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Against their will, Georgian men in their 40s and 50s hauled debris Saturday from the streets of separatist South Ossetia's bombed-out capital.

In a sign that Georgians are being abused in the Russian-controlled province, a Russian officer and armed Ossetians escorted forced laborers through the city, the nucleus of fighting that has pit two former Soviet neighbors against each other and worried the world.

--Associated Press

Tamaz Barbikadze tip-toed out of South Ossetia's Interior Ministry Sunday flanked by three armed guards. A frail man of 69 years, he was given five minutes to describe to two reporters how he and more than 100 other civilians had been rounded up 10 days ago and thrown into prison. As he spoke, one of his Ossetian captors casually shifted his Kalashnikov from knee to knee.

Mr. Barbikadze's crime: He is Georgian. In South Ossetia, Georgians are regarded with visceral hatred after Georgian tanks rolled into this tiny pro-Russian separatist republic fewer than two weeks ago.

Mr. Barbikadze said that he and about 150 other ethnic Georgians had been locked up in the squat Interior Ministry building since Aug. 8, the day the tanks entered the city. Appearing terrified, he said he didn't understand why he had become a "hostage."

--Wall Street Journal ($)

Tomorrow night's discussion at Laughing Horse Books will be on "Panarchy and Pantarchy, with a brief look at Proudhon's theory of the state." As I told the collective yesterday, "It will be breezier than it sounds." I had initially meant to pair Paul Émile de Puydt's 1860 "Panarchy," which proposes a free market in governments, just with some documents relating to Stephen Pearl Andrews' Pantarchy, which was an anarchistic outlier, from roughly the same year, strongly influenced by August Comte and heavy on voluntary hierarchy, with Andrews expecting to find himself, voluntarily, pretty much at the top of the heap. I have written about the Pantarchy and New Catholic Church, in "Anarchist Church, Anarchist State. . . Anarchist Inquisition?" and "Stephen Pearl Andrews' 'New Catholic Church'." I have issues with both projects: Panarchy seems to be impracticable except as a kind of dress-up game for anarchism (not that there's anything wrong with that), and Pantarchy seems a little less than inviting, though it seems to me fairly consistent. Certainly, both are worth looking at. If you want to look at Panarchy, follow the link above to John Zube's panarchy.org site. For the Pantarchy, check out the links below. I have finally transcribed the New Catholic Church document.

• Constitution or Organic Basis of the Pantarchy
• Constitution or Organic Basis of the New Catholic Church

I have a number of sermons from the New Catholic Church, gathered from various sources, which I will eventually transcribe. I have begun to type in "The Science of Universology," from The Index, which followed the Andrews-Tucker debate on Proudhon.

Which brings us back around to Proudhon, who is just full of surprises, if you're willing to wade in. We know that Proudhon admitted the inevitability of some sort of "state," or state-like "concentration," and that it was to counterbalance this that he proposed simple, individual property within anarchy. And we have some indications of what the word "state" meant to him, from The Theory of Property. But Proudhon had a habit of tucking important details in unlikely places, and I only just tracked down the pages from The Theory of Taxation where he engages in his most radical reconstruction of the notion of the "state." There, "the State" is closely identified with that "collective force" which was so important to Proudhon's initial critiques of property and governmentalism. And, there, it becomes clearer just what the "late" Proudhon is on about - and it is exciting, if hardly orthodox anarchism. I'll try to finish up some translations and see if I can get that excitement across. . .

I often disagree with Scott Adams’ “nonfiction” remarks (he’s neither sufficiently libertarian nor sufficiently left), but his comic strip continues to capture what the actual experience of being in the business world is like – as in today’s installment. As long as libertarians are perceived as offering denials of, rather than solutions to, this pervasive feature of most people’s everyday life, we won’t make many converts – nor will we deserve to.

I've been working on a collection of short biographies of radical figures, sort of an introductory miscellany, and had been translating Elisée Reclus' "John Brown" to include there. Gallica has a rough, but readable scan of what appears to be a pamphlet version of the text. Now that I've translated it, it also appears to be an incomplete version. Some text, probably at least a few lines, is pretty clearly missing. Brown's capture, trial and death seem to have disappeared between one line and the next. This looks like an "original" error, rather than a recent scanning error. It's still unfortunate. And I can't seem to track the original down: "John Brown." La Cooperation. 14 July 1867. I anyone has access to that journal, I would love to complete the translation work.

Of course, the problem of missing bits and pieces is a fairly common one. Voltairine de Cleyre's translation of Jean Grave's Moribund Society and Anarchy is one of those texts that are mostly available online, but have unreadable pages in the scans. One of these days, we'll be able to get all this stuff available in complete form.

During the Saddleback forum, when Obama was asked about evil, he replied:

Evil does exist. I think we see evil all the time. We see evil in Darfur. We see evil – sadly – on the streets of our cities. We see evil in parents who viciously abuse their children. And I think it has to be confronted. It has to be confronted squarely. And one of the things that I strongly believe is that we are not going to – as individuals – be able to erase evil from the world. That is God’s task. But we can be soldiers in that process. And we can confront it when we see it.

Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil. Because a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil, in the name of good. And I think one thing that’s very important is having some humility in recognizing that just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t mean we are going to be doing good.

Then during the televised postmortem, Charles Krauthammer referred to this remark as “postmodern.” Funny; I thought it was Christian.

18 August 2008

As I mentioned last month, the IRS levied my bank account. Last Thursday, my bank cut the U.S. Treasury a check for $1,384.71 and debited my account by that much.

In-between, there was a period of a few days in which the account was completely frozen. After that, I was able to make ordinary withdrawls and pay bills and such, but I had to get a special phone authorization to transfer money between accounts (even if the amount was small enough that it left enough to satisfy the levy). Overall, the process was pretty painless, except for that part about the government getting my money.

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I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, mostly in the philosophy area, but not a lot of posting about it. It’s been interesting stuff, of the sort that usually makes me pour out interesting words hereabouts, but so far it’s been all-input, no-output. I’ll try to make up for it today.

Ernst von Salomon’s Fragebogen

Summary: We Germans who tried to be patriotic and come to the aid of our nation during the Nazi period by following the law, supporting the military, and doing our various duties while trying to avoid getting any more mixed up in all those atrocities than we really had to… why can’t the world respect us as the really good, honorable people we are, especially the noblemen and officers among us? Actual quote:

“[T]his was precisely the point at which the problem collided with individual conscience. This was every individual’s experience. No matter what route he might have followed to join the movement [Naziism] he was fully informed in advanced concerning [it’s attitude toward] the Jewish question. But in almost no case did this question impinge on the realms of his own problems[!]. Only gradually, but steadily, did the Jewish question seep into the individual’s own field of activity. And each man was at a given moment faced with this decision — how far did the measures periodically ordered (almost always recognised for what they were, but not as steps in a culminating process) affect the carrying out of what he regarded as his own task and duties. I must assume this: that the decision was honestly faced. But even that meant nothing more than the insinuation, into each man’s own sphere, of the foulest sort of corruption of which the conscience can conceive, the corruption that compels the individual to choose the lesser of two evils.”

This prefaces his discussion of one of his prisoner-of-war camp friends, Hanns Ludin, whom he tried to help escape, but who ended up being hanged for war crimes. Ludin, you see, had helped the Reich carry out its extermination of Jews in the Slovak Republic — but, von Salomon notes, at the time Ludin cried out (to himself) “This is an unspeakably foul blunder!” See, he was good inside. Imagine the lesser of two evils conundrum that was “insinuated into his sphere”: Do I quit the Nazi party and/or my post in the Foreign Office and therefore abandon my party in its time of need, or do I help Hitler perpetuate his reign of butchery? And then they went and hanged the nice fellow, whose only wish was to carry out his “field of activity” without having to get tangled up in this “Jewish question” any more than he had to! This book became a big deal best-seller when it came out in Germany in 1951. It was a good focus for Germans who were sick of being told that a bit of contrition and self-examination was in order.

Thomas Pink’s Free Will: A Very Short Introduction

Such a tiny, slim book, and yet it took me so long to get from one cover to the other. It’s clearly-written, for the most part, and dense with information. The first and better part of the book concerns itself with how the philosophical debate about free will has developed, and what the main points of contention are. The last bit is the author’s own attempt to recover free will from the ashbin of philosophical skepticism. It's less-clearly written, but does a good job of knocking down a bad argument or two — it mainly argues that confident philosophical skepticism about free will tends to assume what it sets out to prove, which was a new counter-argument to me, and which Pink makes a pretty good case for.

A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic

Brash, ballsy, brainy, take-no-prisoners philosophy from a guy who was in his mid-twenties. Now I understand why logical positivism and its ilk got such an enthusiastic response. Shorter Ayer: Much of what is marketed today as philosophy isn’t philosophy. It’s so mistaken that it isn’t even coherent enough to be wrong. Metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, theology, and their cousins are all hereby banished. All of the opinions that have been expressed on these topics are agglomerations of words that are impenetrable by meaningful philosophical investigation and are therefore meaningless linguistic artifacts that can be of no interest except to disciplines like psychology, sociology, & anthropology. I shall now go on to solve the mind/body and idealism vs. realism non-problems, the monist/pluralist debate, reveal the nature of the self, and abolish all “schools” of philosophy as superfluous, so that we can get on with business.

John L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia

Having read Ayer, I had to read the great anti-Ayer. Not quite as good, but almost as combatative, and it makes some good points. Unfortunately, it was cobbled together from the Austin’s notes by someone else, so it doesn’t cohere as well as it ought, and sometimes the counter-arguments seem to miss the point of the arguments.

Matt Taibbi’s The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

A good “America is so going to hell” book. The best bit is where he tries to write the script for the meeting at which was planned the 9/11 conspiracy that the Truthers imagine. Funny stuff.

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics

It's nice to find a book on philosophy that’s written in a challenging way, but in which the challenge doesn’t come from obscure and poorly-chosen language, but from well-presented but difficult topics. Appiah does a good job of reconciling abstract ethical philosophies with psychological/sociological experiments in ethical reasoning and behavior (he insists that until recently the philosophy of ethics was uncontroversially considered to have such an empirical component). He concludes that ethics is a messy business, and that the many attempts to reduce it to a simple formula, while they have had obvious appeal to reductionists and to anyone who hoped there might be something simple about it, have all failed to be up to the task of encompassing the whole problem

Mary Warnock’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ethics

I picked this up because I’d really enjoyed Warnock’s Ethics Since 1900. This one, though, reads more like it was written by the “Ethics” columnist for a newspaper than by a philosopher.

Derrick Jensen’s and Stephanie McMillan’s As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial

A comic parable about environmental catastrophe that makes some good points and doesn’t bother to try to avoid radical environmentalist hyperbole. It’s designed to reach folks who believe that people are making the planet uninhabitable out of short-sighted greed, but who are still hoping that the solution won’t be terribly disruptive to the status quo. It poses a challenge to folks like me who concentrate on individual, lifestyle changes, rather than on organizing and directly confronting the powers that be.

Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling / The Sickness Unto Death

I finished Fear and Trembling but barely got started in Sickness before I gave up. I think Kierkegaard may be too far over my head. Or maybe it’s crap. On the plus side, I think that this translation is much more readable than, say, the last of the Camus I read. However, Kierkegaard is notoriously slippery — for instance in the way he uses pseudonyms to give plausible deniability to anything he asserts. His schtick here is to suggest that there’s something beyond ethics — something that is of the same sort of pull on our behavior but that is less publicly justifiable. We can justify our deviations from self-interest by appealing to a Kantean universal standard, but Kierkegaard says there’s also a possible appeal to an entirely immediable relation between the individual and God that may justify any goddamned thing at all. His prototype for this is the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. He goes to great pains to make this story vivid and awful, and succeeds to some extent. But every once and a while, I have to retreat from my suspension of disbelief, and at that point the whole exercise reminds me of those cheap op-ed pieces in which the author does the math to determine just how much effort Santa Claus would have to go through to deliver that many packages to that many children in that little time, and whether it worries the laws of physics that he does so. The fact that the whole exercise seems to (biographically) have been a horrible post-facto excuse for a terribly bungled love affair doesn't make it more interesting in my eyes, but merely more pathetic. I can’t help but think that I’m just not getting it on some grand level, and if I devoted myself to the pursuit of the rest of Kierkegaard’s more challenging oeuvre, I’d get it.

Bonus Kierkegaard quote:

“The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.”

Here is an interesting take on the recent firefight between the Russian Bear and the Eurasian state of Georgia. This is followed by a statement from Federazione Dei Comunisti Anarchici. The first reprint is taken from Common Dreams the American social democratic newsagency.

Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the story of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election? (or maybe they're both at fault. Western inspired neoconservatives battling it out with a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB ... has a familiar ring somehow)

Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser.

Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

There are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former employer, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, an invasion that clearly was expected to produce a Russian counterreaction? It is inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back. Scheunemann long guided McCain in these matters, even before he was officially running foreign policy for McCain’s presidential campaign.

In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for Georgia’s membership in NATO. A year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to that country, where they met with Saakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Scheunemann is at the center of the neoconservative cabal that has come to dominate the Republican candidate’s foreign policy stance in a replay of the run-up to the war against Iraq. These folks are always looking for a foreign enemy on which to base a new Cold War, and with the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime it was Putin’s Russia that came increasingly to fit the bill.

FdCA Statement on the current situation in the Caucasus

Mikhail Saakashvili and his National Movement were brought to power in Georgia on the wave of a "pink revolution" in 2004. In these last four years, Georgia has strengthened its links with NATO and the EU, but has had to put up with a tough embargo on its goods from Russia, which props up the two secessionist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both effectively out of Georgian control.

Saakashvili as president has not kept his promises. At least a third of the Georgian population is living below the poverty line; unemployment is officially at 16% but is actually much higher; the monthly pension is €16. Current employment legislation permits employers to fire workers without just cause. Popular discontent exploded on the occasion of last January's presidential election, called following the huge demonstrations of November 2007: poverty had been growing at the same rate as the economy. Saakashvili won for the second time, but in order to do so was forced into repressing tens of thousands of demonstrators in the capital, Tbilisi, who were protesting against vote-rigging, corruption, athoritarianism and economic disaster.

But so what?! The strategic control of Georgia is worth much more than the state its people live in. And that de facto Russian-guaranteed autonomy that exists in South Ossetia is no little worry to US and European interests in the area. Georgian entry into NATO would justify an international military presence with the aim of protecting and controlling two enormously important strategic corridors for the West: the famous Baku-Tbilisi-Cehyan (BTC) corridor bringing gas from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzerum corridor bringing gas from the Caspian to Turkey, where it is planned to link up with the TIG ("Nabucco") corridor which will link Turkey to Greece and Italy. But both these oil and gas pipelines pass too outrageously south of Russia and too near Ossetia. Russia (and Gazprom) will certainly not be sitting around doing nothing! As long as there is tension in the Caucasus, there will be no room for NATO and Europe will be forced to deal with Russia if it wants Caspian oil and gas.

Italy's Foreign Minister is worried that the conflict will spread to Abkhazia... but in reality his fears are more for the interests of ENI (which has a 5% stake in the BTC) and Edison (BTE), and he is already offering to send an Italian "peacekeeping" mission to the Caucasus on a European mandate.

Along the 21st-century Silk Road, the lives of 70,000 South Ossetian inhabitants (for whom independence is denied, unlike Kossovo) are worth nothing; as are the lives of the people of Georgia - two peoples apparently divided by ethnic conflict, but in reality hostage to the inter-imperialist conflict for the control of raw materials and corridors.


Finally here is another view on the battles which gives more detail. Renegade Eye also talks about the way in which "false" conflicts between states are generated. However I do think there is something more going on then can be explained by a "wag the dog" theory. Georgia will now be seen as an unstable "partner" at the fringes of NATO which doesn't quite fit in with the usual leftist view of the Anglo/American concordance ie. that the western alliance was trying to build a "firewall" against Moscow. Both Georgia and the Ukraine were looking to join but this process will remain on the back burner for now. If the idea was to expand Nato's influence this represents a very inept effort. Perhaps the United States wants to partially destabilize Europe by encouraging Russian belligerence? Or the neocons are simply thugs who enjoy causing trouble and watching the fireworks? It's all too neat and tidy. Even the Globe and Mail our not so noticeably-at-times "liberal" voice saw Saakashvili's actions as "dangerous". One of their 'oped' pieces also condemned the role of the neoconservatives in Georgia although I couldn't find an online link. True the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline project is razing eyebrows in the former "workers' paradise". The carefully projected image of Russia as a "safe" area for western investment will lose ground ... and THAT doesn't make much sense. If this invasion is meant to be a substitute Orwellian war to replace imperial embarrassments in Iraq or Afghanistan then they 'd better dream up something with better staying power.

You can tell the difference between two different senses of life by looking at what imagery evokes moral horror in people who hold one of the two. This point was violently driven home to me by the backlash to the California Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage.

Who was celebrating? Not the social conservatives. In fact, the specter of gay couples with government issued marriage licenses, and the benefits that come with them motivated social conservatives to put the question to the vote. These miscreants rushed to acquire the signatures necessary to put the proposal that the California constitution be amended to stipulate that marriage is only between a man and a woman on the November ballot.

And this tells me a lot about their sense of life. It tells me that they prefer misery to joy when their god demands it. It tells me that they cannot truly understand the joy of liberty, because their entire perspective on the world is motivated by fear and obedience to a conservative god.

How can a person who believes the good is achieved via obedience understand the beauty of romantic love outside of narrowly circumscribed limits?

They just can’t do it very easily.

Every time you hear somebody preach about the “evil” of government recognized same sex marriage, you should watch this video.

And be reminded that what you’re watching is what they say is immoral.

Contrast this spirit with that of the couples enjoying their romance and marriage in the video.

It’s the difference between a morality of joy and a morality of misery.