We "do not flee from being deceived as much as from being damaged by deception..."

[The Nietzsche quotes in this column come from "Truth and Lies in the Moral Sense," available at this link.]

Check out John Tierney, "The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts," New York Times, May 16, 2004. I'm not going to do the NYT any favors by linking to their subscription-only site (you can get a free subscription, yada yada), but yeah, the pro-war crowd is pretty contrite these days.

Lots of illusions have come crashing down in the last several weeks.

David Sirota, Christy Harvey and (former Claremont debater) Judd Legum chronicle the sudden fall of Ahmad Chalabi, former right wing hero of the Iraqi National Congress who is now being raided by U.S. troops and vilified by coalition spokespersons and conservatives at home.

What will be lost on pro-war and pro-Bush folks is that progressives actually called this one years ago. We said Chalabi was a shady gangster, a consumate liar, possibly even worse. Sirota, Harvey and Legum (it's great to see Judd doing such good work) chronicle this history of lies and deceptions better than I could, so hit the link and read the article.

Barbara Ehrenreich shows contriteness of a different kind in her article "What Abu Ghraib Taught Me."

For Ehrenreich, pictures of Megan Ambuhl, Lynndie England Sabrina Harman engaged in brutal acts against Iraqi prisoners reminded her that women should not automatically be held up as kinder, more progressive, or more humane than men. Now, as a socialist concerned about feminist issues, Ehrenreich has never been publicly guilty of radical feminist essentialism. She's no Mary Daly, and that's good. But I love her honesty, because she admits that, like many of us, her private thoughts did sometimes assign to women an expectation of progressiveness, humane-ness, a kind of hope for a humanity with women at the helm. She writes:

Secretly, I hoped that the presence of women would over time change the military, making it more respectful of other people and cultures, more capable of genuine peacekeeping. That's what I thought, but I don't think that anymore. A certain kind of feminism, or perhaps I should say a certain kind of feminist naiveté, died in Abu Ghraib. [...]
The struggles for peace and social justice and against imperialist and racist arrogance, cannot, I am truly sorry to say, be folded into the struggle for gender equality.

This reminds me of a question I threw out to the edebate community a few weeks ago--a question that remains largely unanswered by those obsessed with identity politics:

What would happen if Condoleeza Rice were elected president, and Colin Powell elected Vice President? Would this make America less racist? Would it change the way America treats the rest of the world? Should I trust Condoleeza Rice more than I trust George Bush? Why or why not?

To me, the answers to those questions are obvious. But they also underscore my problem with any progressive critique that ignores class and materiality.

The crashing of illusions is important, but there's always the skeptic in me, the Nietzschean who wonders whether (especially in the political realm) illusions are stripped away only to reveal more illusions.

We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all.

But we should have outgrown Nietzsche by now. Understanding Marx's project should have taught us that there are material referents, external environments, of which we are part, and we don't merely create them with our discourse and our thoughts. In fact, thinking that ideas matter more than materiality is a kind of ideological suicide; not merely because it buys into a bourgeois postmodernism that encourages fragmentation and opium trips in the face of genuine physical oppression, but also because it encourages a self-centeredness whose culminatory ethic is not just an ignorance of materiality, but an ignorance of other people, and their legitimate needs--needs that are often very much like our own.

A class/materialist perspective can also reveal something else about the political reaction to this recent unfolding of facts. Many self-proclaimed "leftists" take visible delight at the failure of the administration to successfully prosecute the Iraq war. Well, clearly the war was a horrible policy, and clearly it was driven by the worst, and most predictable, of motives. But the delight revealed by these "leftists" is targeted at the administration and its lies, while ignoring the fact that every one of these "failures" involves a massive loss of life--the lives of workers--our fellow workers--who happen to be wearing uniforms. And the lives of ordinary Iraqi working people as well. At least two or three times a week I read a post on the LBO-talk listserve expressing giddy delight at the death of U.S. troops, an explosion somewhere, a failed battle, whatever. I think this kind of attitude is a pretty obvious instance of bourgeois (non)radicalism. It's a manifestation of the fundamental alienation of a self-proclaimed enlightened "left" intelligensia from the everyday struggles and concerns of working people. I'd like to see those bloated false radicals laugh like that in the presence of parents, spouses, and family members of dead U.S. soldiers--however politically misinformed those loved ones might be. That kind of anti-cheerleading doesn't just play into the hands of pro-war demogogues who routinely vilify the left. It's also just flat-out elitist, bourgeois, and aloof from the everyday perspective of the poor and working people--the chief victims of Bush's reign of terror.

One of the most eloquent expositions of what I am trying to say is David North and David Walsh's now classic essay "Anti-Americanism: The Anti-Imperialism of Fools."

Analyzing the rhetoric of those who took delight in the September 11th attacks, and saw in those attacks some kind of progressive strike against imperialism, North and Walsh say:

The socialist future of mankind [sic] depends upon the awakening of the most humane and generous instincts of the working people of the world. What happened on September 11—the awful deaths of thousands of innocent people, among them office workers, firemen, janitors, and business people—profoundly offends those instincts. [...]
What does it mean to “dislike the US”? What sort of social element speaks like this? The United States is a complex entity, with a complex history, elements of which are distinctly ignoble, elements of which are deeply noble. [...]
All this of course is a closed book to the smug middle class philistine and snob, satisfied to make use of words and phrases that come most easily to hand...It is available cheaply and in large quantities in middle class circles in Britain, France, Germany and, for that matter, in the United States. It is available, so to speak, “on tap.” Such an outlook has the virtue of appearing oppositional, while not committing its adherent to any course of political action that might cause inconvenience. It is a form of pseudo-socialism, the phony “anti-imperialism” of cynics and fools.

Thinking of the Bush administration (and bourgeois politics in general), but also thinking of our sometimes hostile reaction to the gradual unfolding of the facts in the past several weeks, there is one quote by Nietzsche that does seem all too appropriate:

The liar uses the valid designations, the words, to make the unreal appear as real; he says, for example, 'I am rich,' when the word 'poor' would be the correct designation of his situation. He abuses the fixed conventions by arbitrary changes or even by reversals of the names. When he does this in a self-serving way damaging to others, then society will no longer trust him but exclude him. Thereby men do not flee from being deceived as much as from being damaged by deception: what they hate at this stage is basically not the deception but the bad, hostile consequences of certain kinds of deceptions. In a similarly limited way man wants the truth: he desires the agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth, but he is indifferent to pure knowledge, which has no consequences; he is even hostile to possibly damaging and destructive truths. And, moreover, what about these conventions of language? Are they really the products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Do the designations and the things coincide? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

May the illusions continue to fall, and rather than replacing them with more bourgeois illusions, may we replace them with the shared vision of genuine human solidarity. We may still wrestle with conflicting appearances; we may not reach some "transcendent" anti-imperialist truth, but whatever we find or lose, we'll do so together.