‘The Horror! the Horror!’, Revisited in Palestine

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“Mistah Kurtz – he dead.”
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad once said that before he had been to the Congo he was a simple animal. It was in one of those lands partially mapped out by the cruelty and hypocrisy of the imperial ethos that Conrad discovered European colonialism in its undiluted, most terrible incarnation, duly depicted in Heart of Darkness – one of the great consciousness-raising epics in the history of literature.

It was in the Congo that Conrad, an ethnic Pole born in what is still known today as “Ukraine”, then controlled by Poland, and who only started to write in English when he was 23, forever lost any illusion over the civilizing mission of his race.

They went through the savage heart of the world and made their fortune, their reputation or their penitence just to come back to the sweet comfort of unconsciousness – when they were not shipped back in a coffin, of course.

The jungle inside

For the European sensibility, the sub-equatorial world, actually the whole Global South, was where the White Man went for personal triumph or for dissolution, becoming somewhat “equal” to the natives. Literature, from the Victorian era onwards, is full of heroes traveling to “exotic” latitudes where passions – like tropical fruit – are bigger than in Europe, and perverted forms of self-knowledge can be experienced to oblivion.

Conrad himself placed his tortured heroes on Earth’s “obscure” places to expiate their shadows alongside the shadows of the world, far away from “civilization” and its conventional punishments.

And that brings us to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness: he’s in a class by himself because he arrives at an extreme of self-knowledge virtually unheard of in European literature, facing the full revelation of the malignity of his mission and his species.

In the Congo, Conrad lost his innocence. And his main character lost reason.

When Kurtz migrated into the movies in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and Cambodia replaced the Congo as the Heart of Darkness, he was denigrating the image of the Empire. So the Pentagon sent a warrior-intellectual to kill him, Captain Willard. Coppola depicted the passive spectator Willard as even more insane than Kurtz: and that’s how he pulled off the psychedelic unmasking of the whole farce of civilizing colonialism.

Today, we don’t need to set sail or embark on a caravan looking for the source of misty rivers to live the neo-imperial adventure.

We just need to turn on the smartphone to follow a genocide, live, 24/7, even in HD. Our meeting with the horror… the horror – as immortalized in Kurtz’s words in Heart of Darkness – can be experienced while shaving in the morning, doing Pilates or dining with friends.

And just as Coppola in Apocalypse Now, we are free to express a humanist moral stupor when facing a “war”, actually a massacre, that is already lost – impossible to be ethically sustained.

Today we are all Conradian characters, just glimpsing fragments, shadows, mixed with the stupor of living in a gruesomely memorable time. There is no possibility of grasping the totality of facts – especially when “facts” are fabricated and artificially reproduced or bolstered.

There are so many invisible horrors enacted behind the fog, in the heart of a jungle now replicated as an urban cage. Helplessly watching the wanton killing of women and children, the carpet bombing of hospitals, schools and mosques, it’s as if we are all passengers in a drunken ship plunging into a whirlpool, admiring the powerful majesty of the whole scenery.

And we are already dying even before we glimpse death.

We are the epigones of T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men. The haunting cries from the jungle don’t come anymore from an “exotic” hemisphere. The jungle is here – creeping inside all of us.

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation by permission of author or representative)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE

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Zionist racism is not hidden in Israel. But many don’t see it because it’s everywhere.

 

 



How extremist Javier Milei became Argentina’s president: A story of debt, crisis, and empire

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Ben Norton

How extremist Javier Milei became Argentina's president: A story of debt, crisis, and empire

Geopolitical Economy Rep

Nov 21, 2023

https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/...
Please consider supporting us at https://GeopoliticalEconomy.com/Support Patreon:   / geopoliticaleconomy   Podcast:   / geopoliticaleconomy   Newsletter: https://GeopoliticalEconomy.Substack.com

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Milei Is ‘Really as Extreme as You Get in Right-Wing Libertarian Ideas’

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FAIR
NOVEMBER 28, 2023
 

Mark Weisbrot: “The whole mess that got this guy elected was really created by the Macri government and that IMF agreement.”

CounterSpin interview with Mark Weisbrot on Javier Milei

Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot about Argentine President-elect Javier Milei for the November 24, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Fox News (11/19/23)

Janine Jackson: Many people are hearing the name Javier Milei for the first time about now. Milei has just been elected president of Argentina—56% to 44% are the numbers we’re hearing right now—over the country’s economic minister, Sergio Massa.

declared, “Prosperity is ahead for Argentina.” That reception gives you some indication of where this is going, and what it could mean.

Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy, and co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Mark Weisbrot.

Mark Weisbrot: Thanks, Janine. Great to be here.

JJ: Lest there be a lot of mystery: To start with, Javier Milei carried around a chainsaw as a prop on the campaign trail, and that was about “cutting public spending.” And he describedthe state as a “pedophile in a kindergarten.” And don’t think he’s done, because he went on to say “the state is a pedophile in a kindergarten with the children chained up and bathed in Vaseline.”

It reminds me of Duterte saying he’d be “happy to slaughter” 3 million drug addicts in the Philippines, and of course it reminds folks of Trump and his current pledge to “root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of this country” (and that’s just from this week).

It’s histrionic. We have politicians saying things you hear supervillains in the movies say. And I guess the concern is that they will be underestimated as merely colorful and over the top, and not considered in terms of the actual real-world things that they want to do and are capable of.

So there, that’s my setup. What are the material things that listeners need to know about Javier Milei and his election?

CEPR (11/17/23)

MW: Well, the material craziness of Milei is an important part of the story. And as you mentioned, or hinted at, by the examples you gave, the media have been comparing him to Trump, and he likes it. And so it is part of that phenomenon, which we could talk about for hours, of crazy people getting elected in situations and ways in which they wouldn’t in the past. And, of course, that’s the big anthropological sociological question, is how does this happen?

But I won’t get into that. What I’d rather talk about is what his craziness means. I think that’s more interesting to your audience as well.

And so his craziness is partly a coherent extreme-right libertarian view. He says, “Every time the state intervenes, it’s a violent action that harms the right to private property, and in the end limits our freedom.” And he applies this to fixing the problem of hunger, fixing the problem of poverty or employment. So he’s really as extreme as you get in that right-wing libertarian set of ideas.

Reuters (11/24/23)

reserves for that at this point, but it wouldn’t be a good idea.

So he has big things he would get rid of. He would get rid of some ministries. And certainly the chainsaw, a symbol. A guy walks around in a Batman costume with chainsaws, and he got elected president. He wants to cut public spending at least 15%, has no attachment whatsoever to anything like public education, healthcare and everything. So he would cut anything he can, and the economy would probably go into recession, almost certainly. And who knows where it would stop.

JJ: He seems to have a definition of “socialism,” and this is what I feel like US media are going to pick up on, because, as you and I both know, they will have a lot of quotes from him, and they will have quotes from some people who disagree with him, but I don’t think they’re going to dig deep into the rhetoric. And so he talks about everything that happened from previous administrations in Argentina as “socialism,” and, I mean, how do we unpack that?

MW: Yeah, that’s right. Argentina “has embraced socialist ideas for the last hundred years.” Of course, that’s crazy too.

I don’t know what he’ll actually be able to do. That’s the first thing. He has only 39 seats out of 257 in the Lower House, and 8 out of 72 in the Senate.

So it’s not clear what he’ll get done. This is going to be what we’ll see.

resigned within less than two weeks, at the end of 2001. And that was because of protest.

New York Times (8/19/19)

I think this is maybe where to start the story, because you guys focus on what the media are missing or getting wrong. And I think we really should start, I think, with what you don’t see in the media.

You don’t see, for example, that in these last 20 years, the Peronists actually did very well. They first came to power with Néstor Kirchner in 2003. And you had, in the 12 years that followed, before Macri, you had a 71% decline in poverty, 81% decline in extreme poverty, and GDP, or income per person, grew by 42%, which, I compared it to Mexico, it’s three times as fast.

So this was a very successful set of policies, but I haven’t seen that in any of the coverage. I wrote it in a New York Times op-ed a couple of years ago, but you don’t really see that part of the story.

And that’s unfortunate, because people need to know that. And of course it’s partly because people don’t know that—the Argentine media is no better than here, the major media—that somebody like this could get elected.

reported the IMF role.

So that was a huge part of the story. Because as you know, as most of your listeners know, the IMF is primarily dominated by decision-making by the US Treasury Department.

And then, of course, you had the Kirchners and the Peronists, and you had this long period where they did very well. And Macri himself—that was the president from 2015 to ’19—he wouldn’t have gotten to power, actually, if it weren’t for more things that came from the United States. And I can tell you that as well, depending on how much time you have.

New York Times (4/1/16)

left governments for the first time ever.

And then the United States, of course, played this role, which we’ll focus right now on Argentina, in trying to get rid of all of them, and making their lives difficult so that they would be ousted, a number of them by coup d’etat.

So what happened in Argentina? They had to default to the IMF, in 2003, and the IMF backed down, and they defaulted on their private debt, right before they actually defaulted to the IMF, but the IMF rolled over the debt. So they had a big fight with the IMF and the private creditors, just to stabilize the economy. But they did that successfully, and they grew.

And then in 2014, a New York judge decided that Argentina should not be able to pay its creditors, over 70% of its creditors, the ones who had accepted the restructured debt. And this was Thomas Griesa, a New York judge, and he did this on behalf of the vulture funds. These were funds that bought up the debt when it was very cheap in the early 2000s, and wanted to collect the full value of it.

So he was trying to force the Argentine government to pay these US vulture funds. And he was doing it by cutting off the Argentines’ ability to pay all other creditors, until they would pay the vultures. And so that is part of what hurt the Argentina economy in 2014.

And just to show you how political this was, in 2016, the same judge, Griesa, actually wrote an opinion where he lifted the injunction on paying this debt, that is, he reversed the decision, and he said he did it because, and this is an exact quote from him, “Put simply. President Macri’s election changed everything.” OK?

So that’s partly how we got Macri, was him harming the Argentine economy right before that, and then, of course, reversing that tremendous harm as soon as Macri was elected. So there you go. There’s a big change. And it leads to another big change in Macri’s term because, OK, so Macri gets elected because of action that came from the US, and there are other actions as well, which I’ll describe.

But then Macri goes and gets—and this is because of Trump’s influence on the IMF that it happened—the largest loan that the IMF ever gave to anybody, any country in the world, $57 billion in 2018. And the conditions on that loan were terrible. And they forced the economy into recession. And then, of course, when things started to go sour—which they did right away, because the big loan that they got just financed capital flight out of the country, and, of course, that led to all kinds of problems—the IMF doubled down and had more austerity, both fiscal policy and monetary policy. And so things got worse.

And that actually leads you, really, to the situation you have today. That’s what created it: The economy, the 140% inflation that you have now, the whole mess that got this guy elected, was really created by the Macri government and that IMF agreement, and also other measures that the US took to deprive Argentina of dollars before Macri came to power as well.

WaPo: Argentina set for sharp right turn as Trump-like radical wins presidency

Washington Post (11/19/19)

trying to explain why did Milei get elected, and it’s saying:

Voters in this nation of 46 million demanded a drastic change from a government that has sent the peso tumbling, inflation skyrocketing and more than 40% of the population into poverty.

MW: Yeah. Although, I mean, I don’t think the media here like Milei. It’s just like Trump. It’s this irony that you have in a lot of these situations, where the media don’t like these people because they’re too extreme. The US didn’t even want Bolsonaro, for example, in Brazil, who, by the way, was one of the first calls, a video call, that Milei made when he won this election. The mainstream consensus here is that these guys are too crazy, but they still do help them win.

JJ: Exactly….

MW: This is a paradox that probably you all can figure out better than me.

Vox: How young Argentines helped put a far-right libertarian into power

Vox (11/20/23)

JJ: I can’t. But you know what, you see the interviews, and we’re seeing them now, and folks who are listening will be seeing them, folks on the street in Argentina saying: “Well, there’s just too much inflation. There’s too much corruption.” Very sort of Trump-voter things of, “Well, I don’t like his social ideas, but his economic plans make sense.”

People want change. And I think that we can acknowledge that people want change. And then folks come along and say, you know what I am? I’m different. I represent change.

But where media don’t, to my mind, exercise their role is, well, why do people want change? And what does that have to do with the failure of existing systems, including economic systems? Instead, media just say, “I guess people just deep down want a kind of fascistic guy.” Even if they’re opposed, they still don’t dig deep enough, to my mind, into why folks were willing to do this Hail Mary play.

Some people remember it, and that’s why they still got 44% of the vote, but not everybody is old enough, or even would necessarily understand the whole situation, not having seen it in print, or heard it on radio or television.

Al Jazeera: Young Argentinians want change. Many see Javier Milei as their best option

Al Jazeera (11/18/23)

And so, yeah, it’s easy for this guy to come in here, he’s almost literally a clown, and even though probably a lot of people, even, who voted for him think his ideas are crazy, or that he’s crazy, you see quotes like that in the press: “Yeah, he’s crazy, but I’m voting for him anyway.” But they don’t have a way of seeing that there actually have been successful alternatives.

capital flight because of that situation.

And you have a situation where you have what’s called an inflation depreciation spiral. So if confidence in the currency is undermined by a variety of things, including the inflation itself, and including the debt problems that the IMF left them with, and then pretty soon it’s going to be the anticipated and real policies of the IMF that are going to cause capital to flee the country, as they did in 2018.

So all of these things: What happens is capital flees the country, and that causes the currency to depreciate. And when the currency depreciates, then the price of all imports goes up, and then that causes more inflation, and then the increased inflation causes the currency to depreciate more.

And that’s why it was so hard for this latest government before Milei to resolve this problem, because it’s a self-perpetuating spiral, something you don’t want to get into. And, of course, there are ways, it is possible, but again, that’s a very hard problem. And that was a result of the policies that came in overwhelmingly with the Macri government, and the IMF agreement that he followed.

And you know, he even said it at one point, I don’t have the exact quote, but it was something like, “I did everything that I agreed to in this agreement, and the economy went down the toilet.” So even he realized that.

But again, you’re not seeing that in the public discussion. All you saw up to the election is, the party in power must be responsible for what’s happening and they have to go. And then you see this guy Milei come in with really crazed ideas, and nobody even cares so much how crazy they are, it’s just different. That’s kind of how Trump won as well.

CEPR.net. Mark Weisbrot, thank you very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MW: Thank you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Janine Jackson is FAIR’s program director and producer/host of FAIR’s syndicated weekly radio show CounterSpin. She contributes frequently to FAIR’s newsletter Extra!, and co-edited The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the ’90s (Westview Press). She has appeared on ABC‘s Nightline and CNN Headline News, among other outlets, and has testified to the Senate Communications Subcommittee on budget reauthorization for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Her articles have appeared in various publications, including In These Times and the UAW’s Solidarity, and in books including Civil Rights Since 1787 (New York University Press) and Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism (New World Library). Jackson is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and has an M.A. in sociology from the New School for Social Research.

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THE TRAP OF IDENTITY POLITICS: YES TO UNIVERSAL RIGHTS, NO to FRAGMENTED RIGHTS

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GUEST EDITORIAL
By Billy Bob
 
One of the most dangerous and destructive aspects of identity politics is that it facilitates and encourages people to have more loyalty to their preferred identity than they have for basic universal principles of morality and justice. When you are trapped in a tribal paradigm instead of the universality of class struggle, it is easy for the ruling elite to manipulate you and use you as a tool to further their own interests.

When people's entire world view is consumed by "what is in the best interest of the group I identify with" instead of what is in the best interest of humanity based on an informed consideration of morality and justice, truly problematic behavior can begin to flourish.
 
I mean there are so many ways in which the Western ruling establishment perpetuates and benefits from fractionalizing the masses and turning them against each other in the most destructive ways: today, the most obvious manifestation of this tendency can be seen in the support for the apartheid state of Israel, among too many of those who identify as Jewish (not to mention those who identify as Christian). For those whose highest moral aspiration boils down to "what is best for my group", truly reprehensible and anti-human behavior can become normalized.
 
But it would not be fair to just pick on Jewish people when there are so many other manifestations of identity politics that are first manufactured and then manipulated, in furtherance of the political and economic ends, of the ruling elite... a ruling elite that could not care less about the degree to which minorities are mistreated or given preferential treatment (due to their classification as uber-victims). The ruling elite does not really give a fuck about any "minority issues" except to the extent it can weaponize them in furtherance of their own elitist and imperialist interests.

So, first the ruling class abuses, mistreats, and exploits minorities for all they are worth, then it leverages their legitimate identitarian grievances to make sure the working class is irreconcilably fractured, and at each other's throats. This is a problem that we must overcome if we are to have any hope of developing the unity necessary to overcoming imperialism.
 
People need to stop perceiving everything on an arbitrary tribalistic basis whether this basis is their own ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, or race, and start basing their world view on the universalist and macro issue of class struggle and opposition to imperialism. This is the only way necessary and significant change will ever be possible.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Billy Bob is dedicated anti-imperialist activist and blogger. You can reach him at his Facebook page HERE.

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