Keith Hart on Sat, 25 Mar 2017 12:44:54 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Notes on the counter-revolution 2 |
I came across these anecdotal scribbles recently. They were written in the context of September 11th, the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq which began while I was teaching in the US. I was led by various encounters and developments to reflect on whether American society was descending into fascism. The style is historical generalization and a sort of ethnography of what I found in daily life there. The obvious reason for posting these pieces now is that they provide one point of comparison between the world today and the events of 2001-2003 and especially a chance to contemplate concretely their historical relationship. Some of these pieces were posted on nettime then and provided a rare opportunity to meet Dan Wang in Chicago. The idea of what I might call the long counter-revolution expresses a sense that since 1945 the world has seen cumulative strides towards greater freedom for many and this poses a challenge to methods of command and control by governments and corporations. The end of the Cold War produced, at least on the surface, a belle epoque in which the balance between freedom and oppression was temporarily lifted in the former's favor: freedom from nuclear terror, reduced fear of state apparatuses, the internet, greater mobility of people, goods and money, the emergence of China and India as capitalist powers. September 11th enabled the Bush regime to prepare the way for Trump and for other despotic rulers round the world, so effectively that Cheney can now come out as a liberal and some commentators pine for W's "normality" Now the economic, legal and political achievements of the postwar decades are being rolled back by a constellation of social forces bent on establishing another thousand year Reich that this time will last, unless progressives come up with more effective political strategies than we have for decades now. The roots of American Fascism Mks 1 and 2 lie in the 90s when Clinton, Blair and the Eurocrats made their Faustian pact with a rampant finance capital. But here the focus is on 2001-2003. There is an Academia discussion for three weeks from March 21st at https://www.academia.edu/s/�notes-on-the-counter-revolution. Keith
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