[Dryerase] The Alarm--Writings of Manuel Schwab

[Alarm!Wires]

Here is a collection of Manuel Schwab's pieces since our first issue on 
May 17th.  They are all very good and none of them are particularly 
local.  Some are timely, but not in a way that would make them sound 
dated if reprinted.  The last issue (7-5-02) was omitted because his 
piece revolved around a photograph that i'm not sure how to get to 
y'all.  They are ordered from oldest to newest

5-17-02
Antiterrorism, Zionism, and Apartheid
By Manuel Schwab
“You cannot in one breath claim the right of the Jews to political power 
and sovereignty in one part of the world…and in the next breath seek to 
take away the same hard-won right from the children of the Boers.”  In 
this way H. Katzew, the Editor of the Zionist Record in South Africa, 
characterized the ideological equivalency he perceived between the 
Zionist state in Palestine and his own country’s Apartheid regime. The 
analogies between the two regimes are, in fact, striking; both were the 
result of systematic expropriation or simple seizure of native land, 
both depended on the support of an imperial international consensus. 
Both depend on racialized citizenship laws and racially biased political 
codes. Both withstood decades of international pressure against them 
(often only surviving with the support of a few powerful allies).
It demands an explanation, therefore, why 11 years after the celebrated 
collapse of Apartheid, the largest military operation by Israel 
targeting the Palestinian population (a population that Israel has 
systematically displaced, persecuted, and oppressed) is met with 
official support from the same government that touts the South African 
Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an exemplary political transition.
The necessity of an explanation seems all the more pressing if we look 
beyond the broad structural similarities of these two settler regimes 
and examine what cannot be called anything but a peculiar alliance. It 
was May 15th, 1948—the same month that the Afrikaner Nationalist Party 
which implemented the “separate development” (Apartheid) policy in South 
Africa came to power—that the state of Israel was officially recognized 
by the United Nations. The build up of what was to become the military 
infrastructure of Israel, however, began long before the state’s 
official recognition; it was in fact prior to the success of the Zionist 
settler state that we see Zionism’s relationship to the South African 
colonies burgeoning.
We can take the case of the Haganah, a pre-military infrastructure that 
played an instrumental role in the suppression of the Arab Revolt 
against the British (1936-1939), as an example. Established in 1920, it 
is from the ranks of the Haganah that the infamous Irgun emerged, later 
to become responsible—alongside their more radical right wing splinter 
group, The Stern Gang -- for the April 1948 massacres in Jaffa and Deir 
Yasin. It was also the Haganah that enjoyed the financial and political 
support of General Jan Christian Smuts—the early Apartheid ideologue 
(before the policy was officially implemented) and celebrated prime 
minister of South Africa.
Although it is important to note that this objective was under some 
dispute throughout the pre-history of Israel, many Zionists taking it as 
their objective to combat both the British Mandatory Authority and the 
Arab Palestinians, General Smuts’ interest in Zionism was its promise to 
defend British imperial interests in the Middle East. Smuts was revered 
as one of the founding father’s of the League of Nations, and is 
remembered for making indispensable contributions to the British dream 
of the establishment of a new international society. He was a man who 
believed just as firmly in race-separation, and in the control of native 
populations by a settler regime explicitly constructed around racial 
exclusion. His relationship to Chaim Weizmann, who was the first 
President of Israel and one of its most important founding Zionists—as 
well as staunch pro-British Zionist—was an important diplomatic and 
strategic boon to the diplomatic success of Israel. Weizmann’s diplomacy 
would help frame Israel as the imperial bulwark which Smuts believed 
necessary for the occidentalization of Africa, and Smuts in turn made 
Zionism a personal diplomatic project.
The collusion between Israel and South Africa was far more than a 
fleeting allegiance between two racialist ideologues at a time when many 
western powers were still avowedly dedicated to some version of 
traditional colonialism. Beyond being the products of the same colonial 
power block (the Balfour agreement that promised British support for a 
Zionist State in Palestine and the 1909 South Africa Act of Union were 
the result of the machinations of the same network of imperialist 
players), the cooperation between South Africa and Israel included 
tactical, ideological, and politico-economic alliances that lasted at 
least until the final decade of the Apartheid regime. The chief of staff 
of the Israeli Air Force, for instance, lectured in the late 60s on the 
tactics Israel used during the 1967 Six-Day War to a South African Air 
Force academy. A rough decade later (circa 1975), Israeli Officers were 
still being sent to South Africa to train troops there in 
counter-insurgency techniques, a collusion aired publicly at that time 
by the London Guardian. Beyond these glaring collaborations, bilateral 
trade and expansion arrangements with South Africa were actively pursued 
by the Israeli Histadrut (the second largest employer in Israel at the 
time, next to the state) through the 70s in relation to South Africa.
This all fell against the backdrop of the Cold War, a time in which the 
US had already proven its capacity to fight their battles against the 
Soviet Union by surrogate, supporting regimes they felt to be 
instrumental for the containment of communism (with overt Military 
interventions like the Vietnam war, but more often clandestinely) the 
world over. Whatever is to be said about the appropriate way to situate 
Israel and South Africa in this picture, it is clear that the magnitude 
of US military and financial support to Israel made the latter’s 
international interventions possible. From the mid 1970s on, 
furthermore, the South African Apartheid government was engaged in the 
period in which their policy against Apartheid resistance was explicitly 
framed as an attempt to prevent the spread of socialist affiliation in 
that country. Both states, then, can be viewed, even by conservative 
estimations, as crucial stratagems in the global containment policy of 
the Cold War.
The barrage of institutional facts that emerge when we examine the 
Zionist relationship to Imperial powers in general and South Africa (the 
most famous settler regime save perhaps the United States, which all but 
succeeded in the extermination of its own native population) makes clear 
certain claims that are often hotly disputed by analysts of contemporary 
Zionism. The fledgling Zionist state was by definition a settler regime, 
and moreover one whose founding architects self-consciously positioned 
themselves to take advantage of the imperial aspirations of the major 
global powers from 1948 on. It is clear from their correspondences that 
neither Herzl (widely acknowledged as the founder of modern Zionism), 
nor Weizmann, nor Ben Gurion (Israel’s first Prime Minister) ever had 
any illusions about the necessity to systematically displace the 
Palestinian Arabs. The government of Israel was, finally, an explicitly 
racialized political regime, and its close relationship to the Apartheid 
government can only be understood in the context of its relationship to 
its own native populations—a political and economic subjugation which is 
as robust as ever—and its relationship to the US.
It seems then that there must be less of a contradiction than we think 
between the global liberal world order our nation vainly claims to 
champion and the racist empires from which it sprung. Israel operates, 
after all, under the banner of its renowned status as a beacon of 
democracy in the Middle East. It has made the seamless transition, on 
the ideological level, from the imperially funded settler regime of the 
past to the stratagem on the forefront of an ever-expanding sphere of 
liberal influence of the present. It stands alongside the US—despite 
laughable admonitions we’ve heard of late from our administration 
attempting to preserve competing alliances in the Arab world—in a fight 
against “politically motivated violence.”
The irony of this formulation will not escape the careful reader who 
recognized state violence as definitively political. Israel’s policies 
have not essentially changed since its close collusion with the 
Apartheid Regime of the 80s, and even this relationship was compatible 
in many western propagandists eyes with the civilizing mission of Israel 
until the regime fell. This seeming contradiction would come as more of 
a surprise if Israel’s pseudo-metamorphosis didn’t mirror in particular 
ways the liberal recuperations of our own neo-imperial ideologies, more 
and more often structured around our “humanitarian” interests in 
intervention.
On this last point, we must be clear. The current US war, which is 
fought like countless others to make the world safe for the democratic 
and the tolerant, is perpetrated in the name of security, and for this 
we must take our government to task. For the contradiction that we see 
in the claims of our own national objectives and the means by which our 
government pursues them is secondary to a deeper contradiction to which 
we must pay attention as much in our analysis of Israel as domestically. 
The contradiction between the interests of an industrialist government, 
built around hard military core, and our interests as its citizens 
(consenting or otherwise) cannot be overlooked.
 From the earliest stages of the successful Zionist campaign to gain 
control of Palestine, there were vocal opponents both within the 
Palestinian Jewish settler community and from the entire range of the 
Jewish community at large who decried the imperialism and racism of the 
Revisionist Zionists. Among them was Bernard Lazarre, a member of the 
Zionist Organization at a time when the question of whether Zionism 
would be imperialist was not yet decided, and who resigned in 1899 
because of what he believed was an attempt by burgeoning Zionism to 
mislead its people. (Lazarre, incidentally, fought Herzl on the 
necessity of a Homeland, emphasizing rather a coalition based defense of 
European Jews in Europe).
We find today the same form of dissent in Israel (yes, from a minority, 
as dissent always is in democracies), and we should not be seduced into 
believing that the high approval ratings for the Sharon government are 
an indicator of some innate hatred stemming from the population. 
Governments are always robust during a “crisis of security,” and we see 
this all too well in the case of our own marginally accepted 
administration which suddenly, under attack, is given leave to enact 
policies that would otherwise have seen a president deposed. Nor should 
we be seduced into believing that this high approval rating amounts to a 
de facto legitimacy for Sharon and his policies. Remember that in the 
case of our own government, the attacks which came to legitimate the 
Bush administrations power were precipitated by decades of imperialism 
by his precursors, imperialism that systematically militarized the 
anti-American resistance we now decry. Remember that Sharon took power 
after a long history of personal military service, in which he was 
commanding officer during the massacres of both Sabra and Shatilla, and 
that his visit to the temple mount was the critical spark in the 
violence that swept him into office.
Once a state is at war, it demands as a matter of public responsibility 
that we revere its leaders—and neither Sharon nor Bush is in the least 
bit oblivious to that fact. As far as the history of these wars is 
concerned, sanity would require us to remember the responsibility that 
both Sharon and Bush hold respectively for initiating the violence they 
now purport to defend themselves against. But sanity is not the 
objective here, and in a state of emergency it somehow becomes 
subversive to even acknowledge their agency. Patriotism, however, is 
more than ever a prime objective, and during war time, it is more and 
more clear that historical memory itself has become unpatriotic.
 
5-24-02
Subjecting ourselves to objectivity
By Manuel Schwab
The Alarm! Newspaper Contributor
The non-neutrality of the media should not come as a revelation in an 
age in which virtually every new medium is credited with ushering in a 
new world. Whether it is by virtue of the rapidity of data transmission 
(the lynchpin of the utopian dreams of the silicon valley) or a 
spectacular capacity for impressing messages onto its target audience 
(the seduction of the moving picture), media always exert their 
influence. The dream of a magic tunnel through which the world can pass 
unaltered is as unrealizable as it is desired.
In this desire lies, among other things, a recognition of the threat 
that ideology poses to our autonomy.  We fear that our capacity for 
judgement will be hijacked by the selective vision of the messengers who 
are the mediators of our world. And this fear is, let us make no mistake 
here, a well founded anxiety, issuing forth from deep within the 
infrastructure of liberal democracies, in which opinion-building is the 
acceptable mode of the modern tyranny. It is, however, misdirected to 
look for purified information (“the facts”) to solve this dilemma.
What would this objectivity look like? A neutral presentation of facts? 
Hardly. Facts themselves are the products of non-neutral systems of 
knowledge, and presented by themselves they are at best alibis for 
ideological biases which get passed off not as opinions but as common 
sense. To report, for example, a theft, without reporting the systematic 
production of the poverty that compelled it, is to frame the thief for 
the crimes of a larger conspiracy of powerful actors. Is this analysis 
itself an ideologically informed interpretation? Evidently. But it is 
not those opinions in which committed interests are apparent that 
threaten our capacity to make judgements of our world. It is rather 
those who postulate their opinions as fact, unleashing all the 
technologies of veracity at their disposal to effect a pretense of 
neutrality, that we should fear.
The distance between facts (which are rendered rigid, isolated, and 
robbed of potential) and truths (which must be the outcome of collective 
negotiations, situated in that collective, and therefore susceptible to 
the potentialities of the collective imagination) is vast. The systems 
of knowledge which are currently dominant perform a dual operation. They 
work first to rigidify and isolate facts, next to pass them off as 
though they are the products of our collective ingenuity. They have 
thereby effectively erased the distinction between truth and fact, and 
in doing so have made their interests look like the products of our 
agency.
Consequently, the world which we see as a constellation of the actual is 
itself a manifestation of intricate mediations: fantasies passed off as 
non-negotiable despite being the product of subjective interests that 
demand contestation. It is this world that we internalize when we ask to 
be handed reality as it appears on the most general level (in other 
words, when we demand “just the facts”). This internalization quickly 
makes us complicit in the reproduction of the reality which we have been 
handed.
It is perplexing that we desire this kind of complicity. More precisely, 
it is a terrible inversion of our relationship to reality that we should 
believe it to precede our interventions, that we must first understand 
it in all its mute actuality before we can concern ourselves with its 
possibilities—possibilities that will always be relegated to the ghetto 
of marginalized opinion until conviction lifts them from that squalor. 
Reality is not a stable entity that is simply observed and responded to. 
It has always been constructed, and it is our job to reclaim it for our 
own making.
Often, to pose a question is to imply its answer, and this is a 
frequently overlooked component of the ideological intonation of news. 
For the case at hand, to pose the question in terms of the relative 
objectivity of news is to entirely miss the point. The question is 
rather one of the responsible disclosure of conviction.  It should be 
made eminently clear that an attack on the pretenses of objectivity is 
not a defense of the right to discard considerations of accuracy.  The 
irrefutable destructive power of a politics based in the fabrication of 
facts and narratives has been demonstrated to us (whether you take the 
disinformation campaigns around Vietnam or the current double-speak 
about Sharon—the “man of peace” with an occupying army—as your point of 
departure, the lesson is the same).
But rather than ask for objectivity, we should ask whether the objective 
conditions that are the substance of news reporting are being exposed as 
the result of argument, engineering, and fabrication.  In short, we 
should ask if the news we are reading is reporting the truth of how 
prevailingly un-objective the objective fabric of our world really is. 
The reporting of “pure fact” leaves dominant opinions potently 
invisible. Responsibility, on the other hand, demands a reporting that 
lays its subjective convictions unabashedly alongside the facts that are 
its motivation, and alongside the subjective fantasies made visible that 
are the foundation for these facts in the first place. The question 
should not be how to construct the magic tunnel through which reality 
can pass unaltered, but rather why we are so eager not to alter a world 
ripe for intervention.
 
5-31-02
Memorial Day and a storm in Rome
By Manuel Schwab
The Alarm! Newspaper Contributor
On Thursday, May 30, the Guardian reported that lightning had hit and 
splintered a 3000-year-old obelisk located in Rome. Italian authorities 
consider it a miracle that no one was hurt. The obelisk, the Guardian 
report continued, had been stolen from Ethiopia in 1937 by Benito 
Mussolini to glorify the political might of the expanding fascist 
dictatorship. As a result of the lighting strike, a junior Culture 
Minister for Italy announced that the Foreign Ministry’s proposal to 
return the ill-gotten cultural artifact to Ethiopia would not be 
pursued, because the obelisk was now “too fragile to move.”
If there is any symbolic weight to the broken rock in Rome, its center 
of gravity is certainly the impact of Fascism’s legacy on the political 
imagination of the West. Since the end of the Second World War, Europe 
(and the United States closely behind) has been working to come to terms 
with its encounter (which many argue is anything but past) with this 
extreme manifestation of nationalist authoritarianism.
This reckoning is all the more relevant today, in an era where the 
global political climate is once again marked by shocking international 
alliances, startling attacks on the sovereignty of nations, and a 
general return to the rhetoric of an international war against a 
monolithic evil. If we read the damage to the obelisk and the ensuing 
government reaction as a figure for our current western relationship to 
Fascism, then what has been shaken loose is our commitment to resist 
nationalist justifications for authoritarianism in the present.
The lightning strike comes on the heels of Bush JR’s Memorial Day 
declaration at Saint- Mere-Eglise in Normandy, the site of the first 
landing of US Forces during the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944. And 
there too, in Normandy, nearly fifty-seven years after the invasion, the 
rhetorical echoes of the old fascist heritage reverberate. In an 
insidious double move, Fascism is invoked as the prototypical threat to 
liberty, and nationalist aggression is offered as its only antidote.
It should strike every civilian as a travesty that the commemoration of 
the war- dead falls, year after year, under the banner of the same 
nationalism that has served as a justification for the sacrifice of 
generations of civilians. But our current administration, at war, would 
never pass up such an opportunity to exploit the history of those who 
have already been killed in the service of their country. In fact, it 
seems that this war only demands renewed sacrifice, and that an alliance 
on the scale of the Second World War is being invoked to justify the 
deaths of countless Americans – not to mention those countless others 
that never seem to count. Making a seamless transition from remembering 
the grief of the families of D-Day victims, our President now insists 
that, “For some military families in America and in Europe, the grief is 
recent, with the losses we have suffered in Afghanistan.”  More 
pointedly, he continues that “Our security is still bound up together in 
a transatlantic alliance, with soldiers in many uniforms defending the 
world from terrorists at this very hour.”
We should be deeply alarmed at this conflation of our present war with 
World War Two – not because the casualties of either war are to be 
disparaged, nor because the geopolitical parameters of the two Wars are 
to be confused. Rather, we should be alarmed that our current 
administration is positioning itself as the central engineer of a war in 
which it demands global complicity. We should be alarmed that it is once 
again acceptable for our president to uncritically remind the world 
that “the grave markers here [in Normandy] all face West.”
Have we stopped paying attention to the dead of the East? Judging from 
the casualty reports we heard daily from mainstream news sources during 
our war in Afghanistan, evidently. But there was a period, more recent 
history than the war hawks would like to acknowledge, in which large 
populations in the West were vigilant (a word that has now taken on an 
entirely new meaning) against the resurgence of such internationally 
hostile nationalism. The New Left of Germany is a compelling example 
from that time: a radical movement of the young generation of the 1960s 
and 70s driven by the fear that the industrial leaders of Nazi Germany 
had never experienced the “de-nazification” attempted in the political 
sector of that country.
There was, alongside this German youth, the movement in the US and 
abroad against the Vietnam War. Many of these anti-war protestors 
emphasized the Cold-War imperialism that was the backdrop of that war. 
They considered the actions of their country as genocide (an opinion 
shared by Jean-Paul Sartre) practiced to further the goals of an 
insupportable American nationalism insinuating itself into to politics 
of the Third World to combat the Soviets. The anti-Soviet surrogate wars 
they waged continued through the late 1980s, and into Afghanistan. Back 
then, ironically, our Government was funding Osama Bin Laden in his 
fight against the Soviets.
But that Cold War era (for which we should be anything but nostalgic) is 
now “officially over.” Back in Italy, the site of the pregnant lightning 
strike on the old spoils of Fascist expansionism, Prime Minister 
Berlusconi took the weeks after September 11 as an opportunity to stump 
for his particular brand of far-right nationalism. He said that the 
attacks demonstrated once and for all the supremacy of Western 
civilization, and that they should inspire all European nations to 
re-commit themselves to their occidental roots. Apparently, more than 
just the tombstones face West.
Or perhaps, the new geopolitical situation is even more complicated. 
Berlusconi was not, after all, the only world leader to take advantage 
of the rhetorical reservoir handed over to the belligerents of the world 
in the form of our government’s declaration of the War On Terrorism. 
Immediately after the attacks, Vladimir Putin announced to the world 
that America’s new war was comparable to Russia’s war against Chechnya, 
and that the two superpowers should join in the global struggle against 
terror. For a while it seemed that his plea would miraculously fall on 
deaf ears, but we should not be so lucky.
The day before running the story on the lighting-struck-Roman obelisk, 
the Guardian reported on the impending US-Russian agreement as “an 
epoch-making agreement that will give Russia a say alongside NATO and 
bury the Cold War forever.” But if the Cold War has been officially 
buried, the lightning that struck twice against the twin towers on 
September 11 was not the cause of death. Rather the attacks are, in 
addition to all their immediate horrors, an abiding alibi for a new era 
of militarism. If Bush’s call to arms does not suffice, and the 
posturing of Putin seems obscure, what about Sharon’s invasion of 
Palestine clothed in the imperial rags of anti-terrorism? Or what about 
the strange political about face of German Foreign Minister Joschka 
Fischer? Fischer was himself somewhat of a radical anti-authoritarian in 
his German-New-Left-Youth, and a man who has for years been fighting the 
attempts of right-leaning government officials, both past and present, 
to brand him a terrorist for his political past. In the days after the 
attacks, he mused on public television that the September 11 events 
demonstrated the need to re-invent the relationship between civilian and 
military intelligence.
Perhaps Bush was onto something after all about the importance of 
Memorial Day. He described it as a day that “our country has set apart 
to remember what was gained in our wars, and all that was lost.” These 
days, we do not need to think far back to remember “our war”. And these 
days, while what we are gaining is at best hypothetical, what has 
already been lost is all too concrete. New legal statutes infringe 
deeply into our civil liberties, and the massive restructuring of the 
FBI, made public four days after Memorial Day, refocuses that 
administration’s objectives on “intelligence gathering,” promising only 
to streamline (and increase) the centralized surveillance of our 
domestic population.
But back to that Ethiopian Obelisk in Rome. Since the lightning strike, 
we will have to wait indefinitely to see that monument of Fascist 
imperialism returned to its country of origin and thereby finally 
dismantled. Like that obelisk, our own repressive nationalism is now 
deemed by those who run our government to be “too fragile to move.” It 
is unclear how long we will have to wait until we believe that our sense 
of national security is once again stable enough to endure critique. For 
the time being, it seems that the Cold War has given way to a new 
acquiescence in the face of old forms of authoritarianism, and if we are 
to commemorate on Memorial Day, it must include the rapidly shrinking 
presence of critical dissent.
 
6-7-02
The fantasy of nuclear democracy
By Manuel Schwab
The Alarm! Newspaper Contributor
Some 40,000 people have been killed in Kashmir over the last ten years, 
according to human rights groups watching the region. This past week, 
our Defense Department released estimates of potential death tolls 
between 6–12 million people in the event of a nuclear conflict between 
India and Pakistan. Nuclear war is efficient.
Perhaps it is this efficiency that makes the rattling of the nuclear 
sabers such an intoxicating thing to a particular sector of the 
societies capable of doing so. One particular leader in the fight to 
wrest Kashmir out from under Indian political domination articulated 
with a peculiar candor how he felt after Pakistan detonated their six 
nuclear warheads in 1998. He believed that this would prove to the rest 
of the world once and for all that “they” (whoever the “they” he 
alligned himself with happened to be) were not a bunch of “castrati”.
At first, the statement is almost amusing, with its mix of grotesque 
chauvinism and misplaced identifications. It is harrowing to recognize, 
however, how common such terrible confusion about the national capacity 
for nuclear war really is and how this reflects on the political 
capacity of that nation’s citizenry.
Immediately after the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York, footage 
began to circulate around Europe of one of the rafters of the wreckage 
besmirched with the massively rendered plea “c’mon bush, nuke ‘em.” This 
was long before anyone was certain who “they” were going to be, but it 
seems clear enough that the author of the request was inspired by some 
sense that with a massive nuclear retaliation, his feeling of agency 
would be restore—perhaps that “America” (and by some strange alchemy he 
too) would show without fail that it could withstand anything.
But neither a nuclear attack on the perpetrators of that bombing, nor a 
nuclear strike in the conflict over Kashmir will do anything to bring 
the situations to which they would respond back under control. Neither 
would they be politically, ecologically, or tactically viable. Obvious 
as that may sound, there seems to be a gap between this rationality and 
the fantasies in which nuclear weapons are obscured. These are fantasies 
that date back to the early days of colonialism, but found their 
culmination during the Cold War, and have proven resilient enough to 
leap the threshold between that era and our New War without serious 
modification.
Remember for a moment the story of Slim Pickins in Stanley Kubric’s cold 
war classic, “Dr. Strangelove”. Pickins, who is commander of a US bomber 
carrying Nuclear arsenal refuses to be deterred from his mission to drop 
the Bomb on the Russians by a failed communications system and a 
malfunctioning pair of cargo doors. His struggle to deliver his deadly 
motherload looks like a testimony to the individual’s triumph over 
obstinate circumstances, and one is almost tempted to cheer when he 
finally manages to discharge the Bomb, which he rides like a cowboy on a 
mechanical bull all the way to ground zero. But before any of us can 
cheer, we remember that the commands by the Pentagon to drop the Bomb 
were, in fact, a false alarm. To make matters worse, the Russians have 
installed a massive “doomsday device” meant to deter against attack by 
triggering a nuclear chain reaction strong enough to destroy the globe 
in the event of any attack on Russian soil. What looked like a triumph 
of heroic ingenuity turns out to be a global catastrophe, a catastrophe 
caused precisely by technologies that end up, eventually, robbing even 
their manufacturers of any agency.
Is this not what we see in all of the national nuclear projects? During 
the Manhattan Project, one of its most prominent Nuclear Physicists 
fantasized that the internationalism of the scientific enterprise 
(transnational cooperation in the pursuit of scientific problems) would 
serve as a model for a new transnational political order. Furthermore, 
the military had to rely on a massive complex of civilian agents to 
produce the Atom Bomb. Even if this large “scientific democracy” did not 
serve as a model for international communalism, it would ensure that 
there would be a broad control over these technologies by the civilian 
sector. This model was carried to its logical extension in India, where 
the military stepped even more drastically out of the way of the 
scientific establishment, leaving the civilian scientists to take care 
of everything. The production of these weapons would finally impose an 
order on the nations that possessed them, making the anarchic renegade 
wars of inter-ethnic hatreds that belonged to a pre-modern era 
definitively a thing of the past.
Each of these fantasies, however, have turned out to resolve into their 
opposite. The scientific internationalism envisioned by Neils Bohr 
turned out, in fact, to be the brinksmanship of the Cold War, in which 
the only common ground between political actors was the technology they 
used to threaten mutual destruction. The complex of civilian agents has 
only brought the “scientific democracy” necessary for the development of 
nuclear technology into unavoidable collusion with the military that 
depends on them, and this military-industrial mutualism has, we all 
know, done nothing to make decisions about military policy more 
accessible.
What has happened rather, is that this technology has further 
rationalized war in such a way as to make it easier for a tiny elite to 
operate in a completely irrational way. The national empowerment that 
joining the ranks of the nuclear powers affords only reflects on the 
extreme elite, and is generally bought at the expense of the populations 
in whose name it’s done.
What this means in the current standoff between India and Pakistan is 
that a Nuclear Industry, modeled on the old colonial model of scientific 
and industrial exclusion, rests at the center of a conflict just as tied 
to that colonial history. If the suggestion by some of the nationalists 
behind these Nuclear projects that they will increase the power of the 
citizens of those countries is a fantasy, the destructive efficiency of 
the technology is, unfortunately, all too real.
 
6-14-02
When does fascism become legitimate?
   1933, 1941, and 2001
By Manuel Schwab
The Alarm! Newspaper Contributor
“War is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a 
continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means. What 
remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means.”
—Carl von Clausewitz

After September 11, the US government began to make systematic 
comparisons between the attacks on the World Trade Towers and the 
Japanese military assault on Pearl Harbor in December 7, 1941. These 
comparisons were clearly meant to convey to national and international 
audiences the gravity of the attacks. Alongside these comparisons, 
however, an alternate discourse emerged. Many critics of the US response 
to the attacks made a different comparison. They invoked the burning of 
the Reichstag building in Germany February 27, 1933. This comparison 
also was meant to convey the gravity of the events, but it was a very 
different gravity. This particular allusion was meant to highlight the 
way in which the events of September 11 were used as an alibi for all 
sorts of repressive legislation unfathomable before the attack. In fact, 
both pieces of legislation offer an illuminating model with which to 
analyze our current administration’s response to the terrorist attacks 
of September 11.
The arson of the Reichstag lead to the signature by the German State of 
an emergency decree “for the protection of the people and the state.” 
This decree stipulated, among other things, that, “restrictions on 
personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including 
freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and 
violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic 
communications and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscation 
as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the 
legal limits otherwise prescribed.”
What followed was one of the most infamous campaigns by any European 
administration to consolidate its own power in the twentieth century. 
The Hitler government rounded up thousands of dissidents under its newly 
acquired right to impose “protective custody.” The industrialists of 
that period rallied around that new government, both with financial 
contributions and with research and development work. The total 
industrial contribution towards the March 5 election campaign of the 
Nazi’s was about three million Marks, and the Krupps foundation joined 
IG Farben in being among the most notable contributors. Krupp was the 
munitions manufacturer for the Reich during the second world war, and IG 
Farben manufactured Zyklon-B the chemical used in the gas chambers of 
the German concentration camps.
The Pearl Harbor attacks, in their turn, precipitated, the most sweeping 
suspensions of constitutional protections of the twentieth century. 
Executive Order 9066, which called for the removal and internment of 
Asian Americans, had to overcome considerable challenges at the supreme 
court level on the grounds that it violated the rights of Asian American 
citizens against illegal search and seizure and equal protection under 
the law.
It is the fact that this deportation and internment of Japanese 
Americans was upheld by the supreme court that should compel us to 
suspicion regarding our current government’s invocation of that 
historical precedent as a model for September 11. In upholding the 
legality of these relocations despite the obvious violation of Japanese 
American rights to equal protection and against illegal search and 
seizure, the supreme court cited the compelling interest of the state to 
defend national security in times of crisis. One state of emergency, it 
seems, deserves the creation of another.
The suspension of Civil Liberties in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor was 
one of several similarities between the US Government’s policy during 
WWII and that of the Nazi Government. The state of exception that the 
German Government heralded in 1933 culminated in the establishment and 
operation of the extermination camps until the end of the war. Although 
the US government did not (thankfully) follow suit with the 
extermination, it mimicked the emergency suspension of rights under 
presidential war powers, and mimicked also the close relationship that 
the German state established between its government and German 
industrial interests.
Back at home, one of the shining lights of American Fascism, Lawrence 
Dennis, sang the praises of the fascist enterprise on our side of the 
Atlantic. “Integration of government agencies, and coordination of 
authority may be called the keystone principles of fascist 
administration,” the economic fascist wrote in 1936, distressed only 
that the development of fascism in America would be impeded by the  
“liberal norms of law or constitutional guarantees of private rights.”
Just as Dennis sought to bridge a gap between the fascism of Europe and 
what he saw as nascent fascism on our side of the Atlantic, it seems 
that the current administration seeks to combine the security fallouts 
of the Reichstag fire with the political latitude their predecessors 
gained sixty years ago with the Pearl Harbor attack. For the one massive 
difference between the Reichstag fire and Pearl Harbor was that while 
the arson of the former clearly constituted a crime by domestic actors, 
and was therefore treated as a criminal act, the attack on Pearl Harbor 
was clearly framed as an act of war. Under the present establishment of 
Military Tribunals in the US outpost in Guatanomo Bay, and the recent 
classification of US citizen Jose Padilla (also known by his assumed 
name Abdullah al-Muhajir) as a foreign combatant, have made it more and 
more difficult to distinguish between civilian crimes and military 
aggressions.
The attacks on Pearl Harbor were, furthermore, the beginning of our 
involvement in the last war that the United States government declared 
legally. Since then, it seems that the line between war crimes and 
civilian crimes is a distinction made at the discretion of our 
government’s authorities. Consider, for example, that in the preceding 
decade, not act of “terrorism” has ever been considered an act of war. 
Whether it was the bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988, the first World Trade 
Center Bombing of 1993, or the bombing of the US Embassies in Kenya and 
Tanzania in 1998, none were considered acts of war.
This attack, however, was not only framed as such, but has thereafter 
been used as a justification to suspend all kinds of constitutional 
protections via the USA Patriot Act, and is now poised as an alibi for 
the establishment of a Department of Homeland Security. This department 
is, without any exaggeration, the prototypical reform dreamed of by 
people like Lawrence Dennis in the 1930s. It brings the responsibilities 
of the Border Patrol, the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Response 
Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory agency, and on and on under the direction 
of a single agency.
Furthermore, this agency will be supported in its pursuit of national 
security by such corporate syndicates as the Security Industry 
Association, and such surveillance heavyweights as the Visionics 
corporation, which recently had the US debut of its face recognition 
technology in Tampa Florida. These private sector competitors have a 
niche built around identifying how our state can better watch us, 
convincing it of the need to, and then procuring private contracts to 
build the appropriate technologies for surveillance.
Gestures towards fascism? Perhaps. But maybe we are dealing with 
something a bit different. While the new war in which we are engaged is 
indeed being used to justify all kinds of draconian internal measures, 
it seems also to be blurring the line between who is and who is not 
under the jurisdiction of this increasingly authoritarian American 
leadership. Our current George W. seems the master slayer of 
distinctions. While it is becoming difficult to know the difference 
between security and government incursions into our daily lives, he has 
come up with a doctrine of international behavior to replace the Truman 
Doctrine of the Cold War. This one, however, makes no distinction 
between terrorists and those that harbor them, in which the only thing 
that is clear is that “you’re either with us or against us”.
While this seems, perplexingly, to treat the rest of the world as an 
extension of our own war policy, it may shed light on one part of the 
post September 11 strategy of our administration. If we can define 
entire countries outside of our national interest, we can also remove 
entire domestic populations from the “national” populace that the 
invocation of national security seeks to protect. In the classic fascist 
move, dissident and undesirable populations are excised from the body 
politic, and its defense measures are turned against them in the 
interest of the rest.
 
6-21-02
Invading the Hague in the name of humanity
 By Manuel Schwab
The Alarm! Newspaper Columnist
 In the second weeks of June, a flurry of headlines began to emerge 
around Europe warning of the imminent invasion of Holland by the US. 
Dutch Authorities reported wryly that they were digging trenches in The 
Hague. The Europeans were reacting to the passage of a piece of 
legislation that is affectionately referred to on their side of the 
Atlantic as “The Hague Invasion Act.” Known on our side of the Atlantic 
as the “American Servicemembers’ Protection Act of 2002,” its most 
provocative section gives congressional authorization to the President 
“to use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release 
of any person [American or American allied]…who is being detained or 
imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International 
Criminal Court.” The International Criminal Court (ICC), which is slated 
to begin to function effectively on July 1, 2002 as the first 
permanently standing international court for the prosecution of “crimes 
against humanity”, is located in The Hague.
There is, of course, no invasion of Holland on the horizon, and the 
existence of a bill like this one is more of a symptom of the 
international-frontier-lawman mentality of our present administration 
than of a climate in which this kind of invasion is foreseeable. What 
is, however, noteworthy about the “Hague Invasion Bill” is how clearly 
it unmasks the posturing of the US as the champion of international 
human rights as an ideological device. Furthermore, this is an 
ideological device that the Administration is guarding vigilantly. It 
is, after all, the defense that we act in the name of human rights that 
serves to justify our unilateral violations of international 
sovereignty, and these violations seem to be this administration’s most 
important foreign policy stratagem.
To really understand the irony of delegitimating the ICC’s capacity to 
interrogate the actions of our own servicemembers, we need to place the 
passage of the “American Servicemember Protection Act” in context of the 
trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic, for 
those of us (some of them clearly government officials) who have 
forgotten, was the “butcher of Belgrade” in our 1998 invasion of 
Yugoslavia. That war, which we fought to defend a Yugoslavian minority 
population against the genocide by their compatriots, was one of our 
wars for the sake of human rights.
The deposed president now sits before the International Criminal 
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on trial for war crimes. But 
our commitment to prosecuting the human rights violations that he has 
committed seems to have flagged. The US, as it turns out, has been 
consistently refusing to permit Richard Holbrooke, the former US 
ambassador to the UN, to testify before the ICTY in the Milosevic trial. 
Besides his somewhat ambivalent record as regards his relationship to 
Milosevic, it is clear that the US is afraid that Holbrooke’s testimony 
would set a precedent of US officials testifying before an international 
tribunal. This is precisely the kind of precedent that the US wants to 
avoid regarding the ICC.
It is no big surprise that the refusal to allow Holbrooke’s testimony 
before a criminal tribunal that is prosecuting Milosevic was more 
thoroughly reported overseas than here in the states. Milosevic was, 
after all, our alibi for one of the humanitarian interventions in 
Yugoslavia. What is a bit more surprising (and disturbing) is that the 
passage of the American Servicemember Protection Act, a piece of 
legislation that has been in the active works for a full year, was 
barely reported here in the States. In fact, the act was passed as a 
subsection (Title II) of an appropriations bill passed June 6. It was 
difficult, therefore, even to find the legislation to which the Dutch 
were responding, and to discover what the real content of the act was. 
This difficulty was certainly more than incidental.
The text of the bill itself redoubles the irony of a comparison to 
Milosevic, our former nemesis. It is not a simple case of withdrawing 
support for his trial, but an actual structural relationship between our 
national leaders’ willingness to be held accountable for their own 
wartime activities and those of the feared “butcher of Belgrade.” 
Milosevic has made it somewhat of a staple of his courtroom antics to 
decry the ICTY as an illegitimate court on the grounds that it violates 
the national sovereignty of the former Yugoslavia. In his estimation, he 
could only be subject to a court that his country has recognized, 
essentially nullifying the possibility that war crimes charges could 
ever be pursued against national leaders whose government deemed such 
violations legitimate practice. The logic is stunningly arrogant.
But we seem to agree precisely with this exculpatory logic. As the act 
puts it, “The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute [the 
statute that empowers the ICC] and will not be bound by any of its 
terms. The United States will not recognize the jurisdiction of the 
International Criminal Court over United States nationals.” We, who have 
now joined the ranks of those who we marked as the most important 
violator of human rights globally, clearly have interest in passing 
legislation that partakes in the logic of war criminals without public 
notice. What better characterizes the desire of war criminals than the 
demand for a total lack of any accountability?
What, after all, could we possibly have to hide? We, who have fought 
wars in the name of human rights, we should not be the country that 
fears the potential prosecution of our citizens and servicemembers for 
war crimes. But the passage of the Servicemember Protection Act ensures 
that any attempted prosecution of US citizens will be considered an act 
of aggression against the US. And it seems that it is precisely the 
human rights campaigns—which were cast in a dubious light by the lack of 
commitment the US showed to Milosevic’s prosecution—that are identified 
by the US for special protection from the ICC. The act demands that the 
president use his influence in the UN to protect “members of the Armed 
Forces of the United States participating in [peacekeeping] operation 
from criminal prosecution or other assertion of jurisdiction by the 
International Criminal Court.”
Not only do we share the logic of our enemies, but we seem to have 
special motivation to ensure that the wars we fight for humanitarian 
purposes are also those which we want exempt from an international 
humanitarian court’s censure. Not only is our human rights commitment 
exposed as—at best—a commitment we only cultivate when it is convenient, 
but it is exposed as a name we give to operations we have specific 
interests in keeping from international censure. Because we are infamous 
for our exceptionalism, constantly demanding that we be exempt from the 
standards of international conduct that apply to the rest of the world, 
it is easy for the Dutch to joke about their imminent invasion. But a 
country that already houses a pantheon of arguably the most egregious 
war criminals at large (Kissinger, Reagan, William Casey) should not be 
taken so lightly in respect to the strange position it defends: the 
position of being able to commit international human rights abuses 
consistently in the name of human rights.
 
6-28-02
“Semper Fi, my love”
By Manuel Schwab
The Alarm! Newspaper Collective
In his State of the Union Address of January 29, 2002, George W. Bush 
announced his plan to generate an opportunity for Americans to 
participate in the War on Terrorism through a new volunteerist 
organization to be called the USA Freedom Corps. The proposal, it seems, 
is to “harness the power of the American people by relying on their 
individual skills and interests to prepare local communities to 
effectively prevent and respond to the threats of terrorism, crime, or 
any kind of disaster.”
It seems we have been called to task this time. We who inhabit the 
largest and most far reaching economic empire to date are perpetually 
reminded of our ostensible influence on the government that acts in our 
name. But we rarely ask the honest question of that government, 
demanding that it tell us by what justification it takes our name as the 
foundation for its strength. As a result, the people who should, all 
things considered, be taking governments to task wherever they prevail 
are instead called to justify ourselves by volunteering to do its work. 
In a time when we should recognize more than ever the parasitic 
character of a government that has made its civilian population the 
target of the revenge of its enemies, we are instead stupefied by that 
government’s demands for service. What would once have been seen as an 
invitation for dissent has become a competition to demonstrate our 
loyalty, and the stakes of this loyalty are astronomical.
The political world, it seems, is running around on its head. Perhaps it 
has something to do with the climate: the thin oxygen of the panicked 
airline cabins in which our national policy was first espoused. Quoting 
the transcript of conversations from the cockpit of the fourth hijacked 
plane of 9/11 (which crashed over Pennsylvania) G.W. Bush announced to 
us that the “new ethic” nay, the “new creed” of the nation would be 
“let’s roll.”  The story goes that “let’s roll” was the last 
transmission from the cell phone of a passenger who later went on to 
drive the plane to the ground, and it doesn’t take much to see what 
interest Bush has to “harness the power” of this story.
But nobody asked by what authority he deigned to take those words as his 
own. As the president spoke of “the sacrifice of soldiers, the fierce 
brotherhood of firefighters, and the bravery and generosity of ordinary 
citizens” nobody asked what this “new culture of responsibility” really 
meant, or who and what we “ordinary citizens” would be responsible to. 
Nobody asked, for that matter, what compelled a librarian in Louisiana 
to start a “grassroots initiative” to compel her coworkers to survey the 
circulation records of patrons, and to turn any relevant information 
over to the Federal Authorities. Nobody demanded an explanation of why 
the President of one of the most powerful unions in the country, the 
Teamsters, felt justified to take at his disposal the lives of 500,000 
of his rank and file when he offered them up wholesale to the security 
apparatus of our government, claiming that “these people can be the eyes 
and ears of the homeland security office.”
Heroic. Except that heroism really only gains its content within a given 
script, and it should be clear from the abundance of heroes in our 
government’s current chapter of fairytales that this is a time when 
heroes play an indispensable role in moving this story along. And 
perhaps the proliferation of heroes is so necessary because it makes it 
that much more difficult to take a critical position regarding the 
script itself. The new volunteerist culture that the President is 
spending so much energy to create is no exception. He has called for 
every American to spend 4,000 hours over their lifetime engaging in 
programs such as his newly created USA Freedom Corps—an organization 
which runs the gamut from offering us voluntary participation in 
policing activities to incorporating us into the Federal Emergency 
Management agenda.
Far from finally offering us the heroic agency that they promise, these 
kinds of incorporations into the federal fairytale only make us more 
servile. They conscript us with a promise that they will unlock our 
potential. An eloquent masochist I know told me once with all sardonic 
glee, “you’ll have to excuse me, my only experience with slavery thus 
far, has been voluntary.” While I appreciated the subversive turn of 
phrase, the parallel between masochism and slavery never struck me as 
terribly apt. The parallel between this new culture of service and 
voluntary servitude is another matter.
The former relation is personal, and its iconoclastic intimacy is made 
possible by the deepest of trust, by the most profound inversion of 
power relations imaginable. It does, despite the provocations of the 
phrase, have nothing to do with slavery. It is the affinity of partners 
that makes a certain submission possible without the attendant 
disempowerments. No attempts by a government to try to invoke this 
affinity to disempower its citizens will ever be capable of bridging the 
chasm between these two experiences. But these attempts are repeatedly 
successful, and successful enough that we somehow accept the argument 
that government service can unlock our deepest potential. In fact we 
should neither need our government to tell us who our heroes are, nor 
should we need them to tell us how to exercise our capacities.
But Bush clearly evokes this deeply personal relation, positioning 
himself and his government as the force capable of unlocking the 
potential of its citizens. He speaks of his belief that “September 11th 
brought out the best in America” and calls for “every American to commit 
at least two years… to the service of your nation.”
In the same State of the Union Address, Bush invokes the words of 
Shannon Spann, whose farewell to her husband—who was killed in a CIA 
operation in Mazur-E-Sharif—was “Semper Fi, my love.” To some of us, 
those words were familiar from the chilling tomes of devotion written by 
Oliver North to then president Ronald Reagan. The phrase translates 
roughly to “always faithful,” and was a common phrase of devotion among 
Roman sentries. There is something chilling about hearing the widow of a 
man who died serving the imperial interests of his nation take as her 
last words to her husband an old roman military devotion. There is an 
added dimension of perversity when these words are re-invoked to shed 
light of the state of the union. Are we really so confused that we must 
borrow from military terms when expressing devotion to our love ones? 
When we blur the distinction between love and political loyalty, between 
family and nation (as we so often do), are we not draining our deepest 
emotions of their gravity?
And what, pray tell, should compel us to such faith in our government? 
What, pray tell, compels us to serve? By what authority is the name of 
countless dead taken as the seal of approval for every form of obedience 
to the state; a state that has been devouring so many of us in a genuine 
form of “voluntary slavery” for so long? Is it lost on us that the 4,000 
hours of voluntarism that G.W. Bush asks for are demanded at the same 
time that mandatory Military Service is being proposed for the first 
time in 30 years in congress? Is it lost on us that we are being asked 
to show our allegiance to this nation with the very substance of our 
lives?
Evidently, because judging from the public response to the perpetual war 
we have so clearly been promised, all we can do is swoon over the parade 
of heroes as though we have lost the ability to commit ourselves to 
anything we have not been instructed to love, as though we would be 
faithful to this nightmare of a nation-state indefinitely.

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