The war, observed; but not observed, and not a war; just murder in the name of not going to war; or primitive accumulation and property value
One of the questions I explore in the book I am concerns illness as the absence of words, the impossibility of stringing words in a sequence adequate to the dimensions of illness and the varieties of pain. This week, I find myself entertaining many things that need to be said, but running desperately short of meaningful words. Which is what war takes, as well, most especially when the war is only ever about to begin, but would seem to proceed nonetheless as if unbidden, a visitation from elsewhere that will never arrive, yet that troubles your lintel and haunts your door, a guest not a boarder, but conspicuous shade. Here, though, are words, strung together, in a sequence. I am running out of things to say or ways to say what must be said. Silence will abide, lest we slip into sophistry. Hysterics suffer from reminiscences, which is to say, we suffer from a surfeit of what is left of the truth.
During the Cold War, Western geopolitical strategy was shaped by the twinned logics of deterrence and containment. These strategies became ends in themselves. Since the beginning of the War on Terror, geopolitical action has been framed by the logic of preemption, which was never much more than a ruse for deterrence and containment to continue as policy under the guise of fighting para-state violence wherever it emerged; that is, in preserving the fiction of the state as the lonely arbiter of the right to wield violence by asserting that right as less a right than an obligation. But now here we are. Western capitalism has entered its terminal phase; and we find ourselves trying to fit the newness of the world back into a Three Worlds model, a model in which there are exactly two superpowers and those two mightiest of superpowers battle over the shape of the present and the remains of the future through undeclared wars in the smaller places that do not much register or matter. The wars are a feint, albeit one necessary to the viability of capital over the long term, the viability of capital as a philosophical disposition toward the plunder of resources and the ruination of lives, whoever will go on to inherit its weightiest mantle. For now, the decrepitatious combatants of the war before the last are waging something that is not a war in defense of a world that did not believe in war but suffered them mightily, nonetheless; as a means to insist on a world that is no more and perhaps never was, to insist or restore the world as they once believe it to have been somewhere around 1948, or 1949, or 1950. These are the wars that have already been lost, and like the last three wars lost, the cost will never be calculable in currency or coin. Trauma is a debt that can never be repaid, even as the bearers of that debt will undoubtedly come round to collect.
Conservative estimates are that Israel has killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 550 people in Lebanon in the last two days. Thousands more have been injured or maimed. The scale and duration of the trauma will be impossible to gauge. Add to this the murders and maimings from last week, carried out in audaciously flagrant violation of what we can now only laughingly refer to as the rules of war. As in Gaza, the enemy orders civilians out of their homes, for their own safety. But where should they go? In Gaza, there is nowhere to go that is not inside of Gaza. Now that the supply chain in consumer goods is no longer merely a target of war but its instrument, where should anyone go, ever? There are no more sides left to pick, no more angles to play. The game is over but the players have not noticed. They continue to move their pieces after having burned the board.