A Modest Proposal for The Empire

[Carrol Cox]

One fundamental gimmick of conservative thought is to compare the
present actuality with a hypothetical state of improvement to be brought
about by paternalistic means. One compares Haiti with Kalamazoo, Congo
with Ontario, and so on. Or, of course, one can compare Dachau with
Naperville, but never a proper German neighborhood of the '30s with
South Chicago. In each of Yoshie's Modest Proposal posts, the writer
compares the actual results of two centuries of colonialism in a given
area with what (hypothetically) that area would be like following the
civilizing experience of a few months of humanitarian bombing.
Similarly, anarchist/autonomist writing compares a hypothetical
democratic future based on consensus with the actual messiness and
frequent defeats of actual liberation struggles. The world in the mind
is always (depending on the projector's aims) either incomparably better
or incomparably worse than any actual world has been, is, or will be in
the next century or so. It is this endless asymmetrical comparison of
the actual with a merely hypothetical alternative that fuels both the
(usually hidden) deep pessimism of the ultra-left, the jolly optimism
(or "pragmatism") of the opportunist (England may yet keep faith; this
new bunch of criminals in Kabul will be nicer than the ones just
slaughtered). The nice people who rule in Naperville surely couldn't be
as great a threat to the rest of the world as those monsters who created
Dachau.

Just doodling on the screen.

Carrol