Mirages

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Ed Curtin

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Mirages

I am sitting on the beach at the National Seashore, a forty-mile long stretch of the Atlantic Ocean seashore on Outer Cape Cod, established in 1961 by President Kennedy.  The wind is whipping hard and the waves are running wildly high against the shore, and, to paraphrase Thoreau – the sand is rapidly drinking up the last wave that wets it.  I am looking far out to the horizon where the sun shimmers on what seems to be the world’s watery edge, creating a strange mirage that I wonder at but find hard to describe.  Earlier, I was rereading Thoreau’s Cape Cod in which he mentioned this phenomenon 150 years ago, not just the mirages across the water but those here along the great stretches of sand.  Now I am confused and my mind wanders to other mirages that make me shake my head in wonderment.  It is hard to grasp what one is seeing these days.

*

When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a presidential aspirant, folded his cards and conceded the current pot to Donald Trump – what he euphemistically called suspending his campaign for the presidency – he let his justifiable hatred of the Democratic Party, their undermining of his campaign, and their pro-war and genocidal agenda get the best of him.  His trust in Trump is naïve in the extreme.  With the issue that Kennedy has made central to his work in recent years – Covid and the “vaccines” – Trump is in the opposite camp.

The investigative journalist Whitney Webb has said:  “The inevitable embrace of the Trump campaign by RFK Jr. will see one of the Covid-era’s most prominent (+ promoted) skeptics embrace the man whose administration established the early Covid policies and Military-run Op Warp Speed. What a world and what a disappointment.”

Furthermore, Trump’s campaign is backed by a host of people – Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, and Trump’s vice-president sidekick, JD Vance, among others – who are big promoters and investors in mRNA and DNA vaccine technology.  Thiel and Lonsdale are cofounders of Palantir, a company that collects American’s health data while it also works with the CIA.

Mirages?

And the independent journalist Vaness Beeley, while being equally scathing of the Democratic Party’s masters of war, has said the following of this odd coupling:

With Trump and Kennedy you have a combination that is 100 times more likely to lead us to Armageddon and idiots are saying Trump supplied less weapons to Israel. Of course he did because he was destroying Syria through unilateral collective punishment economic sanctions, assassinating Resistance leadership and paving the way for greater Israel, Clean Break through Abraham Accords and Jerusalem, giving Golan to Zionist occupation. He didn’t NEED to start wars, he certainly didn’t end them, he increased the hybrid war strategy to pave the way for the final solution and Kennedy is fully on board, whatever his title. It’s astonishing to watch people whitewash the Trump role in the empowerment of the Zionist entity which has led to the genocide we are witnessing. There is no one or the other (Trump or Harris) they work as a tag team, oligarchs and deep dark state create the road map. We are already in WW3 and Trump will go to war with Iran, effectively with Russia and China. Why continue supporting a putrid corpse of a US political system? And, by the way, Kennedy support base is not anti-Zionist. They are generally apathetic and prepared to excuse Kennedy’s criminal genocide denial and defence of Zionist apartheid and ethnosupremacism because “America first”. Genocide is the Red line that Trump and Kennedy will erase and normalisation of genocide is a clandestine policy of this partnership. We are already in WW3. Trump will not end any wars, he never has. Iran and China are in his crosshair.

This too is true, and it runs counter to RFK, Jr.’s pledge to end all foreign wars.  One may have noticed that in his speech suspending his campaign Kennedy said that he disagreed with Trump on certain matters, but he did not conveniently mention that they were in accord with each other and the Democrats in supporting the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians and its push for war with Iran and therefore Iran’s ally Russia.  That sounds like one big foreign war to this observer.

While the mainstream media relish ripping Kennedy, they rarely if ever mention his unequivocal support for Israel, for to do so would bind them to him (and Biden/ Harris, and Trump/Vance) in being full-fledged supporters of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.  Indeed, there is one taboo that the mainstream corporate media, mouthpieces for the warfare state, assiduously maintain: it is to never report the truth about the power Israel maintains over U.S. Mideast policy through its Israel lobby, and their own complicity in Israel propaganda.  Politicians of both parties are venal reprobates who parade with American flags on their chests as they betray their country.  They can only be described as traitors, as the current Biden/Harris administration’s full-fledged proud military backing for Israel’s ongoing slaughter of the Palestinians substantiates.  The recent Democratic Convention was a Hollywood spectacle directed by an American version of Nazi Germany’s Leni Riefenstahl, replete with shouts for the destruction of Russia as well as the Palestinians.  (The Biden-Harris administration has just approved its 100th arms shipment to Israel since October 7, 2023.)  That they are pushing the world toward nuclear war didn’t disturb them in the least, as they sang and laughed and acted out for a fan base deluded by mirages and auditory delusions produced Tinseltown style.

So American voters are offered a choice of a political alliance of an odd couple in Kennedy and Trump, along with Vance, and a conventional one in Harris and Walz, based on the fallacious assumption that a choice is being offered between the war parties whose raisons d’être are to wage foreign wars for the teetering American empire.  Hovering over and behind this pathetic travesty lies the controlling power of the national security state and its corporate media propaganda for these endless wars and corrupt politicians.  Only a skeptically acute mental knife, constantly sharpened, can cut through the propaganda campaign aimed, not at a foreign audience, but at the American people by its own government.  Mind control is the name of its game.

*

What would Thoreau, a man who didn’t vote and refused to his pay poll tax to support war and slavery, think of these strange alliances hiding behind glittering mirages?  Though written more than 150 years ago, his words are more than apropos today:

He made it very clear that one should not lend oneself to the wrongs which one condemns, such as the Israeli genocide of Palestinians or the US/NATO war against Russia through Ukraine that is leading toward nuclear war.  By voting for the so-called “lesser of two evils,” one is voting for evil and lending oneself to the wrongs one condemns.  It is blatant hypocrisy and a vote for the warfare state.

*

As synchronicity would have it, down the winding road a short walk from where we are staying, sits tiny Rock Harbor in Orleans where a fleet of fishing boats are docked on Cape Cod Bay.  Directly across the road rises a massive tower and huge stone basilica that is part of the compound for The Church of the Transfiguration.  It describes itself simply as the Community of Jesus and across its front is a long large sign in red, white, and blue emblazoned with a star and the word JOY.

Sinister Forces, this church was a front for U.S. intelligence agencies in the Cold War with the U.S.S.R.  He says,

As it turns out, the AOCC was a front for American intelligence, specifically anti-communist activities in the United States and abroad. It was created by a Ukrainian Orthodox priest with impeccable credentials who ran anti-communist crusades in the States in the 1940s-1960s. Suspected Kennedy assassination conspirators David Ferrie and Jack Martin were members.

It was not until earlier this year when I was contemplating and mourning the self-immolation of Adam Bushnell, the US airman who burnt himself to death outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza, that I thought again of The Church of the Transfiguration.  Bushnell, who was once a member of this church, left these words:

Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.

His powerful words and tragic death moved me deeply.  I thought of Roger LaPorte, a former seminarian and a Catholic Worker who in 1965 immolated himself in front of the United Nations building in New York City protesting the U.S. war against Vietnam, while the Catholic Church, led by Cardinal Spellman of New York supported the war with the vigor of John Wayne in The Green Berets.  Ruthless jingoism then and now, the lust for killing “others,” such as Vietnamese and Palestinians over the decades.  Worthless people to the War Party.  And two young men whose consciences drove them to extreme acts of protest.

Yesterday I remembered what I read in The New York Post and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigation in February about Adam Bushnell and The Church of the Transfiguration.  These reports assert that the church is a cult and that Bushnell grew up here in the Rock Harbor community where his parents still live. The reports claim that members are mind-controlled and abused, and they are raised to strictly obey and follow some secret agenda.  The church says it stands with Israel, which is what Bushnell emphatically came to reject, for he stood with the Palestinians, even literally standing as he courageously took his life in flames.  Like all cults, money doesn’t seem a problem for this strange community.  One thinks also of Jim Jones and the People’s Temple and its strange intelligence connections.  As John Judge has documented in “The Black Hole of Guyana”:

The connection of intelligence agencies to cults is nothing new. A simple but revealing example is the Unification Church, tied to both the Korean CIA (i.e., American CIA in Korea), and the international fascist network known as the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The Moonies hosted WACL’s first international conference.[217] What distinguished Jonestown was both the level of control and the openly sinister involvement. It was imperative that they cover their tracks.[218]

*

The sky and ocean here on Cape Cod are very restless and constantly changing, even as people come here to rest, to be still for a while.  The movement of the waves and clouds, the shore birds flitting and floating before and above one, the constant breaking of the waves on the shore, and the long looks far out to where the ocean seems to disappear, create dreamy minds, if one allows it.  I am no exception, and this place no doubt increases my tendency to mental vagabonding.  Yet I am one with Thoreau when he says, “I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough.”  For I began with mirages and will drift back to them.  They come in many forms, but all contain the sense of being deluded.  This is the lesson of Plato’s Cave and Eastern philosophy’s idea of maya, among many ancient warnings. “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous,” Thoreau said truly.  Yet when we turn to the realm of politics in our times, as we must when vacations cease, we are forced back to contemplate the insidious nature of the scoundrel politicians and leaders of all sorts who capture so many minds with lies and mirages of false hope on the horizon.

Most people don’t like to see the summer end, but another Fall is approaching.  A different reality beckons.

 

2 thoughts on “Mirages”

To his credit, the last 20 minutes of RFK Jr’s concession speech, in which he outlined in detail the enormous harm done to the public by the medical/agricultural industrial complex over the past several decades, was the one of the most honest and refreshing things heard from a politician in a very long time. The spread of chronic illness among Americans, and especially the younger cohort, is epic and unprecedented, promising repercussions almost hard to imagine. But his strangely naive faith in Trump is certainly puzzling, and his alignment with the openly murderous campaign against Palestine by Israel is deeply disturbing. We seem to be faced with another Hobbesian choice. Whether one takes the red pill, the blue pill, or no pill at all, the foreseeable future appears to be grim. But it is what it is, and likely part of a larger cycle that cannot be avoided.
As that great Confucius of the Infield quipped, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”. Or not.
Borbas says:
Magnificent. Made me rethink some things I had regarded as immutable in my head. 
Thank you for running this. 

 


Lili News 029
  • In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
  • Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
  • Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.

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THE ROLE OF THE – SO CALLED – CONSPIRACY THEORIST IN A HEALTHY SOCIETY

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Garland Nixon

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THE ROLE OF THE - SO CALLED - CONSPIRACY THEORIST IN A HEALTHY SOCIETY

Garland Nixon
Streamed live 8 hours ago
Garland discusses the place that nonconformist thinking—including "conspiracy theorists"— have in a healthy society, especially as it relates to the questioning of narratives and concepts bolstering a particular social arrangement or ruling class, and the reasons why the term has become a way for the establishment to denigrate and contain such individuals, thereby preserving the status quo and normalcy. Examined questions: who has the right to revise the laws? Social deviancy. Conspiracy theorists. The nature of mainstream beliefs. The role of media. Collective belief system organised by the ruling class. The problem of heretics and the threat to established power, and their right to rule, to decide what is true and false, etc. Free thinking can quickly destabilise such a system, with onerous consequences for those at the top. 


Lili News 029
  • In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
  • Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
  • Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS



Roger Waters denounces Britain as a fascist state

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Roger Waters

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"Over my dead body!"

Here's Roger Waters' impassioned denunciation of rapidly creeping fascism in Britain, where free speech is being criminalised to suppress, among other things, criticism of Israel's depraved extermination of Palestinians. In that regard, Britain is no different or worse than the rest of Europe's vassal states, all in the cusp of US power, and led by similar, morally rotten Ziocon elites. The crackdown on free speech throughout the collective West may shake some out of the complacent illusion of living in a "democracy" instead of in a cynical, certifiably sociopathic and fully dystopic global oligarchy, much as Orwell described it in his classic 1984 (although, as an anti-communist, he aimed his arrows at the USSR instead of the capitalist regimes). But don't hold your breath. Well planted delusions and mass stupidity are hard to conquer in the best of times. And these are certainly not the best of times. 

 


But always keep in mind: NOT all Jews are Zionists. The problem is Zionism, a racist ideology that preceded the Holocaust by over 50 years. 

APPENDIX
Yes, do remember that NOT all Jews are Zionists. Many Jews around the world are today in the frontlines of the anti-Zionist struggle, including some Orthodox Jews. The weaponisation of Judaism by Israel and the Cristofascist legions, the branding of anyone who supports Palestinians as an antisemite, is a cynical propaganda manoeuvre designed to impose censorship on any criticism of Israel. Below, members of the Neturei Karta movement, fiercely opposed to Israel and its apartheid policy toward Palestinians. 


Lili News 029
  • In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
  • Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
  • Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS



The Collective Creativity of Workers

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Bruce Lerro
SOCIALIST PLANNING BEYOND CAPITALISM

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The Collective Creativity of Workers

From Unconscious Sleeping Giants to Conscious Builders of Barricades Part I

Orientation

One purpose of this article is to get you to think of creativity in a whole new way. Our notion of creative today is baked with the assumptions of a Romantic theory of art. These have their good points but they also limit us. In this article I want to argue that the most powerful forms of creativity are collective, not individual. One problem is that with the evolution of society into social classes the collective creativity of workers and peasants is buried in their alienated social-historical unconscious. Making this collective creativity conscious is inseparable from making a social revolution.

I proceed first by discussing individual creativity. I begin by describing the ways in which the artist is different from other workers. Then I connect this to the values and limitations of the romanticization of art.  Then I discuss what an artistic person is like. In the second part of my article I discuss the field of history. First, I talk about how all the arts were once integrated into magical activity in egalitarian hunting and gathering and horticultural societies.

There is the long shadow of alienation of collective creativity in caste and class societies. But then I show how even within capitalist societies there are instances during natural disasters, social movements and ultimately revolutionary times when workers express their collective creativity consciously in the construction of workers’ councils.

The Artist as a Visionary

The life of an artist provokes many, if not most, people. Whether dismissed as a good-for-nothing slacker, a vehicle through which the Muses may speak or just an eccentric personality, an artist in the 21st century West is not boring. One reason is that artistic activity flies in the face of that old sop, “you can’t mix business with pleasure”. In its highest moments, considered as a process (rather than a product), artistic activity approaches a synthesis of work and play as well as work and pleasure.

For most of my twenties I worked in various blue-collar jobs, unloading and loading trucks and driving a forklift in a warehouse. Wage-labor, especially the unskilled kind, is so mechanical and deadening it became associated with suffering. It was something I hated to do, a drudge to be gotten over with, a scourge to be wistfully contrasted to “the good life”. After years of this kind of work, it is difficult not to generalize from this particular job to work in general. Among workers not only is work avoided like the plague, as Marx says, but activity itself can come under suspicion. By activity I mean purposeful, non-frivolous deeds which require concentration and the exertion of will. When activity is done under alienated conditions, it is experienced as a dissipation. Rather than experiencing the outpouring of energy as producing more energy, the expenditure of energy is felt to be a loss.

One the other hand, if the hatred of work because synonymous with activity, then the good-life appears to be consuming sprees of mass media, sporting events and concerts, sensual, sexual pleasure, substance abuse and rest.  In the United States, even active play like table games, video games, dancing or travel far from home competes with TV, or internet surfing. Rather than an interlude, a moment of respite and fertilization for the more gratifying work to come, leisure becomes an end-in-itself. Bourgeois utopias are written about a time when leisure will be all there is.

However, we all need a rest from rest. Justifiably, there is a sense of uneasiness when idleness is posed as a way of life, and the discomfort is not limited to puritanical preachers. Many of us can sense this House of Death, jingling with the trappings of divine honors, as Nietzsche said, when we refuse to retire from jobs, even miserable ones, because we “wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.” I wonder how many people unconsciously kill themselves before or soon after retirement, when we start to get a full dose of “leisure for leisure’s sake”. Contrary to superficial notions of pleasure, rest can be disturbing just as activity can be alienating.

The careful ascertainment of how we shall do so, and the art of guiding it with consequent authority – this sense of authority, is for the master builder, the treasure of treasures – renews in the modern alchemist something like the old dream of the secret of life (Creative Process, Brewster Ghiselin, pg. 150).

In this self-contained magical workshop, in this valley of fertility, the artist pushes and pulls, she hems and haws, and when the oils dry, when the clay is fired, when the curtain falls a baby begins to make its way through the world.

Every artist is at heart a magician. Just as the shaman ventures into the forest or the desert on his vision-quest, so the artist heads for her secluded place of work, fitfully muttering “good riddance” to daily distractions. Alone at last, she surrounds herself with her talismans – a hat with a feather, a ring of beads. Like the Greek chorus, they whisper to her of previous glorious ventures, revelation. “Yes” they tell me, “this time you too can make magic on paper”.

Magical considerations of timing motivate the artist’s habits. Just as a magician studies the stars and arranges her correspondences, so too the artist becomes attuned to when and how she does her best work. What are the optimum conditions? What stage of the creative process is most appropriate based on her mood that day?  What non-artistic activities are most likely to stimulate further creativity? The artist becomes sensitive to knowing when persistence pays off and when it doesn’t.  In short, the artistic creative process is a secularization of a magical ritual:

In the minor occurrences of everyday life which passed unnoticed…the person disposed towards the creative life repeatedly finds clues, fragile portents which he seizes as the basis of some future identity at odds with the social pressures prevailing about. He lives like Schubert’s wanderer, in search of the land which speaks his language. (Dialectical Economics, L. Marcus, pg. 100)

Artists can be understood as the link between the old world and the one which may be born:

How can an individual within capitalist society base his identity on a non-capitalist set of identity and world-outlook? In the study of creative personalities. (Dialectical Economics, pg. 98)

Limitations of Romantic Theories of Art

The following bullets below are the beliefs and assumptions of Romantic theories of art. Let us take them one by one. The first two beliefs can be taken together. Like other animals, the human species has to adapt to its environment. Creativity is rooted in the capacity to solve problems that its environment presents. Since all human beings problem-solve, all human beings have some degree of creativity. The Romantic artist not only fails to see the creativity necessary for people to live in everyday life, he also images that the very involvement in the arts bestows upon him the mantle of creativity. By merely crossing the sacred portals of the arts each novice becomes initiated into the mysteries of creativity. It’s as if artists could never be accused of being mechanical or uncreative just because they are artists. But on the contrary, there can be instances of everyday problem solving that involve more creativity than an artistic product.

We can also combine tenets three and four. Romantic artists have a distrust of groups. Rooted in the individualist reaction to the mindless repetition of factory work of the industrial revolution, romantic artists think of groups only as a force for conformity or obedience to the authorities. The Romantic takes the alienation between the individual and society as given. He ignores the fact that extraordinary social circumstances, such as natural disasters and revolutions, can bring out the most of an individual’s creativity.

When the Romantic artist discounts planning and structure, he accepts that creativity is fundamentally unreasonable or irrational activity. On one side are the emotions, intuition and spontaneity and antithetical to that are reason, organization and constraints. It is hard to imagine how a Romantic artist who made their living from art could hold these beliefs. To sell a work to the public requires rationality, organization and deadlines. Only individuals who are supported by others or dabble in the arts as a form of therapy can imagine art as antithetical to organization, planning and setting priorities.

What is the place of shock in the arts? Surely one of the callings of the artist is to move a society beyond the comfortable, the taken-for-granted and the obvious. In the early part of the 20th century, Cubists, Dadaists and Surrealists did this as a reaction to the Renaissance and Baroque conventions. Before a society is crumbling this is a very important calling. However once social cracks appear and spread, too much shock from the arts is counter-revolutionary. The Romantic artist imagines that shocking people might propel masses of people into social action. This may be true. But too much shock can result in anesthetizing, not moving people. Past a certain point artists should be creating constructive visions of the future not tripping over themselves about how to outrage a public already frightened by social conditions.

The values and beliefs of Romantic theories of art include:

  • All creativity is artistic. All other activities are less creative.
  • There are creative individuals and then there are the rest of us.
  • Maximum creativity is achieved in isolation (groups hold creativity back).
  • Creative activity has nothing to do with everyday life. It is an escape from that life.
  • Creativity and planning are mutually exclusive.

(Disciplined, intellectual and structured activity holds creativity back)

  • What is creative is what is shocking and incomprehensible
  • What is creative is what makes us feel better. Art as therapy (Feedback from an audience matters little to the creative process).
  • What is creative is what appears to be absolutely new.
  • Art expresses more creativity than craft. Art is non-utilitarian (the more people use the art, the more debased it becomes). Art is about ornaments and decorations.
  • Art is in the eye of the beholder. Objective judgments about what is creative are impossible. Judgment of creativity is purely subjective.
  • Art is secular and has little do with sacred beliefs, mythology or rituals.
  • Art is all about the process and the product doesn’t matter.
  • Being an artist means you are eccentric, an outcast, unrealistic and a dreamer.
  • Art is the opposite of necessity. It is subjective and voluntary.
  • Art is fictional. It is an escape from reality.

Romantic artists turn art into therapy. However, while there are certainly therapeutic elements to the arts, the purpose of art is to move the public from more than it is to massage and prop up the emotional states of the artist. Romantics fancy themselves as undiscovered geniuses who are too sensitive to subject themselves to the barbaric tastes of the public. But without criticism from the world the artist loses a vital feedback loop that helps him to stay in touch with the socio-historic reality.

Is there anything that comes into the world that is absolutely new? Romantic artists imagine creativity in the Christian sense of God making the world out of nothing. In reality, the most creative work is always built upon the work of others in society, in the cross-currents between societies as well as the influence of those who have went before. There is no such thing as a genius creating something out of nothing.

Crafts are about making things for everyday use such as baskets, hats, pots, and beads. Crafts are embedded in everyday life and can be used by others in the spirit of carrying on a tradition of their kin and the ancestors. The separation of art from crafts in the modern period came about as part of the class divisions within society. Artists were hired by the Church to support its spiritual ideology and among the upper classes to immortalize themselves. During the Romantic period, artists began to rebel against these influences and began to make statements about societies that were somewhat independent of the upper classes. Unlike craft, art in this sense was more abstract, self-reflective, intended for fewer people and involved innovation as part of an ideology of change. To say that art is more creative than craft says that creativity has less to do with everyday life, large groups of people and that which has continuity across time and space. It is a hard case to make. At its worst, the Romantic artist can be accused of being elitist.

The notion that art is merely a matter of subjective taste is a relatively recent phenomenon. Western art became increasingly psychological in the 20th century and with that, the inner experience of the artist became a subject of consideration. This change in part was a reaction to the objective standards of the academic painting. Cross-cultural research on aesthetics together with evolutionary psychology has shown, however that there is a set of objective standards that all cultures point to when making aesthetic judgments about beauty. Among them include bodies of water, places to hide, and available food.

The Romantic movement was not opposed to spirituality, but to organized religion. While many Romantics wanted to bring back myths and rituals, still for many of the Romantics spirituality was an individual experience so that art in the eyes of Romantics is separated from collective myths, rituals and religious practices. This stance ignores the fact that for most of human history, art was in the service of preparation and delivery of magical rituals and the making of costumes for acting out mythological stories.

While Romantic artists rightfully drew attention to and reflects on the creative process rather than just the product, there is a point at which process becomes everything and the product becomes incidental. Again, artists who make their living as artists must pay attention to the product and reactions of the public in order to continue to paint. It is only those who are supported by others or using art for therapeutic purposes who can afford to ignore the product.

“I will live on the fringes of society rather than compromise my art”. This imagine of an artist as being an outcast, an eccentric, unrealistic or a dreamer has not been typical of how artists have been seen throughout history. More times than not the artist was producing objects that supported the existing order. Many artists who lived during the Renaissance were well-off, conventional, realistic and by most standards, creative. Suffering based on feeling misunderstood is atypical in the history of art.

What does it mean to say that art is the opposite of necessity? By necessity I mean that there is some external crisis or constraint that the artist must respond to. In other words, making art is not a voluntary experience. This is offensive to the Romantic because art is imagined to be coming from within, a free choice uninhibited by external circumstances. But why can’t art begin in reaction to something that must be done for social or historical reasons? Art, like problem solving is often most creative when forced by circumstances out of their control. Conversely, without the force of external events artist can fall asleep, falling back on the usual subject matter, materials and treatment or means of creativity. They can become obsessed by personal problems and lose their perspective.

Lastly, the belief that art is fictional is based on the assumption that reality is unchangeable, and the best you can do is escape it into an imaginary world or a future world. On the contrary, revolutionary art can change social and historical reality by being used in the service of a social movement.

The Artist’s Life as a Work of Art

Though Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller were both significant artists in the traditional sense, each understood that artistic products and artistic processes are just moments of living life. How creative is the artist beyond the activity of making art? Certainly, it is possible to be creative as an artist and uncreative in how life is lived. Both Stein and Miller understood that creativity should be extended beyond art. The artistic products and processes are like streams, which, if followed long enough can converge into the river of how an individual lives their lives. Stein points out the shortsightedness of exclusively identifying creativity with being an artist:

“They become writers. They cease to be creative men and they find that they are novelists, or critics or poets or biographers. When a man says “I am a novelist” he is simply a literary shoemaker (The Creative Process, Ghiselin, pg. 162) – a very important thing – and I know because I have seen it kill so many writers – is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing…When one has discovered and evolved a new form, it is not the form, but the fact that you are the form that is important (Ghiselin, 167) ‘This book will make literary history’ and I told him, ‘it will make some part of literary history, perhaps, but only if you can go on making a new part every day and grow with the history you are making, until you become part of it yourself’.

Henry Miller continues the same line of argument:

“I don’t consider myself a writer in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life… I become more and more indifferent to my fate as a writer and more and more certain of my destiny as a man…My life itself becomes a work of art…Now I can easily not write as write, there is no longer any therapeutic aspect to it. (Ghiselin, 178-180)”

These are modern artists aware of their own psychology. However, there were artists before them like Leonardo or Goethe who clearly as artists, lived extraordinary lives and their lives were works of art.

Coming Attractions: Conscious and Unconscious Creativity in History

  • the return of conscious creativity in capitalist society which can be seen in natural disasters, social movements and revolutionary situations which are expressed in workers’ councils.
    •  

     


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    Biden Approved Secret Nuclear Strategy Refocusing on “Chinese Threat”

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    Facilitated by Garland Nixon
    By David Sanger
    The New York Times
    [NOTE: Readers should exercise caution when using imperialist media]

    Resize text-+=
    Biden Approved Secret Nuclear Strategy Refocusing on Chinese Threat

    In a classified document approved in March, the president ordered U.S. forces to prepare for possible coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea.

    Biden at lectern

    Says the NYTimes (take with a huge grain of salt): President Biden spent much of his political career as an advocate of nuclear nonproliferation and reducing the role of nuclear weapons in American defenses.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

    Aug. 20, 2024Updated 4:08 p.m. ET
     
    President Biden approved in March a highly classified nuclear strategic plan for the United States that, for the first time, reorients America’s deterrent strategy to focus on China’s rapid expansion in its nuclear arsenal.

    The shift comes as the Pentagon believes China’s stockpiles will rival the size and diversity of the United States’ and Russia’s over the next decade.

    The White House never announced that Mr. Biden had approved the revised strategy, called the “Nuclear Employment Guidance,” which also newly seeks to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from China, Russia and North Korea. The document, updated every four years or so, is so highly classified that there are no electronic copies, only a small number of hard copies distributed to a few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.

    But in recent speeches, two senior administration officials were allowed to allude to the change — in carefully constrained, single sentences — ahead of a more detailed, unclassified notification to Congress expected before Mr. Biden leaves office.
     
    “The president recently issued updated nuclear-weapons employment guidance to account for multiple nuclear-armed adversaries,” Vipin Narang, an M.I.T. nuclear strategist who served in the Pentagon, said earlier this month before returning to academia. “And in particular,” he added, the weapons guidance accounted for “the significant increase in the size and diversity” of China’s nuclear arsenal.

    In June, the National Security Council’s senior director for arms control and nonproliferation, Pranay Vaddi, also referred to the document, the first to examine in detail whether the United States is prepared to respond to nuclear crises that break out simultaneously or sequentially, with a combination of nuclear and nonnuclear weapons.

    The new strategy, Mr. Vaddi said, emphasizes “the need to deter Russia, the PRC and North Korea simultaneously,” using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.

    In the past, the likelihood that American adversaries could coordinate nuclear threats to outmaneuver the American nuclear arsenal seemed remote. But the emerging partnership between Russia and China, and the conventional arms North Korea and Iran are providing to Russia for the war in Ukraine have fundamentally changed Washington’s thinking.

    Already, Russia and China are conducting military exercises together. Intelligence agencies are trying to determine whether Russia is aiding the North Korean and Iranian missile programs in return.
     
    The new document is a stark reminder that whoever is sworn in next Jan. 20 will confront a changed and far more volatile nuclear landscape than the one that existed just three years ago. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine, including during a crisis in October 2022, when Mr. Biden and his aides, looking at intercepts of conversations between senior Russian commanders, feared the likelihood of nuclear use might rise to 50 percent or even higher.

    Mr. Biden, along with leaders of Germany and Britain, got China and India to make public statements that there was no role for the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and the crisis abated, at least temporarily.

    The second big change arises from China’s nuclear ambitions. The country’s nuclear expansion is running at an even faster pace than American intelligence officials anticipated two years ago, driven by President Xi Jinping’s determination to scrap the decades-long strategy of maintaining a “minimum deterrent” to reach or exceed the size of Washington’s and Moscow’s arsenals. China’s nuclear complex is now the fastest growing in the world.

    Although former President Donald J. Trump confidently predicted that Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, would surrender his nuclear weapons after their three in-person meetings, the opposite happened. Mr. Kim has doubled down, and now has more than 60 weapons, officials estimate, and the fuel for many more.
     
    That expansion has changed the nature of the North Korean challenge: When the country possessed just a handful of weapons, it could be deterred by missile defenses. But its expanded arsenal is fast approaching the size of Pakistan’s and Israel’s, and it is large enough that it could, in theory, coordinate threats with Moscow and Beijing.

    The DF-17 (Dong Feng-17) is a Chinese medium-range missile system equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle. U.S. officials first confirmed the existence of DF-17 prototypes (DF-ZF/Wu-14) in 2014. As a powerful stand-off weapon, the DF-17 may be expected to play a major role in destroying Western naval assets in any confrontation.

    A Chinese soldier standing in front of 4 large ballistic missiles painted in camouflage green during a military parade.

    A soldier stands before vehicles carrying China’s DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missiles.Credit...Thomas Peter/Reuters

    It was only a matter of time before a fundamentally different nuclear environment began to alter American war plans and strategy, officials say.

    “It is our responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we hoped or wished it would be,” Mr. Narang said as he was leaving the Pentagon. “It is possible that we will one day look back and see the quarter-century after the Cold War as nuclear intermission.”

    The new challenge is “the real possibility of collaboration and even collusion between our nuclear-armed adversaries,” he said.
     
    So far in the presidential campaign, the new challenges to American nuclear strategy have not been a topic of debate. Mr. Biden, who spent much of his political career as an advocate of nuclear nonproliferation, has never publicly talked in any detail about how he is responding to the challenges of deterring China’s and North Korea’s expanded forces. Nor has Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic Party’s nominee.

    At his last news conference in July, just days before he announced he would no longer seek the Democratic nomination for a second term, Mr. Biden acknowledged that he had adopted a policy of seeking ways to interfere in the broader China-Russia partnership.

    “Yes, I do, but I’m not prepared to talk about the detail of it in public,” Mr. Biden said. He made no reference to — and was not asked about — how that partnership was altering American nuclear strategy.

    Since Harry Truman’s presidency, that strategy has been overwhelmingly focused on the Kremlin’s arsenal. Mr. Biden’s new guidance suggests how quickly that is shifting.

    China was mentioned in the last nuclear guidance, issued at the end of the Trump administration, according to an unclassified account provided to Congress in 2020. But that was before the scope of Mr. Xi’s ambitions were understood.
     
    The Biden strategy sharpens that focus to reflect the Pentagon’s estimates that China’s nuclear force would expand to 1,000 by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035, roughly the numbers that the United States and Russia now deploy. In fact, Beijing now appears ahead of that schedule, officials say, and has begun loading nuclear missiles into new silo fields that were spotted by commercial satellites three years ago.
    There is another concern about Beijing: It has now halted a short-lived conversation with the United States about improving nuclear safety and security — for example, by agreeing to warn each other of impending missile tests, or setting up hotlines or other means of communication to assure that incidents or accidents do not escalate into nuclear encounters.
     
    One discussion between the two countries took place late last fall, just before Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi met in California, where they sought to repair relations between the two countries. They referred to those talks in a joint statement, but by that time the Chinese had already hinted they were not interested in further discussions, and earlier this summer said the conversations were over. They cited American arms sales to Taiwan, which were underway long before the nuclear safety conversations began.
     
    Mallory Stewart, the assistant secretary for arms control, deterrence and stability at the State Department, said in an interview that the Chinese government was “actively preventing us from having conversations about the risks.”
     
    Instead, she said, Beijing “seems to be taking a page out of Russia’s playbook that, until we address tensions and challenges in our bilateral relationship, they will choose not to continue our arms control, risk reduction and nonproliferation conversations.”
     
    It was in China’s interest, she argued, “to prevent these risks of miscalculation and misunderstanding.”
     

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    David E. SangerDavid E. Sanger has written about American nuclear strategy for The New York Times for nearly four decades. Sanger has written several books on challenges to American national security. More about David E. Sanger


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