Warmongering

Image based on the famous recruitment poster 

feat. Lord Kitchener, by Alfred Leete (1914)

 

 

I. 

 

I trust that readers recognise that I am neither a pacifist nor a conscientious objector to war. I even wrote a long post in praise of fighters a few years back: click here. 

But, having said that, I'm increasingly irritated by the belligerent new spirit that seems to have gripped the imagination not just of politicians, military commanders and arms manufacturers here in the UK, but even left-leaning journalists like Gaby Hinsliff [1] who, all of a sudden, seem keen to warmonger in the name of keeping the peace and defending our way of life.

 

Hers may be a slightly posher, better-read, more respectable form of warmongering, but warmongering is still what it is. Scratch away the moral idealism and Hinsliff is revealed as simply a more articulate (thus more persuasive, more dangerous) version of an old-fashioned jingoist, exploiting the same fears that the enemy are at the gates.

 

 

II.

 

In an opinion piece in today's Guardian, Hinsliff writes in support of army chief Gen. Sir Patrick Sanders' suggestion that those of military age in the UK should be regarded as a prewar generation and that British society should essentially be placed on a war footing.  

 

This comes after the Dutch head of NATO's military committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, warned of the possibility of a wide-scale conflict with Russia within the next 20 years - whether we like it or not - only for Germany's defence minister, Boris Pistorius, to say that, actually, war might break out far sooner: maybe even within the next five years.

 

I suppose we should be thankful that Sanders stopped short of calling for the reintroduction of conscription, although he made it clear that, in his view, civilians would be expected to volunteer for the frontline should Putin's forces invade a NATO country. 

 

 

III.

 

I don't know how seriously we should take all this. 

 

And I don't know how effective it would be to issue a military call up based on an appeal to patriotism; would young people be as ready and willing to fight and die for king and country in 2024 as they were in 1914?

 

I have my doubts, but, on the other hand, I was astonished at the level of conformity and compliance during the Covid period ... Maybe they'd regard World War III as the opportunity to live again ...?

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Gaby Hinsliff is an English journalist and columnist for The Guardian. Her piece I'm referring to here is entitled 'For generations Britain has taken peace for granted. But a belligerent Putin could change all that' and was published today (26 Jan 2024): click here to read online. 

      I have had issues with Hinsliff before: see the post 'Gaby Hinsliff Versus Douglas Murray: You Pays Your Money and You Takes Your Choice' (9 May 2017): click here.   

War - What is it Good For?

 

Russian tank entering eastern Ukraine (24-02-22)

Photo by Nanna Heitmann / Magnum Photos

 

 

Well, if nothing else it reminds us that violence is one of those things which, as Byung-Chul Han says, never disappears; not even in its negative, fully visible and all too real form, which, as the Ukranians are now discovering, is "explosive, massive, and martial" [1]. 

 

Those who (naively) believed that the age of military conflict was over have been given a brutal wake up call by Vladimir Putin and the Russian Armed Forces. 

 

The invasion of Ukraine may only prove to be a temporary set back to the process of globalisation and the utopian dream of a world without borders, etc., but, on the other hand, maybe this would be a good time to reconsider violence in all its externalised macrophysical manifestations ...

 

 

Notes 

 

I know that many readers will think of the No. 1 single by Edwin Starr (Motown, 1970) when they read the title of this post, but what they might not know - unless they happened to work at Pendant Publishing back in the mid-1990s - is that this was originally the title of Tolstoy's novel War and Peace (1869) and it's this little known fact that I was recalling here. 

 

[1] Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, trans. Amanda DeMarco, (The MIT Press, 2018), p. vii.

 

 

Eurotophobia and the Case of Yulia Tsvetkova

Yulia Tsvetkova: 'Living Women Have Body Hair - And It's Normal!' 

Drawing from the series A Woman is Not a Doll (2018) 

 

I. 

 

I closed a recent post discussing the case of Caterina Sforza and her provocative act of vulvic defiance in the face of her male enemies by suggesting that the latter is not something that would work today in a porno-epilated culture; i.e., a culture in which the cunt has been rendered null and void, having lost its monstrous beauty and magical power.  

 

For whilst today, there may still be some men with an aversion to or dislike of female genitalia - perhaps on aesthetic grounds, for example - there is no real horror or fear of the cunt in the old sense. Even Freudians have largely abandoned their anxieties around castration and the old folk idea of vagina dentata has become laughable; the contemporary cunt, alas, has lost its teeth as well as hair.    

Having said this ... It seems that I was being somewhat Eurocentric and had failed to consider what the case of Yulia Tsvetkova tells us about eurotophobia in Vladimir Putin's Russia ...

II.

 

Yulia Tsvetkova is a 27-year-old artist and LGBTQ+ activist, currently under house arrest and facing criminal prosecution for creating and circulating homosexual propaganda and pornography; the latter consisting of no more than simple drawings of the female body posted on a feminist website in order to counter unrealistic and stereotypical images of women (an example of which can be seen above).

 

Well, that's not quite true; even the Russian authorities have conceded that these drawings do not in fact constitute pornography. Thus the charges against Tsvetkova relate, rather, to her role as the administrator of an online community who upload explicit (if often abstract) depictions of female genitalia to a page named after Eve Ensler's 1996 play, The Vagina Monologues. 

 

This, it seems, is too much: images of vaginas worked in elaborate embroidery or painted in delicate watercolour, trigger an ancient disturbance in the Russian male psyche; a primitive fear and hatred not so much for the cunt-as-organ, but for the cunt-as-symbol - one which obliges them to consider that most dreadful of suppositions: Supposing truth to be a woman ... [1]

 

It's a supposition that subverts the entire phallocratic order and its values; one that invites us to reconsider the world from a gynocentric perspective in which truth is not something that can be clearly identified and fixed, but something hidden, ever-changing, and prone to leakage. 

 

Ultimately, in thinking truth as woman - and in terms of the cunt - is to think truth not as presence, but, rather, as absence. Thus male anxiety before the gaping vagina is essentially a terror of staring into the void; a site of sheer loss in which everything becomes zero and Man struggles to maintain his hard-on. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] It was Nietzsche, of course, who first raised this supposition concerning the nature of truth; see his Preface to Beyond Good and Evil. See also chapter 3, Vol. 1, of The Treadwell's Papers, by Stephen Alexander, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 55-80, wherein I discuss this remark at length, developing a sexual politics of what D. H. Lawrence terms cunt-awareness. 

 

For more information on the case of Yulia Tsvetkova, visit freetsvet.net. 

 

Or to send an email to the Russian authorities demanding that charges against Tsvetkova are dropped, visit her Amnesty International page by clicking here. 

  

гомофобия: Vladimir Putin Versus the Gay Emoji

Russia, December 1917: the newly established revolutionary government repudiates all Tsarist laws against homosexuality; the Bolshevik regime declares a policy of absolute non-interference into the love lives of its citizens (so long as no other party is injured or has their rights and freedoms encroached upon). 

Sodomy, announce the Soviets, will henceforth be treated as no different from other supposedly more natural forms of intercourse. Having stormed the Winter Palace, they would now liberate the anus as a site of pleasure and gateway to the future.  

However, fast-forward to Russia in the summer of 2015 and what do we find? 

President Putin announces his intention to outlaw the use of all emojis depicting aspects of contemporary gay lifestyle, which, he says, corrupt and confuse children, undermine the sanctity of marriage, and, in this way, threaten both the family and the state. 

The so-called Young Guard - the youth division of Putin's political party, United Russia - have been instructed to keep an eye out for the sinister spread of gay emoji on social media and to report such at once. Supporters of the move claim that the cartoon figures are in clear breach of the country's ban on gay propaganda that Putin signed into effect in 2013.    

Whilst ludicrous and laughable, this development is also both deeply disturbing and depressing; an indication of just how petty - as well as how widespread and violent - homophobia in Russia has now become (and been officially encouraged to become).    

Perhaps the only good thing is that it helps to dispel the myth of progress: human affairs neither move forward nor backwards; rather we are forever caught up in perpetual spirals of power and pleasure and obliged to fight the same battles against stupidity over and over again to no end whatsoever. There can be gains, but no victory; losses, but no defeat.   

Pussy Whipped (Or Never Mind the Cossacks)

Photograph: Morry Gash / Associated Press (2014)

This just in: members of Pussy Riot attacked with whips and pepper spray by Cossack militiamen as they attempt to stage a protest at the Sochi Olympics.   

Nothing surprising perhaps about the actions of the former, whose opposition to the Games and to all things which receive official state endorsement is well-known. But it was rather surprising to learn that there are still Cossacks in the world (outside of the Moscow State Circus) and that they are now working as an auxiliary police force under orders from the Kremlin.

Surprising and even a little disappointing: for one might have thought and hoped that this people who pride themselves on their independence and who have often been on the wrong side of events in Russia, would resist the temptation to be no more than hired thugs in silly hats doing Putin's dirty work.   

But there you go: the partly shocking, partly ludicrous footage that has come out of Sochi obliges us to forget any romantic notions we might have had, thanks to our poets, of courageous Cossack soldiers on horseback or dancing around the campfire; free spirits, resistant to all authority, etc. The fact is they have always been vicious mercenaries prepared to serve those in power and do whatever is asked of them, whether this be fighting foreign invaders, killing the Jews, or, indeed, attacking feminists in order to uphold traditional values (racism, misogyny, homophobia ...).

This is not to say that the Bolshevik policy of decossackization [Расказачивание] was in any way admirable. But I certainly prefer the radically progressive elements of Soviet Communism over reactionary and religiously-minded ethno-tribal stupidity.