A Plea for Illegitimate Grievances

What is ideology? I would like to propose the most historically primitive definition term that I think is possible. When the slaves of ancient Egypt built the pyramids of Giza, it was assumed that the greatness of the pyramids was selfsame with the greatness of the Pharaohs.  So, it was assumed that the slaves themselves thought the product of their toils represented the works not of their own hands but of their masters’ divinity.

But of course: while it is difficult to imagine slaves who believe this even in ancient civilization, it just as easy to imagine scholar—rulers who believe that their slaves believe it. So, in due time, in order to have subjects who “really believe,” ideology would have to evolve.

Pharonic civilization, the first nation state in the history of humanity, became the topological equivalent of ungodly royal evil in the political imagination of the Torah and consequently in the Gospels and the Qur’an, a stand-in for backward monarchy in Herodotus, and thus an archetypal political concept of rebuke for all Mediterranean civilization. This the first of many self improvements on the part of ideology over the course of world history. The very notion of “pyramidic” tyranny itself functioned as a priceless ideological concept for later regimes of antiquity. Ideology, in this way, came for the first time as an argument to the people primarily concerning what the state is not  (the Hellenistic city-state, the clerical Israelite regime, is not a never-changing pharonic dictatorship). In the sublime language the US state department, such state’s, unlike the Pharaohs, were in their own understanding, “responsive to the legitimate grievances of their people.”

But what about the dialectical opposite of “legitimate grievances”—where is the place of “illegitimate grievances” in our politics today?  

Certainly not, we should now finally come to see, in the criminal “anti-colonial” dictatorships formed in the mire of Cold War atrocities. The problem of “post-colonial” thought, the grave necessity for it to be overcome, should by now be clear in the recent ravings of Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi’s ideology takes the original negativity of the Greek/Hebrew rebuke of Egypt to an ultimate and untenable absurdity. We are witnessing in Libya very limits of the narrative of the beloved “anti-colonial struggle.” 

Insofar as Gaddafi defines himself against the western crusader state, none of the real conditions imposed by his regime matter, his state has no argument for its own existence other than its grievances against Europe, Israel, and the US. Ideology has made a perfect turn here, instead of the Pharaoh’s only argument being that he is in fact the Pharaoh the post-colonial Pharaoh is only legitimate insofar as he convinces his subjects that he is not in fact the “real” Pharaoh.  These grievances are not the opposite of the state department’s “legitimate grievances,” they are their reverse side, “legitimate grievances” in their third world fascist form.   

"Do the armed rebels trying to overthrow that government still count as civilians?"asks George Will.   As Will sees it, there is a totally Orwellian character to US rhetoric on the "Arab Spring," and to my mind the most sublime innovation has been the very opposition we've set up between the "legitimate grievances"/"legitimate aspirations" of the Arab world, which are again of course opposed to their implicit opposite "illegitimate grievances" and 'illegitimate aspirations."

But, a more radical opposition exists in Gaddafi's terms, and those of the other Arab dictators. Notice how interchangeably almost all Arab dictatorships that are currently threatened by uprisings have been willing to accuse dissenters of being "radical Islamists" and "stooges of the American-Zionist crusaders" in almost the same breath.

Have we dared to imagine that perhaps "the West" and the dictators might be afraid of the same thing? Namely, an Arab world that really wants liberal democracy, an Arab world that is just as uninterested in having its politics ruled by Western oil interests and made in America Iraqi-sectarianism as it is in being ruled by the various strains of "Islamism" and secular "Pan Arabism" that have vied for its political allegiances in the past. Not ideological ‘state self-determination’—but the opposite possibility it obscures: determination of one's state for oneself.

Here for once, the an cliché liberal discourse is in fact subversive here. 

Namely, "what if "they" aren't so very different from you and me?" And furthermore, the issue here is simple: “what do they want?” “Freedom!” “When do they want it?” “Now!”

Where does this leave us with regard to our military endeavor in Libya. On this point George Will argues,

Now the administration must decide how to characterize those on whose behalf we have gone to war. They are rebels, and America, born in rebellion and culturally disposed to skepticism about authority, is inclined to think kindly of rebels. This was particularly so during the 1960s, especially on college campuses. On one of them, Antioch, the students, full of idealism and empty of information, gathered to watch “To Die in Madrid,” a documentary about the Spanish Civil War. When the narrator intoned about a column of soldiers, “The rebels advanced on Madrid,” the students cheered, unaware that the rebels were Gen. Franco’s fascists.

and then.....

But not (yet) to Yamoussoukro, capital of Ivory Coast. Members of the Congressional Libyan Liberation Caucus — it does not formally exist (yet) — presumably subscribe to the doctrine “R2P.” That is the accepted shorthand for “responsibility to protect.” This notion is central to humanitarian imperialism, a project that certainly promises to provide steady work. The Libyan venture is coinciding with a humanitarian disaster in Ivory Coast, where corpses are piling up by the hundreds and the fighting is producing displaced persons by the hundreds of thousands. They will have to make do with U.N. and French interveners until America’s humanitarian imperialists can get around to them.

What Will misses here is the basic fact that what the NATO force is up against in Libya is much more radical than that which it has overshadowed in Ivory Coast.  Lawrence Gbagbo's ability to stay in power after his electoral defeat was always  contingent on his ability to continue to pay civil servants and the military from state coffers. Gbagbo's power was not based on any ideological affinity for his government beyond the financial interests of specific social groups privileged by his power. Gaddafi, on the other hand, was at one point a powerful figure in the "third-worldist" political imagination and has held onto Libya like a personal fiefdom since 1969.

The mistake our commentators so often make is to argue that Gaddafi’s control of the state is a facet merely of “brute force,” a notion reiterated over and over again in news articles, that the loyalty to Gaddafi is "tribal" ala Lawrence Gbagbo. His "negative-Pharonic" ideological opposition to the US and nods to old school Pan-Arabism still garners genuine support with many sectors of Libyan society. 

So why would this be an argument for military intervention? Imagine if the very ambiguity of the “rebels” aims is not something which we should look at in order to see the “real” ideology (Will's Spanish fascists) beneath the universality of their demands. What, if the people really“want the downfall of the regime”? We should read this ambiguity as a sign of how precisely universal the aspirations of the Libyan rebels, and the rebels across the Arab world, in fact are.  

It is telling that some of the very neo-conservatives who so welcomed the coming of the “post-ideological” age in theory are so skeptical of it practice. This new world won’t in fact be America’s world, but when tens of thousands of Muslims have rallied in Benghazi to thank 'The West' for bombing their country, one simply cannot argue that this "any old" humanitarian intervention, whatever one's position. The outcome of the present political situation in Libya unclear, and no one can or should make prediction. The hope, and yes now it should only be a hope, is that the Libyan rebels are precisely not either "with us or against us" but rather for themselves. 

A Plea for Illegitimate Grievances

What is ideology? I would like to propose the most historically primitive definition term that I think is possible. When the slaves of ancient Egypt built the pyramids of Giza, it was assumed that the greatness of the pyramids was selfsame with the greatness of the Pharaohs.  So, it was assumed that the slaves themselves thought the product of their toils represented the works not of their own hands but of their masters’ divinity.

But of course: while it is difficult to imagine slaves who believe this even in ancient civilization, it just as easy to imagine scholar—rulers who believe that their slaves believe it. So, in due time, in order to have subjects who “really believe,” ideology would have to evolve.

Pharonic civilization, the first nation state in the history of humanity, became the topological equivalent of ungodly political evil in the political imagination of the Torah and consequently in the Gospels and the Qur’an, a stand-in for backward monarchy in Herodotus, and thus an archetypal political concept of rebuke for all Mediterranean civilization. This the first of many self improvements on the part of ideology over the course of world history. The very notion of “pyramidic” tyranny itself functioned as a priceless ideological concept for later regimes of antiquity. Ideology, in this way, came for the first time as an argument to the people primarily concerning what the state is not  (the Hellenistic city-state, the clerical Israelite regime, is not a never-changing pharonic dictatorship). In the sublime language the US state department, such state’s, unlike the Pharaohs, were in their own understanding, “responsive to the legitimate grievances of their people.”

But what about the dialectical opposite of “legitimate grievances”—where is the place of “illegitimate grievances” in our politics today?  

Certainly not, we should now finally come to see, in the criminal “anti-colonial” dictatorships formed in the mire of Cold War atrocities. The problem of “post-colonial” thought, the grave necessity for it to be overcome, should by now be clear in the recent ravings of Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi’s ideology takes the original negativity of the Greek/Hebrew rebuke of Egypt to an ultimate and untenable absurdity. We are witnessing in Libya very limits of the narrative of the beloved “anti-colonial struggle.” 

 Insofar as Gaddafi defines himself against the western crusader state, none of the real conditions imposed by his regime matter, his state has no argument for its own existence other than its grievances against Europe, Israel, and the US. Ideology has made a perfect turn here, instead of the Pharaoh’s only argument being that he is in fact the Pharaoh the post-colonial Pharaoh is only legitimate insofar as he convinces his subjects that he is not in fact the “real” Pharaoh, not the real “imperialist.”  These grievances are not the opposite of the state department’s “legitimate grievances,” they are their reverse side, “legitimate grievances” in their third world fascist form.   

"Do the armed rebels trying to overthrow that government still count as civilians?"asks George Will.   As Will sees, there is a totally Orwellian character to US rhetoric on the "Arab Spring," and to my mind the most sublime innovation has been the very opposition we've set up between the "legitimate grievances"/"legitimate aspirations" of the Arab world, which are of course opposed to their implicit opposite "illegitimate grievances" and 'illegitimate aspirations."

But, a more radical opposition exists in Gaddafi's terms, and those of the other Arab dictators. Notice how interchangeably almost all Arab dictatorships that are currently threatened by uprisings have been willing to accuse dissenters of being "radical Islamists" and "stooges of the American-Zionist crusaders" in almost the same breath.

Have we dared to imagine that perhaps "the West" and the dictators might be afraid of the same thing? Namely, an Arab world that really wants liberal democracy, an Arab world that is just as uninterested in having its politics ruled by Western oil interests and made in America Iraqi-sectarianism as it is in being ruled by the various strains of "Islamism" and secular "Pan Arabism" that have vied for its political allegiances in the past. Not ideological ‘self-determination’—but the opposite possibility it obscures: determination for oneself.

Here for once, the an cliché liberal discourse is in fact subversive here. 

Namely, "what if they aren't so very different from you and me?" And furthermore, the issue here is simple: “what do they want?” “Freedom!” “When do they want it?” “Now!”

Where does this leave us with regard to our military endeavor in Libya. On this point George Will argues,

Now the administration must decide how to characterize those on whose behalf we have gone to war. They are rebels, and America, born in rebellion and culturally disposed to skepticism about authority, is inclined to think kindly of rebels. This was particularly so during the 1960s, especially on college campuses. On one of them, Antioch, the students, full of idealism and empty of information, gathered to watch “To Die in Madrid,” a documentary about the Spanish Civil War. When the narrator intoned about a column of soldiers, “The rebels advanced on Madrid,” the students cheered, unaware that the rebels were Gen. Franco’s fascists.

and then.....

But not (yet) to Yamoussoukro, capital of Ivory Coast. Members of the Congressional Libyan Liberation Caucus — it does not formally exist (yet) — presumably subscribe to the doctrine “R2P.” That is the accepted shorthand for “responsibility to protect.” This notion is central to humanitarian imperialism, a project that certainly promises to provide steady work. The Libyan venture is coinciding with a humanitarian disaster in Ivory Coast, where corpses are piling up by the hundreds and the fighting is producing displaced persons by the hundreds of thousands. They will have to make do with U.N. and French interveners until America’s humanitarian imperialists can get around to them.

What will misses here is the basic fact that what the NATO force is up against in Libya is much more radical than that which it has overshadowed in Ivory Coast.  Lawrence Gbagbo's ability to stay in power was always  contingent on his ability to continue to pay civil servants and the military from state coffers. Gbagbo's power was not based on any ideological affinity for his government beyond the financial interests of specific social groups privileged by his power. Gaddafi, on the other hand, was at one point a powerful figure in the "third-worldist" political imagination and has held onto Libya like a personal fiefdom crime since 1969.

The mistake our commentators so often make is to argue that Gaddafi’s control of the state is a facet merely of “brute force,” the notion reiterated over and over again in news articles, that the loyalty to Gaddafi is "tribal" ala Lawrence Gbagbo. His "negative-Pharonic" ideological opposition to the US and nods to old school Pan-Arabism still garners genuine support with many sectors of Libyan society beyond his tribal kin.

So why would this be an argument for military intervention? Imagine if the very ambiguity of the “rebels” aims is not something which we should look at in order to see the “real” ideology beneath the demands. What, if the people really “want the downfall of the regime”? We should read this ambiguity as a sign of how precisely universal the aspirations of the Libyan rebels, and the rebels across the Arab world, in fact are.  

It is telling that some of the very neo-conservatives who so welcomed the coming of the “post-ideological” age in theory are so skeptical of it practice. Perhaps this new world won’t in fact still be America’s world, but when

A Plea for Illegitimate Grievances

 

What is ideology? I would like to propose the most historically primitive definition term that I think is possible. When the slaves of ancient Egypt built the pyramids of Giza, it was assumed that the greatness of the pyramids was selfsame with the greatness of the Pharaohs.  So, it was assumed that the slaves themselves thought the product of their toils represented the works not of their own hands but of their masters’ divinity.

But of course: while it is difficult to imagine slaves who believe this even in ancient civilization, it just as easy to imagine scholar—rulers who believe that their slaves believe it. So, in due time, in order to have subjects who “really believe,” ideology would have to evolve.

Pharonic civilization, the first nation state in the history of humanity, became the topological equivalent of ungodly political evil in the political imagination of the Torah and consequently in the Gospels and the Qur’an, a stand-in for backward monarchy in Herodotus, and thus an archetypal political concept of rebuke for all Mediterranean civilization. This the first of many self improvements on the part of ideology over the course of world history. The very notion of “pyramidic” tyranny itself functioned as a priceless ideological concept for later regimes of antiquity. Ideology, in this way, came for the first time as an argument to the people primarily concerning what the state is not  (the Hellenistic city-state, the clerical Israelite regime, is not a never-changing pharonic dictatorship). In the sublime language the US state department, such state’s, unlike the Pharaohs, were in their own understanding, “responsive to the legitimate grievances of their people.”

But what about the dialectical opposite of “legitimate grievances”—where is the place of “illegitimate grievances” in our politics today?  

Certainly not, we should now finally come to see, in the criminal “anti-colonial” dictatorships formed in the mire of Cold War atrocities. The problem of “post-colonial” thought, the grave necessity for it to be overcome, should by now be clear in the recent ravings of Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi’s ideology takes the original negativity of the Greek/Hebrew rebuke of Egypt to an ultimate and untenable absurdity. We are witnessing in Libya very limits of the narrative of the beloved “anti-colonial struggle.” 

 Insofar as Ghadaffi defines himself against the western crusader state, none of the real conditions imposed by his regime matter, his state has no argument for its own existence other than its grievances against Europe, Israel, and the US. Ideology has made a perfect turn here, instead of the Pharaoh’s only argument being that he is in fact the Pharaoh the post-colonial Pharaoh is only legitimate insofar as he convinces his subjects that he is not in fact the “real” Pharaoh, not the real “imperialist.”  These grievances are not the opposite of the state department’s “legitimate grievances,” they are their reverse side, “legitimate grievances” in their third world fascist form.   

"Do the armed rebels trying to overthrow that government still count as civilians?"asks George Will.   As Will sees, there is a totally Orwellian character to US rhetoric on the "Arab Spring," and to my mind the most sublime innovation has been the very opposition we've set up between the "legitimate grievances"/"legitimate aspirations" of the Arab world, which are of course opposed to their implicit opposite "illegitimate grievances" and 'illegitimate aspirations."

But, a more radical opposition exists in Ghadaffi's terms, and those of the other Arab dictators. Notice how interchangeably almost all Arab dictatorships that are currently threatened by uprisings have been willing to accuse dissenters of being "radical Islamists" and "stooges of the American-Zionist crusaders" in almost the same breath.

Have we dared to imagine that perhaps "the West" and the dictators might be afraid of the same thing? Namely, an Arab world that really wants liberal democracy, an Arab world that is just as uninterested in having its politics ruled by Western oil interests and made in America Iraqi-sectarianism as it is in being ruled by the various strains of "Islamism" and secular "Pan Arabism" that have vied for its political allegiances in the past. Not ideological ‘self-determination’—but the opposite possibility it obscures: determination for oneself.

Here for once, the an cliché liberal discourse is in fact subversive here. 

Namely, "what if they aren't so very different from you and me?" And furthermore, the issue here is simple: “what do they want?” “Freedom!” “When do they want it?” “Now!”

Where does this leave us with regard to our military endeavor in Libya. On this point George Will argues,

Now the administration must decide how to characterize those on whose behalf we have gone to war. They are rebels, and America, born in rebellion and culturally disposed to skepticism about authority, is inclined to think kindly of rebels. This was particularly so during the 1960s, especially on college campuses. On one of them, Antioch, the students, full of idealism and empty of information, gathered to watch “To Die in Madrid,” a documentary about the Spanish Civil War. When the narrator intoned about a column of soldiers, “The rebels advanced on Madrid,” the students cheered, unaware that the rebels were Gen. Franco’s fascists.

and then.....

But not (yet) to Yamoussoukro, capital of Ivory Coast. Members of the Congressional Libyan Liberation Caucus — it does not formally exist (yet) — presumably subscribe to the doctrine “R2P.” That is the accepted shorthand for “responsibility to protect.” This notion is central to humanitarian imperialism, a project that certainly promises to provide steady work. The Libyan venture is coinciding with a humanitarian disaster in Ivory Coast, where corpses are piling up by the hundreds and the fighting is producing displaced persons by the hundreds of thousands. They will have to make do with U.N. and French interveners until America’s humanitarian imperialists can get around to them.

What will misses here is the basic fact that what the NATO force is up against in Libya is much more radical than that which it has overshadowed in Ivory Coast.  Lawrence Gbagbo's ability to stay in power was always  contingent on his ability to continue to pay civil servants and the military from state coffers. Gbagbo's power was not based on any ideological affinity for his government beyond the financial interests of specific social groups privileged by his power. Gadaffi, on the other hand, was at one point a powerful figure in the "third-worldist" political imagination and has held onto Libya like a personal fiefdom crime since 1969.

The mistake our commentators so often make is to argue that Gadaffi’s control of the state is a facet merely of “brute force,” the notion reiterated over and over again in news articles, that the loyalty to Gadaffi is "tribal" ala Lawrence Gbagbo. His "negative-Pharonic" ideological opposition to the US and nods to old school Pan-Arabism still garners genuine support with many sectors of Libyan society beyond his tribal kin.

So why would this be an argument for military intervention? Imagine if the very ambiguity of the “rebels” aims is not something which we should look at in order to see the “real” ideology beneath the demands. What, if the people really “want the downfall of the regime”? We should read this ambiguity as a sign of how precisely universal the aspirations of the Libyan rebels, and the rebels across the Arab world, in fact are.  

It is telling that some of the very neo-conservatives who so welcomed the coming of the “post-ideological” age in theory are so skeptical of it practice. Perhaps this new world won’t in fact still be America’s world, but when

A Plea for Illegitimate Grievances

 

What is ideology? I would like to propose the most historically primitive definition term that I think is possible. When the slaves of ancient Egypt built the pyramids of Giza, it was assumed that the greatness of the pyramids was selfsame with the greatness of the Pharaohs.  So, it was assumed that the slaves themselves thought the product of their toils represented the works not of their own hands but of their masters’ divinity.

But of course: while it is difficult to imagine slaves who believe this even in ancient civilization, it just as easy to imagine scholar—rulers who believe that their slaves believe it. So, in due time, in order to have subjects who “really believe,” ideology would have to evolve.

Pharonic civilization, the first nation state in the history of humanity, became the topological equivalent of ungodly royal evil in the political imagination of the Torah and consequently in the Gospels and the Qur’an, a stand-in for backward monarchy in Herodotus, and thus an archetypal political concept of rebuke for all Mediterranean civilization. This the first of many self improvements on the part of ideology over the course of world history. The very notion of “pyramidic” tyranny itself functioned as a priceless ideological concept for later regimes of antiquity. Ideology, in this way, came for the first time as an argument to the people primarily concerning what the state is not  (the Hellenistic city-state, the clerical Israelite regime, is not a never-changing pharonic dictatorship). In the sublime language the US state department, such state’s, unlike the Pharaohs, were in their own understanding, “responsive to the legitimate grievances of their people.”

But what about the dialectical opposite of “legitimate grievances”—where is the place of “illegitimate grievances” in our politics today?  

Certainly not, we should now finally come to see, in the criminal “anti-colonial” dictatorships formed in the mire of Cold War atrocities. The problem of “post-colonial” thought, the grave necessity for it to be overcome, should by now be clear in the recent ravings of Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi’s ideology takes the original negativity of the Greek/Hebrew rebuke of Egypt to an ultimate and untenable absurdity. We are witnessing in Libya very limits of the narrative of the beloved “anti-colonial struggle.” 

Insofar as Gaddafi defines himself against the western crusader state, none of the real conditions imposed by his regime matter, his state has no argument for its own existence other than its grievances against Europe, Israel, and the US. Ideology has made a perfect turn here, instead of the Pharaoh’s only argument being that he is in fact the Pharaoh the post-colonial Pharaoh is only legitimate insofar as he convinces his subjects that he is not in fact the “real” Pharaoh.  These grievances are not the opposite of the state department’s “legitimate grievances,” they are their reverse side, “legitimate grievances” in their third world fascist form.   

"Do the armed rebels trying to overthrow that government still count as civilians?"asks George Will.   As Will sees it, there is a totally Orwellian character to US rhetoric on the "Arab Spring," and to my mind the most sublime innovation has been the very opposition we've set up between the "legitimate grievances"/"legitimate aspirations" of the Arab world, which are again of course opposed to their implicit opposite "illegitimate grievances" and 'illegitimate aspirations."

But, a more radical opposition exists in Gaddafi's terms, and those of the other Arab dictators. Notice how interchangeably almost all Arab dictatorships that are currently threatened by uprisings have been willing to accuse dissenters of being "radical Islamists" and "stooges of the American-Zionist crusaders" in almost the same breath.

Have we dared to imagine that perhaps "the West" and the dictators might be afraid of the same thing? Namely, an Arab world that really wants liberal democracy, an Arab world that is just as uninterested in having its politics ruled by Western oil interests and made in America Iraqi-sectarianism as it is in being ruled by the various strains of "Islamism" and secular "Pan Arabism" that have vied for its political allegiances in the past. Not ideological ‘state self-determination’—but the opposite possibility it obscures: determination of one's state for oneself.

Here for once, the an cliché liberal discourse is in fact subversive here. 

Namely, "what if "they" aren't so very different from you and me?" And furthermore, the issue here is simple: “what do they want?” “Freedom!” “When do they want it?” “Now!”

Where does this leave us with regard to our military endeavor in Libya. On this point George Will argues,

Now the administration must decide how to characterize those on whose behalf we have gone to war. They are rebels, and America, born in rebellion and culturally disposed to skepticism about authority, is inclined to think kindly of rebels. This was particularly so during the 1960s, especially on college campuses. On one of them, Antioch, the students, full of idealism and empty of information, gathered to watch “To Die in Madrid,” a documentary about the Spanish Civil War. When the narrator intoned about a column of soldiers, “The rebels advanced on Madrid,” the students cheered, unaware that the rebels were Gen. Franco’s fascists.

and then.....

But not (yet) to Yamoussoukro, capital of Ivory Coast. Members of the Congressional Libyan Liberation Caucus — it does not formally exist (yet) — presumably subscribe to the doctrine “R2P.” That is the accepted shorthand for “responsibility to protect.” This notion is central to humanitarian imperialism, a project that certainly promises to provide steady work. The Libyan venture is coinciding with a humanitarian disaster in Ivory Coast, where corpses are piling up by the hundreds and the fighting is producing displaced persons by the hundreds of thousands. They will have to make do with U.N. and French interveners until America’s humanitarian imperialists can get around to them.

What Will misses here is the basic fact that what the NATO force is up against in Libya is much more radical than that which it has overshadowed in Ivory Coast.  Lawrence Gbagbo's ability to stay in power after his electoral defeat was always  contingent on his ability to continue to pay civil servants and the military from state coffers. Gbagbo's power was not based on any ideological affinity for his government beyond the financial interests of specific social groups privileged by his power. Gaddafi, on the other hand, was at one point a powerful figure in the "third-worldist" political imagination and has held onto Libya like a personal fiefdom since 1969.

The mistake our commentators so often make is to argue that Gaddafi’s control of the state is a facet merely of “brute force,” a notion reiterated over and over again in news articles, that the loyalty to Gaddafi is "tribal" ala Lawrence Gbagbo. His "negative-Pharonic" ideological opposition to the US and nods to old school Pan-Arabism still garners genuine support with many sectors of Libyan society. 

So why would this be an argument for military intervention? Imagine if the very ambiguity of the “rebels” aims is not something which we should look at in order to see the “real” ideology (Will's Spanish fascists) beneath the universality of their demands. What, if the people really “want the downfall of the regime”? We should read this ambiguity as a sign of how precisely universal the aspirations of the Libyan rebels, and the rebels across the Arab world, in fact are.  

It is telling that some of the very neo-conservatives who so welcomed the coming of the “post-ideological” age in theory are so skeptical of it practice. This new world won’t in fact be America’s world, but when tens of thousands of Muslims have rallied in Benghazi to thank 'The West' for bombing their country, one simply cannot argue that this "any old" humanitarian intervention, whatever one's position. The outcome of the present political situation in Libya unclear, and no one can or should make prediction. The hope, and yes now it should only be a hope, is that the Libyan rebels are precisely not either "with us or against us" but rather for themselves. 

In Defense of "Bullying"--Or--What can Rebecca Black teach us about the Military Intervention in Libya?

In October of last year, there was quick succession of suicides committed by young gay men, mostly American teenagers, that caught the public eye. Seth Walsh hung himself in his backyard. Tyler Clementi jumped to his death from George Washington bridge. Billy Lucas, 15, hung himself, and Asher Brown, only 13, shot himself. Instead of coming to the obvious conclusion that these deaths, while self-inflicted, were commensurate with a culture that still tolerates publicly sanctioned bigotry so long as it is directed against gays and lesbians, America in her infinite wisdom decided to have a conversation about something else. We decided to talk about bullying. It might not be as likely that a child being picked on for a bad haircut would tie a rope around their neck and jump from a high place, but this way we could all manage to have a conversation about our own insecurities and feelings of harassment rather than the obvious reality of well financed and strategically positioned hate groups that sanction explicitly or implicitly the harassment of gay youth yet are accepted as legitimate participants in our “democratic conversation.” Instead, we decided that we are all harassed. And who benefitted from this rhetorical strategy the most? Parents who raise their children on the basis of these homophobic doctrines, who were able to separate instilling hate into their children from the fact that they "didn't raise them to be bullies." 

Like all serious moral and political issues, the semantics of "bullying" can only be drawn out properly with a long digression into pop culture... 

If there's one thing belatedly discovering the Rebecca Black anti-song brought home for me, it the re-appearance of this single word, "bullying." America's least favorite eighth grader deployed the term masterfully in an interview with Katie Couric, hitting all the right notes. According to CNN's narration,

 "Those hurtful comments really shocked me," Black, 13, tells the Daily Beast. "At times, it feels like I'm being cyberbullied."The worst words she's received? " 'I hope you cut yourself, and I hope you'll get an eating disorder so you'll look pretty,' " Black said on Friday's "Good Morning America." "When I first saw all the nasty comments, I did cry ... I don't think I'm the worst singer, but I don't think I'm the best."

The human desire to revel in the embarrassing follies of others is all the more mysterious for how well the sting of cruel laughter is known to us all. Yet while it might be satisfying to blame Ms. Black's (fortunate) bad fortune on a universal human failing it might also be nefarious. As with the "October Suicides" explanations that rely on infinite and tragic follies generally all suffer from the same symptom, that they obscure more obvious exposition. The true villains in Ms. Black's story are not the infinite, tragic, "all of us"--a literary concept finally personified in the pixilliated form of anonymous YOU TUBE comments. They are rather more finite. The villains here are Rebecca Black's parents.  

Not only did the Blacks 'drop a few Gs' for their 13 year old daughter to film a music video with a strange organization offering make believe stardom to the super young, they allowed her to appear alongside other scantily clad children singing about "Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)

Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah) Fun, fun, fun, fun" in what looked like a mix between a more suggestive Disney channel movie and one of Humbert Humbert’s more benign dreams. Oh, and Rebecca Black (code, in the child star's world for Rebecca Black's parents) are currently raking in $27,000 a week from the fruits of "nasty comments." (see my linked article) 

Yet the older Ms. Black had the gall to say this of her daughter's detractors to Katie Couric, 

"In all honesty, I probably could have killed a few people....but that probably would get me nowhere!"

No! Especially when the same people are lining your pockets with thousands of dollars every week you venal fucking sap.  

But of course our sympathy for the "bullied" blinds us to all of this. Malevolent, cruel, and preying on the weak, bullies make perfect villains for our time. If there is a single defining feature in the semantic apparatus of “bullying” in contemporary ideology it is that bullies are not political. Bullies lack ideological and financial interests; they are mean for the sake of meanness, cruel for the sake of cruelty. While the contemporary mythology of bullying suggests the bully as a proto-sociopath, in traditional Freudian terms the bully is a man without a subconscious. Unlike the rest of us, the bully’s personality is in this sense precisely not “split.” He is cruel because he really wants to be cruel. Bullies are the perfect enemy of a culture that (according to its autobiography of itself) has ceased to have an ideology, because they pose an enemy with no ideology as an opposite. “Hegel’s basic insight,” as always, is that we are our own opposite. As President Obama might put it, we are the bullies we have been looking for.  

Here is where the Rebecca Black’s two thousand dollar Karaoke game becomes an important lacuna. We are all bullies now!

And indeed, is this not basically the problem with the current intervention in Libya? In our military’s desire to “impose the no fly zone” without “directly supporting rebel forces” we are setting up Colonel Gadaffi to portray the US as “a bully.” Just like the biggest kid on the playground, we still have no idea what we want from Libya, or, more troubling, from ourselves. 

In Defense of "Bullying"--Or--What can Rebecca Black teach us about the Military Intervention in Libya?

In October of last year, there was quick succession of suicides committed by young gay men, mostly American teenagers, that caught the public eye. Seth Walsh hung himself in his backyard. Tyler Clementi jumped to his death from George Washington bridge. Billy Lucas, 15, hung himself, and Asher Brown, only 13, shot himself. Instead of coming to the obvious conclusion that these deaths, while self-inflicted, were commensurate with a culture that still tolerates publicly sanctioned bigotry so long as it is directed against gays and lesbians, America in her infinite wisdom decided to have a conversation about something else. We decided to talk about bullying. It might not be as likely that a child being picked on for a bad haircut would tie a rope around his neck and jump from a high place, but this way we could all manage to have a conversation about our own insecurities and feelings of harassment rather than the obvious reality of well financed and strategically positioned hate groups that sanction explicitly or implicitly the harassment of gay youth and yet are accepted as legitimate participants in our “democratic conversation.” Instead, we decided that we are all harassed. And who befitted from this rhetorical strategy the most? Parents who raise their children on the basis of these homophobic doctrines, who were able to separate instilling hate into their children from the fact that they "didn't raise them to be bullies." 

Like all serious moral and political issues, the semantics of "bullying" can only be drawn out properly with a long digression into pop culture... 

If there's one thing belatedly discovering the Rebecca Black anti-song brought home for me, it the re-appearance of this single meme, "bullying." America's least favorite eighth grader deployed the term masterfully in an interview with Katie Couric, hitting all the right notes. According to CNN's narration,

 "Those hurtful comments really shocked me," Black, 13, tells the Daily Beast. "At times, it feels like I'm being cyberbullied."The worst words she's received? " 'I hope you cut yourself, and I hope you'll get an eating disorder so you'll look pretty,' " Black said on Friday's "Good Morning America." "When I first saw all the nasty comments, I did cry ... I don't think I'm the worst singer, but I don't think I'm the best."

The human desire to revel in the embarrassing follies of others is all the more mysterious for how well the sting of cruel laughter is known to us all. Yet while it might be satisfying to blame Ms. Black's (fortunate) bad fortune on a universal human failing it might also be nefarious. As with the "October Suicides" explanations that rely on infinite and tragic follies generally all suffer from the same symptom, that they obscure more obvious exposition. The true villains in Ms. Black's story are not the infinite, tragic, "all of us"--a literary concept finally personified in the pixilliated form of anonymous YOU TUBE comments. They are rather more finite. The villains here are Rebecca Black's parents.  

Not only did the Blacks 'drop a few Gs' for their 13 year old daughter to film a music video with a strange organization offering make believe stardom to the super young, they allowed her to appear alongside other scantily clad children singing about "Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)

Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah) Fun, fun, fun, fun" in what looked like a mix between a more suggestive Disney channel movie and one of Humbert Humbert’s more benign dreams. Oh, and Rebecca Black (code, in the child star's world for Rebecca Black's parents) are currently raking in $27,000 a week from the fruits of "nasty comments." (see my linked article) 

Yet the older Ms. Black had the gall to say this of her daughter's detractors to Katie Couric, 

"In all honesty, I probably could have killed a few people....but that probably would get me nowhere!"

No! Especially when the same people are lining your pockets with thousands of dollars every week you venal fucking sap.  

But of course our sympathy for the "bullied" blinds us to all of this. Malevolent, cruel, and preying on the weak, bullies make perfect villains for our time. If there is a single defining feature in the semantic apparatus of “bullying” in contemporary ideology it is that bullies are not political. Bullies lack ideological and financial interests; they are mean for the sake of meanness, cruel for the sake of cruelty. While the contemporary mythology of bullying suggests the bully as a proto-sociopath, in traditional Freudian terms the bully is a man without a subconscious. Unlike the rest of us, the bully’s personality is in this sense precisely not “split.” He is cruel because he really wants to be cruel. Bullies are the perfect enemy of a culture that (according to its autobiography of itself) has ceased to have an ideology, because they pose an enemy with no ideology as an opposite. “Hegel’s basic insight,” as always, is that we are our own opposite. As President Obama might put it, we are the bullies we've been looking for.  

Here is where the Rebecca Black’s two thousand dollar karaoke video becomes an important lacuna. We are all bullies now!

And indeed, is this not basically the problem with the current intervention in Libya? In our military’s desire to “impose the no fly zone” without “directly supporting rebel forces” with further military action  we not up Colonel Gadaffi to portray the US as “a bully.” Just like the biggest kid on the playground, we still have no idea what we want from Libya, or, more troubling still, from ourselves.