We end map III of our navigations in Desperado Philosophy with excerpts from an Arne Naess talk first presented in 1986, articulating ideas that grow in resonance with each passing year within the ongoing ecocide. The images document Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater reef sculptures, about which we will have more to say in 2015; among our many sources of joy, even as the oceans suffocate in plastic.
We write today to urge careful consideration of Edward E. Baptist’s recently published The Half Has Never Been Told, above all in the context of recent racial violence in Ferguson and elsewhere.
Through careful analysis of family plantation records, Baptist demonstrates the centrality of slavery within the booming expansion of the American economy during the 19th century: “In fact, slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation. The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.”
Baptist offers a concise summary of his research in an excellent interview in Kirkus, excerpted below for DP readers.
After publishing an obvious and misleading hatchet job of a review, The Economist magazine issued a rare apology:
Alas, even the apology skews understanding of Baptist’s powerful historical argument, namely that slavery was an immensely profitable and dynamic structural feature of American economic expansion, establishing patterns of dependency, violence and abuse that persist into the present; not Yankee ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit nor the expansion of freedom in pursuit of our manifest destiny, but rather the vast fortunes extracted by way of the “whipping machine” of slave labor and racial subjection.
That violent legacy remains deeply embedded within the American brand.
Reactions to the release of the long-awaited Torture Report (or at least its executive summary) are extensively documented elsewhere. Having spent countless hours over the past three years investigating various dimensions within the lengthy and extensive history of American torture, we offer a few remarks:
1. Much of the discussion appears to accept a false premiss that the torture techniques documented in the report constitute some sort of historical aberration resulting from the panic and chaos of 9/11. This is very definitely not the case. Alfred McCoy has researched the deeper (and darker) history in meticulous detail, most recently in Torture and Impunity.
Beyond the actions of the CIA, many of these techniques (such as stress positions and sexual humiliation) have been widely used throughout American history against Native Americans, slaves, incarcerated prisoners and political dissidents. Further, our history of torture certainly does not end with the human species; indeed, many of the techniques described in the report derive from behavioral experiments conducted on dogs and other animals.
2. The discussion has also assumed a tone that suggests that torture in the United States has been eradicated through the waving of some magic Presidential wand. This is, alas, another self-serving delusion. As Rebecca Gordon so brilliantly recounts in her recent book Mainstreaming Torture, such practices have become so widespread one might conclude they have become part of our “national DNA”.
As Gordon points out on her own blog:
3. We also take note of the constant refrain, from the oval office and elsewhere, that while those who implemented this brutal regime of torture may have made mistakes under desperate circumstances, they are nonetheless to be honored as patriots. Such claims are false and deceptive. The only patriots in this wretched story are those few who courageously refused to participate in these illegal and abhorrent practices.
Returning to Rebecca Gordon, in her essay for TomDispatch:
Finally, a poem has just been brought to our attention, as published on the Guardian website from Iraq veteran Brian Turner:
A correspondent has alerted us to a “performance” by the celebrity-artist (?) Marina Abramovic. At first we thought that the press release and “show” must be some sort of hoax, expressed through outpourings of philosophical gibberish. Surely this must all be some sort of sly spoof on the narcissism and grandiosity of the Art World, right? Alas, the artist appears to be offering her painfully vapid “energy generator” in all earnestness:
PREPARATIONS FOR A FORCED INTROSPECTION
EVIDENCE FOR AN ART OF NOTHINGNESS
Leaving aside her complete lack of understanding of what she refers to as “Tibetan teachings of oneness”, Ms. Abramovic appears either ignorant of or indifferent to the actual history of sensory deprivation as deployed within the present “no touch” torture regime of interrogation and incarceration. We have explored these histories in more detail elsewhere. A concise summary from the peerless historian of our distinctly American brand of torture, Alfred McCoy, follows below:
THIS IS NOT A PERFORMANCE
A DISTINCTLY AMERICAN ART FORM?
Returning to Ms. Abramovic in light of this history, we need only quote from her own press release:
