Sample Reality

The Origins of Totalitarianism

The same thought trajectory that brought me to Le Bon’s work on crowds has led me to something I should’ve read a long time ago: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.

The Origins of Totalitarianism is Arendt’s thoughtful and relentlessly critical dissection of totalitarian movements and nations. In a later chapter called “Totalitarianism in Power,” Arendt argues that the ultimate goal of totalitarian governments is “to conquer the globe and bring all countries on earth under their domination.”

As a result, Arendt argues, a totalitarian government rules as if it were only a matter of time until the world is in fact under its control. Totalitarian regimes, Arendt writes,

conduct their foreign policy on the consistent assumption that they will eventually achieve this ultimate goal, and never lose sight of it no matter how distant it may appear or how seriously its “ideal” demands may conflict with the necessity of the moment. They therefore consider no country as permanently foreign, but, on the contrary, every country as their potential territory. (p. 415)

Let me be clear here: Arendt is specifically talking about Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. She’s not talking about any other nation. And I don’t mean to imply—as one might infer from my politics—that Arendt’s argument can be applied to today’s powerful nations.

The United States is not Nazi Germany. Bush is not Hitler.

Yet Arendt’s remark is nonetheless highly illuminating for the present situation, if only because it underscores how power now operates in the world.

For all the bombs’ bursting red glare and all the talk of bunker busters, the new regimes operate in a fundamentally non-dominational spirit. Or at least (in most cases) the domination assumes a form more alluring than the military occupation that Arendt wrote about. The most striking difference between a totalitarian government like the Nazis and imperial powers today is that the new Empire does not seek to conquer the globe by force, but rather, by a hegemonic false sense of consensus.

In the end, it’s much easier to convince people they want to do something (through powerful media strategies, educational policies, religious orthodoxy) than to hold a gun to their head and force them to do it. That is, essentially, the definition of hegemony.

And the hegemony that has been most wildly successful, the hegemony that is the cockroach of all ideologies, the hegemony that not only convinces people they want to do something, but more importantly convinces them they want to buy something, is global capitalism.

Globalization is the new totalitarianism.

Don’t Hug that Tar Baby

It’s been widely reported (and not just on the Daily Show) that new Presidential Press Secretary Mark Snow used the racist term “tar baby” in his first televised press briefing. Responding to a question about the NSA’s secret wiretapping program, Snow answered:

I am not going to stand up here and presume to declassify any kind of program. That is a decision the President has to make. I can’t confirm or deny it. The President was not confirming or denying. Again, I would take you back to the USA Today story to give you a little context. Look at the poll that appeared the following day […] something like 65% of the public was not troubled by it. Having said that, I don’t want to hug the tar baby of trying to comment on the program… the alleged program, the existence of which I can neither confirm or deny.

Just to illustrate what “tar baby” means to most people, below is a photograph of Tar Baby’s Pancakes, a restaurant in North Myrtle Beach whose logo taps into the vast reserves of racist imagery comprising our nation’s history. I snapped this photograph in July 2005, when I was in Myrtle Beach with my family. We didn’t eat at Tar Baby’s, but when I saw the sign, I had to stop and pull over. The sign left me speechless (close-up of the sign at Flickr). Finally—and sadly—I’ve found some relevance to this photograph.

Tar Baby’s (Larger Image)
Posted to Flickr by samplereality.

The Crowd

I discovered a gem tonight in Gustave Le Bon’s classic 1895 study of crowds, La Psychologie des foules. “Civilisations as yet,” Le Bon writes, “have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction.”

I like the tone of this. All fire and brimstone and presciently tapped into the mob psychology of the Facists. Such a welcome counterpoint to the current oh-the-masses-are-so-wise thinking that dominates the networked era.

Le Bon goes on, in his quaint 19th century French manner, to discuss Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and how Napoleon, though he possessed a “marvellous insight into the psychology of the masses of the country over which he reigned,” had somehow “completely misunderstood the psychology of crowds belonging to other races” (i.e. the Spanish). And then, in a witty footnote that would be comical were it not for its uncanny resonance with the present, Le Bon comments that Napoleon’s

most subtle advisers, moreover, did not understand this psychology any better. Talleyrand wrote him that “Spain would receive his soldiers as liberators.” It received them as beasts of prey.

Now, where I have heard that before? Soldiers greeted as liberators? Sounds familiar, but I can’t quite place it. And the second part, about being received as “beasts of prey”? Again, that vaguely seems hazily to be something foggily that is very nearly barely on the tip of my tongue. But I rack my brains and I can’t come up with it.

Le Bon continues in his footnote, “A psychologist acquainted with the hereditory insticts of the Spanish race would have easily foreseen this reception.” Le Bon frames in terms of instinct and race what is better understand in terms of culture and context: invaders are not liberators, occupiers are not liberators, and, when strategic natural resources are involved—whether it’s control of Atlantic shipping in the early 19th century or Mideast oil in the early 21st—the soldiers are indeed seen by the aggrieved crowds as beasts of prey.

Evel Knievel (not dead yet)

It must be a slow news day at the Associated Press. There’s an article on Evel Knievel, who’s apparently racked with pain, not to mention short-term memory loss. Not sure if this story really is newsworthy, but at least it’s written with a sense of irony:

Evel Knievel has trouble now just walking from his condo to the pool. The ’70s cultural icon and poster boy for fast living and derring-do is 67, his body broken by years of spectacular crashes and ravaged by a multitude of serious ailments. The king of the daredevils can hardly get out of bed most days, let alone straddle a Harley.

Reminds me of a conversation I overheard in May 2002. I was in the National Air & Space Museum at the Smithsonian, oogling one of Knievel’s star-spangled jumpsuits, which was—and still is—on display there (pictured here). And I overheard a couple of kids talking about how cool Knievel was—even though he was 20 years before their time. And one of the kids says, yeah, too bad he died.

You have to ask yourself, which is worse: smashing a flaming motorcycle into a cliff wall and falling to your death, or little kids thinking that’s how you died?

Immigration and National Security

Two implications of Bush’s proposal to beef up border security with National Guard troops:

The first is practical: it’s another instance of the militarization of civil society, which I had criticized in an earlier post.

The second is symbolic: by policing the border with troops trained for combat, Bush masterfully conflates two entirely distinct issues: immigration and national security. Illegal immigration is not a national security threat. (How many of the 9/11 terrorists were here illegally? None.) Framing immigration as a security issue obscures what it really is: a labor issue.

And what would happen if conservatives began treating immigration as the labor issue that it really is? They’d have to confront one of the contradictions of capitalism in the U.S.: we believe in “free trade,” in which corporations and products are free to move across borders, but not in “free labor,” in which the workers that produce those products for those corporations would be free to move across borders.

D.C. Area Humanities Forum on Video Games

Taking Games Seriously: The Impact of Gaming Technology in the Humanities
Monday, May 15th from 4-6pm
Location: Car Barn 316, 3520 Prospect St. NW, near Georgetown University

Overview and Participants:
Please join Michelle Lucey-Roper (Federation for American Scientists) and Jason Rhody (National Endowment for the Humanities) for a discussion moderated by Mark Sample (George Mason University) on gaming and the humanities. Discussion will center on gaming and its implications for education; thinking about ways to exploit aspects of video game technology to create innovative learning spaces; and games as a possible conduit to online archives or museum collections.

Panelist: Michelle Lucey-Roper is the Learning Technologies Project Manager for the Discover Babylon Project and the Digital Promise Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in Washington, DC. She has created and managed several technology projects and research initiatives that helped to improve public access to primary source materials. While working towards her doctorate on the interaction of word and image, Lucey-Roper researched and designed curricula for a wide range of subject areas and created new information resources. Before joining FAS, she worked as a librarian, teacher and most recently at the Library of Congress as a research associate. She earned her B.A. at Trinity College, Hartford, CT; her M.A at King’s College, London; and received a doctorate from Oxford University.

Panelist: Jason Rhody, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, is currently writing his dissertation, entitled Game Fiction. He has taught courses and given conference presentations on new media, electronic literature, and narrative. He currently works on a web-based education initiative, EDSITEment, for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He previously worked for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, an institute dedicated to using technology to enable humanities research and teaching. Jason writes about games and literature on his blog, Miscellany is the Largest Category.

Moderator: Mark Sample teaches and researches both contemporary American literature and New Media/Digital Culture, and he is always exploring how literary texts interact with, critique, and rework visual and media texts. His current research projects include a book manuscript on the early fiction of Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison, exploring their engagement with consumer culture, particularly how they use what Walter Benjamin calls “dialectical images” to reveal the latent violence of everyday things. Another project concerns the interplay between video games, the War on Terror, and the production of knowledge. Professor Sample received an M.A. in Communication, Culture, and Technology from Georgetown University (1998) and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (2004).

RSVP for dinner:
There will be an informal dinner after the forum, at a cost of $10 per person.
You must RSVP for dinner by May 8th.

Directions:

1. Directions to campus
2. Parking options adjacent to the Car Barn: Parking options Street parking around campus is severely limited and strictly enforced by the DC police (MPD) and the DC Department of Public Works (DPW). Most streets require a Zone 2 residential permit issued by the District of Columbia for parking for longer than two hours. A limited number of metered spaces are available on Reservoir Road, 37th Street and Prospect Street. For those up for a short walk, the Southwest Garage is accessible from Canal Road or Prospect St.
3. Map to the Car Barn.
4. The nearest metro station is Rosslyn, across Key Bridge.

About the Forum:
Co-sponsored by the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS— http://cndls.georgetown.edu) at Georgetown University and George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, the DC Area Technology & Humanities Forum explores important issues in humanities computing and provides an opportunity for DC area scholars interested in the uses of new technology in the humanities to meet and get acquainted.

For more information, contact Susannah McGowan, CNDLS, sm256@georgetown.edu

Total Information Awareness, Reprise

A few more thoughts on the massive NSA database of every domestic phone call, ever, in the United States…

The database actualizes what was once only theory: DARPA’s defunct Total Information Awareness project, which sought to “counter asymmetric threats [i.e. terrorism] by achieving total information awareness.”

Awareness of everything, godlike omniscience.

Is this the only way neo-cons can imagine protecting Americans from terrorist attacks?

Forget Total Information Awareness, this is Total Imagination Failure.

Another disturbing aspect of the NSA’s database is that General Michael Hayden, now Bush’s nominee for the head of the CIA, was in charge of it. Hayden is not a retired general. He is still on active status in the U.S. Air Force. So what we had here with the NSA (and what we might have with the CIA) is a military officer running a civilian organization. It is yet another chilling example of the militarization of domestic, civilian life.

There’s a reason the founders of the Constitution made a civilian (the President) the Commander-in-Chief of the military. Men with guns need to be kept in check. Because men with guns will eventually use those guns (and tanks and planes and phone records). Ironically, nobody recognizes this more than the neo-cons, who see Iran’s nuclear ambitions as de facto evidence that Iran will eventually deploy those nuclear weapons.

Again, Total Imagination Failure.

Can You Hear Me Now: The NSA, Me, and Papa John’s

The big surprise in today’s USA Today story about the NSA building a staggering database of every single domestic phone call in the United States is not that such a database exists, but that the NSA waited until after 9/11 to begin building it.

I think we had always assumed that the government was already gathering this information, logging every phone call, timestamping every caller and every recipient, and crossreferencing all those records. Think of it: every pizza delivery order in the U.S. stored for posterity’s sake. Oh, the marketing possibilities!

“A database of every phone call ever made”: this is how one insider describes it.

Yet, there are gaps in the record: Qwest is the only big carrier to refuse to cooperate with the NSA (unlike Verizon, BellSouth, and AT&T). Good for them. Sell your Qwest stock soon, though. (Or, maybe hoard it, and wait for that big buyout from the resurging Ma Bell…)

The sky is falling, but my phones are tapped, so I’m okay and you are too

I caught snippets of the Diane Rehm Show today, and there was a panel of experts discussing the domestic war on terror. There’s the predictable apologist for the Bush administration, spouting the standard refrain that because there’s been no terror attack on the U.S. since 9/11, all that illegal wiretapping and surveillance and profiling and warmongering has paid off. Okay, fine, that’s no surprise, what he’s saying. Typical specious reasoning, Homer Simpson style.

But what got me was one of the callers. First, he said that Robert Heinlein is one of his favorite authors. Red flags go off, right there alone. Then the guy, a marine who, to his credit, is on his way to Afghanistan, says that Heinlein has a quote, something like, You can have peace and you can have freedom, but you can’t have peace and freedom.

If I’m not mistaken, that’s Starship Troopers talking, Heinlein’s most (and there are many contenders) facistic novel, where his militaristic, kill the motherfragging aliens, and so what if a few humans die, because they were weak and deserved to die urges come to full blossom.

And this guy is citing it as a textbook for American liberty?

I bow before the almighty forces of juvenile literature!