Humanitarians With Guillotines

“Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. . . .Certainly if the harm done by willful criminals were to be computed, the number of murders, the extent of damage and loss, would be found negligible in the sum total of death and devastation wrought upon human beings by their kind. Therefore it is obvious that in periods when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object. . . .

Certainly the slaughter committed from time to time by barbarians invading settled regions, or the capricious cruelties of avowed tyrants, would not add up to one-tenth the horrors perpetrated by rulers with good intentions. . . .

It may be said, and it may be true, that [the Nazis and Communists] are vicious hypocrites; that their conscious objective was evil from the beginning; nonetheless, they could not have come by the power at all except with the consent and assistance of good people.

The Communist regime in Russia gained control by promising the peasants land, in terms the promisers knew to be a lie as understood. Having gained power, the Communists took from the peasants the land they already owned – and exterminated those who resisted. This was done by plan and intention; and the lie was praised as “social engineering,” by socialist admirers in America. . . .

The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action….

…If the full roll of sincere philanthropists were called, from the beginning of time, it would be found that all of them together by their strictly philanthropic activities have never conferred upon humanity one-tenth of the benefit derived from the normally self-interested efforts of Thomas Alva Edison, to say nothing of the greater minds who worked out the scientific principles which Edison applied. Innumerable speculative thinkers, inventors, and organizers, have contributed to the comfort, health, and happiness of their fellow men — because that was not their objective.

When Robert Owen tried to run a factory for efficient production, the process incidentally improved some very unpromising characters among his employees, who had been on relief, and were therefore sadly degraded; Owen made money for himself; and while so engaged, it occurred to him that if better wages were paid, production could be increased, having made its own market. That was sensible and true. But then Owen became inspired with a humanitarian ambition, to do good to everybody. He collected a lot of humanitarians, in an experimental colony; they were all so intent upon doing good to others that nobody did a lick of work; the colony dissolved acrimoniously; Owen went broke and died mildly crazy. So the important principle he had glimpsed had to wait a century to be rediscovered…”

Sentier 2 and Franco-Israeli Money Laundering

“SocGen is one of four banks due to appear at the Paris criminal court in the trial known as “Sentier 2″, due to its links with the capital’s Sentier textile district.

The other three banks in the case are HSBC (HSBA.L) unit Societe Marseillaise de Credit (SMC), Barclays France (BARC.L) and National Bank of Pakistan.

SocGen Chairman Daniel Bouton and three other officials at the bank are due to appear at the Paris criminal court in connection with the case.

In July 2006, a French magistrate ruled that more than 130 bankers should face money laundering charges in connection with an alleged cheque scam in the late 1990s.

The alleged money laundering took place between 1996 and 2001 in the Sentier area of the city and involved stolen or fraudulent cheques shuttled between France and Israel…”

Kagawa of Japan On Pulpit Versus Practice

“There are theologians, preachers and religious leaders, not a few, who think that the essential thing about Christianity is to clothe Christ with forms and formulas. They look with disdain upon those who actually follow Christ and toil and moil, motivated by brotherly love and passion to serve. . .They conceive pulpit religion to be much more refined than movements for the actual realizations of brotherly love among men. . The religion Jesus taught was diametrically the opposite of this. He set up no definitions about God, but taught the actual practical practice of love.”

The Erasure of Memory in The Total State

“This term “intellectual” having being identified with “liberal” it scarcely is surprising that Lionel Trilling discovered no conservative intellectuals; one might as well have sought for carnivorous vegetarians. But actually the man of intellectual strength need not be alienated from his cultural patrimony and his society; he may be a member of what Coleridge called the clerisy….

“Because it flourishes upon rootlessness among the masses, the total state detests and endeavors to obliterate knowledge of the past. ” A sense of the past is far more basic to the maintenance of freedom than hope for the future… Hence the relentless effort by totalitarian governments to destroy memory…”

– Excerpted, with a long elision, from pages 485-487 of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.

You’ll find essentially the same argument in The Language of Empire where I argue that commercial news media, advertising, and entertainment (from soap dramas and sports to court-room dramas and pornography) all combine in various ways to fragment and destroy memory making it easier to impose state propaganda onto public consciousness. The erasure and manipulation of memory was precisely what was at work in the Abu Ghraib torture - the effacing of cultural identity and sexual identity.

In Klein’s Shock Doctrine, this argument is appropriated and reversed, and torture becomes the logical outcome of capitalist profit-seeking, instead of statist power-seeking.

(I’ll be going through the book and compiling the many points of resemblance between her argument and mine, as well as hers and Peter Linebaugh’s and others whom she doesn’t cite).

Again (without making any allegations), I note the following resemblances:

(1) Kubark manual and its connection to Abu Ghraib

(2) Erasure of memory through terror (shock) in the population in order to create impose a new reality. She says the new reality is the capitalist market economy; I argue it’s the propaganda of the state; analysis of the term “rapid dominance”

(3) Connecting terrorist attacks on New York to terror bombing in Iraq to the shock of torture.

(4) Connecting apocalyptic terror in some forms of Christianity to emphasis on “terror” in the Promethean (neoconservative) ideology of the Bush administration. She changes my indictment of neo-conservatism to an indictment of capitalism.

(5) I blame neoconservative ideology and trace its roots to Leninism and to an ideology of power, to Machiavellianism. She blames capitalism and traces its roots to Milton Friedman and Hayek.

(6) In articles preceding my book, I charge that the Asian tsunami might be connected to nuclear testing and state weapons research and allege pre-knowledge and failure to assist on the part of the state. She connects the tsunami to corporate profiteering.

(7) In an article published before my book, I connect Katrina to the failure of the federal government and the state’s forced gentrification program through housing. She connects Katrina to capitalist profiteering.

(8) I mention Ewan Cameron at a central part of the book. She does too. I connect it to state behavioral modification research. She connects it to the Chicago School of Economics.

(9) I show the similarity of CIA torture techniques to Nazi and to Soviet techniques and to their mind-control programs. She does not mention the Soviets (who were actually ahead of the US on several counts). I need to double check this more carefully.

(10) I notice a repetitive symbolism of towers, which I use to draw attention to a non-monolithic, fragmented reality which the state wishes to erase but which resurfaces nonetheless as a “real” of history (drawing on my studies of the writing of Deleuze, a post-structuralist thinker whose work is compatible with individualist and anti-state thinking and with chaos theory and complexity).

I reference Deleuze sub-textually in my first book.

I use a similar technique in “Mobs” - of subtextual linking through imagery.

My book (being my first) had to be written within a word count given to me by my publisher, and it was written as a media text, since they and I did not have the resources/name that would allow me to undertake a larger project. The arguments, though complex and I think convincing, had to be fitted into a shorter length and into a more academic frame-work. Still, you’ll see all Klein’s main points made in my book, in relation to the state.

Considering that the manuscript and several closely related articles were published in December 2004 - 2005, and given that the book was sent to every major liberal-left opinion journal and outlet, and that Klein began writing her book only in 2004 and published it only in 2007, it’s hard for me to believe that she didn’t see any of it.

I was writing quite a bit for Dissident Voice and Counterpunch then, and she cites Counterpunch on other things.

Check out the dates of my pieces on this site, the number of hits they got, and the reprints. and you’ll see it’s hard to believe a serious researcher on the subject could’ve have missed them.

Another coincidence: the GetAbstract business award which “Mobs” won in 2008 was previously awarded to Benoit Mandelbrot, who was the father of modern complexity theory, as well as to Nicholas Taleb (2007), whose work also draws on complexity theory. Taleb and Mandelbrot are in fact collaborating on new work.

Now, Klein’s book was recently awarded a newly-created Warwick Prize under the theme “complexity”. The prize was awarded just this year, 2009. Could this be a way to counter the identification of complexity theory with market-based “spontaneous order”?

I have no way of knowing and I’m making no allegations. Merely noting the points of coincidence and wondering aloud….

To be fair, people can arrive at similar ideas and even imagery simultaneously without reading or being influenced directly by each others. Also, I have a lot of respect for Klein’s antiwar reporting in the Guardian. Hers was a much needed voice. And, again, to the extent that Shock Doctrine draws attention to the negative impact of globalization and points out how free trade is “managed” - that too is a very good thing and deserves the widest hearing. Also, at first glance, the Cato Institute critique which I referenced earlier, does not seem fair to the book in calling it poorly researched. It seems well-documented from the number of citations. Of course, I haven’t followed through and pinpointed whether they actually support her text, but there are certainly plenty of them and of good quality.

There’s also the possibility that the lumping together of various people might be from pure ignorance (though it’s hard to believe that). It’s quite possible she really doesn’t know the difference between the old right and the new right, between Friedman, the Austrians, Sachs and Rubin…or perhaps doesn’t think the differences are important enough to matter.

But that would be amazingly shoddy, given that she’s trying to critique capitalism. You’d think it would be a good thing to know what it was first.

Jerusalem Likely to Abandon Plans for More Light Rail Lines

Mayor Nir Barkat sees their cost as the primary problem and envisions BRT

The Jerusalem Post reports that new Mayor Nir Barkat will cancel the light rail program envisioned for Israel’s capital after the completion of the two initial lines currently under construction. Building the line has caused major headaches in the city core, and Mr. Barkat’s election win last year was in part due to his opposition to the continuation of the project, which would include five more lines. The two lines being built today, however, have been sped up since Mr. Barkat took office and will be completed by 2010 as I reported previously.

The mayor’s solution is bus rapid transit, because the buses would be “a fifth of the price and much easier to deploy” than light rail. “I cannot sign on it yet, but most likely those routes will be BRTs and not trains. [They are] much faster to deploy and they provide practically very similar, if not the same [results]. We are now working on those plans and I believe that with new, fresh thinking we could probably converge on a network that will serve the city faster, easier and cheaper,” said Mr. Barkat to the Post.

What’s unfortunate about the mayor’s opinion is that it is far from a reflection of reality. It’s true that bus rapid transit can be cheaper, but only when it provides significantly lower levels of service. In other words, you can label a bus “BRT” and it won’t cost any more than a traditional bus, but it won’t be rapid. A true “BRT,” with similar levels of service that light rail can provide - in terms of capacity, speed, and comfort - would cost just as much to implement because it would need dedicated lanes completely separated from automobiles, and special, expensive vehicles.

What Mr. Barkat is really saying is that he simply doesn’t want to invest as much of his city’s funds in transit.

But consider this: Jerusalem, with a population of 750,000 spread out over an area of 48 square miles, is virtually identical in form to San Francisco, with a population of 800,000 on a peninsula 47 square miles large. And while the former city has two light rail lines under construction, the latter has a heavy rail line serving its suburbs (BART), and a large network of light rail serving much of the city (Muni Metro). Like Jerusalem, San Francisco has been resorting recently to “cheaper” BRT on the important Geary and Van Ness corridors, using the argument that BRT allows it to serve more people for less money. But the heavy use of BART and Muni suggest that rail can attract higher ridership and provide better service; San Francisco’s high rate of non-automobile commuting attests to the city’s success in providing good transit through rail. Jerusalem should consider that comparison before jumping for underperforming BRT.

A Solution to Transit Disorganization: Merger

Ontario’s GO Transit and Metrolinx to be combined into one agency

In the Toronto region, the Toronto Transit Commission provides transit service within the city and GO Transit, a separate agency, runs buses and commuter rail throughout the rest of the region, from Hamilton in the west to Oshawa in the east. Today, an agency called Metrolinx serves as a master planner, deciding which transit lines will be built and how much to subsidize each service, though the two other agencies contribute to the discussion with their own projects and plans. Yesterday, however, Ontario Transport Minister Jim Bradley announced that the province would attempt to legislate a merger between GO Transit and Metrolinx into a broader agency that would have the power both to plan transport services and to provide them. The TTC, under the direct control of the city of Toronto, will remain separate.

The province makes a good point in arguing that consolidating transit planning and service provision will provide better, more efficient transit and quicker implementation of major projects. I’ve pointed out in the past that major discombobulation between transit agencies and a regional planner produces difficulties for average riders attempting to use the systems and ultimately slows down project completion timetables.

The merger, for all its good aspects, is problematic in its proposed execution. Regional chairs who currently sit on the board of Metrolinx would be replaced by transportation “experts” who supposedly would make better decisions about how to invest limited funds. The change in policy is an open challenge to local politicians who want to have a say in how transit is used in their areas. The city of Toronto, which is the biggest contributor of funds towards regional planning, would lose out in the process as it would lose political authority over the agency, though the new vice-chair of the agency promises that “the new body will consult with all the stakeholders.” How believable is that?

While they are advantages of having “experts” control the decision-making process, ultimately, politicians should be determining how to use public funds; otherwise, these public bodies cease to be democratic organisms. We have a collective responsibility to keep public decisions as democratic as possible, so let’s hope to see these merger plans altered over the next few.