Anonymous Comrade writes

"The Parable of Samarra"

John Chuckman, December 9, 2003

Front-page stories announced the greatest battle since the end of combat in Iraq with fifty-four insurgents killed and not an American soldier lost. We were given breathtaking details about two separate, coordinated attacks, the firing of rocket-propelled grenades at American vehicles, and the fact that many of the attackers wore Fedayeen militia uniforms associated with Saddam Hussein. Early reports even claimed eleven insurgents were captured.

"Questions about The New Imperialism:

An Interview with David Harvey

Nader Vossoughian, http://www.agglutinations.com

In his recently published The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), geographer and social theorist David Harvey makes the case for a "New Deal" brand of imperialism in which the responsibilities of government are carried out by a “benevolent… coalition of capitalist powers.”

Against foes of globalization, he argues that the effects of global capitalism are undoable, that advocates of social reform must learn to work within the framework of the marketplace. By the same token, he remains critical of American foreign policy, whose objectives, he argues, have been shaped to a large degree by the neo-liberalism of the moderate left (think US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin) and more recently by the neo-conservatism of the right (think US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld).

In the interview that follows, I ask Harvey to elaborate on his views, particularly on the point of how he distinguishes his vision from those articulated by peer intellectuals of the political left.

"Freezing the Movement:

Posthumous Notes on Nuclear War" (1983)

George Caffentzis

Preface (2003)

I found the following set of “posthumous notes” recently while I was cleaning up a closet. They were written, on the basis of memory and textual evidence, in the spring of 1983, right before I left the US to live and teach in Nigeria. Some of the material in these notes went into a couple of articles that were published then. One was in the "Posthumous Notes" (1983) issue of Midnight Notes and the other was in a piece entitled “The Marxist Theory of War” in the Radical Science Journal issue on the anti-nuclear war movement (1983). But they have since been unread and untroubled. My rediscovery of these notes puts them and me in a tight logical spot. I was supposed to have been dead (and reborn) according to these notes…but I clearly am neither. So their circulation now immediately falsifies them. Self-negating or not, I am hoping that these notes from the dead might be of use to the living at a time when nuclear war is again on the agenda. Anyway, please receive these notes as a gift on the Day of the Dead. -- November 2, 2003

A Lamentation

Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men; that I might leave my people and go from here! for they be all adulterers, and assembly of treacherous men. -- Jeremiah, Lamentations 9:2

"The existence of the bomb paralyzes us. Our only motion a gigantic leap backward in what we take to be the minimal conditions of our existence whereby all desires, demands, struggles vanish; only our biological existence appears a valid cause. Don't kill us, exterminate us, burn us alive, make us witness the more most horrid spectacle the mind can imagine (?????), lived thousands of times in our fears watching the 7:00 News, reading the "scientific medical reports." Please let us live, that's all we ask, forget what this life will be like, forget about our now seemingly utopian dreams..."

But isn't this declaring we're already dead? Isn't this admitting the explosion has already worked, that we've already been blown to pieces hundreds of times when, of all our needs and struggles, only the will to survive remains? Worse yet. Isn't this declaration a most dangerous path? For when only people on their knees confront the powers that be, these powers feel godlike and justified, not restrained by the fear that should they dare so much, whoever of us will be left will make life impossible for them as well.

"The Olive-Drab Rebels:

Military Organizing During The Vietnam Era"

Matthew Rinaldi, Radical America Vol. 8 No. 3 1974

Introduction

"The morale, discipline, and battleworthiness of the U. S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.

By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous. Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious."

So wrote Col. Robert D. Heinl in June of 1971. In an article entitled "The Collapse of the Armed Forces", written for the eyes of the military leadership and published in the Armed Forces Journal, Heinl also stated, "Sedition, coupled with disaffection within the ranks, and externally fomented with an audacity and intensity previously inconceivable, infests the Armed Services." This frank statement accurately reflects the tremendous upheaval which occurred among rank and file GIs during the era of the Vietnam war. Covered up whenever possible and frequently denied by the military brass, this upheaval was nevertheless a significant factor in the termination of the ground war, and helped to imbue a generation of working class youth with a deep-rooted contempt for America's authority structure.