The Nature of Foxes

[blindpig]

Patrick Lawrence: The Impotence of Antony Blinken
April 29, 2024

With the U.S. unable to compete in the EV market and desperate in Ukraine, the Secretary of State traveled to China to talk at Beijing for his domestic audience.



U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken waves as he arrives at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai on April 24. (US State Department/Chuck Kennedy)

By Patrick Lawrence
Scheer Post

Antony Blinken was in China for his second such journey as secretary of state and his third encounter with senior Chinese official. This is our news as April marches toward May.

I have to say, it is a stranger state of affairs than I can figure when the State Department and the media that clerk for it told us in advance that America’s top diplomat is going to fail to get anything done as he sets out for the People’s Republic.

“I want to make clear that we are realistic and clear-eyed about the prospects of breakthroughs on any of these issues,” an unnamed State Department official said when briefing reporters last week on Blinken’s agenda. This is how State warns in advance that the secretary will be wasting his time and our money during his encounters in Shanghai and Beijing.

What was this if not an admission of our secretary of state’s diplomatic impotence? Or do I mean incompetence? Or both? This is the man, after all, who arrived in Israel five days after the events of last Oct. 7 to announce, “I come before you as a Jew.” Does this guy understand diplomacy or what?

The media followed the State Department’ lead, naturally, in advising us of the pointlessness of Blinken’s sojourn in China—this at both ends of the Pacific. “Washington is realistic about its expectations on Blinken’s visit in resolving key issues,” said CNBC. “While crucial for keeping lines of communication open, the visit is unlikely to yield major breakthroughs,” the Japan Times commented.

Matt Lee, the very able diplomatic correspondent at The Associated Press (AP), got it righter than anyone in his April 22 report: The point of Blinken’s three days of talks with top Chinese officials, he reported, was to have three days of talks with top Chinese officials. “The mere fact that Blinken is making the trip might be seen by some as encouraging,” Lee wrote, “but ties between Washington and Beijing are tense and the rifts are growing wider.”

This is our Tony. As the record makes pitifully clear, there’s no mileage in predicting success when Blinken boards a plane for the great “out there.” This is unequivocally so in his dealings with the western end of the Pacific.

There is a long list of the topics Blinken was set to raise with Chinese officials, notable among these Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Taiwan and the South China Sea, military-to-military contacts, artificial intelligence applications, illicit drug traffic, human rights, trade: These are standards on the American menu when a U.S. official addresses Chinese counterparts.

The last is especially contentious just now, given the Biden regime’s disgraceful determination to subvert those Chinese industries with which the U.S. cannot compete. With plans to block imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles already afoot, last week President Biden announced new tariffs on imports of Chinese steel.

And it is now “investigating” China’s shipping and shipbuilding industries, which sounds to me like prelude to yet more measures to undermine China’s admirable economic advances.

Nonsensical Times 10


US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is met by Kong Fuan, director general of the Shanghai Foreign Affairs Office (left), ambassador Nicholas Burns and consul general Scott Walker as he arrives at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport. (US State Department/Chuck Kennedy)

But the premier question Blinken addressed has to do with Sino–Russian relations. As he made clear before departing, the secretary of state would more or less insist that the Chinese stop selling various industrial goods to Russia because the U.S. considers them “dual use,” meaning the Russians could use such things as semiconductors in their defense industries—so implicating China in Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.

Before going any further, let’s try one of those “imagine if” exercises. Imagine if Beijing sent Foreign Minister Wang to Washington to tell the Biden regime to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine as this implicates the U.S. in Ukraine’s war with Russia and this is not on because China and Russia are friends.

It is not even fun, this “imagine if,” so nonsensical is it. Any such exercise would turn Wang, an acutely skilled diplomat, into another Blinken—the thought of which is nonsensical times 10.


But never mind sense and nonsense. Blinken and those who speak for him at State boldly previewed the secretary’s presentation in the days before his departure. Here is Blinken speaking to reporters last Friday:

“We see China sharing machine tools, semiconductors, other dual-use items that have helped Russia rebuild the defense industrial base that sanctions and export controls had done so much to degrade. Now, if China purports on the one hand to want good relations with Europe and other countries, it can’t on the other hand be fueling what is the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War.”

A day later the unnamed State Department official elaborated with this:

“We’re prepared to take steps when we believe necessary against firms that … severely undermine security in both Ukraine and Europe. We’ve demonstrated our willingness to do so regarding firms from a number of countries, not just China. We will express our intent to have China curtail that support.”

As tough diplomatic talk goes, it does not get much tougher. And as dumb diplomacy goes, it does not get much dumber.

For one thing, the Biden regime is demanding that China act against what we can count Beijing’s closest partner—this as leading non–Western nations are coalescing behind a joint project to create a new, let’s call it post–Western world order.

I am reminded of a brilliant tweet someone wrote just after Russia began its Ukraine operation two years ago and the Biden regime sought to recruit Beijing against “Putin’s Russia,” as people such as Blinken insist on referring to the Russian Federation. “Please help us defeat Russia,” the tweet read, “so we can turn our aggression on you when we’re done.” But precisely.

Non-interference Key to Future

For another, the Chinese Foreign Ministry made its response to Blinken’s preposterous intentions clear even before the secretary boarded his plane (and just prior to the passage in the House last week of $60.1 billion in new aid for the Kiev regime).

“It is extremely hypocritical and irresponsible for the U.S. to introduce a large-scale aid bill for Ukraine,” a ministry spokesperson said last week, “while making groundless accusations against normal economic and trade exchanges between China and Russia.”

I cannot think of a handier way of shutting down Antony Blinken.

One other thing while we are on this topic. Among the principles on which a post-Western global order will rest are respect for the sovereignty of all nations and non-interference into the internal affairs of others.

These are two elements of civilized statecraft, as it is destined to be in the 21st century and of which the secretary of state has absolutely no clue.


Why did Secretary Blinken bother to raise this question of Sino–Russian trade when he must have known the response as well as you and I know it. I see two immediate explanations.

One, the crooks in Kiev have already lost Washington’s proxy war with Russia—and goodness knows how much of the just-approved aid they will steal—and Blinken’s presentation in Beijing reflects mounting desperation among the policy cliques who got the U.S. into this hopeless-from-the-start conflict.

Two, and closely related to the above, when Antony Blinken goes to Beijing he does not talk to the Chinese: He talks at them and is not especially concerned about their responses. He is talking only to the American public and the China hawks on Capitol Hill, who have the White House stretching to out-hawk them at every turn.

If you need support for this latter thought, there is Blinken’s assertion last Monday, when introducing the State Department’s annual human rights report, that China is guilty of “genocide and crimes against humanity” against the Uighur population in Xinjiang Province. This charge has been highly suspect since Mike Pompeo, Blinken’s fanatically Sinophobic predecessor at State, conjured it before leaving office in 2021.

Given no charge of genocide has ever been supported with evidence, what in hell was Blinken doing raising this question (1) on the eve of a diplomatic visit to Beijing during which he purported to want other things out of the Chinese, and (2) given his government’s open sponsorship of what we must now call the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza?

Blinken Has Learned Nothing


Antony Blinken and China’s Central Foreign Affairs Office Director Wang Yi meet in Beijing in June last year. (U.S. State Department, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

My mind goes back to March 2021 when I read these things. It was then, in an Anchorage hotel (named the Captain Cook) that Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Biden’s new national security adviser, made an utter disaster out of their first encounter with senior Chinese officials, Wang Yi among them.

It was then and there that Blinken and Sullivan, all by themselves, tipped over Sino–U.S. relations with just the sort of shockingly ignorant display of late-imperial presumption Blinken is trying on yet again in Beijing this week.

Sino–American ties have never recovered from the encounter in Anchorage. And Blinken has learned nothing from the mess he made.

Lessons of which there are several. One and as suggested above, a creeping desperation now pervades the Biden regime’s foreign policy cliques. They do not know what to do about Russia and they do not know what to do about China.

Two and related to one, the level of incompetence evident among those directing this administration’s foreign policies is very likely unprecedented in the history of postwar American diplomacy. This now reaches the point it is a danger—most evidently in the cases of China and Russia.

Three, there is no self-awareness among these people. They are not present in their diplomatic encounters—reading, instead, from ideologically driven scripts. Again, three years into the Biden regime this is a clear danger.

Four, last, and by no means least, the Biden regime does not have a China policy.

Think carefully about this. In the single most important relationship the U.S. will have to navigate in the 21st century, those running policy are paralyzed—no map, no diplomatic design, no clear objective other than to oppose, literally, the 21st century in the name of prolonging the 20th.

This is why the warmongers, the economic saboteurs, and the paranoids left over from the “Who lost China?” years remain ascendant in Washington.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So does a foreign policy made of nothing but ignorance and empty bluster. It is the gravest of charges, but Antony Blinken in China makes me feel unsafe.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/04/29/p ... y-blinken/

Well, I dunno if these clowns are more incompetent than the Trump regimes' ego-manically driven tenure, the only saving grace of which was that it retarded the imperialist program through sheer incompetence. Just compare the body counts...

And that's why I don't think that Trump will be allowed to be prez again, by hook or crook.

******

US Skyrocketing Military Spending Upsets World



The General Frank S Besson carries equipment to build a floating harbour in Gaza, 2024. | Photo: X/ @swilkinsonbc

Published 29 April 2024

With its appetite for global hegemony, Washington continues to fuel chaos around the world.

A recently released report showed that defense spending by the United States -- the world's largest military spender -- accounted for nearly 40 percent of world's total military expenditures in 2023.

In the latest move of aggressive U.S. military spending, President Joe Biden signed a US$95-billion foreign aid bill, which includes more military aid for Ukraine and Israel.

With its skyrocketing military spending and unabated appetite for global hegemony, the United States continues to fuel chaos around the world.



ROCKETING SPENDING
Military spending by the United States rose 2.3 percent to reach US$916 billion in 2023, representing 68 percent of total North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military spending, according to a Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) report.

Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to addressing the U.S. long-term fiscal challenges, noted that the U.S. defense spending increased by US$55 billion from 2022 to 2023 in part due to additional military aid for Ukraine.

In the bill newly signed by Biden, more than US$60 billion goes to Ukraine while US$26 billion goes to Israel despite international criticism over the civilian casualties the Israeli army caused in Gaza.

The United States has provided Ukraine with massive military aid especially since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, as part of its strategy to counter its strategic rival, Russia.

As Israel's largest military supplier, the United States is complacent in the humanitarian crisis and regional insecurity of the Middle East.

In 2023, most European NATO members increased their military expenditure partly due to the two conflicts, the SIPRI report showed. The total European military spending in 2023 has seen a 16 percent year-on-year increase to US$588 billion.

Estimated military expenditure in the Middle East increased by 9.0 percent to US$200 billion in 2023, the highest annual growth rate in the region seen in the past decade. Israel's military spending grew by 24 percent to reach US$27.5 billion in 2023.


PURSUIT OF HEGEMONY
The SIPRI report showed that the United States spend more on defense than the next nine countries combined. Meanwhile, total military spending by NATO members reached US$1.3 trillion last year, accounting for 55 percent of global military spending.

The United States has decided to "shift its focus away from counterinsurgency operations and asymmetric warfare to developing new weapon systems that could be used in a potential conflict with adversaries with advanced military capabilities," according to the report.

Analysts believe that this shows that the United States is trying to eliminate all potential enemies, which embodies the Cold War mentality and hegemonic thinking.

"Really what American foreign policy is about is promoting American power: ensuring that America remains the hegemonic dominant power of the international system and minimizing any source of threat to America's geopolitical dominance," U.S. political scholar Christopher Layne said in a discussion last year.

Igor Korotchenko, a Russian military expert and the editor-in-chief of National Defense magazine, pointed out that the large number of U.S. military bases and aircraft carrier formations around the world serve its ambition to expand global military influence.

Huge U.S. military spending is not only an important indication of Washington's pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy but a cause of instability and chaos across the world, Korotchenko said.

Washington's attempt to maintain global hegemony by trying to divide the world is "a strategy that is very dangerous and misguided," said Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor at Columbia University.


WIN OR LOSE
The United States' enormous military expenditure and ongoing provision of foreign military aid clearly show its priorities. In the newly released first quarter financial results, U.S. military giant Raytheon saw sales of US$19.3 billion, up 12 percent from a year earlier, and net income of US$1.7 billion, up 20 percent from a year earlier, which both beat expectations.

Raytheon's order backlog is a record US$202 billion, with massive orders in the defense and commercial aerospace sectors, reflecting strong revenue potential in the future.

Lockheed Martin, meanwhile, reported first-quarter sales of US$17.2 billion , up 14 percent from a year earlier. The recent passage of the foreign aid bill may increase orders for F-35 fighter jets, which could mean additional revenue for Lockheed Martin, reported Bloomberg.

"It's past time to break the grip that the U.S. military-industrial complex has on our politics, policy, and collective thinking. For the military-industrial complex, no amount is too much to spend on Pentagon contractors," Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization headquartered in Washington. D.C., said in a statement earlier this week.

"For those of us in the real world, a dollar spent on killing machines is a dollar that we can't spend on daycare, expanding Medicare, or other human priorities," said Weissman.

A growing number of Americans are discontented with the continued consumption of national resources by the military-industrial complex, while crucial areas of people's livelihood receive insufficient attention.

Earlier in April, people held a rally protesting America's defense policies in Renton, a city in the northwestern U.S. State of Washington, according to a report by Renton Reporter.

"I would like to see the money being spent on the military being spent on healthcare, education, saving the planet, transportation, light rail, bicycle infrastructure, and things like that. Good things for human beings," Mona Lee, 85, who led the protest.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/US- ... -0002.html

*******

[blindpig]

A mad world: Capitalism and the rise of mental illness
Originally published: Red Pepper on August 2017 by Rod Tweedy (more by Red Pepper) | (Posted May 18, 2024)

Mental illness is now recognised as one of the biggest causes of individual distress and misery in our societies and cities, comparable to poverty and unemployment. One in four adults in the UK today has been diagnosed with a mental illness, and four million people take antidepressants.

‘What greater indictment of a system could there be,’ George Monbiot has asked,

than an epidemic of mental illness?

The shocking extent of this ‘epidemic’ is made all the more disturbing by the knowledge that so much of it is preventable. This is due to the significant correlation between social and environmental conditions and the prevalence of mental disorders.

Richard Bentall, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool, and Peter Kinderman, president of the British Psychological Society, have written compellingly about this connection in recent years, drawing powerful attention to ‘the social determinants of our psychological wellbeing’.

The evidence is overwhelming,’ notes Kinderman,

it’s not just that there exist social determinants; they are overwhelmingly important.

A sick society
Experiences of social isolation, inequality, feelings of alienation and dissociation, and even the basic assumptions and ideology of materialism and neoliberalism itself are seen today to be significant drivers—reflected in the titles of a number of recent articles and talks on this subject, such as those of consultant psychotherapist David Morgan’s groundbreaking Frontier Psychoanalyst podcasts, which have included discussions on whether ‘Neoliberalism is dangerous for your mental health’, and ‘Is neoliberalism making us sick?’

Clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Jay Watts observes in the Guardian that ‘psychological and social factors are at least as significant and, for many, the main cause of suffering. Poverty, relative inequality, being subject to racism, sexism, displacement and a competitive culture all increase the likelihood of mental suffering.

Governments and pharmaceutical companies are not as interested in these results, throwing funding at studies looking at genetics and physical biomarkers as opposed to the environmental causes of distress.

Similarly, there is little political will to combine increasing mental distress with structural inequalities, though the association is robust and many professionals think this would be the best way to tackle the current mental health epidemic.

There are clearly very powerful and entrenched interests and agendas here, which consciously or unconsciously act to conceal or try to deny this relationship, and which also makes the recent willingness amongst so many psychoanalysts and therapists to embrace this wider context so exciting and moving.

Commentators often talk about society, social context, group thinking, and environmental determinants in connection with mental distress and disorders, but we can I think actually be a bit more precise about what aspect of society is mainly driving it, is mainly responsible for it. And in this context it’s probably time we talk about the c word—capitalism.

Many of the contemporary forms of illness and individual distress that we treat and engage with certainly seem to be correlated with and amplified by the processes and byproducts of capitalism. In fact, you might say that capitalism is in many respects a mental illness generating system—and if we are serious about tackling not only the effects of mental distress and illness, but also their causes and origins, we need to look more closely, more precisely, and more analytically at the nature of the political and economic womb out of which they emerge, and how psychology is fundamentally interwoven with every aspect of it.

Ubiquitous neurosis
Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of this intimate connection between capitalism and mental distress is the prevalence of neurosis. As Joel Kovel, a former psychiatrist and professor of political science, notes:

‘A most striking feature of neurosis within capitalism is its ubiquity.’ In his classic essay ‘Therapy in late capitalism’ (reprinted in The Political Self), Kovel refers to the ‘colossal burden of neurotic misery in the population, a weight that continually and palpably betrays the capitalist ideology, which maintains that commodity civilization promotes human happiness’:

If, given all this rationalization, comfort, fun and choice, people are still wretched, unable to love, believe or feel some integrity to their lives, they might also begin to draw the conclusion that something was seriously wrong with their social order.

There’s also been some fascinating work done on this more recently by Eli Zaretsky (Political Freud), and Bruce Cohen (author of Psychiatric Hegemony), who have both written on the relations between the family, sexuality, and capitalism in the generation of neuroses.

It is significant, for example, that one of the most prominent features of the psychological landscape that Freud encountered in late nineteenth-century Vienna were the neuroses—which, as Kovel notes, Freud saw as being entirely continuous with ‘normal’ development in modern societies—with much of these, he adds, being rooted in our modern experience of alienation. ‘Neurosis,’ Kovel says,

is the self-alienation of a subject who has been readied for freedom but runs afoul of personal history.

It was of course Marx who was the great analyst of alienation, showing how capitalist economics generates alienation as part of its very fabric or structure—showing how, for instance, alienation gets ‘lost’ or ‘trapped’, embodied, in products, commodities—from the obvious examples (such as Nikes made in sweatshops, and sweatshops embodied in Nikes)—to a wider and much more pervasive sense that the whole system of production and creation is somehow alienating.

As Pavon Cuellar remarks, ‘Marx was the first to realise that this alienation actually gets contained and incarnated in things—in “commodities”‘ (Marxism and Psychoanalysis). These ‘fetishised’ commodities, he adds, seem to retain and promise to return, when consumed, the subjective-social part lost by those alienated while producing them:

the alienated have lost what they imagine [or hope] to find in what is fetishised.

This understanding of alienation is really the core issue for Marx. People probably know him today for his theories of capital—how issues of exploitation, profit, and control continually characterise and resurface in capitalism—but for me the key concern of Marx, and one that is constantly neglected, or misunderstood, is his view on the centrality and importance of human creativity and productivity—man’s ‘colossal productive power’ as he calls it—exactly as it was in fact for William Blake, slightly earlier in the century.

Marx refers to this extraordinary world-transformative energy and agency as our ‘active species-life’, our ‘species-being’—our ‘physical and spiritual energies’. But these immense creative energies and transformative capacities are, he notes, under the present system, immediately taken from us and converted into something alien, objective, enslaving, fetishised.

Restructuring desire
The image he evokes is of mothers giving birth—another form of labour perhaps—with the baby immediately being taken away and converted into something alien, something doll-like–a commodity. He considers what effect that must have on the mother’s spirit. This, for Marx, is the source of the alienation and unease, the sort of profound dislocation of the human spirit that characterises industrial capitalism. And as Pavon Cuellar shows, we can’t buy our way out of this alienation—by producing more toys, more dolls—because that’s where the alienation occurs, and is embodied and generated.

Indeed, consumerism and materialism are themselves widely recognised today as key drivers of a whole raft of mental health problems, from addiction to depression. As George Monbiot notes,

Buying more stuff is associated with depression, anxiety and broken relationships. It is socially destructive and self-destructive.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt has written very compellingly on this association, suggesting that in modern societies we often ‘confuse material well-being with psychological well-being’. In her book The Selfish Society she shows how successfully and relentlessly consumer capitalism reshapes our brains and reworks our nervous systems in its own image. For ‘we would miss much of what capitalism is about,’ she notes,

if we overlook its role in restructuring and marketing desire and impulse themselves.

Another key aspect of capitalism and its impact on mental illness we could talk about of course is inequality. Capitalism is as much an inequality-generating system as it is a mental illness producing system. As a Royal College of Psychiatrists report noted:

Inequality is a major determinant of mental illness: the greater the level of inequality, the worse the health outcomes. Children from the poorest households have a three-fold greater risk of mental ill health than children from the richest households. Mental illness is consistently associated with deprivation, low income, unemployment, poor education, poorer physical health and increased health-risk behaviour.

Some commentators have even suggested that capitalism itself, as a way of being or way of thinking about the world, might be seen as a rather ‘psychopathic’ or pathological system. There are certainly some striking correspondences between modern financial and corporate systems and individuals diagnosed with clinical psychopathy, as a number of analysts have noticed.

Robert Hare for instance, one of the world’s leading authorities into psychopathy and the originator of the widely accepted ‘Hare Checklist’ used to test for psychopathy, remarked to Jon Ronson: ‘I shouldn’t have done my research just in prisons. I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well.’ ‘But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths?’ the interviewer asks. ‘”Serial killers ruin families,” shrugged Bob.

Corporate and political … psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.

Pathological institutions in Capitalism
These traits, as Joel Bakan brilliantly suggested in his book The Corporation, are encrypted into the very fabric of modern corporations—part of its basic DNA and modus operandi.

The corporation’s legally defined mandate,’ he notes, ‘is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others.

By its own legal definition, therefore, the corporation is ‘a pathological institution’, and Bakan helpfully lists the diagnostic features of its default pathology (lack of empathy, pursuit of self-interest, grandiosity, shallow affect, aggression, social indifference) to show what a reliably disturbed patient the corporation is.

Why should all of these contemporary social and economic practices and processes generate so much illness, so many disorders? To answer this I think we need to look back at the wider Enlightenment project, and the psychological models of human nature out of which they emerged.

Modern capitalism grew out of seventeenth century concepts of man as some sort of disconnected, discontinuous, disengaged self—one driven by competition and a narrow, ‘rational’ self-interest—the concept of homo economicus that drove and underwrote much of the whole Enlightenment project, including its economic models.

As Iain McGilchrist notes,

Capitalism and consumerism, ways of conceiving human relationships based on little more than utility, greed, and competition, came to supplant those based on felt connection and cultural continuity.

We now know how mistaken, and destructive, this model of the self is. Recent neuroscientific research into the ‘social brain’, together with exciting developments in modern attachment theory, developmental psychology, and interpersonal neurobiology, are significantly revising, and upgrading, this rather quaint, old-fashioned view of the isolated, ‘rational’ individual—and also revealing a far richer and more sophisticated understanding of human development and identity, through increased knowledge of ‘right hemisphere’ intersubjectivity, unconscious processes, group behaviour, the role of empathy and mentalisation in brain development, and the significance of context and socialisation in emotional and cognitive development.

As neuroscientist David Eagleman observes, the human brain itself relies on other brains for its very existence and growth—the concept of ‘me’, he notes, is dependent on the reality of ‘we’:

We are a single vast superorganism, a neural network embedded in a far larger web of neural networks. Our brains are so fundamentally wired to interact that it’s not even clear where each of us begins and ends. Who you are has everything to do with who we are. There’s no avoiding the truth that’s etched into our neural circuitry: we need each other.

Dependency is therefore built into the fabric of who we are as social and biological beings, hardwired into our mainframe: it is ‘how love becomes flesh’, in Louis Cozolino’s striking phrase. ‘There are no single brains,’ Cozolino observes, echoing Winnicott, ‘brains only exist within networks of other brains.’ Some people have termed this new neurological and scientific understanding of the deep patterns of interdependency, mutual cooperation, and the social brain ‘neuro-Marxism’ because of the implications involved.

Capitalism is, it seems, rooted in a fundamentally flawed, naive, and old-fashioned seventeenth-century model of who we are—it tries to make us think that we’re isolated, autonomous, disengaged, competitive, decontextualised—an ultimately rather ruthless and dissociated entity. The harm that this view of the self has done to us, and our children, is incalculable.

Many people believe, and are encouraged to believe, that these problems and disorders—psychosis, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, self-harm—these symptoms of a ‘sick world’ (to use James Hillman’s terrific description) are theirs, rather than the world’s. ‘But what if your emotional problems weren’t merely your own?’, asks Tom Syverson. ‘What if they were our problems? What if the real problem is that we’re living in wrong society? Perhaps Adorno was correct when he said,

wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

The root of this ‘living wrongly’ seems to be because we live in a social and economic system at odds with both our psychology and our neurology, with who we are as social beings. As I suggest in my book, we need to realise that our inner and outer worlds constantly and profoundly interact and shape each other, and that therefore rather than separating our understanding of economic and social practices from our understanding of psychology and human development, we need to bring them together, to align them. And for this to happen, we need a new dialogue between the political and personal worlds, a new integrated model for mental health, and a new politics.

https://mronline.org/2024/05/18/a-mad-world/

"Scab of a nation, driven insane."
Frank Zappa

[blindpig]

Up in Arms: Why Educators Must Resist the Arms Industry in Our Schools and Colleges
21-05-2024
Austin Bilal

As a secondary school student, I remember visiting the Airbus Aerospace, Engineering, and Technology site on a school trip. Proudly nestled in our town’s small business and technology park, Airbus painted an impressive picture. They told us the story of the Mars Rover that they built and we were told that, if we worked hard enough, we could aim for the stars too. Little did I know that Airbus was also a leading manufacturer of military equipment used in wars which have resulted in countless deaths and casualties all over the world.

My town isn’t just home to Airbus, it is also home to MBDA. A joint venture between Airbus, BAE Systems and Leonardo, it is known as a world-renowned manufacturer of missiles. My dad even played for their football team. Surrounded by arms dealers and manufacturers my whole life, it’s no wonder that, on becoming a teacher, I would again be subject to the marketing campaigns of the infamous and bloody industry of arms exports. Or rather, I would be on a school trip from another perspective; working within an institution that normalises relations with such businesses of death.

Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, Thales and Raytheon, to name but a few, are reported to spend millions every year sponsoring school events, funding competitions, and even providing classroom materials: from a missile simulator for children to play with, to workshops on the benefits of using camouflage on the battlefield. At a time of increasing disruption of arms contractors and so-called defence manufacturers by activists up and down the country,1 firms like BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin are working hard on their public image. And what better audience than unsuspecting children? Presenting themselves as world leaders in advanced engineering and technology and as key contributors to the UK economy by fostering young peoples’ interest in STEM subjects and computer science, arms companies have been actively targeting school children for several years.

However, beneath the veneer of innovation and economic contribution lies the reality that arms companies are dependent on imperialism; the arms industry is geared to reap great profits from the inherent tendency towards war and military conflict within a world system of uneven exchange, and so their role in the education system is to reproduce the ideological basis for its perpetuation. As an extension of US imperial power in the region, Israel is the recipient of billions of dollars worth of arms. One wonders without such military aid and investment from Western states, whether their settler-colonial project would last a minute longer against the Palestinian resistance. The Israeli state is dependent on such arms, and the arms industry is currently dependent on the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. Between 2010-2019, the UK was the second biggest arms exporter in the world with £86 billion in sales. In 2022 alone, UK arms exports were valued at £12 billion, the most immediately relevant example of this being the UK’s £489 million arms exports to Israel since 2015. This has included the production of F-16 and F-35 fighter jets currently being used in Israel’s onslaught of Palestinian men, women and children in their homes, hospitals, and refugee camps.2 After October 7th, Israel even ordered more F-35 jets from Lockheed Martin, further entrenching the deeply imperialistic relationship between Israel, the United States and the UK. Highlighting this dynamic, US Air Force officer Mike Schmidt reportedly said ‘we are going to learn a lot’ from Israel’s use of F-35s in Gaza. The new F-35s are equipped with the latest computing capabilities, which the United States military deems as having ‘software kinks’ that need to be ironed out before the U.S can claim readiness of their fleet. Like many arms dealers, Airbus boasts that their technology is ‘field-proven’, conveniently sidestepping the grim realities of its application. Gaza is yet again a testing ground for the global imperialist powers to test their weaponry.

Amnesty International has called for several arms companies to be investigated by the ICC for complicity in war crimes. According to UK law, arms sales cannot be licensed by the British government if there is a risk of those weapons being used to unlawfully harm civilians.

In light of this, it is clear that the defence industry should not be in our schools. Far from teaching students about innovative ways to engineer technology for the future, representatives of these firms are normalising the role in which their employers play in the global political economy, reproducing war in the service of the neo-colonial system. As such, there is a clear moral argument to be made in resisting arms companies and defence contractors being invited into British schools.

Arms industry in schools
Since 2012, the Department for Education has promoted ‘military ethos’ programmes such as cadet units in state schools as well as increasing the role of the armed forces and arms industry in the provision of STEM and computing activities for students, even sponsoring youth organisations like Girlguiding and Scouts.

The image of the military is key to its survival. Recruitment targets for the Army and Navy have fallen short every year since 2010, and facing the perceived threat by Russia, ex-MI6 chief Alex Younger has added to the growing discourse around introducing conscription to suture the lack of recruits. This recruitment drive is intimately connected with the ideological maintenance of the status quo, of constructing the image of the proud and dutiful British military and associated defence industry. Such an industry plays on the innocence of children and their natural curiosity and intrigue in technology.

In 2017 ForcesWatch reported that arms companies, alongside and often in partnership with the military, have created an industry for STEM activities and sponsorship. BAE Systems, for example, ran an education roadshow with the Royal Navy and RAF, hosted by a CBeebies presenter.3 Named ‘The Big Bang Fair’, this roadshow was sponsored by 100 arms companies, attracting primary and secondary school children. BAE also invested more than £100 million in education, skills and early careers in 2018 alone. In October 2022, they delivered a workshop to one million students through their education roadshow. On average, they visit 435 schools a year, even using Lego Mindstorm kits to develop the skills to build high-tech weaponry, which the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) has appropriately called ‘grooming’.


In 2020, Declassified UK reported that the British intelligence agency GCHQ had been secretly promoting arms companies to school children. Paid for by public funds, the ‘cyber school hub’ pilot scheme in Gloucestershire run by Lockheed Martin whilst promoting BAE Systems, delivers workshops to children ages 9-10, and ‘careers advice’ for those aged 11-12 – all without the consent of parents. In the same report, it was revealed that, in some workshops, students were building drones and ‘sniffing’4 on classmates’ internet connections.

Lockheed Martin boasts a child-friendly STEM activity pack for British Science week, containing cartoonish clouds and smiling robots. The answers to their ‘crack the code’ activity include allusive and cryptic sentences such as ‘your mission is ours / we never forget who we’re working for / ensuring those we serve always stay ahead of ready’, clear efforts at instilling the military’s ethos. On the back of their activity pack is a ‘colouring activity’ of the Stealth Combat Aircraft F-35 Lightning II and the military transport aircraft the C-130J Super Hercules. Whilst in Ampthill, Bedfordshire, they host a Code Quest competition, giving students the ‘opportunity to explore new horizons in the ever-evolving ecosystem of computer programming and cybersecurity’.

Beyond workshops in STEM and computer science, the arms industry has a far wider and deeper connection to the British education system. ForcesWatch reports that, in conjunction with the Armed Forces, ‘arms companies and defence suppliers … are now influences within schools and colleges, particularly within career-led and technical education’. Of the University Technical Colleges’ sponsors, 39% are by or partnered with one or more major arms companies like BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce.

As CAAT spokesperson Andrew Smith, has pointed out, ‘Arms companies aren’t spending money in schools because they care about education or young people. They are doing it because they want to improve their reputations and normalise what they do’. ForcesWatch further expands this point, stating that ‘[not only does it steer interested students towards a career in the defence industry or military and provide a mechanism for directly recruiting them, it helps to create an acceptance of military interests among young people and society at large’.

Companies involved in war crimes are, in collaboration with British intelligence services, delivering workshops in schools and creating classroom resources, which both canalise and socialise students into a normalised view of an industry built upon death. On one side of the world, children are bombed and murdered in their homes. On the other side, children are offered a career path to manufacturing and engineering weapons, offered marketing and human resources roles for war criminals, accounting and finance for the armoury of the global capitalist system. As an educator in an institution that is increasingly focussed on careers, one is found frequently questioning my role in the system and what are the intended purposes of schooling. In an effort to answer that, we must first understand the role of education in British society.


The role of education
Any educator will tell you that schools and colleges are complicated institutions. As a teacher of Sociology, I have the delight of teaching students the role of education as a part of the curriculum. Social theorists generally agree that the role of education in society is that of an agent of secondary socialisation. Socialisation, in this sense, is a process whereby young people are taught and learn the dominant norms and values of society.

Where sociologists disagree on the role of education is what norms and values are transmitted and whether this is an inherently positive process. The Marxist duo Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis conceptualised the hidden or informal curriculum as having a ‘correspondence principle’. They drew distinctions between how schools and education generally prepare young people for the exploitation in the workplace, concluding that schools ‘correspond’ to the workplace. In essence, schools mirror workplaces. Systems of punishment and reward, hierarchical relationships, strict uniform policies policing the body, and punctuality, are all norms and values that are taught informally in capitalist schooling. The key connection that they make is that schools act as an agency of the socialisation of the dominant norms and values of society, which ultimately prepare students to be docile, obedient workers that do not question their exploitation.

Similarly, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser argues that the education system is one of many social institutions that encompass the apparatus of the capitalist state. Althusser conceptualises the reproduction of the conditions of capitalist production through the apparatus of the state, playing a double function of violence and ideology. The means by which the bourgeoisie maintain their power is through the repressive state apparatus and ideological state apparatus. Althusser’s primary argument, as it is taught in the Sociology curriculum, is that the education system is a part of the ideological state apparatus, and the military is part of the repressive state apparatus. The institutions of education, our schools and colleges, belonging to the ideological state apparatus and an agency of socialisation, are vehicles of the norms, values, beliefs and worldviews of the UK ruling classes.

Althusser even argues that the educational ideological apparatus has embodied the ‘dominant position in mature capitalist social formations’. The school has replaced the church as the social institution of ideological influence. The overarching argument made by Althusser is that the ideological state apparatuses reproduce capitalist relations of exploitation. Therefore, the school becomes a site of ideological struggle.

The two apparatuses have met in the classroom. Applying Althusser’s conceptualisation of the state apparatus to the global capitalist system, the relationship between the two apparatuses crystallises in the arm industry’s normalisation campaign in UK schools. On the one hand, we have the increasing presence of the military and arms companies in schools. On the other, we have the exports of UK-made arms to entities like Israel equipping them with the technology for their genocide of the Palestinians. The ideological drive of normalisation in UK schools facilitates the next generation of British citizens to accept the social relations of British imperialism. This begs the question, how can educators resist the transmission of imperialist ideology within the school system?

How can educators resist?
As teachers, we are taught in our safeguarding training that our job is ‘loco parentis’, that we act in the place of parents, a sentiment which begs the question: would a responsible parent let a bomb maker into their home? If we truly embody this role, then we ought to act more like it; as educators, we are duty-bound to protect our children. All teachers will know that we are also duty bound to teach ‘British values’, by promoting ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs’. This was in order to, as explained by the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools Lord Nash, ‘tighten up the standards on pupil welfare to improve safeguarding, and the standards on spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils to strengthen the barriers to extremism’. It is clear that there is a double standard in the application of these values, as the extremism of the Israeli state has been unchecked by our government, despite the widely felt horror of the genocide has had on the ‘spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils’. One must not forget that ‘British values’ are a cynical attempt at curtailing ‘extremism’, which in reality is nothing more than racialised counter terror policing in schools as outlined by Dr. Layla Aitlhadj at PreventWatch on numerous occasions. Educators could use ‘British values’ as a strategic device in efforts to resist the arms industry in schools, but it is unlikely to have any cutting edge. That being said, there are two possible frameworks for resisting the arms industry in UK schools.

As a member of the National Education Union (NEU), I believe the initiation of a campaign to ban military companies, arms dealers and defence contractors from our schools is a viable route to take. There are pockets of inspiration and hope to be drawn from trade unions across the world. In the UK, the NEU successfully passed a motion at the Trades Union Congress in 2023 opposing the UK Government’s Economic Activity of Public Bodies Bill, which would make it harder to boycott Israel. In the latest national conference of the NEU, the urgent motion on Palestine overwhelmingly passed, which cemented the union’s position on the most crucial topic of our times. An amendment was carried which called the Israeli government ‘racist’ and that it has a ‘case to answer for genocide.’ Members of the NEU are now empowered to confidently speak about Palestine in our schools, building solidarity with their struggle in one of the most important sites of secondary socialisation. Members now have the protection of their union to speak up in condemning the violence of the Israeli state.

Another way to resist was outlined by Dr. Nimer Sultany, in his speech at an Educators for Palestine conference organised by Camden NEU, he wished to highlight the significance of South Africa’s success in bringing Israel to court, outlining how the consensus view, that the International Criminal Court (ICJ) has failed to properly hold Israel to account, has been misplaced. Whilst the focus of public critique on the ICJ’s lack of a call for a ceasefire, he outlined the gravity and meaning behind the demand of Israel and its allies to ensure that genocide against the Palestinians did not happen.

Dr. Sultany noted that we should look at ‘how law can influence politics’, and that as educators we should use the ICJ ruling, or international law more widely, as a basis of security to speak about Palestine in schools. His argument is that, within the context of the ICJ preliminary ruling, a legal precedent has been established. Israel has been taken to court for genocide, with enough evidence for proceedings to continue, and that they have been mandated to ensure that genocide does not occur. Whilst one does not hold much hope in international law, battling on the basis of the legality of arms exports is a potential tool for the groups resisting the Zionist entity and the UK government’s complicity. If educators are not members of the NEU, they can opt to use this legal precedent as a defence against any possible incursions or consequences that may come their way from school leadership. Furthermore, if educators wish to join me in resisting arms companies in schools and colleges, quoting the ICJ preliminary rulings as a justification may prove difficult for leadership to deny.

Meanwhile, educators can also attempt the diplomatic route by making a case to their Senior Leadership Team, arguing that having defence contractors on school premises that speak and engage with our children is immoral and goes against ‘British values’. If diplomacy is ineffective, I wonder if it is our moral and pastoral duty as educators to consider disrupting the career events and talks. A more radical intervention could prove effective in stopping them happening altogether, whether that be by pulling the fire alarm or by hijacking the presentation through visible and loud protest.


Lunch with Lockheed
Having established the framework to analyse the education system, and the fact that the school has become a primary site of ideological struggle, I believe that it is our duty as teachers to block the transmission of harmful established norms that seek to perpetuate the logic of imperialism and colonialism in whatever way we are able to. While I do not wish for any educator to lose their job, I do not wish for children to be exploited and manipulated by defence contractors either. An example from my own workplace can serve as a case study for how to foster such action against the arms trade within the school. As a part of a week-long series of careers talks, the Army and Lockheed Martin entered my school during lunchtimes late in the week. I had been forewarned of Lockheed Martin’s attendance, however the Army turned up on the day too, and a handful of students were pulled out of class to spread the message that they were to be delivering their talk in the coming lunch break.

The news of the national workplace day of action for Gaza on February 7th 2024 had inspired me to create a workplace group chat with pro-Palestinian teachers: on the top of the agenda was what to do with Lockheed Martin. After some brainstorming, we concluded that it would be more fruitful for students that we knew were pro-Palestinian to attend the talk.

Our conversation led to several students who had shown an interest in the Palestinian cause being invited to my classroom. We had a brief conversation about Lockheed Martin and the historical complicity of these types of companies in the oppression, ethnic cleansing and genocides against colonised populations in several nations. Research drew them to the sobering fact that Lockheed Martin manufactures the F-35 jets that Israel uses to bomb Gaza, and that they sold the Mark 85 bomb that was used by Saudi Arabia in the killing of 40 children on a school bus in Yemen. The increasingly horrified students took note of questions I had prepared and then developed their own to ask the representatives of Lockheed Martin.

In a conversation the next day, the students debriefed me on the deflections that the Lockheed Martin representatives made. They pressed them on their production and sale of weapons and machinery used against civilians, but the Lockheed representatives doubled down and denied making anything of the sort, only ‘tanks and turrets’ – an attempt to deny complicity in the crimes of the company at large, professing innocently that the local factory is absolved of responsibility. The students were eventually shut down by the careers officer present in the meeting, and the representatives of Lockheed Martin refused to take questions from the pro-Palestinian students.

Though the event went ahead, informed and empowered students disrupting it in this way is one of the many seeds sown for future critical thinking and activism. I am proud of these students for showing the bravery and courage to stand up and question injustice. It is time for educators to follow their lead; be empowered to speak critically about Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine, hold schools and colleges accountable as institutions of socialisation, and to make the case for the leadership of schools and colleges to cease relationships with arms companies and defence contractors.


References

1 This work is crystalised in Palestine Action’s work in shutting down Elbit factories and their subsidiaries, as well as a protracted targeting of businesses and institutions that deal with Elbit, such as the landlord to their sites.

2 Lockheed Martin manufactured the Mark 82 bomb which Saudi Arabia used in August 2018 to blow up more than 40 children on a school bus in Yemen.

3 CBeebies is a famous British children’s television channel.

4 Sniffing is a computing term that describes monitoring and intercepting network traffic. It is one of the main ways to spy on internet activity.

Austin Bilal

https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/up-in-arms