Eso’s Chronicles 325 / 1
Odds and Ends
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.
 

EFA: POLITICS AT ‘WOUNDED KNEE’ (7)

I am intrigued by Russia’s suggestion that there ought to be a referendum in Ukraine, and that the Ukraine ought to become a federation of states http://pennyforyourthoughts2.blogspot.com/2014/03/kerrylavrov-to-meet-today-federated.html  subordinate to a central government in Kiev or Moscow. My interest arises, because the suggestion ought to be easily turned around and asked of Russia itself, as it and its many states, too, are composed of many regions with their own history and geopolitical lay.

In the end, the Russian suggestion is not only on behalf of many member nations of the UN, but also for the Federation of Russia itself. It raises a question that may appear to be a paradox: Why propose a Matrushka https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoKodHqRoD9FONUigqUMt-pccXEtIyNPUUGq-qILdGoOB-Z7t7nAdSYUTvTU8ofPITwxsyOQodsOKxXhuzyVUIeOZPY6HLiVUXgRtd0Ar7G4r4HMMSA7zbHXKltqATzL0NZPghBcI7m7g/s1600/EggDoll.jpg  style government for Ukraine, when it is more impressive to lead by example?

By what synechism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synechism does the  legislature of a Federation, its ruling body composed in the main by the ‘intelligentsia’ of hominids born into a hominid created urban desert, created out of a living planet laid prostrate by chemical and nuclear explosives, declare that an organization such as the UN Security Council http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council  has the right to define the nature of peace for our planet’s biosphere?

Surely, if peace is constructed on the ability of continuous militarization to deter war (keep pulling the rubber band)—is it not subject to a delayed, but even a greater catastrophe?

The band of wannabe scientologists ensconced in the legislature of the EU, holds that joining and supporting an Empire formed of federalized and somaticized States is the best guaranty for prosperity and peace. Yet, the band has apparently forgotten that though the beginnings of the European Empire are

from “… 1950 [on, when] the European Coal and Steel Community begins to unite European countries economically and politically in order to secure lasting peace[;] …the six founders… Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands….” http://europa.eu/about-eu/eu-history/index_en.htm refuse to introduce democratic elections in the body politic of the EU that could legitimize its dictatorship.

Unification in Europe was largely achieved not by an economic and political agreement, but on the insistence of the United States of America, which had begun the Cold War on behalf of Capitalism against the Communist Soviet Union that very year.

Before ‘unification’ there was no such thing as a referendum to see if the people of Europe wished to make Europe an Empire. Instead, the EU legislation from that year on has been dominated by exo-parliamentarians, rather than elected officials. Whether elected parliamentarians would be any better than American legislators, most of who are elected, is to be doubted as long as lobying is permitted. The system of exosystemic appointment of the EU Parliament is operative to this day and is doing great service in maintaining a militarist monopolist government in power—including my country, Latvia.

Paul Virilio, an observer and social critic of governments, describes the results nicely*: “…entire countries are progressively becoming sites of social extermination, training zones for … an insiduous form of ‘militaro-police’ coalition comparable to Interpol [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpol ], an interarmy conspiracy destined to sacrifice the civic and political power of the people, where… [in] place of self-sacrifice for the sake of the Nation, these states sacrifice their own population in the name of a state of generalized passivity….”

While such a function may lead one to believe that the opposition of Tibetans to the repression of the Chinese government is terrorism, I note that no such ready accusation can be made against the behavior of government. For example, in Latvia, the government has got rid of near half of its population (about 900,000) by choosing membership in the EU over sovereignty, but no accusation of a crime against it by the Latvian people can be made . The ways the crime is accomplished are too many to count, but one way that facilitated it was for the Latvian Bank to give credits to private clients in Euros rather than its own currency (the Lats). As a result, at the time of economic crisis, Latvia could not devalue its currency and, thus, lessen the economic impact on its people.

Not that the dangers of federalization are a secret. Many states that have been federalized into a centralized government in Europe are members of the European Free Alliance (EFA)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Free_Alliance . Unfortunately, the EFA, too, manifests a case of ‘generalized passivity’, notably by remaining silent on the issue of referendums by not taking advantage of such cases as Latvia and Russia offer by calling for criminalization of attempts to form a centralized (and fascist) globalized government.

*Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon, Continuum 2005, p 167.

Eso’s Chronicles 324 / 11
It’s Not Over Until It’s Over
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

REVENGE OF SOMATIC CONSCIOUSNESS (6)

Seeing that spring has arrived in Latvia, my thoughts turn more to planting some blueberry bushes and a vegetable garden than sitting before my computer and writing blogs. Nevertheless, the horrific nature and state of finding myself being a hominid creature goads me on to write one more.

I just received news (by way of my brother) that Mr. Martins Bisters, one of the Latvians who returned from his ‘reeducational’ trip to Siberia, sent there by the Soviet Government, has at long last published his book on the Latvian poet Leonids Breikshs (Breikšs) http:/www.breikss.com/. Martins was arrested (1941) at the age of sixteen and with 900 other Latvians (including said poet and my father) ended up in Astrahan on the Volga River. At one point, writes Martins, his own weight was reduced to 46.5 kilos. The poet apparently died on the floor of his prison of a stomach ailment. Of the 900 prisoners most were shot, and only 50, including Martins B., survived. The bodies of most were dumped in the sandy marshes that form the Volga delta region http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrakhan …. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Volga.A2002137.0745.250m.jpg ….    http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Earth_from_Space_Volga_Delta

Though I defend communism on the grounds of egalitarianism and it being based on hominid origin in the wood, where the species economic basis is autarchic and at asubsistence level, or, if you will, takes advantage of the gifts of nature: berries, fruits, roots, insects, worms, and fish, and see capitalism as originating with conscious thievery, I am of course more than appalled by the depths of the mechnisms of revenge that capitalism engenders.

We may also conjecture that the revenge mechanism of the hominids, is based on the depths of despair that economic inequality reduces our somatically conscious being to http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jsp/summary/v022/22.3.gayman.html . While generally somatic despair induces a headache or diarrhea, it is conceivable that under certain circumstances it engenders a murderous heart. Our modern governments have long taken advantage of that murder in our hearts by enlisting it in its military forces. Not surprisingly, most line level soldiers stem from the lower levels of society.

We may probably never know what despair induces so-called ‘primitive’ men to hunt other men for the sake of keeping their heads or scalps as a souvenirs. For all I know, it may have something to do with nature turning from parthenogenetic to exogenetic procreation. Indeed, the female praying mantis eating her mate after copulation may be an early psychic reaction to exogenesis. How the early mother of hominids relays this instinct (body discomfort?) to her male offspring remains yet to be discovered.

The readers of my blogs also know that I have a long standing belief that a transcendent community of hominids (other than mother and children) is not possible without human self-sacrifice of life. Apparently this idea emerges (and emerged) from being male. Is it a consequence of a body not feeling itself comfortable at being a singularity, which the male necessarily is, but which the female escapes through motherhood? I cannot say that I know, but the very thought leads me to believe that I am not far off the truth.

To return now to the cruel revenge that the Bolsheviks released in those who agreed with them and joined their ranks. Some may call it ‘blood lust’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlust . In a series of earlier blogs, I even called it “”The Despair of Stalin”. In my subjective judgment, I tie the motivation to kill and torture with the centuries of repression of a people of the wood with capitalist exploitation, the latter which we, members of ‘capitalist’ society, now consider as ‘normal’.

On the other hand, we must not forget that the ‘evil’ Soviet system—after it had made its cruel sacrifices to the Gods of Equality—created a system that many of my countryside neighbors insist was ‘better’ than the present capitalist system that replaced the ‘communists’.

Now that I have returned to Latvia and have lived here nineteen years [and been witness to the ‘voluntary’ exile of some 900,000 (nearly a half of the population) of my people as laborers in ‘advanced’ capitalist countries], I can appreciate what they mean. The ‘evil’ of the Soviet system (aside of the cruelties in the ‘heat’ of the Revolution and ‘war’ conditions), has to be understood by keeping by keeping in mind capitalist propaganda preaching about the extensive benefits of consumerism, at the same time as it destroys the basis of Latvia’s countryside culture with a materialist parody of its native religion, which—once upon a time—it shared with the peoples of the entire Eurasian continent. No doubt, there is and will remain in my somatic consciousness empathy for those hurt by a system that encourages the consciousness of our species to seek relief in suicidal tendencies by the innocent seeking to revenge themselves upon the innocent.

Eso’s Chronicles 323 / 10
It’s Not Over Until It’s Over
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

AN APPLE TREE X 1000 YEARS? (5)

Eso’s Chronicles 322 / 9
It’s Not Over Until It’s Over
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

WHAT IS CAPITALISM? (5)

The origin of capitalism is not to be sought in the production of a ‘surplus’, but is an exception, re, an exceptional activity created out of a desire to survive a situation, which without resorting to some desperate deed could resulted in the individual’s or group’s death.

I place the emphasis on the word ‘exceptional’ as opposed to instinctual or archetypal as some of today’s capitalists wish to project their institution. In an ‘exceptional’ situation anyone of us may perform an act that may be entirely ‘accidental’ and will never be performed again under ‘normal’ circumstances (such as Mike Tyson biting Evander Holyfield’s ear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcXYEIhy-rc ). On the other hand, if the exceptional circumstance leads to an act that lends itself to easy repetition, the exceptional may be manipulated into being thought of as normal.

Since resorting to robbery in order to survive is like birds pecking seeds from under the beaks of their cousins, this makes for an easy analogy to robbing our dinner from under the noses of the people living along the river bank of the Dniepr, Volga, Donau, Oder, or Rhine. However, since we cannot avoid noting that this robbery is not accomplished as a result of pecking seeds faster than our cousin, but is done with aid of weapons and violence, and the robbed tend to resist being victimized, by resorting to killing the robbers if any are captured, the robbers thought of a tactic, whereby they could rob without suffering casualties. Thereby hangs the tory of how capitalism was invented.

The tactic of the marauders was simple enough—torture. Since we all can script a torture, my example is based on imagination not fact. Thus, if you are the smartass kid who dared call me  “a rowing thief”—I made sure that I captured you. When myself and my mates had robbed your village ‘blind’ and terrorized it into submission, we simply gathered the survivors around a small bonfire which we built next to the banks of the Volga. Then we pulled you by your hair to next to the fire, where we then put your feet in stocks, put the stocks at the edge of the bonfire, and threw some extra faggots on the flames.

You screamed bloody murder and men and women of your village fell on their knees and pleaded for us to stop: “Dear, dear, rowers,” they pleaded, “in the name of God, let the kid go. He is but young and stupid. He meant you no real harm. We will give you whatever you ask of us. Just let him go, please, please!”

We then replied: “Listen, you smelly cattle rustlers!” (Rusky, by the way, may echo in the word ‘rustler’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus_(name) as the Russian linguist I.N. Danilevskiy argues the name may have originally referred to a social class. Perhaps the class was that of wood dwellers whose autarchic economy was based on reindeer herding) “We are kind hearted men,” we said, “and we will stop if you promise us that come next year around this time, when we come again, you will deliver to us fifty well dressed pelts of your reindeer.” We the Ruotsi (the rowers) knew that if we managed to collect our boat full of such pelts, we could gather for ourselves a few pieces of gold once we got to the city of Jerusalem in Byzantium.

The villagers of course promised that they would do as we asked. Even so, to make sure that they knew that we meant business, we left your feet bake until all could smell how well roasted they were. After, we kicked your unconscious body in the river. This became our signature act wherever we rowed.

Of course, the next year, we did not come to collect the pelts for ourselves, but had the local king of the Ruskies do the collecting for us. He, not wishing to become hated by his people, had the Jews of Khazaria http://www.discerningtoday.org/members/Digest/2001digest/mar/khazar-empire-jews_migratio.gif  collect it for him.

In the end, the Ruskies did not know whether they were coming or going, and what was really happening. The wood and its trees had always protected them. Now that this protection was gone, some of them even believed that we had come to deliver to them ‘the end of days’. In a way they were right. In later days, after our descendants, the Franks, had stolen from the Ruskies (who were also partly Avenks http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/russia/evenki-reindeer-herding-history ) their compassionate religion, they attributed the forerunners of their religion to have been the Jews and their Bible, and deemed their Kings or Basils, all named John, worth a mention only in passing. No wonder, they are a screwed up people to this day.

Though the economy of wood dwellers is autarchic by its nature and the natives worship nature for its ‘free’ gifts, we the ‘robbing rowers’ made enough of a ‘surplus’ from the fur tax to hide the bloodshed behind it by renaming the event as ‘trade’ and ‘business’, which is why marauding became known as ‘productivity’.

Map of Eiropa as Holy Roman Empire:  http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2014/04/20140401_EU1.png

PS I have always appreciated William Butler Yeats poem, “The Song of Wandering Angus” (1899),  originally published in the Irish poetry magazine “Wind in the Reeds”. It is the only poem I can recite by heart.

Just the other day, as I took a walk about some of the long abandoned farms and their ruins in my near neighborhood, I came upon a site surrounded by a hazel wood. I also came upon an almost unbelievable wonder: an apple tree, which, in my amazement, I judged to be a thousand years old (probably 500 year to be on the safe side). Its trunk a meter above the ground measures 76 cm in diameter, the length of my arm from fingertips to top of shoulder). The site, in spite of its natural beauty, has been abandoned for many many years. The stone walls of a building and the foundations of two others are all that remains of the life of the people who once lived here. I pressed my head against the tree and wept, and recited (with apologies to Yeats):

I went out to a hazel wood,

Because a fire of despair was in my head,
And cut and peeled a dowsing stick,
And closed my eyes and let it lead;
And when I had stepped on the mound of a mole,
And the fork in my hands told me ‘stop’,
I opened my eyes to the light
And found my forehead abut a broken branch.

When my eyes took in all that was about,

My despair sprouted into tears
As something from a long time ago told me
Even as someone called me by my name:
The broken tree, I saw, was an ancient apple tree
With broken branches yet hanging by the skin
Waiting for another May.
I reached the camera and clicked the air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through foreign lands and honking streets,
I promise, I will do what I can:
Kiss her bark and pet her branches;
And think of all the love that took place here,
And linger with her till thought and time are done,
And, come May, pluck with the wind her falling petals,
From a thousand years in the Sun,
From a thousand years in my hair.

Eso’s Chronicles 321 / 8
It’s Not Over Until It’s Over
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

WHAT IS ‘COMMUNISM’? (4)

Under the subtitle of ‘Early communism’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism , we read: “Karl Marx saw primitive communism as the original, hunter-gatherer state of humankind from which it arose. For Marx, only after humanity was capable of producing surplus, did private property develop….”

I could, loosely speaking, agree with the sentences, but with some serious qualifications and objections. For me:

1. Communism is the given state of any and all species in nature’; I assume that the hominid species emerged from life in the wood;

2. Private property began as theft; a good example being the Vikings, who emerged from animal herders, who not knowing much about geography, got stuck on the Scandinavian peninsula, and because when winter came, they could not find their way back to the Black and Caspian seas region, began to slaughter their herds (for warm clothing and tents). Earlier on, they had used the animals (reindeer) largely as milking cows. The act of butchery (as opposed to sacrifice; an act of giving of what was dear to them to the Gods) inured the herders against taking life and eating flesh. Such inuring served the Vikings well when they finally discovered a way to cross the Baltic Sea and got back south to whence they had come. Along their way back home they survived by marauding http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/marauder , i.e. thievery, an activity alien to them in the past.;

3. A post-forest era communist is a ‘human rights activist’ as an unacknowledged anarchist in an urban environment who is not familiar with and does not recognize any other environment than the urban one, which is a direct outgrowth of Viking (and their like) maraudery. Like the early Greeks—said to have invented ‘democracy’ (a nostalgic and idyllic term for communism in the wood)—the ‘democrat’ is an idealist without quite knowing whence his-her idealism derives;

4. The early ‘surplus’ that Marx speaks of was not a result of deliberately produced ‘surplus’, but was the marauders booty. Aggressive thievery is ultimately costly, not only to the victims of robbery, but also to the robbers, because the early travel routes were a constant and well known, that is to say, these were river routes, which is why it was discovered, likely early on, that robbery could be replaced by an annual fur ‘tax’, which the Vikings would collect on their way to the holy cities that lay to the south. Alexandria, Egypt, may have been one such city, but was eventually transferred across the Mediterranean to Byzantium.

5. Political and economic writers give short shrift to the custom of early communists of gift giving http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Mauss . According to Marcel Mauss gifts are not ‘free’, but invite reciprocity, whereby a kind of equality if maintained between the gift givers and receivers. In short, economic equality is an a priori presumption of the hominids of the wood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_Samoa .

6. Production of ‘surplus’ is an alien activity to the hominids of the wood. The contrary tradition in capitalist society indicates a society living in a stressful mode. The artificial or alienated nature of modern government and society are reflected in two modes of natural resistance:

a) organized or disorganized revolts and rebellions against capitalist and government exploitation;

b) unconscious relief seeking—from the stress of producing a never ending demand for a commodity ‘surplus’ and yasak or ‘tax’—by turning to alcohol, marihuana, various drugs, and transcendental meditation.

7. Contrary to the presumption of contemporary political ‘scientists’, the urban environment did not originate among hominids because it is an archetype that comes with its own momentum. The original city was not an agglomeration of huts, but a temple with a resident shaman-healer. The temple was, over a period of time, embellished from the gifts left by the healed in return for the gift of being healed. Because of such accumulations of ‘surplus’ (very likely silver and gold—because both shine), the temples became attractions to marauders, who replaced the shaman with the ‘Sturmbandfuerer’ of the oarsmen of their boat.

8. Though Hardt and Negri at one point insinuate that the struggle of the proletariat (no longer simply the ‘industrial working class’) against the ‘good’ or ‘beneficial’ Empire continues, they also acknowledge that “…in our much celebrated age of communication, struggles have become all but incommunicable.”  (Italics in original, p54.) While they attribute the incommunicability to the increasingly sophisticated (‘charm them into passivity’) management tactics of the Empire, and suggest that the ‘struggle’ against the Empire will eventually discover a ‘real alternative’, they appear unfazed by the fact that the Empire presumes itself to be a Monopoly (a fascist organization) for itself, for which reason it cares little for the hominid swarms in the city deserts, but is more concerned about fighting and winning wars against their competitors, re: U.S. & NATO vs Russia & China.

The war of Empires is brewing in the area that used to be the destination of the Viking marauders, and it does not at all concern the multitudes of hominids, who—for all their passivity—are alleged to have a somatic apparatus within them to eventually seize control of the urban desert and continue to desertify the planet for the sake of their ‘human rights’ orgasms for ever more.

9. I fail to see why the hominids (the outsiders of the Empire, whose operators call themselves ‘human beings’) should not welcome, both, the end of the Empires and the ‘proletariat’, in return for being able to gift our planet with apple trees a thousand years old—in the middle of the wood anywhere on planet Earth.

 

 

 

Eso’s Chronicles 320 / 7
It’s Not Over Until It’s Over
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

SO-CALLED ‘SUICIDE’ AS MECHANISM TO ESCAPE THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE CONSENSUS STATE (3)

Whether there is a war over the Ukraine to see which Empire it comes under is not a certainty, nevertheless it is reasonably clear that in the event that a war becomes real, on one side there will be the Western Empire (U.S., NATO-Europe, Israel, and beholden) and on the other the Eurasian Empire (Russia, China, Iran, and sympathizers).

If there is a war, it could very well be of planetary dimensions: changing not only geopolitical configurations, but also affecting the environment and cultures. It also seems clear that among the most affected will be the urban environment, which may to a large extent cease to exist due to the war’s catastrophic effects not only on the physical city and its hominid stock, but its supply routes involving energy and food supplies.

WW3 may be a great opportunity for countryside cities, at least those not directly in the way of radiation brought by prevailing weather patterns http://www.nucleardarkness.org/warconsequences/fivemilliontonsofsmoke/ .  Over a longer time pattern, the beneficiaries will also be forests and wild-life, though if nuclear weapons are extensively used, we may expect mutations in plant and animals forms, hominids not excluded.

The Big question is of course why a war that leads to such destructive results is even thought of?

The answer is that it will be fought not for reasons of power (because even the victor will gain ‘power’ for only a relatively short period of time), but because of an attempt to maintain a grossly overextended urban civilization. Also, the violence is foreordained as a result of a deliberate misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the history of civilizations on our planet. I have written many blogs on the theme in this series of 320.

As readable and interesting as “Empire” by Mssrs. Hardt and Negri may be in the context of the authors’ presumption of social history, in so far as the presumption points 180 degrees in the other direction from where that history began, the book presents great labor expended on a history presented by the Empire--as that history did not happen. Thus, working over ground that has been presumably ameliorated by capitalism, when it should have been left fallow or natural, the authors assert obvious falsehoods. So, what is wrong with their book “Empire”?

For one, the authors presume that Capitalism, which began its acutely destructive phase with the beginning of the Industrial Age, is a given for all futures hence forward, and completely ignore the possibility that it may be an exponential event that leads to its near immediate collapse. They thus present themselves as pseudo-religious disciples, even evangelists for urbanism http://namb.s3.amazonaws.com/files/email_images/discipleship-urban-final_650.jpg , rather than scholars of political science. For example, the authors state (p45):

“…we insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with our nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the nation-state to protect against global capital. We claim that Empire is better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and modes of production that came before it.” (My italics.)

Notwithstanding that I agree that the nation-state in isolation is an insufficient vehicle with which to resist global capitalism, the catastrophic weakness of Mssrs. Hardt and Negri is that they apparently have never considered that social history may, like anything else, come in segments, some of which are very short lived, yet apparently lived long enough to ‘snow’ Hardt and Negri.

Though the authors profess “…to [be] grounding [their] analysis in the power of the global multitute”, they actually do no such thing, though capitalism does drive ‘the global multitute’ to suicide (by way of brain damaging soldiers and workers due to over-kill and over-work), even while denying ‘suicides’ the potential dignity as they are the agon of self-sacrifice in disguise as well as denial. Not surprisingly, the attempt to escape the tortures of the capitalist social order by the multitudes which seek relief in alcohol or marihuana is met with contempt and further repressions by government and academia officials.

The ‘snow-job’ done on history and the failure of consensus scholarship to uncover this fraud, even to the extent that it fails to understand that the accumulation of capital does not begin with the multitude, but with proto-capitalist Viking marauders imposing yasak (bloody skin or fur), ‘taxes’ in place of serialized robberies, is to the shame of scholars to last till times are done.

Eso’s Chronicles 319 / 6
It’s Not Over Until It’s Over
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

SO-CALLED ‘SUICIDE’ AS MECHANISM TO ESCAPE THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE CONSENSUS STATE (2)

I was being selective when in the previous blog, I chose to honor Hardt and Negri with the quote: “The first task of Empire, then, is to enlarge the realm of the concensus that support its own power.”

However, as the book states a few sentences before the above quote: “Empire is formed not on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace. All interventions of the imperial armies are solicited by one or more of the parties involved in an already existing conflict. Empire is not born of its own will but rather is called into being and constituted on the basis of its capacity to resolve conflicts. Empire is formed and its intervention becomes juridicially legitimate only when it is already inserted into the chain of international consensuses aimed at resolving existing conflicts….” (p15)

Hardt and Negri, however, also point out that to be “juridicially legitimate’ and to enforce this legitimacy is based on “…poststructuralist [Deleuze and Guattari] understanding of [hominid] biopower that renews materialist thought and grounds itself solidly in the question of the production of social being.” (p28. My highlight.)

The authors anticipate my possible disagreement with their argument—which seeing that it precludes the multitudes or masses of hominids of making their own evaluation of the situation, which may lead them to insubordination of the ‘law’ (Aaron Schwartz being one such insubordinate)—by stating that “…a new theory of subjectivity must be formulated that operates primarily through knowledge, communication, and language.”

Alas (and unfortunately), the Empire acts as a dictatorship rather sooner than later.

We can note this act of the Empire in the fact that the U.S. government presumes itself to represent The Empire and bars all others from participating in its self-presumed juridicial legitimacy also known as ‘exceptionalism’. This disbarment includes all other UN Security Council Members and the so-called BRICS nations http://thediplomat.com/2014/03/why-did-brics-back-russia-on-crimea/ (: via ZH). Indeed, as the BRICS of he link have it: the exceptionalist approach of the U.S. has become a matter of dictatorship on more than one level, because its ‘legitimacy’ is based on no more than militant militarism and its ability to project it to the field. Aaron Schwartz (see blog 318) experienced the Empire’s militancy on the domestic juridical front, while Russia experiences it in the geopolitical arena by having its traditional area of influence undermined by overpaid NGOs stirring up insubordination among the multitudes by utilizing extremist nationalist elements as, for example, in the Ukraine.

The presumption of the U.S. government is not only self-puffery, but a puffery that aside from its potential tragic consequences is comical as the laughter of Russia’s President Putin at a correspondent’s formally serious question indicates https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ux3oiWELIQ . The only thing missing from the scene is the President of the U.S. asking the question and getting the same answer.

The encirclement or Russia with missile bases, its missiles ostensibly programmed not against Russia, but Iran is in fact a perfect illustration of what Hardt and Negri say is the Empire’s “…contemporary transformation of supranational law, the imperial process of constitution [that] tends either directly or indirectly to penetrate and reconfigure the domestic law of the nation-states, and thus supranational law powerfully overdetermines domestic law.” (p17)

As we may judge for ourselves, in this case, the ‘imperial process’ is not aimed at either Aaron Schwartz or Latvia (where the NGO ‘politica.lv’ is more than happy to collaborate with the undermining of Latvia’s sovereignty), but against a UN Security Council State—a not to be belittled Empire itself. The U.S.’s ‘imperial process’ can be (indeed must be) perceived as arrogant dependence on military power that treats potential human beings as a multitude or swarm of hominids.

As we saw in the previous blog, Aaron Schwartz perceived himself as being reduced—in spite of his attendance at MIT and Harvard (allegedly the elite among institutions of higher education in the U.S. and the world) to a hominid, who is left no other recourse but to fight the Empire with self-sacrifice of his life. Is the next step the self-sacrifice of 47? I am thinking of the 47 samurai sacrificing themselves in front ot the gates of the Japanese emperor.  Are these the warriors of the future against the Empire? To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari: “Is this the resistance to the present?”