The spectacle of politics in the imperial core is pure, white, and bloodless. Whether it is the United States of America or Great Britain, the founding myth of all liberal democracies is one and the same. It is the myth that liberal democracies are peaceful states which resort to warfare only when provoked. These states organise toothless international legal institutions only to lend credibility to their charade. The Geneva Conventions exist to dictate the moral terms of engagement when conflict is unavoidable. But where were the voices of liberals in the imperial core when Israel deployed white phosphorous against civilian targets in the Gaza strip, simultaneously violating injunctions against chemical weaponry and against attacking non-military targets? And these war crimes were conducted, no less, by ‘the most moral military on earth.’
The last 3 years have been a poignant reminder that the spectacle of bloodless politics is just that: a spectacle. And the function of the spectacle is to misdirect and to justify. Just so, the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was ostensibly kidnapped by the US military on the pretence of his dictatorship, as if the people of Venezuela had no agency themselves, and as if they actually stood to gain from an American military dictatorship, instead of a Venezuelan one. When the kidnapping took place, the Trump administration laid claim to bloodless spectacle, announcing zero casualties. But in the immediate aftermath, at least 40 deaths were announced, as well as the intentional bombing by the US military of the mausoleum of Hugo Chavez, the previous president of Venezuela. Toppling foreign governments is not enough for empire anymore: to quench its thirst, it also needs to murder civilians and to desecrate the final resting places of deceased political enemies.
In the coming days and weeks, we expect to see the American propaganda machine operating at full throttle. This means working, as politics does, to retroactively justify the pure machinations of power and greed. If Maduro was a violent dictator, responsible for mass torture among other crimes, we insist that this fact is irrelevant to his kidnapping, apart from the veneer of legitimacy that it could grant to the action. Empire patiently conducted its media operations, groping about to find a target on whom its ravenous machines of war could again be unleashed without repercussions. It found a pariah state, isolated from any significant support among America’s political allies and competitors. The selection was prudent: the EU’s Foreign Affairs Chief, the UK Prime Minister, and the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs could not denounce the action without also tacitly applauding it, foregrounding remarks about Maduro’s illegitimacy in their comments. The European far-right are giddy with the prospect of similar operations proliferating globally. It is very unlikely that comparable operations will be conducted against Mexico, Canada or Denmark, about which Trump has made his designs clear for a long time. But supporters of Trump in these countries may still recall the words of Elon Musk following 2023’s unsuccessful attempted regime change in Bolivia: “We will coup whoever we want.”
In the same sense that the Geneva Conventions apply to all immoral military acts, but fail to apply when those acts are being perpetrated by Israel’s moral military, so too the US has performed its moral duty to Venezuela by clenching its fist around the throat of all of South America. If this is what it means to be moral today, then let us cast our lot in with those who the American president Donald Trump in 2020 referred to as “the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who, in many instances, have absolutely no clue what they are doing.” When the spectacle’s morality mandates killing innocents in the Levant, or cynically toppling foreign governments in order to expropriate their natural resources, then paradoxically the right thing to do is to be immoral.
What, then, does an immoralist politics look like? In the first instance, Deleuze and Guattari’s inversion of Clausewitz’s dictum is instructive. Clausewitz claimed that war is the continuation of politics by other means (On War, chapter 1, §24). This slogan briefly summarises the cherubic self-ignorance of first-world democracies. It points towards a political order in which civil negotiation is the norm, and outright warfare is the rare exception. Only when the democratic process has thoroughly malfunctioned do we hear the aerial shrieking of F-35 fighter jets, or the rhythmic stomping of an infantry march. If war is the final resource of a just political order, then where there is war, we must be the moral ones. A war which continues the political process does not challenge the morality of a political order: it seemingly confirms it. This vision of a moral, rule-governed international order is a dangerous delusion, invented to justify dropping more bombs, killing more innocents, salting more earth, and burning more forests. Clausewitz’s dictum, as a summary of the ideology of liberal democracy must be, like all founding myths, utterly false. It is a slogan which was coined after the fact to create a new morality in which the aggressor is truly the victim. What else would our governments be but victims, when they are sadly forced against their own best intentions by intransigent foreign actors to commit international atrocities?
Clausewitz was wrong. As Deleuze and Guattari say instead, “politics is the continuation of war by other means” (A Thousand Plateaus, p.421) War is not the anomaly; what is truly rare is for any capitalist state to function in a genuinely ‘political’ manner. Politics, as opposed to war, has only ever existed in small locations, and for a slim minority of people. For the rest of us, war is the daily reality: whether it is a war of extermination, a resource war, a war for sovereignty, or class war. Politics only comes into existence when a diversion is needed, because the bodies have started to choke up the engines of the war machine, or because the legitimacy of war has come into question. Politics is not about justice, it handles issues of ideology so that material conflict can continue apace. Politics and its rule-governed international order exists on behalf of whoever has the power to enforce their rules. The idea that, when it really contradicts powerful imperial interests, international law can restore the just balance, is false. In reality, international law exists to keep any balance disrupted, or at least to tip the scales in favour of those who made up the rules in the first place.
Being an immoralist in politics does not mean taking a side against orderly, conscientious international relations. What siding against that would mean, if it means anything, is supporting more violations of international law and demanding that there be more crimes against humanity. Being an immoralist in politics means taking seriously the reality that the genuine, international regime of law and order has never existed. It means opposing the very idea of a ‘moral army’ for which democratic peace-processes are actually sovereign over aspirations for regional control or resource accumulation. There cannot be a moral army, because such a thing presupposes that there could be a war where politics is in command. Wars are never waged for truly humanitarian, that is truly political, reasons. But politics is conducted for truly expropriative, truly militaristic reasons. Being an immoralist in politics does not mean supporting war. It means opposing the lie that politics was ever peaceful to begin with.
Words: Kenny N (Plan C)
