Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Parenti Update; Quote of the Day

For the few people out there who care (Adrian, Duhalde, and Matt May, I'm looking in your direction...), the Parenti interview will not be up for another weak or two due to some technical problems. Apparently my recorder did not record the audio of our phone conversation at a loud enough volume, so it will take quite a while to transcribe.

In the meantime, I encourage you to munch on this cartoon:

5 Comments:

Blogger Evan McLaren said...

Haha! I suspect I may have been the cause of this post. I'm happy that Ben's tone remains friendly with me even though I bombed the Left with accusations in my last comment. Bravo. On to the cartoon!

Are there people in the world who exhibit this degree of callousness? Certainly. The other day I was denouncing the Allied firebombing of Dresden in front of a relative--in this maneuver, Churchill attempted to impress Stalin with the might of the Western armies by levelling one of the cultural jewels of Europe and destroying over 150,000 innocent men, women, and children in the process. My relative's response? "Shit happens". What is left to do or say, in that situation?

So, I'm sure some Haliburton types are apologizing for their profits with statements of bare unconcern . . . one likely frame of mind, I think, is that war will occur without or without me (war profiteer), so better I profit then someone else.

Another likely frame of mind is patriotism, that the American cause is just and anyone backing it should feel proud.

Anyways, it's not difficult to discover businessmen whose pockets are deepening with war profits. I was reading yesterday about the network of permanent bases the government is planning for Iraq, each very expensive and very plush. The Baghdad embassy itself, boasts "twenty-one buildings, 619 apartments with very fancy digs for the big shots, restaurants, shops, gym facilities, a swimming pool, a food court, a beauty salon, a movie theater... and, as the Times of London reports, ‘a swish club for evening functions.'" It's cost? almost $600 million. Wonder where all the contracts are going for that.

But, first, I'll simply point out that the system I advocate, pure capitalism or private property anarchism, would not allow this situation. Corrupt businessmen could be as corrupt as they wanted, but it's hard to see how that would bring them profits. Where institutions must rely for survival and success on their capacity to satisfy consumers, they are forced to contribute to the "Common Good". Where businessmen are shielded by state subsidies, forcefully-imposed monopolies, and other imaginative government delights, they're no longer bound to serve consumers and society.

Second, our implicit aim here is to discover final causes. Readers of this blog discover them in capitalism and profits--capitalism causes or contributes to war. This allows an opportunity to quote Murray Rothbard, whom I cited recently on my blog:

"There's a rational conspiracy view of history, and an irrational, sort of sloppy conspiracy theory of history. The sloppy view only says 'cui bono' [who benefits] and then says, Ah ha! These guys are responsible! They're evil and so forth . . . The rational conspiracy theorist looks more deeply and asks, 'Who caused these measures? Who lobbied for them? Who continues to lobby for them?' . . . This makes him a scholar instead of a hopped up paranoid. So scholarship is essentially confirming your early paranoia through a deeper factual analysis."

What is the lie that sells this war--in Bush's mind and in the mind of many in his administration and the government--in the minds of pro-war Americans--in the minds of anti-war Americans who protest the war simply because it was mismanaged or has become unsustainable--in the minds of the profiteer who feels the cause is good? It certainly isn't the idea that making money trumps death and destruction. If profits really were the only reasoning behind a war, support would all but disappear. It's equally implausible to suggest that the profiteers create all the pro-America, pro-democracy hype to sustain themselves. The men who fashioned the motivating doctrines were not aiming at profits, and neither are those who march behind their ideas. People support causes (or fail to resist them) because they believe, to varying extents, in the correctness and superiority of those causes. In our culture, how often do you hear anti-democratic voices? The question answers itself. So, to what extent does that culture permit wars that are advocated as pro-democratic measures? This is another rhetorical or near-rhetorical question.

9:02 AM  
Blogger Evan McLaren said...

Just to be more precise, explicit, and agressive . . .

Legions of administrators and intellectuals repeatedly interpret this war and past US wars as just because they spread democratic, egalitarian government and eliminated monarchical, reactionary, anti-egalitarian, or simply tyrannical government. In other words, they're completely honest in this respect! They tell us all the time, over and over again, what it's all for and what it's all about! Bush uses the words "freedom" and "democracy" every time he opens his mouth--it's really what he believes in his hare brain!

No one can move the West without bumping into democracy and egalitarianism. So, it's not a difficult logical leap for me to say that war thrives in large part because large enough groups of people believe it serves those causes.

Anti-capitalists have a much more difficult task. They cannot finish by stating that capitalism causes war. They have to show that they understand what, exactly, capitalism is, and then they must show how the institution of private property, by itself or in certain modes and expressions, is the root cause of war.

9:35 AM  
Blogger Ben said...

actually, Evan, I just put up this cartoon because it's one of my favorites. glad it got a reaction from you, though! will reply later, post-gre's...

10:02 AM  
Blogger Ursa said...

dude. parenti is hot. hurry up with the interview. add pics.

3:04 PM  
Blogger Ben said...

yeah, parenti is hot stuff in pretty much every sense. interview should be
up next week.

5:53 PM  

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