Signifying Nothing - A Litany Of Modern Banalities
In the Middle Ages, the ban or banality was the power to command men in war, and evolved into the general authority to order and to punish. As such, it was the basis for the raising of armies and the exercise of justice. The word is of Germanic origin and first appears in fifth-century law codes. I doubt this is what Hannah Arendt had in mind when coining the phrase The Banality of Evil in reference to the trial of Adolf Eichmann - one of the chief architects of the Holocaust - but it seems appropriate nonetheless. This piece could probably be titled The Evil of Banality, as it attempts to confront some of the commonplace descriptors which help to enforce our world view; which in fact do more to obfuscate than to illuminate, and which could probably be dispensed with.
Let's begin with a personal favourite, The American Empire. It really is the least accurate description one could give to the military and financial cabal which dominates the world today. Power operates through a web of interconnected relations within and between political and economic spheres. Oil companies, weapons manufacturers and corporate finance are multinational interests. In the grand scheme of things, nation states serve only minor administrative roles, basically open air prisons for the peasantry. There is certainly an imperial ruling class. Call it the empire of global corporate capital. Call it the international bourgeoisie. Call it what you want, but calling it the American Empire is missing the point by a mile.
Speaking of threats to world peace and security, we also need to stop talking about radical Islamic terrorism. There really is no such thing. Today's terrorists are proxies, armed, trained and funded to do the dirty work of the ruling elites: multinational oil companies, weapons manufacturers and bankers - the same people who own your politicians and write your laws. Islam did not create ISIS or al Qaeda any more than Jews created the state of Israel.
"I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough". "If in fact compromise is not coming, the traditional way America gets to war is what would be best for US interests" - Patrick Clawson, Washington Institute for Near East Studies.
Next on my list of personal peeves is blowback. If I read one more article explaining that "the cause of present-day Jihadist terrorism is the calamitous decision of George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard to invade Iraq in 2003" I think my head may explode. Enough with the liberal apologetics already! The idea that 'jihadist terrorism' is 'blowback' is an insidious lie which serves to perpetuate genocide by reinforcing the myth that we are fighting a 'just war' against 'terrorism'. Framing 'terrorism' as a 'reaction' that can be easily understood in response to the West's war crimes is misleading and inaccurate. Once again, ISIS and al Qaeda are not a 'reaction' to US foreign policy. They are U.S. foreign policy. These terrorist groups continue to be DIRECTLY armed, trained and funded by the West.
Chinese market socialism is another banality I've no time for. China is socialist in name only - what Lenin called social imperialist. There is no place for a market economy under socialism. The fundamental principle of socialism is NO PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF PROPERTY. You could lecture me about how China's win win approach to economic development is transforming the global south, but you'd be wrong. Chinese investment contributes measurably little in terms of human development in Africa and Latin America. Like all large institutional capital flows it serves mainly to increase the wealth of the already wealthy.
It is peer to peer remittances which account for the lion’s share of international cash flows – NOT foreign direct investment, NOT foreign aid, NOT loans from the IMF or World Bank, which by and large are either siphoned off into large private bank accounts, or go to fund narco states, prop up dictators and arm terrorists. By contrast, the vast pool of relatively small person to person payments which flow mostly from hardworking migrant workers to their families at home is channeled directly into the pockets of the desperately poor, who use it to pay for food and basic services, which in turn helps to develop local economies.
China is not socialist, nor is it the powerhouse of the global economy. It’s not ‘free trade’ or ‘foreign investment’ which drives economic growth in developing countries. If anything, it’s the blood and toil of roughly 260 million migrant workers. And since we're here, let's stop talking about free trade as well. There is no 'free trade', just as there is no 'free market'. We have a rigged market economy in which preferential bilateral and multilateral trade deals are foisted upon weaker economies under duress, usually accompanied by tariffs and sanctions. Nothing is free.
But but but... China's economic miracle has lifted 800 million people out of poverty!
Can we please dispense with this 'lifting people out of poverty' claptrap too? Giving people higher wages while taking away social services which were once taken for granted is not lifting people out of poverty. Taking them away from their family farm which provided for all their needs and giving them a job in a factory in a city a thousand miles away and a shoe box to sleep in is not lifting people out of poverty. Putting a dollar in their pocket while denying them the right to live off the land is not lifting people out of poverty. 'Lifting people out of poverty' is a purely economic metric which belongs to the discourse of capitalism. It is seldom a measure of human development, and all too often a measure of human misery.
Climate change is another deliberately vague banality which we whine about, while doing literally nothing to address. In the grand narrative, solutions currently on offer tend to focus on putting the cost of mitigation onto developing countries, keeping them poor and ripe for exploitation; on individual direct action, recycling, consuming less (probably a good idea, but missing the point), and on investment in alternative (equally destructive in the short term, but good for business) technologies. Meanwhile NOBODY is talking about shutting down the military industrial complex - the single biggest carbon emitter on the planet. NOBODY is talking about ending capitalist imperialism, the very engine which drives our march to extinction.
The destruction of capital through crises is a key concept in Marx's understanding of capitalist economic crisis. Currently it seems the ruling class have two options: Either a major war (favoured by neoconservatives), or wiping out the fossil fuel industry (favoured by neoliberals.) Either way, vast amounts of capital need to be destroyed in order to restart the process of capital accumulation, until the next crisis. This is why we see billionaires spruiking the need for 'climate action'. They don't give a shit about saving the planet. They want to preserve the economic system from which they benefit.
I'll skip right over democracy and freedom, which seem almost too ubiquitous to mention, and give a quick shout out to race before closing. Skin pigmentation in human beings evolved by a process of natural selection primarily to regulate the amount of ultraviolet radiation penetrating the skin, controlling its biochemical effects. Also, women don't have penises. We are one race and two genders, and that is all there is.
Arendt wrote of Eichmann, "What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such."
This is the danger we face when we allow ourselves to just go along with fabricated words and ideas. Words like democracy and freedom, socialism and fascism, become weaponised against us. They are plucked from their historical context, imbued with new meaning, and plastered anywhere and everywhere. They are subverted and inverted and finally internalised, leaving us bamboozled, lacking the proper conceptual tools to accurately describe our world, and before we know it, speaking the language of the oppressor.
Let's begin with a personal favourite, The American Empire. It really is the least accurate description one could give to the military and financial cabal which dominates the world today. Power operates through a web of interconnected relations within and between political and economic spheres. Oil companies, weapons manufacturers and corporate finance are multinational interests. In the grand scheme of things, nation states serve only minor administrative roles, basically open air prisons for the peasantry. There is certainly an imperial ruling class. Call it the empire of global corporate capital. Call it the international bourgeoisie. Call it what you want, but calling it the American Empire is missing the point by a mile.
Speaking of threats to world peace and security, we also need to stop talking about radical Islamic terrorism. There really is no such thing. Today's terrorists are proxies, armed, trained and funded to do the dirty work of the ruling elites: multinational oil companies, weapons manufacturers and bankers - the same people who own your politicians and write your laws. Islam did not create ISIS or al Qaeda any more than Jews created the state of Israel.
"I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough". "If in fact compromise is not coming, the traditional way America gets to war is what would be best for US interests" - Patrick Clawson, Washington Institute for Near East Studies.
Next on my list of personal peeves is blowback. If I read one more article explaining that "the cause of present-day Jihadist terrorism is the calamitous decision of George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard to invade Iraq in 2003" I think my head may explode. Enough with the liberal apologetics already! The idea that 'jihadist terrorism' is 'blowback' is an insidious lie which serves to perpetuate genocide by reinforcing the myth that we are fighting a 'just war' against 'terrorism'. Framing 'terrorism' as a 'reaction' that can be easily understood in response to the West's war crimes is misleading and inaccurate. Once again, ISIS and al Qaeda are not a 'reaction' to US foreign policy. They are U.S. foreign policy. These terrorist groups continue to be DIRECTLY armed, trained and funded by the West.
Chinese market socialism is another banality I've no time for. China is socialist in name only - what Lenin called social imperialist. There is no place for a market economy under socialism. The fundamental principle of socialism is NO PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF PROPERTY. You could lecture me about how China's win win approach to economic development is transforming the global south, but you'd be wrong. Chinese investment contributes measurably little in terms of human development in Africa and Latin America. Like all large institutional capital flows it serves mainly to increase the wealth of the already wealthy.
It is peer to peer remittances which account for the lion’s share of international cash flows – NOT foreign direct investment, NOT foreign aid, NOT loans from the IMF or World Bank, which by and large are either siphoned off into large private bank accounts, or go to fund narco states, prop up dictators and arm terrorists. By contrast, the vast pool of relatively small person to person payments which flow mostly from hardworking migrant workers to their families at home is channeled directly into the pockets of the desperately poor, who use it to pay for food and basic services, which in turn helps to develop local economies.
China is not socialist, nor is it the powerhouse of the global economy. It’s not ‘free trade’ or ‘foreign investment’ which drives economic growth in developing countries. If anything, it’s the blood and toil of roughly 260 million migrant workers. And since we're here, let's stop talking about free trade as well. There is no 'free trade', just as there is no 'free market'. We have a rigged market economy in which preferential bilateral and multilateral trade deals are foisted upon weaker economies under duress, usually accompanied by tariffs and sanctions. Nothing is free.
But but but... China's economic miracle has lifted 800 million people out of poverty!
Can we please dispense with this 'lifting people out of poverty' claptrap too? Giving people higher wages while taking away social services which were once taken for granted is not lifting people out of poverty. Taking them away from their family farm which provided for all their needs and giving them a job in a factory in a city a thousand miles away and a shoe box to sleep in is not lifting people out of poverty. Putting a dollar in their pocket while denying them the right to live off the land is not lifting people out of poverty. 'Lifting people out of poverty' is a purely economic metric which belongs to the discourse of capitalism. It is seldom a measure of human development, and all too often a measure of human misery.
Climate change is another deliberately vague banality which we whine about, while doing literally nothing to address. In the grand narrative, solutions currently on offer tend to focus on putting the cost of mitigation onto developing countries, keeping them poor and ripe for exploitation; on individual direct action, recycling, consuming less (probably a good idea, but missing the point), and on investment in alternative (equally destructive in the short term, but good for business) technologies. Meanwhile NOBODY is talking about shutting down the military industrial complex - the single biggest carbon emitter on the planet. NOBODY is talking about ending capitalist imperialism, the very engine which drives our march to extinction.
The destruction of capital through crises is a key concept in Marx's understanding of capitalist economic crisis. Currently it seems the ruling class have two options: Either a major war (favoured by neoconservatives), or wiping out the fossil fuel industry (favoured by neoliberals.) Either way, vast amounts of capital need to be destroyed in order to restart the process of capital accumulation, until the next crisis. This is why we see billionaires spruiking the need for 'climate action'. They don't give a shit about saving the planet. They want to preserve the economic system from which they benefit.
I'll skip right over democracy and freedom, which seem almost too ubiquitous to mention, and give a quick shout out to race before closing. Skin pigmentation in human beings evolved by a process of natural selection primarily to regulate the amount of ultraviolet radiation penetrating the skin, controlling its biochemical effects. Also, women don't have penises. We are one race and two genders, and that is all there is.
Arendt wrote of Eichmann, "What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such."
This is the danger we face when we allow ourselves to just go along with fabricated words and ideas. Words like democracy and freedom, socialism and fascism, become weaponised against us. They are plucked from their historical context, imbued with new meaning, and plastered anywhere and everywhere. They are subverted and inverted and finally internalised, leaving us bamboozled, lacking the proper conceptual tools to accurately describe our world, and before we know it, speaking the language of the oppressor.
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