In the calculus of human suffering I wonder if the actions of Standard and Poor’s, Fitch or Moody’s outweigh the actions of al-Qaeda. When private credit rating agencies nod, nudge and hint the world economy into mass unemployment, homelessness, wage depression, soaring staple prices then terrorism might be better understood otherwise, or additionally, to planting bombs and indiscriminate slaughter.
“Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.”
Woody Guthrie
It is the death warrant of whole livelihoods that the pens of credit rating agencies are deployed to sign. Credit rating agencies are possibly the most unaccountable, most powerful, most anti-democratic institutions of our times, and all perfectly legal. (See the late great Peter Gowan on the historical rise of the new global credit economy in which the credit rating agencies have become kingmakers).
Woody Guthrie concludes,
“And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.”
Footnote : It is worth recalling that Woody Guthrie was the composer and lyricist of “This land is my land’, now an anthem appropriated by the anti-democratic, nationalist right in the US. But Woody Guthrie was a Communist in the ‘Wobblies’ tradition. He’s reputed to have said, “Where three communists meet, the fourth one ought to be a guitar player.“
That a genocide was committed against Armenians by a Turkish Ottoman polity and policy in the last decades of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, plumbing abysmal depths in 1915 has only been qualified by euphemism, not substance. The naming of mass killings, like the naming of all aspects of life and death, has a politics. That is to say, naming is a power struggle.
Just to make an example of the politics of two naming conventions, we could take a deontological means of naming mass killings on the one hand, and a consequentialist means of naming mass killings on the other hand. The deontologist is concerned with the intentions that lie behind actions. Thus the deontologist might say that only those mass killings, or should I say mass deaths, in which the perpetrators intended to destroy or eradicate a people should carry the name genocide. So the deontological case for naming a genocide as such rests upon the production of historical evidence that identifies perpetrators, uncovers policies and plans which refer to the orchestration of genocide, and establishes material evidence of the translation into action or implementation of those policies and plans by the direct perpetrators. In the naming of genocide by deontologists, intention needs to be demonstrated. By contrast the consequentialist is concerned with …. errr … consequences; they’re focused on effects and thus correspondingly discount intentions. So even if immediate perpetrators cannot be identified, even if mass death came from the privations of cold and hunger rather than from the bullet or the sword, and yet tens of thousands of bodies are counted or hundreds of thousands of persons ‘disappear’, then the effect has been genocidal.
The official position of successive governments of Turkey has two strands to it. First there is the basic objection to the vocabulary of genocide. Second, it has followed a deontological reading. In this way Turkish governments have a mixed set of arguments including, but not limited to the claim that Armenian deaths have been exaggerated and therefore do not warrant the label ‘genocide’ (rather forgetting or ignoring that genocide has never been defined by any numerical threshold); that Armenians were killed in the course of internal or civil wars in which their killing was not as Armenians but as rebels; that Armenians, amongst many other ethnies or nationalities of the wider Anatolian regions, died under wartime and ‘peacetime’ conditions of hunger and famine, diseases of malnutrition and insanitary conditions, and as unfortunate casualties of necessary forced migrations or deportations; that Armenians were killed by local, uncontrolled and unauthorised warlords, rogue army squads and irregular militias; that Armenians died at the hands of other ethnic or national minorities and not principally at the hands of Turkish Ottoman authorities or agents of the Turkish Ottoman state. These claims, together with other claims, amount to a deontological denial of any systematic or coherent intention to kill or otherwise eradicate the Armenian people. To summarise in a rather casual phrasing the official Turkish government position regarding the Armenian question [that being, of course, a euphemism] : ‘The Ottoman Turkish state never carried out an intentional persecution of the Armenians and in any case it was not as bad as people make out.’
Whether on a deontological reading or a consequentialist reading I think the naming of the deaths of Armenians over the turning decades of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries as genocide is entirely appropriate. Whilst there is always room for historical refinement and revision as a consequence of new rounds of scholarship, the fundamental parameters of intention and effect have been well established for the genocide of Armenians.
But of course the scholarship and historical evidence regarding the Armenian genocide is not, ironically, the big issue. The big issue continues to be the politics of naming and the way that this politics plays around genocide denial. And it is to this politics that I want to turn next. But before concluding this first part, I want to signal my subsequent, seemingly inconsistent, argument : In the interests of truth, Turkey’s denial of the Armenian genocide is a terrible wrong but genocide denial should not be prohibited.
The well-known opening of Shakespeare’s Richard III has Richard, Duke of Gloucester, reflecting upon England’s new-found peace, with the following disingenuous assessment :
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Instead of the currently familiar seasonal metaphor of the ‘Arab spring’ let me displace and substitute it with a suitably metaphoric season and local meteorology which tells a different and more realistic story of the Egyptian struggle :
Now is the spring of our hope
Made bitter winter by these enduring thugs of yore;
To switch the metaphor, the Egyptian ‘spring’ changed the chief clown but left the same troupe and circus in town. Outside critics and supporters of the Egyptian upheaval alike have made the oft-repeated mistake of anthropomorphising the state, of interpreting the man as the regime, of discounting the maintaining order in favour of the immediate object of derision. To claim that the ills that have befallen or been shouldered by Egyptians for decades were the casual consequences of a careless Mubarak such that a deposing of the feckless man and his immediates would be to argue that Richard III was a simply a play about a bad man. Whilst Richard, Duke of Gloucester is without doubt morally suspect, he is by no means evil and, crucially, no worse than his entourage and class. Indeed I read Richard III not primarily about what a bad man can do but as an account of the preconditions which obtain for a man to act badly. ‘Badness’ needs others. Badness is the condition of complicity.
Springtime and the summer sun of 2011 saw the order throw a sacrificial lamb before Egyptians and the ‘international community.’ It ejected the man Hosni Mubarak after the extraordinary discovery, at least by the ‘international community’, that he was bad. One does not amass in excess of $70 billion in personal family wealth without help and complicity of a ruling class. The spring air did not, however, have chance to cleanse the complicit.
The complicit are still there, secure in their ‘protection of democracy’, relatively undisturbed as they try to ‘maintain order’, enjoying the the sympathy of the international community as they oversee the transition to law. The complicit are not only those who beat with impunity; who torture without concern; who casually violate; who detain without charge; who, if you want a picture of the present, have a “boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
"always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever." George Orwell, 1984
The complicit are not just, not even primarily, the foot-soldiers. After all the foot-soldiers can be identified and named. The complicit are, to be sure, those who continue to hold the reigns of power but they are also those who say that arbitrary arrests are conducive to public order; those who see a policeman beating a protestor to the ground and see no problem; those who witness a right boot in the kidney and rue the lost opportunity for a repeat from the left boot; those who promote the frequent gymnastic of the truncheon as the necessary exercise of political order; those who cannot see order without the swirling clouds of tear gas; those who whose horizon of moral reasoning cannot go beyond the self-interestedness of blaming the victim.
It is the Egyptian military or, rather, the security apparatus in toto which has ruled Egypt for half a century and continues to do so despite the revolutionary spring. The military has always been in season in Egypt. The military is a corrupting perennial.
I’m not one for aphorisms especially of the saccharine-sounding kind, but in the light of the worldwide contagion of beatings, bloodshed and butchery committed in the name of “law and order” the temptation to invoke (and adapt) Gandhi is too strong : “Recall the face of the most vulnerable person whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him or her. Will she gain anything by it? Will it restore her to a control over her own life and destiny?”
Those complicit in Egypt and elsewhere cannot answer in the positive to this test.
As we witness possibly the most dramatic change in UK foreign policy in a century or more, resulting in the splendid isolation of 26 European states from the UK, we also learn of the key factors determining Cameron’s decision. Cameron thought it best to be outside the tent pissing in, rather than inside the tent pissing out. Excruciatingly, his decision to piss inside the tent from the outside was taken whilst he was inside the tent refusing to piss outside the tent. Got that ?
Masochistic self-denial, of which only the abused public school boys of Eton can truly know, has long been the spiritual source of British foreign policy. (For its accomplishment, the sadistic slaughter of others has been its twin). Notwithstanding IgNobel-worthy research on “The effect of acute increase in urge to void on cognitive function in healthy adults” , apparently the Prime Minister is an authentic piss artist, whose refusal to void, reports explain, is because “Cameron [has] … used his tried-and-tested “full-bladder technique” to achieve maximum focus and clarity of thought.”
(And now back to the failings of Marxist critiques of society : A Marxist would never make this sort of thing up. A good Marxist would say something like “Cameron was defending his paymasters, that capital fraction in the City of London whose freedom from European regulation his executive position was made to ensure.” And not, “His resolve was maintained because by crossing his legs in painful distraction he couldn’t pay attention to what his fellow EU leaders were saying”).
Whichever way you cut it, Cameron pisses on everyone except himself. Again.
Morfoubey 