Economist hit on Naomi Klein

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Fri Nov 8 07:44:19 PST 2002


Hitchens writes:
> >These "root causes" [of 9-11] lay in the
> >political slum that the United States has been running in the region, and
> >in the rotten nexus of
> >client-states from Riyadh to Islamabad. Such causes cannot be publicly
> >admitted, nor can they be addressed all at once. But a slum-clearance
> program is >beginning to form in the political mind.

JBrown72073 at cs.com:
> In other words, it's not about Iraq, it's about Saudi Arabia and Turkey. And
> if 'we' can't be buddies with the Saudis, and we can't have our bases in
> Turkey, we'll need Iraq as a combined landing strip/oil field. That would
> mean it's not about spreading the Enlightenment, freeing the Kurds, or
> ousting a dictator. These, he supposes, will be the happy side effects that
> go along with the proconsul, paving, and partition. History is apparently no
> guide.
>
> OK, I'm trying to understand. The U.S. 'runs a political slum in the
> region,' which generates the preconditions for 9-11, but then attacks a part
> it didn't run, and which doesn't have Al Qaeda--except perhaps in the Kurdish
> area--to clear up the slum? Oh, right, that was before, the next client
> state, man, we've learned our lesson, no more rotten ones, this next one's
> going to be pure as blow.
> ...
> Tell me again how attacking the gulf state which has afforded women the most
> rights (comparatively) will encourage other gulf states that are
> "experimenting with democracy and women's rights." Dazzling.

Given belief in the State, Hitchens's conclusions are logical enough. The essence, the central principle, the eternal fact of the State is coercive violence. There is no particular reason for rulers to stop the violence and coercion at the boundaries of their states if they have the power to extend them, and as a rule they have not failed to attempt to extend their power whenever it was convenient to do so, by whatever means necessary. The present regime in Washington is not different in this way from Imperial Britain, the Kaiser's Germany, or Imperial Rome for that matter.

Given a religious belief in the inevitability of the State, then, imperialism must take place, and the only issue is whether it will be nice imperialism or nasty imperialism. Hitchens wants America's inevitable imperial role to be exerted nicely. And once the smoke clears, the blood dries, and the bodies are buried, why not impose Western-style human and civil rights of a sort on Iraq, especially for the better-off and more cooperative types? This move could have a strongly disturbing influence on the regimes and populations in Iran and Saudi Arabia, leading to events that might facilitate yet further imperial advances.

Nathan Newman:
> ...
> You may not buy their good faith intentions to democratize Iraq or their
> ability to do so, but the argument Hitch outlines is as coherent as the
> alternative left argument of addressing the root causes of poverty and
> hopelessness. In fact, they converge, as Hitch notes to the discomfort of
> the neoconservatives, in having to address the plight of the Palestinians.
> In the article, if you notice, Hitch is pushing his analysis not just
> hitting the Left but pointing out to the Right that their own logic forces
> attention towards dismantling the settlements and moving towards real peace
> in Palestine.
>
> Now, I don't buy that the neocon democrats either run the show or are
> all-together serious, but the argument is appealing to many liberal
> supporters of the war. So if folks don't acknowledge and respond to a
> pretty clear argument, the Left has little chance of convincing them to
> oppose intervention.
> ...

Exactly. Once the Left buys into State power, it's pretty much given up. One might as well accept the dead end of liberalism and capitalism. And I do mean dead. Or one can think radically.

Doug:
> > The Economist - November 7, 2002
> > In training her guns on free trade and big multinationals, Ms Klein
> > is attacking the best means for reducing poverty and, for that
> > matter, extending justice and a political voice to the world's
> > poorest people. When companies, properly regulated and acting within
> > the law, pursue profits, they end up increasing prosperity. This is
> > not a theory but an easily observable fact. The result, unintended
> > though it may be, is social good. Ms Klein denies all this at every
> > turn-and the tragedy is that her denials have an effect.

Wojtek Sokolowski:
> That was also the point argued by John Kenneth Galbraith (hardly a
> neo-lib hack), no?
>
> The truth is that US populism despises organization in favor of a utopia
> where everyone is just getting along with one another (pass that bong,
> dude). That is fine, but organizations (think of planned economy as a
> corporation writ large to vercome inefficinecies of the market) have the
> best track recrods in alleviating poverty and promoting rational
> development.

Actually, "large organizations" of the centralized sort must include the various manifestations of the State, and these have produced, over the course of time, mainly slavery, war and imperialism, that is, terror, imprisonment, death and destruction. As Edward Gibbon put it, history is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. Under pressure from the anarchist and populist impulses which constantly arise from the non-elite strata of every population, elites have conceded power and goods to the lower orders under the guises of liberalism, democracy, and socialism, especially during crises. But, as we observe today and in history, the concession is always conditional and temporory: crises passed, the elites are always working to take them back, for, after all, the precise, sociopathic point of adhering to a ruling class is to rule (if only through the person of one's big dog, one's Fuehrer). Meanwhile, the constant progress of technology ensures that, when the inevitable conflicts break out between ruling-class factions and their imitators, they will be ever more destructive. Mass extinctions of human populations can now be realistically contemplated.

The solution is not to improve the State but to abolish it. The way to abolish it is not by force, which would simply reinstitute another state in the place of the one which was destroyed, but from below, by disorganizing and sabotaging coercive institutions and relations and replacing them with noncoercive ones -- the bong utopia, if you like. Of course, the initial steps will appear inept, diffuse, incoherent, the sort of thing the bristly boys and girls at the _Economist_ will surely despise -- it'll never put a Beemer in anyone's garage. Their contempt is a sign of points well taken, work well done. Onward!

-- Gordon



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