The Gernsback Continuum

Mindful of the fact I don't seem to read enough these days, I've set myself a challenge: to read all of the 2009 nominees for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. The Hugo is one of the top prizes a science fiction author can receive, and they awarded annually at Worldcon, the annual convention of the World Science Fiction Society. As an added bonus, this year's Worldcon, Anticipation, will be in Montreal, and I'm thinking about going.

This year's nominees for Best Novel are:

• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, a juvenile fantasy in the vein of The Jungle Book that has already won the John Newbery Medal.



• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, a young adult novel about a group of teenagers fighting the attempts of their government to curtail personal freedoms in the wake of a terrorist attack. Think of the movie "Hackers" only a) the methods and technologies described are heavily grounded in realism and b) the enemy is a government security apparatus overstepping its bounds and shifting blame for its criminal activities onto libertarian-minded tech-saavy adolescents, instead of an evil corporation.



• Saturn's Children by Charles Stross, a space-opera tale of sentient robots, continuing to live, work and play in a solar system-spanning society, long after their human Creators (i.e., us) have died out.



• Anathem by Neal Stephenson, about monastic societies that preserve knowledge and learning in the face of societal collapse, and conflict with the secular authorities about what knowledge should be revealed. (The basic premise sounds similar to the venerable science fiction classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz.)



• Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi, whose plot is contemporaneous with the third novel in his acclaimed "Old Man's War" universe, The Last Colony, with events related from the perspective of the titular 16-year-old protagonist.

Thus far I've read The Graveyard Book and Little Brother, and am almost halfway through Saturn's Children. Initial impressions:

• Graveyard Book is textbook Gaiman, with an original premise, interesting, well-detailed characters, a moving plot, and a somewhat lacklustre ending. It's definitely recommended--even on his worst days Gaiman writes circles around the rest--but I didn't find it as compelling as say, American Gods or Neverwhere.



• Little Brother is extremely fascinating, but also extremely didactic, and reads more of a combination of libertarian political manifesto and how-to manual for subverting government surveillance than novel. In other words, it's the novelization of Doctorow's personal ideology as regularly expressed on his site and the BoingBoing shared blog. Some might see that as interfering with the narrative, but science fiction is about exploring ideas. Using novels as soapboxes didn't stop Robert A. Heinlein from winning five Hugos either.



• Saturn's Children is an engaging read so far, but not exactly compelling or innovative. To his credit, Stross considers SC to be the weakest of his last six novels (all nominated for the Hugo) and hopes to improve his record for most consecutive nominations without a win



• Typical for him, Stephenson's book comes close to a thousand pages of dense prose and fabricated terminology, so I'm thinking I'll have to listen to Anathem on audiobook.



• I don't feel right reading Zoe's Tale, the fourth book to be set in the "Old Man's War" setting, without some background so I'm going to attempt to read the other three first. I will certainly work on the first one, Old Man's War, as it is considered a modern sf classic.

Incidentally, Stross's blog post on his nomination seems to set the same tenor that all the authors have expressed: All of them are falling over with praise for each other (well, except maybe Stephenson, who doesn't seem to blog). Part of me wants to be at Worldcon when the award is announced, on the chance they'll all be there, and will go into a big group hug as the winner is announced, and cry tears of joy collectively (because there's nothing sexier than half a dozen geeks tearfully embracing--and I speak from experience).

More updates to follow!

Book review: Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, by Chalmers Johnson

This is the third and final book of Chalmers Johnson's Blowback trilogy. I previously reviewed the first book, Blowback, which focused on the harmful consequences of American military intervention and covert operations around the world. The title is a word used by the Central Intelligence Agency to refer to such consequences of operations, and Johnson argued that because such operations are kept secret from the American public--and even their elected representatives--when blowback occurs, citizens are often unable to comprehend the reasons why. Published in mid-2000, Blowback became a bestseller after 9/11, though sadly not enough people seemed to have learned its principle argument.

I reviewed the sequel, Sorrows of Empire, which dealt with the extent of American military colonialization around the world, and how this anticipated the United States becoming a militaristic empire, a new Rome, where generals and admirals are no longer accountable to their civilian leaders.

Now, in Nemesis, Johnson gives a final call, warning that the dissolution of the American Republic is imminent. Summarizing the main arguments from the first two books, he compares the United States to the two other imperialist powers contemporary pundits frequently juxtapose with it: Ancient Rome and Colonialist Britain. Both were democratic states that became empires, at great cost to their economies and their democracy. Prevailing wisdom holds that the Romans sacrificed their democracy for their empire, while the British (eventually) sacrificed their empire for their democracy. This is not entirely accurate; the bloody British attempts to retain Kenya after World War II hardly indicates a magnanimous sacrifice on their part.

The book isn't seamless; one factual error I noted (being the space geek that I am) was identifying Sally Ride as the first woman in space. Dr. Ride was the first American woman in space but she was preceded by the Soviet cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. I also feel that Johnson doesn't really introduce any new arguments in this book, rather he adds to the arguments from Blowback in Chapters 3 and 5, and Sorrows of Empire in Chapters 1 and 4. Chapter 2 is the comparison with Rome and Britain: instructive, but kind of a simplification of history. Chapter 6 discusses the militarization of space and the potential for disaster it entails, but again this just builds on the arguments from the second book. Still, Nemesis is excellent as a survey of the arguments of the first two books.

UPDATE (August 1, 2008): I found the complete text of the poem Johnson quotes in the introduction.

Neighborhood Girl by John Shreffler

She's new to the neighborhood, her family just moved in
From Greece or somewhere, she's a great, tall gawky girl
With braces and earrings and uneven skin:
Hormones and acne, her change is coming in.

And today, she's playing hooky, January fog.
Orange lights on the school zone sign beat out their tattoo
And caution the Homeland's socked-in morning rush
With their strobe-light samba: Condition Amber,

As she sits invisible, swinging her legs to the beat,
Perched up high on aluminum over
The uncanny Day-Glo of the key-lime fluorescence
That says: School at the top of this composition.

I see her and she lets me. I'm an old family friend:
Sometimes I play poker with her Aunt Erato.
Her name is Nemesis and she's just moved in,
She's new to the neighborhood, she's checking it out.

WANTED...a plot that makes sense



I don't really review movies here at False Prophecy, but I saw one this weekend that compels me to discuss it. Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman, opened this Friday. And let me get it out of the way now: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS!!!

Wanted is based on the comic series by noted British comics scribe, Mark Millar. Like much of his work, it tends to be brutal, cynical and nihilistic (even though he's one of the only noteworthy Brits who still writes superheroes). However, this style is perfectly suited for Wanted, Millar's tale of a socety of supervillains who banded together in 1986 to take over the world, eliminate all the superheroes, and then convince the world that neither they nor the heroes ever existed (except in comic books), while secretly running things from behind the scenes. This Fraternity faces its first major upheaval when one of their luminaries, the assassin known as The Killer (who never misses his target) is himself slain. At this point, his estranged and ignorant son Wesley, an unassuming cubicle jockey, is made aware of his father's identity, the existence of the Fraternity, and his inheritance of his father's abilities.

Millar intentionally structures this plot as the "anti-Spiderman": in both stories, a geeky nebbish finds out he has incredible powers. Peter Parker initially tries to profit from his powers only to have his beloved uncle die as a result of his inaction, whereupon he swears to use his spider powers to help people and fight for justice. Whereas Wesley Gibson uses his newfound talent at killing to turn his worthless life around: among other things, he kills his best friend for sleeping with his girlfriend. Basically, for the first part Wesley revels in the evil he can get away with as a result of his powers and position, and then has to deal with the supervillains who probably killed his father and are now gunning for him. As nihilistic, amoral adolescent power fantasies go, it's entertaining.

The film, directed by Timur Bekmambetov (Russian director of Night Watch fame), takes a lot of liberties with the comic. First thing thrown out the window: the Fraternity aren't supervillains, but a thousand-year-old secret society of assassins. They are trained in tricks like curving bullets around obstacles and knocking bullets out of the air with knives, and seeing the world in Matrix-style bullet-time.

The Fraternity obstensibly assassinates individuals to shape the course of history towards a better path: "Kill one; save a thousand". The targets the Fraternity knocks off are evidently bad people who will perpetuate great evil deeds later on.

This supposedly makes the actions of the protagonists more noble, a grand departure from the comic (although it brings up the same moral dilemmas that "pre-crime" did in The Minority Report). Apparently, the filmmakers told Millar (who otherwise is very supportive of the film--must be getting a percentage) it would be difficult for the audience to root for the protagonists if all the major characters were out-and-out villains. In an interview, Millar notes that The Godfather is such a film, and it's considered one of the greatest films of all time.

There's a lot of flashy action sequences that are well-executed, for the most part, although one wonders how this "secret society" stayed secret for a millennia when they're so recklessly destructive. The main plot is similar to the comic, wherein Wesley has to kill the man who killed his father or suffer his father's fate. There's a blatant "Luke I Am Your Father" moment. But little things like this I can forgive if the film otherwise entertains me. However, one glaring plothole just kept bugging me for the whole picture, and would not let go, and it deals with the method of how the Fraternity gets the names of its targets.

See, the Fraternity was born from a guild of weavers (ie, cloth weavers) a thousand years ago, who started seeing a binary code in their woven cloth. The present-day Fraternity still gets their marching orders from a giant loom, that renders names in a binary code that Sloan, head of the order, translates into the names of targets. And these hardened killers take it on faith (or rather Fate) that offing these people has to be done. Pro bono, since the Fraternity doesn't do paid hits, all kills are to advance the "mission"--ie, what the loom tells them. The Fraternity still participates in the always-reliable textile industry to pay for its exotic cars and unique weaponry. Alas, despite all the high-tech gadgetry, their archives are still a room full of leather and wood bound parchment texts.

I'm still trying to understand how you motivate a society of ruthless, can't-fail assassins based on a legend like this:

[SCENE: Somewhere in Europe, 1000 years ago]

WEAVER 1: Hey look, there's something weird in the cloth.
WEAVER 2: Let me see...(looks)...looks like the shuttle missed a few passes.
WEAVER 1: I think it's a code.
WEAVER 2: Get out!
WEAVER 1: No, really, it's a code in binary which we won't really develop for cryptographical purposes for another six centuries!
WEAVER 2: OK, assuming it is a code and not the more likely explanation that the shuttle occasionally misses given that we're using 11th century technology here...what's the code say?
WEAVER 1: Gimme a sec...(decrypts message)...look, it spells out names!
WEAVER 2: [Skeptically] Uh-huh. So what do we, humble weavers of cloth, do with these names?
WEAVER 1: Clearly Fate is telling us these people need to die!
WEAVER 2: Right. And by sheer coincidence the first name on the list is the guy who stiffed you over all that Persian silk last week?

Sigh.

Hasan-i Sabbah knew how to motivate a secret society of assassins: drug them up with hallucinogens, offer them willing and attractive sexual partners, then take it all away. Then, send them to kill your enemies promising them they will return to paradise if they die after completing their missions. Why mess with a proven formula?

Sorry about that, old chums...

The British government has gone and done something absolutely dreadful:

British PM Brown 'profoundly' regrets data security breach

Last Updated: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 | 11:44 AM ET
CBC News

Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized Wednesday for the "inconvenience and worries" caused by the British government's accidental loss of computer discs containing detailed personal information of 25 million citizens.

During a heated question period in the House of Commons, Brown tried to reassure the country that people's personal details gathered by Britain's tax and customs service were safe following one of the biggest security breaches in the country's history.

Two computer discs that went missing while being sent from one government department to another contained names, addresses, birth dates, national insurance numbers and — in some cases — banking details for nearly half the country's population.

"I profoundly regret and apologize for the inconvenience and worries that have been caused to millions of families that receive child benefits," Brown said. "We have a duty to do everything that we can to protect the public."

Treasury chief Alistair Darling said the discs contained details of the 7.25 million families in Britain claiming the child benefit — a tax-free monthly payment available to everyone with children.

He said the delivery was not being tracked and was missing for three weeks before any alarm was raised.

The discs were password protected but the information on them was not encrypted, officials said.

I always find it interesting that our governments collect ever-increasing amounts of personal information on their citizens--on us. It's all for our own good, for our safety and protection, they tell us. When they demonstrate they aren't even capable of keeping this supposedly critical information safe, what sort of confidence are we supposed to have in their ability to protect us from more concrete and salient threats?

Which brings us to my next book review, Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn't Always Better by Matt Hern. Hern runs an independent school in East Vancouver and is a scholar of Urban Studies. With Watch Yourself, he discusses our society's increasing obsession with safety and protection before openly wondering if we're actually safer as a result. Not to mention, as the subtitle indicates, if safety is always the preferred option.

Hern notes the obsession with safety in all aspects, often accompanied by the mantra "for the sake of the children". He shares an anecdote about two girls who died during a high school skiing trip. They slipped under a safety fence that had been clearly plastered with warning signs, and fell to their deaths. Despite these precautions, their families still felt that "more could have been done" to prevent the deaths of their daughters.

Fear is among the most potent of marketing tools, and this does not escape Hern's notice. His discussion on SUVs, summarized in this interview states that SUVs were originally a ploy by automobile manufacturers to sell cars as trucks, skirting around certain emission and safety requirements. Owners became convinced that the size of an SUV compared to other passenger vehicles made them safer, when in fact the opposite is true: top-heavy SUVs are more likely to roll over during a quick manouevre, say when trying to avoid a crash.

Hern does not speak from some cloistered, upper-middle class bubble or ivory tower of academe. He runs an alternative school, the Purple Thistle Centre, in Vancouver's infamous East Side. He and his family have been the victims of property crime, and he knows that drug dealers operate in his neighbourhood. This gives his narrative an authenticity other books of this type often lack. For example, he notes that a park in his neighbourhood known for the presence of drug dealers and their clients, was granted a beefed-up police presence. All this did was move the drug dealers to another park several blocks away, whereupon the residents of that neighbourhood began to demand more police. Hern notes that calls to deal with crime and safety typically mean spending more money on policing, and not on the root causes of crime. This is treating the symptoms while letting the disease fester.

Heresy is Hern's agenda: to spread the idea that safety is not always the most desirable goal. And he has a point: how much progress has been achieved in our society because some people were willing to take risks? I would say damn near all of it.

Suddenly Seeking Search Engine

Cross-posted at Map of the Informatique.

At work, I've been asked to train one of the library board members on "advanced Google searching". I'm not entirely sure what he means by that (the training session has yet to materialize), but I suspect he wants to go somewhat beyond typing one or two words into Google's search field.

In the hopes of providing a full exploration of the topic, and to show exactly why I'm worth the (not so) big bucks they're paying, I've been doing a bit of research on the Google phenomenon. Two books on the search engine king were released in 2005, probably to capitalize on Google's initial public offering and some of the fallout in the year following that seemed to tarnish the seemingly-untouchable lustre of the Internet's fasting-rising company and its likeable founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page (as of October 2007, both men are tied for 26th richest person in the world, worth about $16.6 billion US each). I read one at the time, that being The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle. Like many non-fiction authors these days, Battelle maintained a website detailing some of his research and writing, and continues to use the site to promote his book as well as blog on internet search more generally.

The other book, which I just finished, was The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time, by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, whose authors also maintain a website.

Both books are valuable for anyone who wants to learn more about the current master of internet search, and complement each other very well. Both books focus on Google and how it used internet search, a feature the rest of the internet industry had dismissed as useless and unprofitable, to rise above the bursting of the dot-com bubble and become the fastest-rising technology company in history. But I would call The Google Story more of a business biography, while Battelle's book is more of technological history.

Vise and Malseed focus on Brin and Page and the business they built, from their fated meeting in the computer science graduate program at Stanford, to the humble beginnings of Google on campus, tracing the company's development to its IPO and some of its legal and public image troubles following that, ending with some of Brin and Page's hopes for the future of search. While the account is thorough, there is a mood of triumphalism that permeates the text, a narrative of two smart kids with a new idea done good. The focus is more on how Google transformed business culture with its very different approach. Brin and Page, academics and the children of academics, run Google more like a college campus than a business (the PageRank system at the core of Google's search technology is based on the citing practices and impact factors of academic journal articles). One of their more revolutionary practices is the 20% rule. In the academic world, professors are given 20% of their time (generally, one day a week) away from lecturing and administrative work to work on their own research and projects. Employees at Google are also given 20% of their time to work on their own projects. Sometimes these go nowhere, but other times they result in new applications like Froogle and Google News. Vise and Malseed even devote a chapter to Google's former head chef, Employee #53, Charlie Ayers, as part of their description of Google's corporate culture. Google is also known for its humour, evidenced by its regular April Fools Day jokes and the Google Labs Aptitude Test, or GLAT, a spoof of the battery of standard tests used by other firms.

Meanwhile, Battelle begins with the history of internet search, tracing the development of some of Google's more noteworthy forefathers, from Archie at McGill University, to the web's "first truly good search engine", AltaVista, to those other two Stanford PhDs at Yahoo!, Jerry Yang and David Filo. While the spotlight of his text then shifts to Google, his overall focus is on internet search and search engines. In the mid and late-90s, other dot-coms were trying to build "portals", which were actually destinations. The idea was to draw in users and keep them on the site, which was awash in visual and pop-up ads. Anyone who remembers Yahoo!, Excite and Altavista back then remembers the slew of ads, internal links and flashy banner ads splashed over every square inch of the site. Search was seen as just another service provided by the portal, along with email, personal ads, weather reports, and so on.

Along comes Google with its bare bones white screen and a single search field, but that simple field offered the keys to the World Wide Web. While others were adding to the clutter of the internet's closet, Google provided the sense of organization to all that clutter, while making billions from advertising that was so unobtrusive, few people recognized the ads when they saw them. In just a few short years, the search engine named for the impossibly large number garnered the greatest brand recognition in the online world, even becoming a verb related to internet searching in the process (e.g., "I Googled him last night").

Both books offer a very comprehensive coverage of Google's rise and dominance of the market, while focusing on different aspects of the company. The Google Story, true to its title, is a biographical narrative of the company's "life", largely holding to a tone of triumphalism throughout. Only in a handful of later chapters, when discussing threats to Google's public image and through the courts, is the clarion call muted. The Search is more illustrative of the search technologies involved, without getting overly technical, and is probably more interesting to my fellow library and information science professionals.

Google continues to maintain a high profile in the public eye, as even the company's former masseuse is ready to tell her story:

Bonnie Brown was fresh from a nasty divorce in 1999, living with her sister and uncertain of her future. On a lark, she answered an ad for an in-house masseuse at Google, then a Silicon Valley start-up with 40 employees. She was offered the part-time job, which started out at $450 a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a penny.

After five years of kneading engineers’ backs, Ms. Brown retired, cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions of dollars. To her delight, the shares she held onto have continued to balloon in value.

“I’m happy I saved enough stock for a rainy day, and lately it’s been pouring,” said Ms. Brown, 52, who now lives in a 3,000-square-foot house in Nevada, gets her own massages at least once a week and has a private Pilates instructor. She has traveled the world to oversee a charitable foundation she started with her Google wealth and has written a book, still unpublished, Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google.

Book Review: Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinski

October 4, 2007 marked an important historical anniversary. The 50th anniversary of humanity's exploration of outer space. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial object launched by human beings to escape the Earth's gravity (for six months, but a milestone).

In Red Moon Rising, Matthew Brzezinski covers the intense rivalries that served as the catalyst to the great space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, which would eventually culminate in landing men on the moon, and laid the foundations for today's space program, including the International Space Station.

Although the obvious rivalry between the Americans and the Soviets plays out over the course of Brzezinski's account, many other more personal conflicts come to the front of the stage. For the USSR's head of missile development, Sergei Korolev, his childhood obsession to touch space drove him relentlessly. Even years spent in Stalin's gulag did not dash the dream from him. His drive to put a satellite in orbit allowed him to navigate the treacherous waters of the Soviet military community.

Rivalries were, if anything, were more pronounced on the American side of the missile race. The army, navy, and nascent air force all had ballistic missile programs in the works, though it was the Army's that would place the first American satellite in orbit, thanks largely to the stubbornness of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency's commander, Major General John B. Medaris, and ABMA's chief engineer, Wernher von Braun, the man behind the German V-2 rockets.

Brzezinski's book is a fast-paced, enjoyable read giving a lot of insight into the scientific and political environments of the USA and USSR of the late 1950s. The personalities involved leap off the page and come alive, shaping the course of the historical narrative. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Sorrows of Empire, by Chalmers Johnson

A few months ago, I reviewed Blowback, Chalmers Johnson's take on American military and economic imperialism. The economist and East Asia expert explained how both trigger consequences that the American people are often required to bear, but because military and covert actions are kept secret or hidden, most citizens haven't the slightest clue why these "terrorists" or "rogue states" are targeting them.

Some might say Johnson's book was uncannily prophetic, since it was written in 2000 and one year later the ultimate form of "blowback", the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, occurred. Others--like myself--might have been surprised at the scope and effectiveness of the attack, but few active observers of international politics were surprised that 9/11 happened in the first place.

In Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic, Johnson takes on American imperialism directly. Tracing its history from the Spanish-American War to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Johnson details the string of bases the US military has erected in something like 3/4 of the nations of the world. He also details the personal arrangements American military officers cultivate with the military elite of other nations. These relationships bypass and undermine the usual channels of civilian diplomacy, as these military relationships are not subject to oversight or control by the elected civilian authorities.

Truth be told, the earlier chapters are not as strong as Blowback's thesis. Johnson's expertise in economics and East Asia were evident in the earlier book, but here he delves into somewhat unfamiliar territory, and thus it comes across more as a popular history than a scholarly analysis. Still, the facts he compiles are shocking.

Much like Gwynne Dyer, Johnson failed to predict just how disastrous the occupation of Iraq would become. In fact, few of the major commentators heard before the war and during the initial invasion, whether supporters of the action or its opponents, were able to predict just how badly the Bush administration would bungle the occupation. In this Johnson is not unique. It seems many commentators and analysts believed the Bush administration could be idealistic, or corrupt, or evil, but no one predicted they could be incompetent. Sadly, the last three years have made that abundantly evident.

Johnson saves the best for last, as it is the book's penultimate chapter that features his strongest argument. "Globalization", that capitalist buzzword of the 1990s, is nothing but Western (ie, American) economic imperialism. This rebirth of eighteenth-century liberalism, often dubbed "neoliberalism", brings with it the racism and exploitation that accompanied classical liberalism in the heydays of the British Empire. Johnson feels that Bill Clinton was a far more successful imperialist than George W. Bush:

In accordance with the logic of Sun Tzu, Bill Clinton was actually a much more effective imperialist than George W. Bush. During the Clinton administration, the United States employed an indirect approach in imposing its will on other nations. The government of George W. Bush, by contrast, dropped all legitimating principles and adopted the view that might makes right. History tells us that an expansive nation must at least attempt to disguise what it is doing if it wants to consolidate its gains. It must pretend that its exploitation of the weak is in their own best interest, or their own fault, or the result of ineluctable processes beyond human control, or a consequence of the spread of civilization, or in accordance with scientific laws--anything but deliberate aggression by a hyperpower.

Clinton camouflagued his policies by carrying them out under the banner of "globalization". This proved quite effective in maneuvering rich but gullible nations to do America's bidding--for example, Argentina--or in destabilizing potential rivals--for example, South Korea and Indonesia in the 1997 economic crisis--or in protecting domestic economic interests--for example, in maintaining the exorbitant prices of American pharmaceutical companies under cover of defending "intellectual property rights". During the 1990s, the rationales of free trade and capitalist economics were used to disguise America's hegemonic power and make it seem benign or, at least, natural and unavoidable. The main agents of this imperialism were Clinton's secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, and his deputy (today, president of Harvard University). Lawrence Summers. The United States ruled the world but did so in a carefully masked way that produced high degrees of acquiescence among the dominated nations.

George W. Bush, by contrast, turned to a frontal assault based on the use of America's unequaled military power.

Ironically, "in its spurious scientificity, globalism has proved similar to Marxism, whose roots lie in the same intellectual soil," in that the modern globalists are convinced their path is inevitable and irresistible. Clearly this notion of historical determinism mirrors the dialectical process of Marxist thought.

The notion of the American military-industrial complex as a socialist entity is not a new one: see for example William Greider's Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace. Greider, Johnson and others have noted that American defence spending shows little regard for market forces or other considerations of a capitalist economy--indeed, periods of economic downturn seem to be accompanied by increases in American defence spending. Generally speaking, the same arms manufacturers are granted defence contracts over and over again, which brings into question how competitive the awarding of contracts is. The US military has many of the earmarks of a planned economy.

Johnson takes this idea to the next level, quoting Peru's ambassador to the World Trade Organization, Oswaldo de Rivero:

The ideological war between capitalism and communism during the second half of the twentieth century was not a conflict between totally different ideologies. It was, rather, a civil war between two extreme viewpoints of the same Western ideology: the search for happiness through the material progress disseminated by the Industrial Revolution...the cost of the Soviet version of development was shortages and lack of freedom; today, that of the neoliberal, capitalist variant is unemployment and social exclusion.

The book's conclusion summarizes four likely negative results to the American Republic from increasing American imperialism, the last (and most dangerous in his eyes) being bankruptcy. Imperialism is an expensive business and American defense spending is more out of control than ever before. Although Johnson suggests that the American people could still use their civil institutions to reclaim their nation from the imperialists, he isn't very hopeful.

I conclude this review with a recent example of blowback from American interventionism: the Fort Dix Six, Kosovars so pleased with American involvement in their war against Serbia, they decided to show their gratitude by attempting to break into a US military base on American soil and kill as many US soldiers as they could.

And this is why those who favour American imperialism, even for beneficial reasons (there is something positive to be said about the type of society American imperialists give lip service to, even if they don't practice it). The globalization project of the imperialists has empowered the dissident and disgruntled around the world. The Romans, British, Russians, Turks--they didn't have to worry about oppressed subject peoples in the colonies causing major damage in the homeland. At least not until their empires were well on their way to complete collapse. Whereas today, the openness of frontiers and borders and the free flow of information, technology and finance (a direct consequence of globalization) has placed immense destructive power into the hands of dissidents--and we've seen they're quite prepared to use it--and given them the ability to project that force directly into the political, military and economic capitals of the American empire. The American people should fear their rising empire as much as those worldwide. For much like the British empire that preceded it, the American empire benefits the wealthy and powerful, but it is the rest of society that suffers the consequences.

Book review: Blowback, by Chalmers Johnson

Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson (2000)

Johnson, an American economist and East Asia specialist of some repute (co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute, did consulting for the CIA on Maoist China) wrote this book well before the events of September 11th, 2001. Although recognized when it was first published, it quickly shot up the bestseller lists during the "War on Terror", most likely because Johnson saw something like 9/11 coming.

"Blowback" is a term used by the intelligence community to describe unintended consequences of covert operations. Because the general public is kept in the dark about covert operations, when violent consequences result, the public is generally surprised and believes the aggression was without cause. Being so uninformed, the general public feels they have been unfairly targeted by freedom-hating evil-doers, not understanding that their government has ravaged the homeland of the evil-doers through economic or military imperialism and a severe disregard for the native culture.

Writing in very accesible style, Johnson makes his points with clarity and vigor. He largely confines the discussion to areas of his expertise: East Asia and economics. Johnson begins with the tale of US military bases in Okinawa. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has maintained a military presence in Japan, ostensibly to keep the Soviet Union and Maoist China in check and to prevent the spread of communism into the rest of East Asia (see Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations to see how well that worked during the Cold War). The vast majority of US bases in Japan are based on the island of Okinawa, which was an independent nation until its occupation by Meiji Japan in the late 19th century. It was the site of perhaps the bloodiest campaign of the Pacific War, and after spilling the blood of thousands of Marines on its soil, the US military never left. However, the arranged marriage between the Okinawans and US military personnel was hardly harmonious. Johnson relates a series of offenses perpetuated by US servicemen, starting with the rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl in 1995 by three military personnel, and moving on to pollution, deadly traffic accidents, violence, land appropriation, extraterritoriality, and overall cultural insensitivity.

In subsequent chapters, Johnson relates American support for East Asian dictators throughout the Cold War and afterwards, noting examples of the CIA undermining democratically-elected governments in favour of compliant strongmen.

Johnson's thesis is that since the end of the Cold War, with their enemy defeated and the reason for supporting military bases, covert operations and brutal dictators around the world gone, US foreign policy now has the goal of transforming the economies of all other nations into mirrors of its own. Not accepting the possibility that Japanese or Korean capitalism might be organized differently than American capitalism, the US uses the World Bank and the IMF to force "globalization" (ie, Americanization) on foreign markets. Also, in the post-Cold War world, the US relies more and more on military and economic dominance to get its way, while diplomacy is tossed aside (clearly the foreign policy of the current Bush administration is almost the culmination of Johnson's fears).

Essentially, Johnson feels that this is naught but American imperialism. American foreign policy no longer seeks to contain Soviet influence, so it must manufacture new reasons to justify military bases around the world, and economic and political interference in every other nation's affairs. These justifications are forcing the rest of the world into the American economic system, and policing the world against "rogue states" (Axis of Evil, anyone?), whose ability to actually threaten American power is practically non-existent. (Lest I sound heartless, there could be 10 more 9/11s, and America would still be the lone superpower. Far less stable governments have endured far more.) Pre-9/11, you would have added the threat of China to that list, even though China has little military capability beyond its own borders (though extensive economic influence through Chinese expatriate communities in East Asia) and likely little desire to exercise military might: history shows China only seems to be concerned with territory it believes it has historical claims to--Taiwan and Tibet, and not much else. And yet, there is threat exaggeration. Whether motivated by greed on the part of the military-industrial complex, or some kind of messianic idealism on the part of American foreign policy, Johnson feels this is imperial overstretch, and there's no way the United States can continue on this trajectory without serious blowback (and not just violently, but economically or diplomatically as well).

Book Review

Inspired by MadJenny, I've decided to review a book here from time to time, when I actually get a chance to read them (I've been pretty good of late). Given my tastes, expect a lot of:

1. Non-fiction, especially history, politics, philosophy, religion, war and technology


2. Graphic novels and comic collections


3. Genre fiction, especially speculative fiction

Ignorant Armies: Sliding into War in Iraq by Gwynne Dyer (2003)
Dyer wrote this book in three weeks over the period when the Bush administration was moving towards the invasion of Iraq. Dyer, a Canadian journalist based in London, specializing in international politics, is probably best known for his CBC series War and its companion book. His column is published in newspapers worldwide. I had the pleasure of seeing Dyer speak while I was an undergrad (despite being in the middle of finishing two fourth-year papers and working on very little sleep and very much espresso), on the topic of NATO's bombing campaign in Serbia and Kosovo. For the record, Dyer considered the campaign a great success, and perhaps the only time in history when a military action was won solely through air power.

Ignorant Armies of course turns out to be a fairly prophetic piece, its main weakness is that even a seasoned commentator like Dyer could not predict the incredible bungling the Bush administration and the Pentagon in this conflict. Dyer's focus is more on the effect a US invasion of Iraq would have on the global order, fearing a diminishing of international law and the legitimacy of the United Nations.

In both this and its companion work, Future Tense: The Coming World Order?, Dyer advocates on behalf of the UN. While many commentators criticize the UN for failing to save the world, Dyer maintains this was not its original purpose. In his view, the UN has succeeded in the primary goal of its founders: to prevent another war between the major world powers. While the world since 1945 has seen no end to violence, such violence has been contained to smaller-scale wars and terrorist actions, and not the total mobilization of world powers towards a war footing. The UN and the international order has done this in two ways, basically by saying: a) wherever national boundaries are drawn now is where they will stay; it is no longer legitimate for nation-states to acquire territory by force, and b) no state has the right to intervene in the internal affairs of another. Violations of either are in theory to be punished by the UN or its Security Council. In practice, especially in the post-colonial era, this was not always upheld (a little thing called the Cold War tended to make Security Council consensus a pipe dream), but it was upheld enough that the major powers more or less followed these protocols, and the smaller powers lined up behind either the Americans or the Soviets, and for the most part, followed suit as well.

Unfortunately, the non-interference directive above means the UN has not always been successful in upholding another one of its founding principles--the universal protection of human rights. However, it has perhaps blunted such activities as compared to pre-1946. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States certainly did not eliminate racism, but it did succeed in making racism a dirty word. In the past, racist rhetoric was common, even accepted at face value. Today, being openly racist will destroy you in the public eye, and probably cost Virginia Senator George Allen reelection. No one wants to be known as a racist, even if they are one. Likewise, although genocide and ethnic cleansing still occur, they are almost universally condemned. Whether the political will exists to do anything about it, or whether the great powers consider dealing with it worth violating the other founding principle of the international equilibrium (the sovereignty of nation-states), is another matter altogether.

However, just as racist rhetoric seems to be on the rise again, so too is the kind of imperialism and eliminationism we saw in the pre-1946 world. So-called experts and political leaders now speak openly of imperialism and ethnic cleansing, and this frightens Dyer. Should the international order collapse, the great powers would fall back on alliance-systems and imperialist spheres of influence, the kind of order that resulted in the brutality of colonialism from the Renaissance up until a few decades ago, and two savagely destructive world wars.

Focused on this possible outcome, Dyer speaks less about the occupation of Iraq. (For any educated onlooker, the invasion's success was a foregone conclusion.) It's likely he (like many others) could not predict such blunders as the disbanding of the Iraqi army; trusting Iranian stooge Ahmed Chalabi; recruiting the inexperienced children of influential neoconservatives to rebuild Iraq's social institutions, despite their ignorance of the Middle East and their intent to use Iraq as a laboratory for their political agendas, regardless of the efficacy of such ideas; and ignoring the State Department's input into the project completely.

Ignorant Armies is a short and riveting read, but ultimately fell short of predicting the true outcomes of the invasion of Iraq.