#international_relations

China’s Deflation – GS Paper 2 – International Relations

The Blog

While the elimination of symbols of the Confederacy may be a necessary, if belated, way of combating injustice, we must be careful not to be drawn into a battle of symbols that is ultimately as superficial as the symbols themselves.

That is the warning issued by top social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein. Alluding to the apparent distinctions between the flag of the US federal government and the former Confederacy, Wallerstein wrote, "It is all too easy in the struggle against one noxious set of symbols to install in our collective value system another noxious set of symbols". Included was of course the recognition that "symbols matter", but what matters more is changing what the symbols stood for. The absence of Confederate flags would have done nothing to prevent the numerous police killings of unarmed Black people that continue to stain the reputation of the United States as a supposedly multiracial and tolerant society. Removing the Confederate flag does not guarantee "less racism" as racism is a deeper problem than the allegiance to a flag (a contagion that exists everywhere today including among government officials and is not unique to racists in any way). Wallerstein reminds us that symbols, as with many institutions of the modern state, are designed to exclude and even kill people on an arbitrary basis. Dislike of something as trivial as women's headwear in Europe is now the basis for much discrimination and also political discussion in western countries now, which represents a fascination with superficial cultural trappings and scapegoats. Ultimately, all people in the human family are part of multiple and overlapping groups and we have to make compromises about symbols rather than getting into some kind of match where one symbol of a murderous state is pitted against another symbol of a murderous state, as if one is really the antithesis of the other.

Dying, #EricHarris yelled he was losing breath. An officer responded, “F*ck your breath.” http://t.co/h68DMCqiit pic.twitter.com/jfJPFKWOLX

— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) July 1, 2015

The Blog

The clubof.info Blog

The boy who cried wolf is no longer able to convince the American public. The case against Iran is exposed as a lie and those who repeat it, traitors.

This was the view of Chad Nelson writing at Counterpunch on 9 March, after the recent debacle of Benjamin Netanyahu's 3 March plea before the United States Congress to undermine the US negotiations with Iran and insist on maintaining threats of aggression against that country. Increasingly, "most sane Americans" are aware of the fact that the case against Iran is a lie. Seeing that Netanyahu only wants to send the United States' powerful armies to wage a new war, Americans "largely opposed" his speech. Netanyahu had already been "trumpeting the same dire warnings for decades", repeatedly stating that Iran was three years away from a nuclear weapon - even twenty years ago. By entertaining the lies of Netanyahu and taking the side of military aggression and prejudice against Iran, the US Congress is only proving itself to be not just unpopular but illegitimate and unaccountable. This is as Nelson argues:

The growing disconnect between the US government’s staunch support of Israel and the American public’s disagreement with that support is best explained by Lysander Spooner’s No Treason No. 6, in which Spooner says of Congress, “these pretended agents of the people are really the agents of nobody.” For if members of Congress were legitimately acting as our agents, we would be “responsible for all acts done within the limits of the power entrusted to [Congress].” That constituents are not held legally responsible for the actions of their Congressional “representatives” says much about the purported agency, or lack thereof.

The clubof.info Blog adds that the negotiations with Iran are only taking place because the technologically "gifted" Zionist state lobbied the United States to destroy any regional scientific or technological developments that might deter Zionist crimes. According to United Nations resolutions and the opinions of international civil society, the Zionist regime's escalating crimes against humanity have already included annexation, aggression, genocide and infanticide. These crimes have always been met with the disgust, fear and mass walk-outs of the international community, who consider the Zionist regime rather than Iran as a grave threat to world peace.

The clubof.info Blog

The clubof.info Blog

In a feature-length article at the website of Asian broadcaster Press TV, futurist author Harry J. Bentham questions the future of US military power.

From the article:

First, ask yourself this: what is this Empire, and who does it serve? It can be argued in good faith that the special interest groups, those gentlemen setting the objectives of American foreign policy, are the same ones who once played monopoly using the British Empire.

Much of the article appeals not to left-wing critics of US foreign policy, but to self-labelled American patriots. "If America’s many patriots can be reasoned with - if it is possible to reach their hearts, past the propaganda and money that glamorize the squander of American military power - let them know that they are being used" the op-ed argues. Although stating that patriotism is a concept alien to the futurist political discourse, the op-ed makes the case that giving up lives and fortunes on foreign battlefields that don't help the nation does not fit with idea of patriotic virtue.

In what may not strike a chord with more conservative patriots, though, the long version of the article makes the case that the US should focus more on the social ills at home rather than remaking the world in America's image:

The growing social failures and the proliferation of misery in places like Chicago, where law enforcers indulge in torture and terrorism against people on account of the color of their skin, demand the full attention of all who profess to love America. It is a time like this, when messianic and utopian foreign policy aimed at reshaping other countries like Ukraine or Syria in America’s image belies the dystopic and doomed course that the US government has taken at home. 

The op-ed blames the decline of America's moral and political standing with other countries on "courtiers of international power", who ironically do not consider themselves as patriots.

The clubof.info Blog

@cnels43.

Wear this defiant symbol in the form of the L'Ordre Dissident Apparel

In his ongoing quest to remain relevant, Rudy Giuliani recently accused president Barack Obama of not loving America. In the ensuing outrage, Giuliani quickly backpedaled, clarifying that he doesn’t doubt Obama’s love of country, but instead believes Obama’s policies are wrongheaded, representative of someone who doesn’t know what’s in America’s best interests, as set forth in the Rudy Giuliani Handbook for Patriotism.

I Don’t Love America Either, Rudy » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names http://t.co/cwOLsnXkC3 — Chad Nelson (@cnels43) February 28, 2015

I must confess to Giuliani and all of the other nationalists in government: I don’t love America either. For starters, it’s worth quoting eminent scholar and semanticist Alfred Korzybski: “The map is not the territory.” What Korzybski meant is that no linguistic construct or model used to describe an existential “thing” should be confused for the thing itself. Attempts to substitute the map for the territory fail for many different reasons, not the least of which is that people will always interpret the map as representing different things, in accordance with their own subjective experiences. When Rudy Giuliani declares that someone doesn’t love America, he defines America like most other hyperstatists — America as a political entity. The America that you can literally point to on a map, and whose borders have grown in proportion to the American military state’s aggression and brutality. The America Giuliani loves is the one made up of, first and foremost, its government, which Giuliani and his fellow American exceptionalists claim have “allowed” for the greatest freedom and prosperity in mankind’s history. Giuliani and his ilk love the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, the court system which Giuliani once worked the levers of, and all the American state’s arbitrarily drawn political sub-entities (states and cities) — one of which he ruled with an iron fist for many years. Love of America, for Giuliani, means love of its political infrastructure. No number of pictures of Giuliani at Yankees games will convince me otherwise. Giuliani’s definition of America is a far cry from the one most Americans envision, myself included. I don’t love the American government. I have no reverence for the Constitution, nor for any part of the state machinery, which to me, doesn’t represent America at all. The things that Giuliani loves about America are irrelevant to the freedom and prosperity Americans have so often enjoyed, good fortune which Giuliani wrongly attributes to the state. I love food, music, books, movies, language, ideas and innovations, especially those molded by some of the people who live in the region Giuliani calls America. But I love those things regardless of where they’ve came from, be it America, Canada, Africa, or the Middle East. In short, I love the human ingenuity that is the driving force behind those things. And I am in awe of the process (not thing) called culture that serves as a kiln in which many of those creations have been formed. So while we’re on this debate about who does and doesn’t love America, count me as a no vote so long as tyrants like Giuliani are setting the bounds of the debate.

Citations to this article

Chad Nelson, I Don’t Love America Either, Rudy, CounterPunch, 02/27/15

Chad Nelson | More articles by Chad Nelson

Originally published at C4SS on 25 February 2015 CC0 1.1