…a cornucopia of lamentations…

Clairvoyant remarks by Paul Mattick in 1934 from World-wide Fascism or World Revolution? :

Fascism in the general crisis is a situation of capitalist barbarism. Killing becomes a political science; robbery goes on as economy. Pauperization of the workers, as the only source for making possible profits, makes a passive proletariat necessary. To accomplish this, enough privileges must be given the killers.
The rebellion of the middle class is essentially not directed against capitalism, but against their own pauperization. Fascism makes use of all the energies of the middle class, and engages them in the interests of capitalism against the only revolutionary class – the proletariat.
In America, with the breakdown of the New Deal, it is considered a likelihood that the Roosevelt regime will become a fascist dictatorship; but this conclusion is not necessarily correct. Fascism is the best form of government in the permanent crisis for monopoly capital; but it is not an absolute necessity. A dictatorship of the capitalist class, themselves, is possible here where the middle class are relatively weak. Only when a condition exists where the workers are in a menacing condition, when the middle class becomes rebellious, when a really revolutionary situation lies before capitalism, then the ruling class will be forced to further the fascist tendencies.
[…]
The international character of the depression, the international character of the class struggle, will force the dictatorship of the ruing class all over the world. Fascism becomes a world menace. To escape this situation, nothing else is possible but that the workers overthrow capitalism with the world revolution. History has set the stage; – World Fascism or World Revolution – Barbarism or Communism¹.

A humorous, Godowsky-like composition by Sciarrino. Marc-André Hamelin at the piano.

Although it’s not revelatory to discuss the various ways in which the United States aided and abetted members of the Nazi elite after the war (not to talk of the various capitalist factions that did little to hide their willful collusion with the Nazis during the war), recently declassified documents present a more disturbing picture than even I was prepared for. A new report detailing the documents, Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War, shows the myriad ways in which yet again, waging war against leftists is to trump all else- even atrocities. I would like to give the references to Klaus Barbie a shot in the arm though, specifically that the CIA likely met with him (after facilitating his escape to Bolivia) to discuss how best to murder Che Guevara. The slaughter of leftists as a national priority? No…
From Declassified Documents Show U.S. Recruited Ex-Nazis, appearing in the December 11th online edition of The New York Times:

After World War II, American counterintelligence recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans and Nazi collaborators to an even greater extent than had been previously disclosed and helped many of them avoid prosecution or looked the other way when they escaped, according to thousands of newly declassified documents.
[…]
Like earlier reports generated by the group, this one paints a grim portrait of bureaucracy, turf wars and communication gaps among intelligence agencies. It also details blatantly cynical self-interested tactical decisions by Allied governments and a general predisposition that some war crimes by former Nazis and their collaborators should be overlooked because the suspects could be transformed into valuable assets in the more urgent undercover campaigns against Soviet aggression.
[…]
“Tracking and punishing war criminals were not high among the Army’s priorities in late 1946,” the report says. Instead, it concludes that the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps spied on suspect groups ranging from German Communists to politically active Jewish refugees in camps for displaced people and also “went to some lengths to protect certain persons from justice.”

Re: Alfred W. McCoy’s December 6 article on Salon.com, How America Will Collapse (By 2025):

I remember seeing an interview with Immanuel Wallerstein some time ago where he aptly described the practice of predicting the distant future as a kind of fantastic or creative-fiction based project. This would seem to me a very uncontroversial claim given what we are able to understand about the nature of reality, with it’s stark frictions, dynamical processes, brute facts, etc, all violently interrupting our near-pathological desire(s) to “explain” and “know” our world.

However, it seems equally uncontroversial to insist on fidelity to material facts and readily observable trends, and to draw conclusions thusly- put frankly, a sensible materialist stance. Alfred McCoy’s descriptions of 2025 may be entertaining in the sense of the aforementioned creative-fiction sense, but the overall message cannot be discarded as it is also thoroughly uncontroversial. America’s continued hegemony is so precarious , it’s behavior foreign and domestic so unsustainable, that to dispute what is so abundantly accessible to critique and analysis defies any sane position.

Moreover, a writer like Alfred McCoy is not some cred-lacking-try-hard with no intellectual backbone. His books, The Politics of Heroin, an exposé of CIA involvement in the global drug trade¹ (a fact that should also no longer elicit controversy), or A Question of Torture, an exposé of the CIA’s involvement in torture research in the past century (another fact that should not tolerate challenge), are simply not works of hackery. Despite the imaginativeness of his 2025 scenarios, can American imperial decline and collapse even be considered up for debate?

Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be².

Interviewer Sue Cook and composer Michael Finnissy discussing his composition Red Earth, from a BBC Proms interview, 1988:

Michael Finnissy: […] when one calls a piece Red Earth, and it’s ostensibly just about a landscape, it could be confusing to people that they’re expecting to hear something which in some way sounds like that landscape looks, for me there are a lot of other things involved in it, feelings, emotions, which in some ways contradict that landscape…

Sue Cook: I personally listened to it, found it rather a menacing piece, I felt that I didn’t want to listen to it alone on a dark night. Is that the sort of reaction you’d expect?

Some highlights from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Test Scorer in this month’s issue of Monthly Review:

Test-scoring companies make their money by hiring a temporary workforce each spring, people willing to work for low wages (generally $11 to $13 an hour), no benefits, and no hope of long-term employment—not exactly the most attractive conditions for trained and licensed educators. So all it takes to become a test scorer is a bachelor’s degree, a lack of a steady job, and a willingness to throw independent thinking out the window and follow the absurd and ever-changing guidelines set by the test-scoring companies.
[…]
Scoring is particularly rushed when scorers are paid by piece-rate, as is the case when you are scoring from home, where a growing part of the industry’s work is done. At 30 to 70 cents per paper, depending on the test, the incentive, especially for a home worker, is to score as quickly as possible in order to earn any money: at 30 cents per paper, you have to score forty papers an hour to make $12 an hour, and test scoring requires a lot of mental breaks.
[…]
Even if the scoring were a more exact science, this would in no way make up for the atrocious effect on creativity wrought by the mania for standardized testing. This impact has now been documented. According to one study, creativity among U.S. children has been in decline since 1990, with a particularly severe drop among those currently between kindergarten and sixth grade. {footnote in original refers to this Newsweek article}
[…]
I remember reading, for twenty-three straight days, the responses of thousands of middle-schoolers to the question, “What is a goal of yours in life?” A plurality devoted several paragraphs to explain that their life’s goal was to talk less in class, listen to their teacher, and stop fooling around so much. It’s asking too much to hope for great literature on a standardized test. But, given that this is the process through which so many students are learning to write and to think, one would hope for more. These rote responses, in themselves, are a testament to the failure of our education system, its failure to actually connect with kids’ lives, to help them develop their humanity and their critical thinking skills, to do more than discipline them and prepare them to be obedient workers—or troops.¹

Extract from his website:

On the process of his Quadraturen (“Squarings”):
(1)
The first step is always an acoustic photograph (“phonograph”).
This can be a recording of anything: speech, street noise, music.
(2)
Time and frequency of the chosen “phonograph” are dissolved into a grid of small “squares”
whose format may, for example, be 1 second (time) to 1 second (interval).
(3)
The resulting grid is the score, which is then to be reproduced in different media:
on traditional instruments, computer controlled piano, or in white noise.¹

From the Democracy Now! broadcast on December 2nd, 2010:

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about the growing number of threats against Julian Assange. The former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has said Assange should be, quote, “hunted down,” and a former campaign aide of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper went a step further in a recent interview on the Canadian Broadcasting, CBC.

TIM FLANAGAN: Well, I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something. You know, there’s no good coming of this.

AMY GOODMAN: That was University of Calgary professor Tim Flanagan, who served as the Conservative Party’s campaign manager in Canada’s general election in 2004 and 2006. Jennifer Robinson, as Julian Assange’s attorney, your response?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: These calls for his assassination are absolutely outrageous and, indeed, illegal. I think that the prosecuting authorities ought to consider prosecuting these individuals for incitement to violence. Obviously assassination is illegal, and we take these concerns very seriously. Now, the press around the fact that my client is in hiding to evade arrest is absolutely incorrect. And one can imagine that when you have very public officials making these sorts of serious calls for assassination, that one would be concerned for their personal safety. I also think that it raises genuine concerns when you have Sarah Palin making such allegations for the prospect of my client receiving any sort of due process in the U.S.¹

From Alain Badiou’s Rhapsody for the Theatre:

LXXXII
Here I propose my second reform, which is so wide-ranging that it is a
pleasure to see. It can be summed up as follows: our presence in the theatre halls must become obligatory.

[...]

LXXXIV
Once such logistics were put into place, what would be the forms
and means of the theatrical obligation?
Every resident age 7 and up, except in cases of force majeure, would be expected to attend at least four representations per year.
Theatre would obviously be free. It is true that, aside from its evident secular nature, popular theatre in the fifties already wished to be free. However, in Jules Ferry’s model the essential element was forgotten: the obligation.
Control at the entrance would be limited to putting the official stamp in the theatre card that every resident receives at the start of each year.
The compensations and the punishments must always be of the essence: the theatre card will be joined to the tax declaration. Spectators who are particularly zealous, whose card offers a constellation of stamps, would be entitled to substantial deductions. By contrast, the recalcitrant ones, those who fall short of their legal theatre obligations, would pay a painful fine of a fixed amount, whose profits would go entirely to the theatre budget¹.

A recent story by someone with whom I have absolutely no association was recently published in the online literary magazine The Furnace Review.
On Quebec:

Because this year I had thrown the Learn French! tapes out in early May so as to make the Veronica sanction official. French can be a very beautiful language, but it can also be used for evil. Every year it’s the same thing: her comments about the mandate to write road signs in French, the condescending tone when explaining if they must write in English, it must be so-and-so times as small and it really must be discouraged more, don’t you think Debbie? She gets such a thrill from pointing out how far she has come from home and how much I have stayed the same, English language and all.¹

.