if we can do then we can do good. The result is, however, the unavoidable perpetuation of existing structures, except fronted by a talking head called Tony. The dynamics and logic of intervention can currently only be understood as the positive-re-enforcement of the potency of capital (of which the arms industry is no small part). These are the values Blair refers to, the values he claims are ours.
