pandemonium  documents

THE CURRENT, GLOBALIZED, VIOLENT,
CRIMINAL CULTURE
Times of Political Coups in Venezuela

By Franz J. T. Lee

10th October, 2002.
(Revised 17/07/03)



Today, outside beautifully Mother Nature smiles at us, with sunny Spring vividness, clad in green, blooming and blossoming red, pink, yellow, lilac and white; it is Eternal Spring; Mérida, Venezuela, wishes serene, revolutionary contradictions, true, global dialectics, and loving, loveable, emancipatory trialogics to the world.

However, ¿hasta cuándo?, Venezuelan "opposition" homo sapiens sapiens, CEO, gente de petróleo, coordinadora democrática, landowner, industrialist, capitalist,  multinational, general, oil worker, peasant, buhonero, lumpen, will embrace terror, terrorism and violence; according to CNN, at this very moment "more than a million" blindfolded, denaturalized, dissocialized, "peaceful democrats" are marching in Caracas, intending to oust the "revolutionary" government of Chavez, "ya"! What a globe, what a world, what a fascism, my country(wo)men!  

Of course all over, the language of global governments or of the "opposition" is "civico-militar"; the prose style of all political theories and/or ideologies is struck by military and warlike expressions, including words like struggle, resist, march, victory, home land, patria, glory, nobility, justicia, not one step backward, and we shall overcome; similarly, the literature of global fascist ideology, of newspeak, is replete with martial expressions, like full spectrum dominance, operation freedom, collateral damage, the attacking noble eagles, the embedded desert rats, etc. 

Now, together with Camus and Popper, let us see what the revolutionary trade unionist, the middle-class, civil engineer Eugène Sorel Georges (1847-1922), from Cherbourg, France, has to tell us about the social, creative role of violence in history. As you all should know, he was a passionate defender of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer who was wrongly convicted of treason in France.  Also, he heavily influenced Frantz Fanon's theory of counter-violence.

However, his best known work is Réflexions sur la violence (1908 -- Reflections On Violence), that first appeared as a series of articles in Le Mouvement Socialiste early in 1906 and has been translated in many languages. During the 60's the global, anti-imperialist student movement, next to Marx, Marcuse, Lukacs, Fromm and Reich, was studying Sorel, especially his concept of violence.

Sorel very clearly differentiated two concepts: Violence (the revolutionary denial of the existing social order) and Force (the state's power of coercion). Of course, like Marxism was perverted into Stalinism and Real Socialism, so Sorel's Theory of Violence was first desecrated by Italian fascism, and then utilized by the dictator Benito Mussolini.

Now what were the scientific and philosophic contents of his theory of violence?

" Throughout Sorel's thought there runs a moralistic hatred of social decadence and resignation. He attacked the idea of inevitable progress, as developed by 18th-century philosophers, in his work Les Illusions du progrès (1908; “Illusions of Progress”) and believed that the future was what men chose to make it. Departing from the intellectual tradition of European Socialism, Sorel held that human nature was not innately good; he therefore concluded that a satisfactory social order was not likely to evolve but would have to be brought about by revolutionary action."

"With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Sorel declared himself for the Bolsheviks, who he thought might be capable of precipitating the moral regeneration of mankind. ..."

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=70528&tocid=0&query=sorel

Strange enough, in his heyday, Sorel was generally categorized as being more a Fascist than a Socialist. He also used the word violence in his own special way; by violence he meant creative passion, not the throwing of stones, or the launching of human bombs and less the burning of huts, houses and Twin Towers. He clearly stated that we have not invented violence (coercion by social order), that we are being born into a world of violence, that is, in capitalism. Not the resistance against such oppressive domination is "violent", e contrario, it is self-defence.   
  

Certainly Sorel's views were criticized by authors such as the French philosopher-writer Albert Camus, born in Algeria, and the Austrian-born British philosopher  Karl Popper. Camus, beginning as an Existentialist who subscribed to the view that “the universe is absurd,”  another version of Scott Schneider's "the universe is a madhouse"; he continued believing in the  "personal affirmation of justice and human decency as compelling values to be realized in conduct". Fervently, he appealed to "the 'Mediterranean' tradition of moderation and human warmth and joy in living as opposed to the 'northern' Germanic tradition of fanatical, puritan devotion to metaphysical abstractions."

In his book, The Rebel, (L'Homme révolté), the anti-Marxist, Camus, argued that the true revolutionary is not the (wo)man who conforms to the orthodoxy of some ideology, but a (wo)man who could say “no” to injustice. To him, the systematic violence of ideology - the crimes de logique that were committed in its name - seemed to be totally unjustifiable. Nevertheless, hating violence of all calibres -- domestic, matrimonial, fratricidal, matricidal, genocidal, genocidal, economic, political, social, military -- Camus stated the rise of ideology -- (not of philosophy) for example, of Stalinism, fascism, racism, etc. -- in the modern world had added enormously to human suffering and misery. 
 

In nuce, Karl Popper was pleading for capitalist “piecemeal social engineering”, and against Camus, found ideology as something excellent, its only vice was that "it rests on a logical mistake". In his "The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Logik der Forschung)", he affirmed ideology, including its corresponding coercion of the State, as follows, as "an attempt to find certainty in history and to produce predictions on the model of what were supposed to be scientific predictions." 

Furthermore,

"Violence found eloquent champions in several black militant writers of the 1960s, notably the Martinican theorist Frantz Fanon. Moreover, several of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's dramatic writings turn on the theme that “dirty hands” are necessary in politics and that a man with so-called bourgeois inhibitions about bloodshed cannot usefully serve a revolutionary cause. Sartre's attachment to the ideal of revolution tended to increase as he grew older, and in some of his later writings he suggested that violence might even be a good thing in itself." 
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=109254&hook=292082#292082.hook

In the last analysis, currently, taking Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld by their words, globally violence is identical to "terror" and "terrorism".  What they do not explain is that ab ovo, quintessentially, capitalism, globalization, democracy, etc. are brutal, economic, exploiting violence; merciless, political, dominating violence; beastly, social, discriminating violence; genocidal, global, military, violence and galactic, transhistoric, alienating violence. We live in a global criminal culture, that has transformed itself into savage recognizability; the only problem: as a result of sophisticated, ideological infowarfare, very few remain to be able to identify scientifically, to understand philosophically, to contradict, to negate, to differentiate its global, fascist reality.

Furthermore, a typical example of the world state of affairs; for three and a half centuries, the Africans of South Africa fought against colonial, neo-colonial, racist and apartheid violence. For this Mandela and Mbeki suffered in prison and in exile; at last, the "road to freedom" was cleared in 1989, and the avenues of non-violence against criminality were wide open. Now, to conclude, a decade later, how is life in free, liberated, democratic South Africa? For the Rainbow Nation? 

I just quote:

"SOUTH AFRICA'S CRIMINAL CULTURE

Crime Wave: The South African Underworld and Its Foes 

By Eric Pelser, who is a senior researcher in the Crime and Justice Programme at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria.
Edited by Jonny Steinberg 202 pages, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001

"Few people living in South Africa would be surprised that a police sergeant drives a bright pink Volkswagen with black tinted windows because he believes no one would want to steal it. Or that someone could be robbed of his cash, cellphone, and handheld computer in the main Johannesburg police station. Or that the primary suspect in a pizzeria bomb blast in Cape Town could be arrested at a police roadblock in the company of two cops attached to an anticorruption task force, and that the suspect would be a well-known police informer." 

 

"Indeed, every year for the past seven years, South Africa's police have recorded an increasing number of serious crimes, in excess of 2 million annually. Despite the minister of safety and security's angry protestations that the crime rate has stabilized, statistics from his own department indicate that recorded crime in South Africa increased by 24 percent between 1994 and 2000. A quick comparison indicates the scale of the problem: Interpol reports that in 1998 in Russia, 110 violent robberies were recorded per 100,000 people; in South Africa the number was 208." 

http://www.britannica.com/magazine/article?query=%
22social+violence%22&id=6&smode=2

What more is there to say? Apartheid was an appearance form of Social Violence; now it is Reconciliatory Democracy! Such types of puppet regimes will be installed in all "terrorist" countries across the globe by the Fourth Reich, by the United States of America.

   -----ooo-----