Permanent Pandemics and American Imperialism

Notes on some recent readings

It’s been now almost four weeks since I finished the first draft of my manuscript on Woke Ideology and submitted it to the publisher. After two weeks of a rather fantastic voyage with my husband for our honeymoon and two weeks of being back to work, I’m a little more myself again.

A little more, but not fully. I’d not really realized how much writing that book had required of me until yesterday. A new writer had contacted me a few months ago with a draft of an essay, and he’d wanted my feedback. I rather love this sort of thing, especially helping new writers get better at writing, and he waited rather patiently for feedback.

A few days ago, I’d gotten another email from him asking if I’d had a chance to look at his draft. I felt rather sad that I hadn’t ever responded to him, so quickly read it and replied with notes. He replied back a bit later thanking me, but added that I’d apparently just re-edited the first draft he’d sent, rather than the second draft I’d requested.

In other words, I’d forgotten I’d already edited it because I’d done it in the final weeks of working on the manuscript.

I’ve noticed a few other incidents like this, and I’m sure there are many more. It’s more amusing to me than anything else, especially since it’s been a long time since I’ve been so enraptured by a creative project that I’ve acted like a crazy artist or a doddering old fool during it. Here’s hoping that all translated into a really good book.

Anyway, I wanted to draw your attention to some of the recent things I’ve read, because I suspect you’ll like them or find them as thought-provoking as I did.

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First, there was a really brilliant and lusciously-written essay in Harper’s Magazine by Justin E. H. Smith, “Permanent Pandemic.” It’s been a few years since I’ve read anything from Harpers and over 10 years since I canceled my print subscription, but this essay convinced me to renew it.

Smith’s essay is a rare find in any American print journal, as it’s the sort of frank discussion which was completely disallowed the past two years during COVID and still considered utterly verboten by progressives, liberals, and the woke. Georgio Agamben was saying the same thing as Smith, as did occult writer Gordon White, as did many other leftists and non-leftists, but they were all smeared out of any public acceptability. Smith’s essay being published in Harper’s might be a sign we are finally allowed to think aloud again. It’s also a sign that Harper’s might finally be resisting the pressure of respectability and finally returning to its original legacy of independent thought.

Under the new regime, a significant portion of the decisions that, until recently, would have been considered subject to democratic procedure have instead been turned over to experts, or purported experts, who rely for the implementation of their decisions on private companies, particularly tech and pharmaceutical companies, which, in needing to turn profits for shareholders, have their own reasons for hoping that whatever crisis they have been given the task of managing does not end.

Once again, in an important sense, much of this is not new: it’s just capitalism doing its thing. What has seemed unprecedented is the eagerness with which self-styled progressives have rushed to the support of the new regime, and have sought to marginalize dissenting voices as belonging to fringe conspiracy theorists and unscrupulous reactionaries. Meanwhile, those pockets of resistance—places where we find at least some inchoate commitment to the principle of popular will as a counterbalance to elite expertise, and where unease about technological overreach may be honestly expressed—are often also, as progressives have rightly but superciliously noted, hot spots of bonkers conspiracism.

This may be as much a consequence of their marginalization as a reason for it. What “cannot” be said will still be said, but it will be said by the sort of person prepared to convey in speaking not just the content of an idea, but the disregard for the social costs of coming across as an outsider. And so the worry about elite hegemony gets expressed as a rumor of Anthony Fauci’s “reptilian” origins, and the concern about technological overreach comes through as a fantasy about Bill Gates’s insertion of microchips into each dose of the vaccine. Meanwhile we are being tracked, by chips in our phones if not in our shoulders, and Fauci’s long record of mistakes should invite any lucid thinker to question his suitability for the role of supreme authority in matters of health.

Incidentally, if the link for it is pay-walled and you are not a subscriber, re-enter the URL in a different browser to view it.

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One of the thoughts that came to me after reading this were several very strange conversations I had with American anarchists regarding COVID and authoritarian controls. While you might initially think anarchists might be a bit more about personal freedom and bodily autonomy than the rest in America, it’s actually quite the opposite. I heard the same thing from each: people who are not vaccinated are no better than Nazis, people who refused to wear masks were genocidal fascists, and both groups should be harassed, shamed, and even physically harmed to prevent them from spreading their ideas.

I finally got around to reading an essay published almost two months ago by Christian Parenti on the much-maligned and utterly important site, The Grayzone. I’d heard reference to it previously, because it’d made lots of American liberal-leftists angry (Parenti was once one of their heroes), but only now did I have the time to read it.

For some readers here who’ve been more attentive to the state surveillance and bio-political shifts that came along with COVID than I have (sorry—I was writing a book…), the essay won’t have much new for you. It’s not much different from what Smith is saying in his essay, except that it’s written specifically about the undermining of leftist frameworks towards pro-capitalist government dogma. I’m sure none of the aforementioned anarchists would ever dare read it, though I do wish they would.

The public health response to Covid and the left’s inability to offer a critique of it have been catastrophic. Left refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the populist critique of mandates, passports, lockdowns, and censorship is alienating large swathes of the working class. Vaccination rates are not the same as approval rates for mandates. Many people get the shots only because their jobs and thus physical wellbeing are threatened. 

The Lockdown Left, being mostly members of the Professional Managerial Class generally has no idea about such things. Its members enjoyed the lockdown – telecommuting from their second homes, spending more time with the kids, getting into homemade meals. One friend praised lockdown’s new “life-work balance” and described convivial socially-distanced outdoor cocktail hours with neighbors on their sundrenched side street in Berkeley. Lost in its own foggy war against the deplorables, Lockdown Leftists are confused. They think that because they trust Fauci, most everyone else does too.  

Many working-class people have taken vaccines under duress, carry their vaccine papers because they must, and deeply resent the lockdowns, mandates, and high-handed directives from unaccountable bureaucrats like Fauci. Many people feel that their society is being destroyed. One working-class former student at my university, described being forced to take the vaccine (thanks to the union’s bullying) as feeling akin to rape. And many people in similar situations see the Democrats and The Left as responsible.

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Speaking of The Grayzone, they just published an essay exposing a prominent UK journalist’s attempts to organize a co-ordinated smear campaign against them. While an interesting article itself, there’s something fascinating in the leaked emails they published that desperately demands attention from a larger audience. In the emails, Paul Mason references his plan to co-ordinate with a really strange, supposedly-independent investigative journalism site called Bellingcat.

In case you’re blessedly unaware, Bellingcat has become part of the “antifascist” internet ecosystem, though they gained renown first for doing independent anti-Russian intelligence work. I’ve referenced this before, but there is a widespread conspiracy theory among the Antifa elite (journalists, researches, ‘experts,’ etc) that Russia has been behind a “red-brown” alliance, a supposedly growing movement of anti-war leftists (such as myself, but more prominently people like Glenn Greenwald, Angie Speaks, and many others) who are adopting fascist ideologies. There are already quite a few essays by obscure and anonymous bloggers about me having become a fascist which use this conspiracy theory, and you can find many, many, many more of them about much more prominent figures (I’m blessedly nobody compared to them).

Bellingcat’s “investigations” often make use of certain internet tools developed first by activists and later sold to military intelligence (and also tools developed the other way around). This is a thing in general with Antifa “researchers.” There’s a prominent American Antifa activist currently in Berlin, for example, who had previously boasted about working for military contractors on intelligence and drone technology, and this person often promotes Bellingcat and other work and is one of the core pushers of the red-brown conspiracy theory.

Anyway, what’s deeply interesting about the leak on The Grayzone is that Paul Mason references Bellingcat’s relationship to US and UK military intelligence. It’s long been suspected that Bellingcat was “laundering” government propaganda, and Bellingcat always seems extremely flush with cash despite being a supposedly small and independent outfit, but there’s been no way to get definitive evidence on what’s happening. Mason’s reference to Bellingcat’s role as a receiver and re-transmitter of ‘intel’ is probably as close to a smoking gun as we’ll ever get.

The implications here are staggering. I try to avoid thinking too much about such matters because you start to feel a bit paranoid, but it’s become less unthinkable now to suspect that many other Antifa elements (besides Alexander Reid Ross) are either unwitting stooges of US intelligence propaganda or eager propagandists for it, or both. We have historical precedent for this, by the way: the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 50’s and 60’s specifically shaped the “New Left” in the US and Europe, and its goal was to create an anti-internationalist leftism that was more amenable to American cultural values (i.e.; imperialism).

The fact that Antifa now spends more time smearing other leftists as fascists and has pivoted to attacking populist resistance movements against government repressions certainly leads to the suspicion that there’s some other influence involved.

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And on that matter, and especially because it’s Pride month, I’ll end with a link to a very short essay at Compact Magazine: Pride and American Imperialism, by Malcolm Kyeyune. The author isn’t really saying much new; John Gray, for example, has already written about how Woke Ideology functions as a useful soft-power ideology for US imperialism. I present this one to you because it’s a useful starting point for a larger discussion on Woke Ideology and US-centric ‘human rights’ discourse.

The same Slovenian interlocutor I mentioned in my previous essay had mentioned something else that I was shouldn’t have been surprised to hear but was regardless. He was gay, a leftist, and quite involved in several radical queer and leftist groups throughout the Balkans and also the rest of Europe, and I’d expected him to parrot a lot of what one hears from the Woke.

He didn’t, however. Instead, he mentioned something that had become a common complaint in the groups he was involved in, that American ideas of gender and sexuality not only should not be applied to Europe, but also cannot. He spoke of the example of long-standing cross-dressing and other gender-variant groups in villages throughout the Balkans, groups which pre-exist by centuries any of the newer frameworks of declarative gender. Such groups and communities were not just tolerated but rather celebrated until American ideas of what those older traditions “truly” meant began to interfere. “We’re colonizing ourselves with American ideas,” he said, and pointed to increases in attacks on gays as one of the effects of that colonization.

A tangential point to this is worth mentioning because it illustrates the larger political problem. As a young gay guy in radical communities I immediately heard the famous story about Stonewall. It’s a beautiful story, and one that should be told, but there’s now a different story replacing it that is untrue. Perhaps you’ve heard this newer version, but I’ll repeat it anyway: “gays owe their liberation to transgender women of color who fought police at stonewall.” Ten years ago, the story was the same except for one detail: they were not trans, but rather drag queens.

That older story is the true one, because the people involved in that riot explicitly identified as drag queens and transvestites, not as transgendered people. Transgendered as an idea didn’t even exist yet; instead, a person born into one sex and living fully as the other called themselves a transsexual. Even Sylvia Rivera, one of the drag queens who was there, explicitly explained to people that he (yes, he used “he” as his pronoun) was a drag queen and transvestite, not a transsexual. Also, Marsha P. Johnson, the drag queen (and again, not transgendered) usually credited with throwing the first brick repeatedly clarified that he hadn’t actually been there when the riot started.

What is happening now is that the entire story of Stonewall is being re-written in order to fit into the current Woke Ideological framework. Humans do this, of course—we always re-narrate the past according to our current conceits and opinions—but it’s both historically inaccurate and politically dangerous to do this. It does nothing to increase understanding about the relationship between variant gender and sexuality to history or societies, and it functions exactly as the sort of colonization which the aforementioned Slovenian mentioned. Especially, it erases other forms of variance and other cultural expressions. You cannot accurately call the third, forth, and fifth genders of the Bugis people in Indonesia “transgendered” or “non-binary,” because those are American (and capitalist) ideological frameworks.

Worse, when those frameworks are imposed on people in other cultures, it actually endangers them because the acceptance for such variant groups is woven into the social conditions and fabric of meaning of the society itself. Undermine those conditions with American gender ideology and the foundation of that acceptance goes away as well.

This is the true danger of “Woke Imperialism” referenced in the Compact essay, which it correctly just calls American Imperialism.