the form of life presses on the living: 1948 reverberations

the form of life presses on the living: 1948 reverberations

I participated in the Assembly -- Toward Nakba as a Planetary Process -- organised by Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri in collaboration with the Anti-Denialist Museum of Palestine. https://arika.org.uk/anti-denialist-museum-of-palestine/

These were my opening remarks.

Track 1: submerged in a sea of words

Submerged in a sea of words /our hearts are with them/ the form of life presses on the living and on the form of the filmmaking. These were among the words spoken by Ayreen and Rene on Wednesday night in their beautiful and moving opening / inauguration film-making-unmaking For Ever Gaza. I am still sitting with and meditating on that offering, grateful to them and to Mahmoud for the stories of words that have disappeared and lost their rhythm and for the words that can still be chosen as a hand held out. Grateful for so many images and sounds of life. Grateful for the dancing young girls who call Ayreen Auntie.

I’m holding that séance and its movements in mind as we begin the assembly because while it has the same orientation – to stand on the side of life -- the assembly operates in a different register and discourse. It’s more distant and more coherent words are required, words that I have found difficult to muster, to be honest. Words that insist on what they cannot do: get it right, make a difference. Rene and Ayreen’s call to assemble is demanding – in a good way. It asks that we “open up the scale and magnitude of Nakba” to its “planetary reverberations,” that we understand what 1948 can and does mean, that we take the measure of the order that is “coming to an end, unravelling before our eyes,” and that we consider how we can both imagine and make “a way out,” find a liveable next. I hope that Ayreen and Rene will speak more about their specific arguments as they are quite important. In the meantime, submerged in a sea of words, here are a few tracks gesturing towards, as they put it, “the things that would need to be abolished, undone, overcome.”

Track 2: 1948

A lot of things happened in 1948 before and after Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14th, the subsequent Arab-Israeli war, and the rotting of the father’s last orange in Ghassan Kanafani’s story “The Land of Sad Oranges.” On the same day on 14 May when the US recognized the state of Israel it conducted one of the 43 nuclear weapon tests on the Enewetak Atoll in the Majol or Ralik-Ratak Islands in the Pacific. In April Truman also approved the Marshall Plan to rebuild post-war Europe and in response to a threat by African American veterans to march on the Pentagon, in July, he issued an executive order to end racial segregation in the military. In the meantime, the Smith Act trials of members of the Communist Party started, trials that would by 1957 convict over 200 people, including Claudia Jones. The South African elections in May (26th) of 1948 began 46 years of apartheid rule.

In Latin America, Truman supported a military coup in Venezuela and in Peru a year earlier and interfered in the civil war in Costa Rica, in Columbia and in general helped to crush a range of democratic initiatives as a “good neighbour” in the name of containment. In East and Southeast Asia, Burma declared independence from Great Britain (4 January); Ghandi was assassinated (30 January) five months after 200 years of British rule ended (15 August 1947); the Pakistan socialist party was founded (29 January); there was a communist uprising in Indonesia (September-December) and Ceylon won independence and renamed itself Sri Lanka. The partition of Korea was made more permanent with the election in August of US puppet Syngman Rhee, and on 19 October a group of young soldiers in Yeosu rebelled against US occupation and capitalist authoritarianism prompting a regional people’s uprising whose suppression made civil war inevitable. Mao’s army conquered Manchuria on the first of November and less than a year later (1 October 1949) the Chinese revolution ended with the creation of the People’s Republic of China and the dispatch of Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan. On 9 December, the UN approved the convention on genocide and the universal declaration of human rights.

Obviously, this is a very incomplete but not entirely random list of moments in a changing world in which US actions mattered more than before. I provide it to give a tiny sense of what it might mean to bring the 1948 Nakba’s reverberations beyond into view. I’m writing a small book about the refusal of the soldiers in the 14th regiment in South Korea in 1948 to participate in the scorched earth counterinsurgency campaign on Jeju Island that killed 30,000 people and I’m happy to talk about that and what 1948 looks like from the vantage of Korea if folks are interested. But I want to focus on one crucial element of the post war order that 1948 signifies in the spirit of identifying what needs to be undone.

The triumphant post-1945 modern liberal capitalist democratic order, a deeply anti-communist white supremacist order whose terms were set by the U. S. and enshrined in the hallowed and hollow hands of the law, depends fundamentally on war and police power. Depends not only on discrete wars in the past or the present but on permanent war. The 1948 Nakba and even more so the 1967 Nakba and thus the ongoing Nakba regime are impossible without the active participation of the U.S., notwithstanding the energetic commitments and cruelties of the state of Israel. The rise of the US as the primary global economic and political power after 1945 is impossible without its military power and its military economy, without its having taken the form of a military empire. There is no way of properly speaking about capitalism or colonialism then and now without understanding the role of war in creating and maintaining it, without grasping the nature of a militaristic society which depends on and is attached to war and policing not just as tools of extraction and profiteering but as a mode of living and relationality.

There is a small possible fork in the road in 1945 at the conclusion ofWorld War II when the US can take another path. Like other previous and future opportunities, such as with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the official end of the Cold War, it is not taken. Rather than de-militarising as was done in every previous war, a military industrial complex was created to enable rule in a state of permanent war, which has mutated into a vast global military security carceral machine, the major source of U.S. economic and political power globally and the miseries it produces. By 1948, the military industrial complex had become the chosen infrastructure and engine for the US’s extraordinary wealth production. This infrastructure was and is paid for by the US government. Very high levels of spending on military, security and order, until relatively recently funded by the taxation of the people, became the norm and they never declined despite the rise of what Ruth and Craig Gilmore call the anti-state state. 1948 inaugurates first a significant transfer of wealth and second a significant transfer of power and prestige from representative branches of government to the military (partially in the name of professionalising) and to the national security agencies: the CIA was expanded and its protection from civilian oversight secured.

By 1948, the form of the US’s military empire has also been decided, its roots in the post- war military occupations of Germany, Japan and Korea. At the height of the Cold War, the US had over 1500 military installations in about 100 countries. Currently, this empire is secured by approximately 750 US military bases in at least 80 countries and approximately 180,000 active duty military troops spread across close to 180 countries. Japan (over 50,000), Germany (over 35,000) and South Korea (over 27,000) have the most concentrated numbers and the largest number of military bases (120, 119 and 73 respectively), the African continent the site of the empire’s greatest expansion in the last 15 years. Rightly, there is a lot of oppositional attention paid to the provision of weapons to Israel, but there is also a large and increasing US military presence in the Middle East. For example, the US is building an enormous new “embassy” (43 acres, 19 structures), basically a fortress, that will serve as a command for the Lebanese military and police in the suburbs of Beirut (Awkar). https://merip.org/2024/04/beirut-and-the-birth-of-the-fortress-embassy/ (https://merip.org/2024/04/beirut-and-the-birth-of-the-fortress-embassy/) It is a partner to the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar that hosts the US Air Forces Central Command and four other command centres. As of October, there were close to 45,000 US troops in the Middle East as well a more than a dozen warships, aircraft carriers which carry fighter jets, all ordered by US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin to increase their “readiness” for combat. As you know they are bombing Yemen and Syria with them. The situation in East Asia is similar and related. https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/10/01/how_many_us_troops_are_in_the_middle_east_1062050.html (https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/10/01/how_many_us_troops_are_in_the_middle_east_1062050.html)

The 1948 military industrial complex has mutated into a vast transnational military security carceral machine. The mutation highlights not just the centrality of war but also the importance of police power, which takes on greater importance both in the US and in Israel with the 1967 Nakba. Police power is a mode of governance, the discretionary power to dispose of present threats to the social order and to avert future dangers to it. The responsibility of the power for the future is important – predicting dangerousness or determining what threatens order is one of its main functions. Police power is always anticipatory in this sense, and its 17th and 18th c European theorists viewed it as a means to achieve a political ideal of a harmonious state, its interior affairs all in good order. In Rene and Ayreen’s terms, it is one of the most important technologies of "denialist futurity." Settler colonial regimes have been crucial laboratories for the development of a police power capable of effectively expropriating and protecting property, including racial property, such as whiteness or Jewishness, and protecting social order, as the case of the US and Israel demonstrate. In the pre Civil War (1865) United States, police power was an explicitly racial privilege, as it is in Israel today. The state did not, in fact, hold a monopoly on the use of force, thus the right of slave owners and their deputies, such as slave patrols and labour overseers, to police at will and usurp the judicial power to punish. In principle, the power to punish belongs to the judiciary, the judge, although this principle, constitutional in nature, has a rather checkered history and one could argue that the prison, which concentrates police power, and which is central to the Nakba regime, mocks the very principle itself.

By 1948, the ideological cover – the veil of forgeries masquerading as natural truths – is woven in an American exceptionalism, rooted in its identity as the great liberator of the world from fascism, that still today continues to claim that U.S. capitalist democracy is the best way of life known to mankind, the highest form of freedom, and that its preservation and extension by any means necessary is an “existential” requirement and cannot be otherwise than a “good” power. Israel and the US speak the same language here. It has taken enormous work by states, corporations, media and educational systems, civil society organisations and individuals to keep these “forgeries of memory and meaning,” to use Cedric J. Robinson’s words, going and to also continually adjust and fine-tune them. Now, it's getting harder and harder for them. The world order itself is shifting and they have real competition for primacy in a context where they have done great harm to the world’s majority. The mystifications and misdirections have become more and more fragile and worn thin over time and thus more chaotic and unhinged. As these contrivances are continuously challenged by the realities and the experiences and the people they deny and distort, their unrelenting hostility to exposure becomes more evident, more violent, and more dangerous. Here, I think that Ayreen and Rene’s emphasis on denial is really crucial because as an epistemological-ontological affective structure, denial is bound up literally with the rage that sustains it as a deflective shield and at the same time is completely unbound or untethered from anything or anyone that isn’t possessed of the same spell.

Third track: mutiny is the conscience of war a discordant note

However we assess the overall global shifts and the unravelling of U.S. hegemony -- and here it’s worth heeding Ramzy Baroud’s advice that the Palestine struggle requires “a version of the truth that is not driven by future political interests but a profound understanding of the past,” the formidable destructive capabilities of the US military empire remain a force to be reckoned with. Everywhere. Since almost everywhere it has provoked a major new arms race. If Operation Al-Aqsa Flood has re-opened the question of armed resistance, we must also re-open the question of how to encourage, assist, offer solidarity and refuge to soldiers who might become absent without leave AWOL, in the broadest sense: who might refuse to enlist or be conscripted; who might actively refuse orders or cleverly find ways to sabotage war from within; who might leave in the midst or later; who might keep secret or whisper furtively their unsettled dissatisfaction with the whole business; who might organise politically against war itself or for causes their job is to subjugate. Soldiers from every army during the very unpopular First World War left in the trenches the graffiti message: mutiny is the conscience of war. A few are saying it now. Just as their participation is crucial to the functioning of a system that relies on this vast labour force, their refusal to participate in the denials and in the work itself is an important conduit to the broader undoing under discussion.

Fourth track. Briefly. On living through it.

In a rather cranky interview with Mediapart in early January of 2022, the filmmaker Jean Luc Godard, in explaining his criticism of the news outlet, said: “A fact is something that happens. But we mustn’t forget that it’s also something that doesn’t happen. And as far as I’m concerned, what doesn’t happen ... today is more of a fact … much more important than what does happen.” This wouldn’t be a terribly profound point except for the caveat he makes: “Living through it is another matter.” Living through the Nakba regime, especially in this exterminationist phase, living through a denialism that operates like possession by a very angry unrequited demon, living through everything we are living through is a complex delicate process best treated with means that can remove the weight being carried and not add to it. Different vocabulary, different mode than tracks 1-3. More like Wednesday evening’s unmaking film Forever Gaza.

Later in that same interview, Godard makes the rather Jesuitical admission that he has five quotations or textual passages, “for five fingers,” that “stay in my memory and which I sometimes repeat in the evening … when I’m going to sleep… to see if I still remember them.” The quotation of his I like best and the one that might be of some use to us today is the last line of philosopher Henri Bergson’s book Matter and Memory. The quotation reads: “Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds, and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.” Gaza Forever.