Adbusters #100: Are We Happy Yet?

Display until April 9, 2012

$8.95 Mar/Apr 2012 Vol.20 No.2

AMERICA

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Emilio Morenatti/AP Images

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Reuters/Amr Dalsh

Nick Whalen, nickwhalen.com

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Reuters/Amr Dalsh

Nick Whalen, nickwhalen.com

2100–

Daniel Beltra

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06.

Economic and ecological collapse are averted by reinventing the industrial, transportation, nutritional and communications paradigms that currently rule our lives. In this scenario, consumer culture is revamped; the American dream reimagined; and a level playing field between living and future generations becomes the new reality.

Human society, along with the planet we inhabit, is sustained.

07.

If we do not rise to the challenge, then future generations will have to deal with collapsed ecosystems and irreversible economic decline on a permanently degraded planet. No technology, no austerity measure however severe, will be able to stop the descent into ecocide.

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Daniel Beltra

Hyers and Mebane hyersandmebane.com

ted, and its than initially predic is happening faster more extreme of m y upon us in the for ead alr are s act imp acidification, ertification, ocean weather events, des sea levels. incrementally rising melting glaciers and

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Daniel Beltra

Tommaso Ausili/Contrasto

The scientists who construct the computer models that analyze climate data believe that even if we stop dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, CO2 levels are already so high that we are locked into a significant increase in global temperatures.

Disruptive climate change is a certainty even if we make the economic shift away from fossil fuels.

Incipient climate change is already starting to express itself in the realm of politics.

Climate change arrives in a world primed for crisis. The current and impending dislocations of climate change intersect with the already-existing crises of poverty and violence. I call this collision of political, economic and environmental disasters the catastrophic convergence. By catastrophic convergence, I do not merely mean that several disasters happen simultaneously, one atop another. Rather, I argue that problems compound and amplify each other, one expressing itself through another.

Societies, like people, deal with new challenges in ways that are conditioned by the traumas of their past. Thus, damaged societies, like damaged people, often respond to new crises in ways that are irrational, shortsighted, and self-destructive. In the case of climate change, the prior traumas that set the stage for bad adaptation, the destructive social response, are Cold War– era militarism and the economic pathologies of neoliberal capitalism. Over the last 40 years, both of these forces have distorted the state’s relationship to society – removing and undermining the state’s collectivist, regulatory and redistributive functions, while overdeveloping its repressive and military capacities. This, I argue, inhibits society’s ability to avoid violent dislocations as climate change kicks in.

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, THE FIVE OF US HAD ENOUGH MONEY OUR VEHICLES AND WEAPONS TO FORM BEGAN OWN LITTLE GUERRILLA GROUP. WE .

ION RAT PLANNING OUR FIRST OPE

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Excerpted from, Voices from Iraq by Mark Kukis. Copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

I knew from my reading of history what was coming – an occupation. None of us figured Saddam’s regime would survive the American invasion. The only question on our minds was what to do after the collapse. My first connection to the insurgency was through writers and intellectuals who, like me, had spoken out through published articles before the collapse about what was to come and what should be done. We shared an ideological view about the coming occupation, and we began thinking how we might act.

The first serious discussion about forming a resistance I took part in came about three weeks before the fall of Baghdad. There were about 64 of us. We met at a farmhouse south of Baghdad. We were all different ages. We all had different backgrounds, different levels of education. But all of us had two things in common: we had all been imprisoned under Saddam, and we were all Sunnis.

The purpose of the meeting was to come up with a plan, basically, on how to organize a resistance.

There were four senior figures who led the meeting. I cannot reveal the names, however, because several of them are still prominent figures in politics and religious affairs today.

The first thing we decided to do was to reach out to all the Sunni officers in the regime and urge them not to fight the Americans. It was no use to see them die for Saddam Hussein. We would need them for our cause. They had military experience, and they knew where to find all the weapons.

Why just the Sunnis? There were a lot of Shi’ite officers, nationalist men, who might have been interested in your cause.

We did not want to complicate things. A lot of us, myself included, were very conservative religiously. But that was not the point. We did not want to waste time on arguments over religion.

Doing so would have been a distraction. That’s why we excluded Shi’ites. We knew there would be conflicts about that but our base of support then was basically conservative rural Sunnis.

So we just decided to avoid this whole problem mostly for organization purposes, not sectarian or ideological reasons. Look, reaching out to former Ba’athist officers in Saddam’s army was already complicated enough. Most of us hated them and their socialist ideological view and their years serving the old regime. But we knew we needed them. They had military experience, and they knew where to find weapons. When the meeting broke up, we had all vowed to go out and recruit as many Sunni officers as we could to the cause and gather as much money as we might find from sympathizers. We agreed to meet again on the first of May. We all figured Saddam would be out of power by then at the latest, and that would be our time to begin.

The area where I was living at the time was home to many Iraqi army officers, and I personally recruited about 11 high-ranking officers and about

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50 in lower ranks. I convinced them to keep whatever weapons they could find in a safe place and be ready to start the real war, the one that was coming. By the time Baghdad fell, altogether we gathered enough weapons to fight for three years, we estimated. We gathered a lot of money also in the days of the looting. A lot of the looting was organized by gangs. We went to the heads of these gangs after the fall and demanded half of what they had taken, for the cause. They knew we were serious. They knew that we had been gathering men and weapons, and they did not argue with us. In return for half the money, we promised to leave them alone from then on.

We met again as planned at the same place. There were a lot of arguments, of course. We had a lot of money and weapons, and some in the group were getting greedy. They wanted shares of money to support their families and so on. Some in the group were putting forward ideas about forming an Islamic state led by an emir. Others in the group like me were more concerned about coming up with attack strategies and getting started right away with strikes. That meeting broke up without any firm decisions or directives, but it didn’t matter. We had set things in motion with all the work we had done. We had opened the field for anyone who wanted to fight.

I decided along with a few close friends of mine to ignore all these political arguments and simply get started with what we meant to do, fight the occupation. We had among ourselves enough money, vehicles and weapons to form our own little guerrilla group. Five of us began planning our first operation, a roadside bomb on Canal Street in Baghdad near a newly built American base.

To begin, none of us had experience in explosives. So we had to be taught how to make the device. There was an Egyptian from al-Qaeda who showed us how.

You mean from Osama bin Laden’s followers in Pakistan and Afghanistan?

Yes. He had come from Afghanistan, through Pakistan and Iran to Iraq. From our group we dedicated an engineer who took lessons from this Egyptian. He was a typical Egyptian al-Qaeda guy. He had felt oppressed by the Egyptian government and had gone to join the fighters in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion there. He had worked in Iraq in the oil fields in the 1970s, however, so he knew the place pretty well. He knew the roads. He knew the accent.

And he had come to Iraq for jihad after the Americans invaded.

friction to set it off. Then after you have a proper hole you put in a little C-4 explosive. On top of that you put a blasting cap or primer. We put several blasting caps, actually, because they were from old Iraqi stores and might be busted. When we were done making the bomb we carried it out of the mosque, all five of us. A lot of people saw us.

Everyone knew what we were doing. No one said anything to us. We had made the thing in front of many people in the mosque. Even children were running around us playing as we worked.

We made our way to the road. There were some shepherds there with sheep. They saw us planting the bomb but said nothing. It all seemed like a game, honestly. A game you might play as a child. We ran a wire from the bomb through the fields off the road and found a hiding place where the leaves and grass kept us from view.

From there we watched. We did not have to wait long. It was a busy road. The Americans used it a lot. After about an hour we saw a Humvee. This was in the early days when Humvees were often seen alone, not always in armored convoys like later. The Humvee approached, and at the right moment we detonated. The explosion flipped the Humvee onto its side, and after a moment a crowd gathered. We eased out of our hiding spot and joined the group on the street. I don’t know if the Americans in the Humvee were dead or not.

I just saw them being carried away on stretchers.

No one walked away as far as I could tell.

I can’t say how the others felt at that moment, but I was in tears. I didn’t know whether I was crying out of sadness or fear or happiness. Maybe all those reasons. For me, that first operation was like breaking free from a whole life of oppression. I had grown up under Saddam Hussein. I had spent nearly a decade of my youth in his jails.

I had seen my country invaded by a foreign army.

All my life I felt beaten down by one hand or another. And now, finally, for the first time I was hitting back.

Omar Yousef Hussein is thin and bookish-looking in his late thirties. He had served roughly eight years in Iraqi prisons for political dissidence but was released toward the end of 2002. Prior to the US invasion he was a historian and academic in Baghdad. He has since helped organize roughly 30 attacks on American forces.

Mark Kukis is an American journalist. This excerpt is taken from his recent book, Voices from Iraq: A People’s History, a collection of 70 individual Iraqi accounts of the war.

After a few lessons from this Egyptian, our engineer came back, and we went about making the device. We made it in a mosque one evening near the base, just after evening prayers. We took an old artillery shell and bored into the casing with a hand drill to reach the explosive material.

You have to drill very slowly. You don’t want the

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Nick Whalen, nickwhalen.com

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I think that it’s time to ask:

What if society can no longer resist the destructive effects of unbounded capitalism? What if society can no longer resist the devastating power of financial accumulation?

We have to disentangle autonomy from resistance. And if we want to do that, we have to disentangle desire from energy. The prevailing focus of modern capitalism has been energy: the ability to produce, to compete, to dominate. A sort of energolatria, a cult of energy, has dominated the cultural sense of the West from Faust to the Futurists. The ever growing availability of energy has been its dogma. Now we know that energy isn’t boundless. In the social psyche of the West, energy is fading. I think we should reframe the concept and practice of autonomy from this point of view. The social body is unable to reaffirm its rights against the wild assertiveness of capital because the pursuit of rights can never be dissociated from the exercise of force.

When workers were strong in the 1960s and 1970s, they did not restrict themselves to asking for their rights, to peaceful demonstrations of their will. They acted in solidarity, refusing to work, redistributing wealth, sharing things, services, and spaces. Capitalists, on their side, do not merely ask or demonstrate, they do not simply declare their wish: they enact it. They make things happen; they invest, disinvest, displace; they destroy and they build. Only force makes autonomy possible in the relation between capital and society. But what is force?

What is force nowadays?

The identification of desire with energy has produced the identification of force with violence that turned out so badly for the Italian movement in the 1970s and 1980s. We have to distinguish energy and desire. Energy is falling, but desire has to be saved. Similarly, we have to distinguish force from violence. Fighting power with violence is suicidal or useless nowadays. How can we think of activists going against professional organizations of killers in the mold of Blackwater, Haliburton, secret services, mafias?

Brett Casper, brettcasper.com

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Only suicide has proved to be efficient in the struggle against power.

And actually suicide has become decisive in contemporary history. The dark side of the multitude meets here the loneliness of death. Activist culture should avoid the danger of becoming a culture of resentment.

Acknowledging the irreversibility of the catastrophic trends that capitalism has inscribed in the history of society does not mean renouncing it.

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Nick Whalen, nickwhalen.com

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PO

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AnewworldORDER!

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