Capitalism

I want to hire a contract killer

The End was supposed to be the Beginning

"The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people. (…)

At a time when German resistance to Hitler receives attention in the mass media, it is worth recalling that some participants in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler were right at the center of mass killing policies: Arthur Nebe, for example, who commanded Einsatzgruppe B in the killing fields of Belarus during the first wave of the Holocaust in 1941; or Eduard Wagner, the quartermaster general of the Wehrmacht, who wrote a cheery letter to his wife about the need to deny food to the starving millions of Leningrad."

The New York Review of Books: Holocaust: The Ignored Reality. Also contains often neglected facts about the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, the geographics of World War II’s mass killings, and about the Expulsion of Germans (”Vertreibung”) after the war:

"Although the expulsions were a case of collective responsibility, and involved hideous treatment, mortality rates among German civilians—some 600,000 out of 12 million—were relatively low when compared to the other events discussed here. Caught up in the end of a horrible war fought in their name, and then by an Allied consensus in favor of border changes and deportation, these Germans were not victims of a calculated Stalinist killing policy comparable to the Terror or the famine."

Article.

Hat tip me hat tipping him hat tipping me.

Been to the shops today

Fucking shopping for shit at supermarkets and shit really pisses me off -- the fucking cost of shite is a fucking joke these days.

And I'm just talking here about necessities and that -- not fucking luxury items like Walls Vienetta and that.

Apples. Since when did apples start costing a fucking fortune like?

From Tehran

Slavoj Žižek speaks

About Iran

see also

“Operation Ajax”

Richard Seaford, a classicist at Exeter, explains that the introduction of money was what made Ancient Greece blossom. "This new and revolutionary phenomenon of money itself underpinned and stimulated two great inventions in the Greek polis of the sixth century, philosophy and tragedy."

What makes the ancient Greeks worth studying is that they are sufficiently like us to be comprehensible but sufficiently unlike us to be worth making the effort to understand. It may be a common theme among enthusiastic modern supporters of the Classics that the Greeks and Romans were very much like us (and that they therefore legitimate the present). Most academics, on the other hand, prefer to emphasize how different and simultaneously how similar they were. The culture of – say – pharaonic Egypt is, despite its fascination, beyond the grasp of all but a few specialists, whereas ancient Greece and Rome are both inside and outside our ken.

Let me explore just one example. A crucial factor in this pattern of “similarity and difference”, and one with tremendous resonance in the early twenty-first century, is money. As I argued some years ago in Money and the Early Greek Mind (2004), the pivotal position of the Greeks in world culture stems largely from the fact that the sixth-century polis was the first society in history (with the conceivable exception of China) to be pervaded by money. Coinage was invented towards the end of the seventh century BC, and spread rapidly in the Greek city-states from the beginning of the sixth. Did not the Babylonians, for instance, use silver as money well before that? On any sensibly narrow definition of money, no they did not.

This new and revolutionary phenomenon of money itself underpinned and stimulated two great inventions in the Greek polis of the sixth century, “philosophy” and tragedy. “Philosophy” (or rather idea of the cosmos as an impersonal system) was first produced in the very first monetized society, early sixth-century Ionia, and – even more specifically – in its commercial centre Miletos. The tendency of pre-modern society to project social power onto cosmology (for example, “king Zeus rules the world”) applies to the new social power of money. And the following description applies equally to money and to much of the cosmology of the early philosophers: universal power resides not in a person but in an impersonal, all-underlying, semi-abstract substance.

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The Greeks had money but not capitalism, in which constant innovation is a precondition for survival, and in which accordingly – as Marx and Engels famously put it – “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”, producing an age of “everlasting uncertainty and agitation”. Here constant intense desire for novelty means that new fashions and ideas “become antiquated before they can ossify into custom”. Even this we now simply take as part of nature. In Graeco-Roman antiquity, by contrast, investment, and techniques of production and marketing remained crude and relatively static, and a poetic genre, for instance epic, could remain fundamentally the same for a thousand years.

And yet, after two-and-a-half millennia, money remains isolating, unlimited and homogenizing. The Greeks were struck and sometimes horrified by this. Aristotle maintained that using money to make money is – in contrast to other forms of economic activity – unlimited and unnatural. And so he would be equipped to understand the novelty contained in the following typical observation, from a recent textbook of economics. “International financial flows hold out the promise of liberating a country’s rate of investment from the limitation imposed by its savings.”

This liberation is just one element in a universal deregulation or “unlimitedness” that has in the last generation changed the world. This has involved the destruction of limits of all kinds: limits on the movement of capital (once controlled by nation-states); limits articulating cultural space, with the result that a Holiday Inn in Minneapolis is now exactly the same as a Holiday Inn in Mombasa (money homogenizes); limits on the salaries-cum-bonuses that the money-controllers pay themselves; limits on the gap between rich and poor (an unlimitedness that makes common purpose impossible). It has also destroyed the limitation of speculative price by any internal relation to its financial or artistic product (investing in junk bonds is essentially the same as investing in junk art, and done by some of the same people).

Aristotle might also recognize the concomitant deregulation of the subject, the liberation of signs from the limits imposed by reality. The myth of Midas marked the replacement of money as a means of exchange by money as the primary but strangely unreal object of aspiration. Aristotle cites the myth to illustrate the nonsensicality of money, the arbitrariness of the monetary sign; and so he would be equipped to understand the claim that money has now been joined (or even replaced) in the unlimited realm of hyper-reality by the images purveyed by media and advertising.

Greeks of the classical period were anxious about the potentially unlimited scope and power of money, and this anxiety contributed to their explicit privileging of limit over the unlimited, especially but not only in metaphysics and ethics. For instance Plato in the Philebus states that limit should control the unlimited, and that the introduction of limit brings safety in countless spheres, notably in health and music. Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics that “bad is of the unlimited, as the Pythagoreans surmised, and good is of the limited”. This persists into the Pythagorean and Platonist philosophies that remained popular throughout antiquity.

But these Greek ideas are not confined to philosophical texts. If I was forced to characterize the outcome of Aeschylus' Oresteia in a single abstract formula, I would call it the victory of limit over the unlimited, in various respects that include the limitation of the potentially unlimited cycle of revenge and of the potentially unlimited accumulation of wealth. Among the ancient Greeks there is what I call a culture of limit. By contrast, our culture is characterized by hostility to closure (limit) in various spheres: economic, metaphysical, conceptual, narrative and others.

This opposition is related to an opposition in basic forms of life. For the Greeks, the realm of freedom (economic and ethical) was stable self-sufficiency; and this determined the manner in which they (or at least those whose voices have survived) reacted to the unlimitedness of money. But we react to it in a manner determined by the fact that for us the realm of freedom is constant exchange. “Metaphysical categories”, wrote Adorno, “are not merely an ideology concealing the social system; at the same time they express its nature, the truth about it and in their changes are precipitated those in its most central experiences”. The same is true of the modern theoretical hostility to metaphysics, the postmodern fetishization of fragmentation, depthlessness, and indeterminacy, and its sublimation of the universe of free-floating images.

Well worth a read through the lot -- all here