Egypt bans flogging in jails

cgrimes at rawbw.com cgrimes at rawbw.com
Wed Dec 26 14:05:41 PST 2001


Those god-damned Human rights groups are just providing cover for the New Imperialism. These NGOs are just "mendicant orders" like the Dominicans and Jesuits of old. In reality its the religious zealots of Egypt who have forced the government to mend its ways. Of course, if/when they take power they'll reinstitute torture but that's besides the point.

Peter -------

Yes, I got up to about that part of Empire. But you know, you have to have worked in something like NGOs or community service projects to see how close to an accurate assessment the concept of mendicant order is to the realities.

The conceptual function is something like the humanitarian pretense of volunteer organizations. For example the Bush administration response to the WTC victims was to hand them off to an ad hoc volunteer effort---almost literally a mendicant order. That's how much the US govt gave a shit.

I don't want to get too far into it just yet, but I can already see why Empire pissed off the older more material minded crowd. The one thing that seems to be conceptually missing is the in-depth understanding that government, particular the US government has deliberately constructed Empire in its broad outline, and in its detail and has been more than just instrumental in its design and function. I would say that since about the mid-Seventies, Empire is all the US govt has been about.

So, provisionally I think Hardt and Negri have missed this kind of direct `hands-on' view. I think this might be a somewhat deliberate tract in an attempt to write a more sweeping assessment. After all, getting into the detailed history of post-Vietnam developments in geopolitical and technological detail would be a much more vast undertaking. Following the communications industry, as just one example would easily cover a book. So I think H&N must have decided to go the cultural critique route instead, leaving the empirical detail out.

The trouble with this tract it that it makes it impossible to imagine how specifically to do battle with these interlocking systems that are in fact the concrete Empire.

Also, they do make a point of elaborating Empire as a virtual reality, which is a kind of intellectual mistake. It would have been more clear what they were doing, if they had grounded this so-called virtual reality in an already well defined and understood cultural matrix. As it is so far, they have made their construction a kind of imaginary entity, and therefore posited it beyond direct engagement.

Gotta go back to work

Chuck Grimes



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