Rebel Yell: Resistance and Renaissance in the Age of Terror

Tweet Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque posits the only sane response to current dire conditions, portion below; whole thing here: http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1597/135/

The whole world absent-mindedly turns its back on these crimes; the victims have reached the extremity of their disgrace: they are a bore. – Albert Camus, The Fastidious Assassins.

The "War on Terror" is a brutal and criminal enterprise launched by George W. Bush and fully supported by John McCain and Barack Obama, both of whom have pledged not only to continue its deadly operations but to expand them to new killing fields. Iran, Pakistan, Russia's "soft underbelly" in the Caucasus – these and other regions have been moved into the cross-hairs of the voracious war machine that drives the foreign policy of both parties. And of course, the countless "covert ops" carried out by the plethora of secret armies and agents of Washington's hydra-headed "security organs" will likewise continue unabated.

Three nations have already been destroyed (or driven into further ruin) by the Terror War: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. More than a million innocent people have been murdered, either by direct military action by American forces and Washington's various proxy armies and hired killers, or indirectly, in the savage internal conflicts spawned by the vast state terror of invasion and occupation. A million people slaughtered, millions more left dispossessed, orphaned, suffering, grieving, lost: these are monstrous crimes on a scale that make the depredations of Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden look like child's play.

Yet almost the entire American political and media establishments – and most of the public as well – approve, even applaud this monstrous engine of depravity, though they may disagree on a few tactics or targets here and there in the overall operation. Despite the fact that the corridors of power in Washington are flooded with the viscera of disemboweled children – murdered in the name of every American – this campaign season is just "business as usual," the same old horse race, the same fevered attention to polls, veep picks, gossip and posturing, to the exclusion of all else. "Hey, get those guts off my Guccis; we're trying to shoot a commercial here!"

It is an extraordinary situation. Those who lived in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia might find it familiar: the broad acceptance of a system of barbarous criminality as a normal state of affairs, the ordinary – even laudable – circumstances of life in which one simply gets on with things. The victims – the boring victims – whose blood and anguish feed the system are always somewhere else: in a camp, a secret prison, some faraway land.

We live in despairing times. And the presidential campaign – which has turned many "dissidents" into fierce partisans of political forces that will, by their own proud admission, continue to feed the Terror War machine that has dishonored and degraded us all – only deepens the despair.

But despair is a condition, not a response. The only worthwhile response to our historical moment, it seems to me, is rebellion, in the profound sense in which Camus uses the term: a highly individual act which nonetheless expresses a universal value – our common humanity and the inviolability and integrity of every human being. Rebellion is the adamant – and forever flawed and conflicted – resistance to everything that threatens this integrity.

Floyd then goes on to quote Camus (go to link at beginning), a paragraph of which below:

Claiming the unity of the human condition, [rebellion] is a force of life and not of death. Its most profound logic is not the logic of destruction; it is the logic of creation. Its movements, in order to be authentic, must never abandon any of the terms of the contradiction which sustains it. It must be faithful to the yes that it contains as well as to the no…The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness. …The consequence of rebellion is to refuse to legitimize murder because rebellion, in principle, is a protest against death. …Every rebel, by the movement that sets him in opposition to the oppressor, therefore pleads for life, undertake to struggle against servitude, falsehood and terror.