False Jersey Ops (Part 3): A Late Whistle

Basketball, Reality Programming, and Programming Reality

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do[1].

The 2017–18 NBA season has been underway for a couple of weeks now, and keen-eyed observers will likely have noticed a few interesting things about the new uniforms that have been introduced league-wide. Aside from the obvious fact that they are all hideous and ill-fitting[2], a handful of teams have struck jersey sponsorship deals and now boast garish corporate logos just above their player’s hearts.

Starting this season, Orlando Magic players will wear Disney logos on their jerseys. This is no great surprise; Disney World is located in Greater Orlando, and the team name is an obvious allusion to Disney’s “Magic Kingdom.” Less well-known is the fact that Disney owns ABC and ESPN, which, between them, broadcast the majority of nationally televised NBA games.

Why is this interesting? Described by David Kunzle as “arguably, the [twentieth] century’s most important figure in bourgeois popular culture,” and a man who “has done more than any single person to disseminate around the world certain myths upon which that culture has thrived,” Walt Disney was, of course, a fascist[3] and an anti-communist FBI snitch. Henry Giroux sums up Disney’s mission:

There are few cultural icons in the United States that can match the signifying power of the Disney Company. Relentless in its efforts to…send into the community an endless stream of representations and commodities that conjure up a nostalgic view of the United States as the “magic kingdom,” the Disney Company has become synonymous with a notion of innocence that aggressively rewrites the historical and collective identity of the American past.

While Disney owns ABC outright, it shares ESPN with the Hearst Corporation (which owns 20%). Its founder, William Randolph Hearst, was (surprise!) a zealous fascist responsible for publishing all manner of pro-Nazi and anti-communist propaganda in the United States. As we explored in last month’s instalment, the NBA, like other American sports leagues (and like Disney), is quite keen to team up with the fascist US military in order to produce fascist propaganda of various kinds. I mention this at the outset because I think it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the NBA entertainment we view is curated and framed by fascist media empires intent on promoting fascist messages. I do think this is noteworthy, and not a coincidence or an irrelevance. As Michael Parenti observes, “even a sector of the entertainment media such as sports reportage, which has no narrative line, can be permeated with anticommunist, militaristic, and chauvinistic imagery.” Major American media of all kinds have historically been very receptive to fascism, and I really don’t see any indication that this state of affairs has changed.

Disney has patented—”sewn up all the rights on”—tomorrow as well as today. For, in the jargon of the media, “he has made tomorrow come true today,” and “enables one to actually experience the future.” His future has now taken shape in Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida; an amusement park which covers an area of once virgin land twice the size of Manhattan … With its own laws, it is a state within a state. It boasts of the fifth largest submarine fleet in the world[4].

But enough about Disney (for now); it’s Halloween, and we’re going to take a look at some spooks. Ten years ago, the NBA found itself in the midst of a gambling scandal. Referee Tim Donaghy appeared to have been busted by the FBI for betting on—and fixing—a number of games, and was ultimately sentenced to 15 months in prison on July 29, 2008 as a result of misconduct during his final two seasons. Shortly before his sentencing, however, Donaghy attempted to blow the whistle (ha…) on the NBA itself, alleging that the league regularly fixed games in order to sell more tickets and boost television ratings, and that all of its referees were in on the scam. Donaghy would go on to write a book, and, after serving his sentence, establish a niche for himself on the periphery of NBA-related media, giving interviews and fuelling ever more speculation about the latest in referee skulduggery.

In summary, a rogue official caused a considerable stir by deciding to leak information concerning unscrupulous institutional practices (about which everybody already knew), and, following his “revelations,” nothing whatsoever appears to have changed (the NBA, in case you’re wondering, is indeed fixed). This should have a familiar ring to it.

Donaghy’s narrative arc matches that of Edward Snowden, a man who is almost certainly not what he says he is. I don’t intend to devote much space here to the Snowden psyop theory—this work has already been done by other more capable people who were on the ball as the saga unfolded, so if you’re unfamiliar and are curious (or sceptical), I recommend you click these links. Briefly, there is a compelling argument to be made that Snowden’s exhaustively promoted and image-laden whistleblowing caper was a limited hangout. Indeed, now that surveillance is more pervasive, invasive, and normalised than ever, Snowden has declared his mission accomplished.

Whether or not we ever get to the bottom of who Snowden really is, whether he is still working for the CIA, etc., we can learn quite a bit from the entertainment media by which he is presented to us. Most people have come to know Edward Snowden through slick, well-produced documentaries, Vice Interviews, Hollywood films, and, famously, the fascist platform that is Twitter[5].

Oliver Stone’s Snowden (2016) helpfully provides audiences with the official version of events in one neat, entertaining package. The film affords Snowden yet another opportunity to tell his tale, framed and lit just right, adding another layer of fiction to the already fictional Citizenfour (2014), and supplanting whatever real images and fragments might remain in viewers’ minds with dramatic re-enactments of dramatic re-enactments[6].

The film quite explicitly lays out Snowden’s mission to preserve America’s spying apparatus and protect ruling class interests: “Look, I had access to the entire intelligence community, so if I had wanted to harm the US, you could shut down the entire surveillance system in an afternoon. But that was never my intention.” The blurring of reality and fiction reaches its climax at the end of the film when the real Ed Snowden replaces Joseph Gordon-Levitt on the screen and delivers his concluding remarks: “I no longer have to worry about what happens tomorrow, because I’m happy with what I’ve done today.” Mission accomplished. Unfortunately, the rest of us do still have to worry about what happens tomorrow.

In addition to tying up loose ends by retroactively providing sanitised, official narratives for otherwise confusing or controversial episodes in history, Hollywood films can be utilised to alter public perceptions in advance of major events. Edward Snowden, for instance, may have been “predicted” by Enemy of the State (1998). One of the most famous examples of “predictive programming” is Disney’s Pearl Harbor (2001).

Agent Affleck and his handler Jennifer Garner enjoy a fascist spectacle[7].

Produced with the assistance of the Pentagon, and starring CIA agent Ben Affleck, Pearl Harbor appeared in cinemas in May 2001, less than four months before 9/11. In the immediate aftermath, every politician, pundit, and academic drew the seemingly natural comparison between the two events. As Noha Mellor writes,

a study about American and British coverage of 9/11 attacks found that newspapers frequently resorted to history to draw on comparison and analogies with previous events, such as those from World War II. Historical context here helps journalists interpret this event while tapping a collective memory. It was particularly the memory of Pearl Harbor that was commonly used in British and American newspapers to link 9/11 to the past. As Brennen and Duffy (2003: 3) observe: “journalists and citizens struggled to find a way to frame the disaster socially and historically. ‘it’s another Pearl Harbor’ was a frequent comment uttered by pundits and politicians alike.”

But were commentators really drawing from “history” and “the memory of Pearl Harbor”? Where did this “memory” come from? More accurately, they were tapping a collective memory of representations of Pearl Harbor in popular culture. Mellor continues:

Moreover, the images showing the gradual collapse of the towers lend resonance to the images of Hollywood action movies, as shown in the American coverage (Nacos 2003: 25). In a comment on this resemblance to fiction, the American novelist John Updike said that “the destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect perception” (quoted in Nacos 2003: 26) … Each of the Arab newspapers examined here picked up on these blurring boundaries between fact and fiction in this unprecedented event, seemingly indicative of Hollywood entertainment, in order to stress the public disbelief.

That the actual events of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were nothing alike doesn’t matter. The fictional Pearl Harbor is more real to Americans than any first-hand account. When PNAC signatories suggested in 2000 that “a new Pearl Harbor” would be a useful catalyst for “rebuilding America’s defences,” we can read this literally as a desire for a Michael Bay dramatisation, because it was this false memory of Pearl Harbor—Disney’s signature “innocence that aggressively rewrites the historical and collective identity of the American past”—which helped to prime Americans for the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

As Geoffrey M. White explains, a preoccupation with historical trivia obscured for many critics the utility that Pearl Harbor had as war propaganda:

Over the years, Hollywood and the U.S. military have formed innumerable partnerships in the production of war films—partnerships that can, potentially, raise questions about the image-making power of the military-corporate complex and its stake in producing inspiring stories for purposes of profit, public relations, and recruitment. These sensitivities provide yet another rationale for attention to matters of “accuracy,” to telling the story “the way it was,” as attested by military historians and veterans. Yet, raising questions of historical accuracy has the ironic effect of deflecting the viewer’s gaze from such questions of politics and purpose to concern with specific details and inaccuracies. With attention focused narrowly on the truth of details in a given text, larger issues of context never arise.

Similarly, a narrow focus on the particular details of this or that leaked document may deflect the viewer’s gaze from more pertinent questions concerning Edward Snowden’s identity (CIA agent) and agenda (promoting American imperialism). This applies equally to the Donaghy case: the result of the Tim Donaghy scandal has been to attract considerable attention to the sanctioned conspiracy (the NBA is fixed), while deflecting the viewer’s gaze from some of the NBA’s more nefarious activities. There are, for example, documentaries about the refereeing in the 2002 Western Conference Finals, but very little is said about the friendly and lucrative relationship between the NBA and the US Army[8].

What is real, then, is what can be (like the signifier) perfectly programmed, controlled, and reproduced each and every time from a preexisting symbolic model or “simulation.” There is thus no “reality” or Real in the Lacanian sense; what is real refers back each and every time not to something, but to a model, a program, a simulated hyperreal[9].

As well as investing in Hollywood productions and sporting events, the Pentagon is very interested in reality television, as a glance through its Entertainment Liaison Office reports will reveal. This interest is shared by NBA commissioner Adam Silver, who considers NBA basketball “the ultimate reality programming[10].” As with other forms of popular entertainment, it is unwise to dismiss reality television as meaningless or unworthy of our attention. On the contrary, as David R. Dreyer explains:

Reality television programming has become a pervasive part of popular culture. Although such programming may seem to be mindless entertainment, it can serve as a tool to introduce political lessons … An analysis reveals that contestants often behave strategically when forming alliances and voting, in ways that are similar to the strategic behavior of nation-states and individuals residing in democracies, respectively.

Are the NBA and the Pentagon using reality television formats to promote fascism? “There is,” writes Karen D. Austin, “no reason to suspect that the producers of American Idol, Survivor, and all of the other new reality shows are driven by any ideological agenda larger or more comprehensive than making money.” Yes, exactly! But the ideological agenda of making money at any cost—of capitalism—is vile and poisonous, and if government agencies can use films as psychological weapons, of course they are doing the same with reality television shows. The NBA already has a popular reality television series underway, and with ESPN ranking college basketball players by their reality television potential, we can expect to see many more such shows in the future.

In his typically provocative way, Baudrillard claims that in industrialized societies capital has attained such sophistication in the manipulation of popular consciousness through the interdefinition and the constructed character of contemporary media products (both news and entertainment) that it no longer needs to substantiate its claims in real terms to the public. He describes this situation by positing what he calls the “precession of simulacra” which generates what he calls “the hyperreal.” The hyperreal is that realm of appearances which are “dishonest” not merely in failing to faithfully copy their originals in structural terms but in failing to copy at all. In other words, this is the realm of simulacra that functions in the absence of corresponding real things which could serve as models for pretended likenesses represented by simulacra. Baudrillard’s view is that the public is now used to authentications of simulacra by other simulacra[11].

It is interesting to note the similarities between the activities of Colin Kaepernick, Tim Donaghy, Edward Snowden, Ben Affleck, Bana Alabed, etc. As Adorno and Horkheimer wrote of the culture industry,

Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfil the purpose allotted them in the overall plan.

I think it is useful to view what is known as “predictive programming” from this angle. Rather than creating in advance media which “predict” specific events and prescribe the ways in which audiences are to conceive of such events, it is perhaps more accurate to say that the same stale but effective narratives are constantly being acted out (on film sets, on football fields and basketball courts, on Twitter, in “real life”) by actors (willing or unwitting as the case may be), in order that “history’s actors” may always have new realities at their disposal.

As always, thank you for reading, and death to the United States of America.

[1] A senior advisor to George W. Bush, speaking in 2002, and cited by Ron Suskind in the New York Times, October 17, 2004.

[2] I am convinced that the drab and displeasing colours of more recent NBA uniforms are a form of psychological warfare, but this is a topic for another time.

[3] To get a sense of “the iron fist beneath the Mouse’s glove,” do take a look at How to Read Donald Duck, an exploration by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart of the ways in which the images and stories found within Disney comics—and disseminated around the globe—naturalise capitalism and imperialism.

[4] From the introduction of How to Read Donald Duck.

[5] Predictably, Snowden’s Twitter activity includes (but is not limited to): chauvinistic American exceptionalism; promoting “regime change” in Syria; equating communists with fascists.

[6] I re-watched Citizenfour while writing this, and during the scene in which Glen Greenwald initially begins to interrogate Snowden, I expected Laura Poitras to interrupt him and suggest that “we just start with your name.” A “real” scene from this documentary had been replaced in my memory by a scene from Oliver Stone’s film. These tricks work.

[7] Speaking of basketball and hyperreality, Ben Affleck was once interviewed for ESPN and recounted a story in which he was playing basketball and leapt “like six feet off the ground” to block a layup attempt by Matt Damon. Asked when this had occurred, Affleck responded, “I’m not sure that actually took place. I think it might have been an implanted memory.”

[8] A relationship that the US Army is eager to take to the next level. You can sense their frustration with the “limited messaging impact” of having troops parade about before a Clippers game, and they write elsewhere in their ELO reports that they want to “attract larger roles with…sports entertainment networks for future Army-related stories.”

[9] Anthony Kubiak, Disappearance as History: The Stages of Terror.

[10] The ambiguity of this statement is interesting—is he talking about the reality television format, or about programming (an audience’s perception of) reality?

[11] Thomas Heyd, The Real and the Hyperreal: Dance and Simulacra.

False Jersey Ops (Part 2): Kaepitalism

Basketball, T-Shirt Praxis, and Crafted Storytelling

Major sports are now transmitted by satellite to global audiences. The commercial messages accompanying the broadcast, ringing the stadia, and often worn on the uniforms of the athletes constitute a concerted assault of corporate marketing values on global consciousness. The envelopment of professional and amateur sports for transnational corporate marketing objectives and ideological pacification and control is not a patented American practice, limited exclusively to U.S. companies. It is, however, carried to its fullest development in the United States[1].

It’s that time of year again. American football players (along with other assorted sportspeople and posturing opportunists) are performing revolutionary acts at an unprecedented rate! Standing shoulder to shoulder with ruling class millionaires, arms linked in heart-warming unity, professional athletes are once more using their platforms to bring people together and make a difference.

The major organisations now jostle for the title of “most socially conscious professional sports league,” and, smelling opportunity, Adam Silver has descended like a gangly, besuited vulture, offering in an open letter to help his players “figure out the most meaningful way to make [a] difference[2]” (it’s wearing t-shirts and linking arms, in case you were wondering).

Like all sports leagues, the NBA—as its players and commissioners never tire of reminding us—is a business. “In the United States,” Herbert I. Schiller wrote, “practically no sports activity remains outside the interest and sponsorship of the big national advertisers”—and these include government agencies. Teams are owned by the very richest of the rich, and unthinkable sums of money are spent on advertisements of various sorts, from regular TV commercials, to branding, to Department of Defence propaganda, to God knows what else. With this in mind, we ought to consider the question of what, aside from jerseys and t-shirts, we are being sold. So, let’s investigate.

Just a normal basketball game in a not-fascist country.

From the very beginning of this tiresome saga, Colin Kaepernick proved himself to be a faithful and unashamed propagandist for the US armed forces, and for American exceptionalism in general. When asked to clarify his thoughts on the military in August last year, Kaepernick made the following remarks:

I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country. I have family, I have friends that have gone and fought for this country. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice, for everyone … [Kneeling during the national anthem is] a freedom that men and woman that have fought for this country have given me this opportunity by contributions they have made … I know a lot of people’s initial reactions thought it was bashing the military, which it wasn’t. That wasn’t my intention at all[3].

Kaepernick’s former teammate and fellow grovelling kneeler Eric Reid reemphasised the pair’s reverence for murderous American soldiers in a recent op-ed for the New York Times, explaining that he “wanted to be as respectful as possible,” and that they “chose to kneel because it’s a respectful gesture.” He continues:

It baffles me that our protest is still being misconstrued as disrespectful to the country, flag and military personnel. We chose it because it’s exactly the opposite. It has always been my understanding that the brave men and women who fought and died for our country did so to ensure that we could live in a fair and free society, which includes the right to speak out in protest.

The pro-empire orientation of Kaepernick and his copycats has always left room for cross-pollination with other ongoing psyops and enabled the US military to boost its image in ways other than the crude displays that are typically associated with American sports (mindless flag reverence[4] and tasteless pageantry, recruitment ads, collaborative PR performances, and so forth). Thanks to Kaepernick’s “socially conscious” credentials, bloodthirsty imperial soldiers can, by association, now posit themselves as sympathetic characters who share our concerns, and even as revolutionaries! They’re cool and subversive, and we kneel with them!

The prophet Mani recognised the power of images in spreading propaganda way back in the third century CE, and the best propagandists today are well aware of this utility. Kaepernick’s CIA-endorsed “protest” may be short on theory and on focus (“there’s a lot of things that need to change, a lot of different issues that need to be addressed … it’s really hard to lock down one specific thing that needs to change currently”), but it produces endless iconic and inspirational imagery! Look at the images! Wear them on a t-shirt. Are you not empowered?

An expression of fascism.

By clearly emphasising this supposed distinction between US police (who are temporarily bad and racist) and US soldiers (who are eternally good and noble), Kaepernick promotes a myopic understanding of contemporary America, according to which racist policing is not an intended and inevitable outcome of capitalism, but rather an alarming deviation from an otherwise presumed American exceptionalism, a problem which can be treated and dealt with in isolation through kneeling and t-shirt wearing, “raising awareness” and “having conversations.” But as David Gilbert observed in 2001,

there is a complete correlation over the past twenty years between the greatest ever recorded shift of wealth from the poor to the rich and our skyrocketing prison population. The dual needs of containment and scapegoating are clearly expressed in the racial character of American justice.

Kaepernick’s belief that American cops can be reformed or “held to account” without really understanding in the first place why they consistently exhibit racist behaviour amounts, in other words, to a liberal complaint (as opposed to a radical analysis). American police do not intend to serve and protect the working class, and it is crucial to do away with any belief in a community of interests—and thus any chance of productive dialogue—between cops and the people they brutalise, imprison, and execute. You cannot condemn American cops without also condemning American capitalism.

But Kaepernick does more than just pose and sell t-shirts—he’s an activist. Eric Reid vouches for him, pointing out in his op-ed that Kaepernick is “a man who helped to orchestrate a commercial planeful of food and supplies for famine-stricken Somalia.” Kaepernick and the “Love Army” (a subliminal command as well as a name?) did indeed deliver 60 tonnes of food to hungry Somalis this year, and that’s all very nice. But why does Somalia suffer such terrible famines? Kaepernick doesn’t say. But I’m going to tell you!

“These people, they have no food.”

Somalia is a victim of (you guessed it) US imperialism (or, as Kaepernick calls it, “politics”). The very soldiers whose deeds Kaepernick and his cop friends love to celebrate have murdered dozens of Somalis this year alone by the most conservative estimates. Thousands of Somalis have been killed (and hundreds of thousands displaced) by US invaders since 2007 in a rarely-publicised war that has been going on for decades. Famines have occurred with ever-increasing frequency and severity since the United States instigated this war, and this is no coincidence:

A country that has been deprived of any civil peace and stable government by the repeated meddling of imperialism over a period of decades, a country whose economy has been destroyed by IMF loan sharks, a country whose fishing industry has been wiped out by giant factory ships deployed by monopoly capitalist poachers, and whose fishermen have been transformed into pirates, is not well-equipped to deal with the consequences of major drought.  Whilst the drought is, in some measure, a natural phenomenon, the famine is entirely man-made: the consequence of the decades of imperialist meddling which have effectively sabotaged any hope of peace and order for the Somalis.

To borrow Kaepernick’s own words, there’s “a social responsibility that we have to be educated on these things and talk about these things,” and “when you have the knowledge of those things you can make an educated decision on what you really feel and what you really stand for.”

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes have visited relentless persecution on them and received their teaching with the most savage hostility, the most furious hatred, the most ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, attempts are made to turn them into harmless icons, canonise them, and surround their names with a certain halo for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating and vulgarising the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge[5].

Colin Kaepernick is often credited with raising awareness and starting a conversation, but this is giving him too much credit. He is more than happy to strut about in t-shirts branded with images of revolutionary figures (Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Fidel Castro[6]), but when it comes to discussing the topics with which these great leaders spent their lives grappling, Kaepernick has nothing to say. His t-shirt praxis is offensive not just because it is dishonest, but because it contributes to the debasement of powerful revolutionary icons and ideas. The late poet Amiri Baraka once prophesised that Malcolm X’s face would appear on a t-shirt worn by Colin Kaepernick:

There is, of course, the syndrome Lenin spoke about when he said that once opponents of the bourgeoisie are dead the rulers transform these class enemies into ciphers or agreeable sycophants of Imperialism (however “askew” they might have “seemed” in life) who are now “rehabilitated” all the way into being represented as the very opposite ideologically of what they actually were in life.

In particular, Kaepernick seems intent on “rehabilitating” the Black Panther Party, whose 10 point programme he has caricatured and had printed on t-shirts. The original Panther Programme was a substantial list of demands, while Kaepernick’s “10 inspirational sentences” have the air of a friendly cop reading you your rights: “you have the right to be brilliant; you have the right to be courageous”—fuck off. Black Panthers, evidently, can be “radically audacious” backup dancers sharing a stage with Coldplay; they can be obsequious grovelers; and they can be Marvel super heroes. They cannot, however, be revolutionaries.

But enough about Kaepernick. He’s old news, and his feckless demonstrations were on the verge of disappearing down the memory hole until former NBA cameraman and current US President Donald Trump gave this dying story a much-needed shot in the arm. Trump’s remarks have provoked a renewed frenzy of insipid jingoism from athletes and pundits alike. The problem with Trump, you see, is that he’s not a patriot. His presence disgraces the White House, which until last year was a monument to freedom, universally respected and beloved.

“We know this is the greatest country in the world. It’s the land of the free[7].”

Trump, like racist police brutality, is un-American, and bending over in order to revere the US military is not only the best way to protest these things, it’s the American way. Stephen Curry is a real American. So is Bill Russell. Are you?

Cops and soldiers are now joining in these pathetic displays to demonstrate their commitment to American Values, but this is not evidence that Kaepernick’s “protest” has been “ruined” or subverted by opportunists. “Empty platitudes and gestures aimed at pleasing and comforting everyone” were all there ever was to this brain-dissolving spectacle. The whole thing is, I think, an elaborate recruitment ad for the US military (a more ambitious and interactive advert than we’re used to seeing, but an advert nonetheless). Today, the whole world is an advert. Advertising is no longer about straightforward product placement, brand sponsorship, and commercial breaks; advertising today consists of “compelling narratives” and “crafted storytelling” directed at “highly valuable and engaged audiences.” The BBC smuggles ever more subtle and sophisticated advertising into its news broadcasts, boasting of its ability to “deliver content solutions built on compelling narratives that engage audiences across the globe.”

“Welcome to the science of engagement.”

With the DoD throwing millions of dollars at professional sports leagues, it’s not at all wild to suspect that something a little more creative than a bit of flag waving is taking place. All it takes is “matching the content strategy of brands [i.e. the DoD] to issues [i.e. #BlackLivesMatter], motivating audiences anywhere on the planet.” We’re not only being sold products, we’re being sold wars, and we’re being sold a belief in capitalism itself.

Inevitably, Kaepernick will sign with some NFL team or other, and this will be hailed as a great victory for America. Like Chelsea Manning, who was banished and then forgiven, Colin Kaepernick will be welcomed back into the fold and celebrated for his courageous struggle. Kaepernick may mobilise people, but he will never organise them[8]. Instead we will learn an important lesson: that change comes from the top down, led by millionaire capitalists performing gestures on the stage, and not from the bottom up by the likes of you and I. Mission accomplished!

As Gaddafi wrote, “[t]hose who make their own life do not need to see how life takes its course through watching the actors on stage or other theatres.” We should always remain critical when observing media-appointed spokespeople and celebrity revolutionaries, especially those that appropriate and pervert the images and teachings of real anti-imperialist heroes. There have been principled and admirable athletes and entertainers, and they deserve to be taken seriously, but they tend to receive quite different treatment to that enjoyed by Kaepernick. Tupak Shakur, for example, was a black radical, and for that he was assassinated by the FBI. By contrast, Colin Kaepernick receives words of solidarity from the former Director of the CIA.

Thank you for reading, and death to the USA.

[1] Paraphrased from Herbert I. Schiller’s essay Not Yet the Post-Imperialist Era.

[2] Amusingly, this letter was initially reported as “encouraging players to speak out on social issues and not be afraid like NFL players,” but in a subsequent memo the league has made it clear that all players had better stand up straight during anthem performances.

[3] If you think he’s being cautious and is simply worried that by condemning the NFL’s military sponsors he runs the risk of losing his job or endorsement revenue, consider his own remarks from this same interview: “Those are things I’m prepared to handle … I can live with that at the end of the day.” He no longer has an NFL job to lose, anyway. He’s free to set the record straight whenever he likes.

[4] James Johnson: “Without the military there would be no freedom to even play basketball.” What?

[5] Lenin, State and Revolution.

[6] None of these three had a high opinion of the US military, in case you were unsure.

[7] LeBron actually said this.

[8] Kaepernick doesn’t need your help: “This isn’t something I’m going to ask other people to put their necks out for what I’m doing. If they agree with me and feel strongly about it then by all means I hope they stand with me. But I’m not going to go and try to recruit people and be like ‘Hey, come do this with me’ because I know the consequences that come with that and they need to make that decision for themselves.”

 

False Jersey Ops (Part 1): Critical Beatdown

Basketball, Anti-Communism, and Conspiracy Theory

In a word, compared with the splendid promises of the philosophers, the social and political institutions born of the “triumph of reason” were bitterly disappointing caricatures. All that was wanting was the men to formulate this disappointment, and they came with the turn of the century[1].

Kyrie Irving has been behaving strangely of late. During an interview last month, Irving expressed his apparent frustration[2] with capitalism (“the fact that you have to pay to play in this world is ridiculous”), and even brought up the taboo subject of class (“there’s a separate class that they’ve put us in because of money”)! However, rather than suggest a viable alternative, much less one in which we can all participate, Irving simply offered some brief remarks about his nebulous, utopian vision of a self-sustaining eco commune within which he and his friends might live pleasant and equitable lives isolated from the outside world.

Well, it may not be perfect, but perhaps we shouldn’t be too critical of well-intentioned celebrities. Surely we should be content that Kyrie Irving is prepared to imagine alternative ways of arranging society, regardless of the petty details. Or should we?

Irving, a notorious troll who just a few months ago made headlines by pretending to believe that the earth is flat, may have an ulterior motive. His peddling of a facile utopian socialism at a time when such a great deal of money and effort is being spent on anti-communist propaganda campaigns warrants suspicion.

During the second half of the twentieth century, secret armies of fascist hooligans were organised and maintained throughout various NATO[3] countries, their purpose to commit acts of terror under the “flag” of communism as part of a strategy of tension. Of course, Irving is not murdering civilians and blaming it on the Communist Party USA (yet); he is merely pretending to be an idiot, and then pretending to be some sort of a socialist in order to encourage the public to associate these two modes of thinking: socialists are clearly imbeciles, and to believe that capitalism is destructive, that there is an exploiting class and an exploited class, is as ludicrous as believing that the earth is flat.

It’s not that I think literally everything is a psyop[4]. I am not being entirely serious here, but I am being sincere. Is Kyrie Irving really engaged in some sort of “false flag” operation? I don’t know. Probably not. It’s quite possible that Irving really is a sensitive fellow with dreams of creating a better society, and that he simply hasn’t had the chance to devote much thought to it yet. I hope that this is the case, and time will tell. Nevertheless, we can be confident that basketball is used for propaganda purposes, that governments throughout the world do indeed carry out psychological operations on social media, and that the US military is very interested in the influence that celebrities exert over their Twitter followers. This being the case, we should regard the political rhetoric of basketball players and other celebrities with a healthy degree of scepticism.

Chelsea Manning demonstrating the capacity of jokes to reveal the truth.

I started writing this before Chelsea Manning began talking trash about communists, but Manning’s case is actually very relevant here, so it’s just as well she invited the ire of principled Marxist-Leninists with an ill-conceived tweet equating communism and fascism. Unlike Irving, who first established himself as a buffoon and a bad teammate in the eyes of the public before uttering vague anti-capitalist and environmentally conscientious mumblings with the goal of discrediting such attitudes, Manning began by doing something brilliant, establishing her credibility as a dissident and earning the sympathy of a great many well-meaning people. It is since her release, following years of imprisonment and torture, that she has begun to behave very much like a propaganda asset, helpfully explaining to her many fans why Venezuelan socialism is unsustainable, joking about the bumbling and incompetent FBI, and assuring her audience over and over again that “we got this”—that is to say, mission accomplished; the system works; power has been successfully held to account.

For a story with such tremendous implications—beyond the famous collateral murder video and other war crimes committed by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, Manning also leaked documents exposing a variety of additional crimes committed by the US ruling class all over the world—this is a bitterly disappointing conclusion, though a familiar one, as we shall see. Chelsea Manning the celebrity icon, along with (perfectly legitimate) concern over her imprisonment and her future, overshadowed the revelations themselves in media coverage, and the resolution of her personal struggle for some semblance of justice now appears to have drawn the whole saga to a convenient close. Thanks, Obama.

There are illuminating parallels, I think, between the Manning/WikiLeaks story and the Al Yamamah controversy (a recurring drama in the UK media concerning alleged bribes paid by weapons manufacturer BAe Systems to the Saudi royal family and others in order to secure an arms deal, and a subsequent cover-up). The latter culminated in an apparent resolution with the announcement of a handful of out-of-court penalties. BAe admitted to “corporate misdemeanours” in relation to a Serious Fraud Office inquiry, and to “obstructing investigation” by the US Department of Justice, but not to any bribery. Naturally, the news media and their official sources sought to amplify the penalties imposed on BAe as a means of avoiding accusations of a whitewash and deterring further scrutiny. Here, for example, are the headlines the BBC chose to print the day the settlements were announced:

This all sounds very serious, except that the incurred fines were worth just 1% of BAe’s annual turnover, and, as Justin Schlosberg explains, the framing of the settlements

demonstrated the apparent efficacy of due process and enabled a line to be drawn between BAe’s past and present. Crucially, it suggested the system en masse had worked: BAe had done wrong, the media had exposed it, the judicial system imposed an appropriate penalty, and the company had reformed its practices as a result.

Yet this is not the worst of it. The bribery allegations may have slipped out of the headlines, but that was never the most important aspect of this story. It is not true that the UK government, in order to profit from arms deals, cynically looks the other way while the naughty Saudi Arabian military destroys Yemen; on the contrary, it is the UK government that specifically wants to destroy Yemen, and that provides material aid to the Saudi Arabian military in order to achieve its genocidal goal. This is not about a few crooked people profiting from arms deals, it is about imperialism. The war is not “Saudi-led,” it is UK-led. It is this story which is obscured by headlines about fines and accountability, not the “corruption” of BAe. But all we can expect to hear from the obsequious pundits[5] of the “left” is that our government is in league with the terrorism-exporting Saudi establishment, and that “we” must stop “supporting” them.

Similarly, the story lost in the shuffle of the Chelsea Manning spectacle is not one of a few rogue soldiers caught murdering civilians and journalists in Baghdad on the 12th of July 2007 and subsequently avoiding punishment despite incontrovertible video evidence, as Cenk Uygur claims (though of course this is not unimportant). Rather, it is that the cables provide yet more proof (as though more were needed) of the true nature of the United States, and the fact that it cannot just be voted away. Its backing of the 2009 coup in Honduras and its engineering of the “Arab Spring” in order to overthrow yet more progressive governments are not isolated crimes; they are systemic, part of a deliberate strategy by which the ruling class uses whatever means are expedient to pursue its interests throughout the world. The big story is that, in spite of Manning’s leaks and the media coverage they received, nothing has changed. We haven’t “got this.”

In addition to emphasising certain aspects of a story over others, one of the ways in which inconvenient news is “contained” by the capitalist media is to deploy accusations of conspiracy theory. “This taboo,” writes Schlosberg, “which operates within journalist and academic circles alike, has some sound basis. It discriminates against conjecture often associated with tabloid sensationalism or internet subcultures that respond to secrecy or uncertainty with unfounded reasoning.” It also has a distinct tendency to discriminate against good investigative journalism and correct analysis.

Oh, you think entertainment media is used for propaganda purposes? You think there’s some kind of “ruling class”?

When I heard Nietzsche-obsessed Cambridge academic Hugo Drochon compare conspiracy theory with critical theory, I was a little excited. “Conspiracy theory,” Drochon says, “is kind of vulgarised critical theory, but you use many of the same tools, so it’s about debunking the kind of official line and seeing what’s behind it.” Critical theory without all of the impenetrable academic jargon sounds pretty good to me. After all, Gerhard Schweppenhäuser and Frigga Haug define critical theory in their Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism) as an “emancipatory social philosophy” that attempts to “unite in one movement of thought the analysis and critique of forms of practice as well as types of reason and rationality of bourgeois-capitalist societies since the middle of the 19th century until today.” Christian Fuchs makes critical theory sound quite wonderful in his Critical Theory of Communication:

Critical theory questions all thought and practices that justify or uphold domination and exploitation. Marx formulated the categorical imperative of critical theory: it is the ‘categoric imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being’ (Marx 1997, 257–258). Critical theory wants to show that a good life is possible for all and that domination and exploitation alienate humans from achieving such a society. For Marx, the ‘task of philosophy […] is to unmask human self-alienation’ (Marx 1997, 251). In deconstructing alienation, domination and exploitation, critical theory also makes demands for a self-determined, participatory and just democracy. Such a society is not only a grassroots political democracy, but also an economic democracy, in which the producers control the production process and the means and outcomes of production. Critical theory wants to make the world conscious of its own possibilities. The ‘world has long dreamed of something of which it only has to become conscious in order to possess it in actuality’ (Marx 1997, 214).

According to Drochon, it was Bruno Latour who initially made this comparison between critical theory and conspiracy theory, so I read Latour’s essay on the subject. Finally, conspiracy theory is receiving recognition and serious engagement from respected academics, I thought as I opened up the document.

But Latour was not elevating conspiracy theory by comparing it with the “serious” work of academics. Rather, according to Latour, critical theory resembles conspiracy theory to the extent that critical theory is a lot of self-indulgent nonsense: “entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on.”

stop it tankies chelsea is our woman and you will have NO PART in insulting her
the stasi were repressive as fuck jeeshh
tankies: UGHHH liberal psyops calling all statist communists tankies
also tankies: hey look at all these statists thats us right there lol

Latour, who takes the US government’s account of 9/11 for granted and is deeply disturbed that anybody might question this narrative, considers conspiracy theories “an absurd deformation of our [i.e. academics’] own arguments.” But those who go to university to study critical theory are apparently no better!

Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? Why critique, this most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are always right! When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naïve believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don’t see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. Isn’t this fabulous? Isn’t it really worth going to graduate school to study critique? “Enter here, you poor folks. After arduous years of reading turgid prose, you will be always right, you will never be taken in any more; no one, no matter how powerful, will be able to accuse you of naïveté, that supreme sin, any longer? Better equipped than Zeus himself you rule alone, striking from above with the salvo of antifetishism in one hand and the solid causality of objectivity in the other.” The only loser is the naïve believer, the great unwashed, always caught off balance.

Here Latour employs a familiar tactic, ascribing to conspiracy theorists (and critical theorists) a psychological need that they supposedly fulfil through their delusional theorising. Whether it is the need to be right at all times, as Latour presumes, or a desire to project heroism in a time of cultural malaise, as Noam Chomsky suggests, these smears conveniently sidestep the need to engage with actual arguments and evidence. Yet as Michael Parenti points out, the legitimacy of conspiracy theories must be “decided by an investigation of evidence, not by a priori, unscientific, and patronising presumptions about the public mind.” Chomsky argues that analysis of US institutions and political culture, not of individuals or assassination plots, is the key to understanding history. But as Parenti says, “conspiracy is not something that’s in contradistinction to structural analysis. It is part of it.”

Conspiracies in which institutions, rather than individuals, are implicated make academics very uncomfortable. To return to Justin Schlosberg for a moment, his book attempts to answer the following question: why does the news media consistently fail to hold power to account? This question can be answered in a very straightforward way by reformulating it: why does the capitalist news media consistently fail to hold the ruling class to account? There’s your answer.

Instead, Schlosberg does everything he can to avoid a Marxist analysis by playing with words. “The powerful,” he suggests, “are not a ruling class but rather an elite core of decision-makers—a network that transcends party politics and operates at the nexus between government, industry and military” and which “operates largely informally and ‘off the record’” (i.e. a ruling class). Schlosberg argues that “an essential function of the media in liberal democracies is to legitimate power by holding it to account.” This is correct, provided you wink and make air-quote gestures while saying “holding it to account.” Latour, likewise, takes a dim view of such theories: “Of course, we in the academy like to use more elevated causes—society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism—while conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intents.” Believing in a capitalist class who pursue their interests is basically like believing in a cabal of shadowy figures who are evil for the sake of it, according to these brilliant minds.

Conspiracy theories concerning Chelsea Manning are not far-fetched but proceed from pretty straightforward facts. Manning, still “on active duty in a special [unpaid] status,” was released from prison for no apparent reason and has since then promoted the anti-communist, fascist-abetting ACLU and relentlessly tweeted Barack Obama campaign slogans, focus-tested platitudes, and State Department propaganda. Maybe she’s just a liberal and all of this is perfectly spontaneous, sure. She doesn’t owe it to anybody to be a communist. But it is not at all unlikely that she is a propaganda asset, and it doesn’t make any sense not to be critical.

Before I go, there is one further way in which news stories are contained, and it is perhaps the most effective of all. That the United States backed the 2009 Honduran coup and orchestrated the “Arab Spring” did not escape the notice of influential publications like the Guardian and the New York Times when they were covering the diplomatic cables leak. But so what? As Parenti explains in Make-Believe Media,

Even when the truth is not totally suppressed and parts of it get out to the public in an occasionally dissident book or film, it no longer seems all that important to a public conditioned to mass-market glitz and glamor. Thus books and films that tell us something of the truth about our history and our social and political life pose only a marginal challenge to the dominant ideology, if even that. They are crowded to the edges of the communication universe by the crush of mainstream offerings. Rather than being completely interdicted, truth is submerged in a sea of irrelevance. Silly amusement, contrived distraction, and endless hype become the foremost means of social control. Preemption is the most effective form of social control. Rather than being politically repressed, people are made apolitical.

On that note, thanks for reading, and death to America.

[1] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

[2] He doesn’t want to pay for his clothes and is confused by free-range eggs.

[3] Today, NATO has an accredited international military organisation called the NATO Strategic Communication Center of Excellence. What does it do? In its own words, it is concerned with discovering “new challenges in [the] information environment in the context of robot trolling.”

[4] Well, actually…

[5] “[W]here,” enquires Owen Jones, “are the western demands for Qatar to stop funding international terrorism or being complicit in the rise of jihadi groups? Instead, Britain arms Qatar’s dictatorship, selling it millions of pounds worth of weaponry including “crowd-control ammunition” and missile parts.” Now, it is of course Jones’ job to be a credulous dimwit, but his readers must surely put two and two together eventually.

Court Fools

Basketball, Drawing-Room Life, and the Function of the Fool

Witty people are a very important part of modern life, and they are very popular. They replace truth, seriousness and profundity with a quip that makes people laugh. The idea of their spiritual life is the elegant drawing-room, its fatuous and brilliant conversation, its measured applause and the veiled smile of its habitués. They reduce all life to the clever mediocrity of drawing-room life: a lot of words, amiable scepticism, and a light sprinkle of melancholy sentimentalism. The wit has become even more important through the latest incarnation of drawing-room life, namely the offices of the bourgeois newspapers. Here the wit has enlarged the circle of his audience and has made everything a source of humour—politics, war, pain, life and death—thereby winning much applause and earning a pile of money[1].

The 2017 NBA All-Star Game was shit. I’m by no means the first person to make such an observation, but I nevertheless feel that a thorough investigation into the All-Star Game as an institution is warranted, and that its descent into self-parody can tell us something about the destructive potential of jokes.

As the above clip from the 1996 game in San Antonio demonstrates, defence was not always a faux pas at the All-Star Game. The annoyance with which Marv Albert declares Grant Hill’s dunk “too easy” is telling: such lapses were not the norm, and they were certainly not to be encouraged. Steve Jones is even able to joke that some sort of conspiracy exists between Hill and Shawn Kemp, a joke that can only work if the audience knows that these are in fact competitive players, that they are of course taking this game quite seriously. An earlier remark by Jones—“you’re seeing a team from the West not playing much defence, looking to score a lot of points”—likewise indicates that prioritising scoring over defence was simply one of a number of legitimate strategies that a team might adopt, not a prescribed play style.

Much has changed in the 21 intervening years. What was once a wink-wink, unwritten-but-slyly-acknowledged aspect of the All-Star Game has become its raison d’être. While the All-Star Game is still officially a real basketball game, the “you let me have one, and I’ll let you have one” arrangement has been formalised and is now taken for granted by all involved. That an actual basketball game might occur is recognised to be a slim hope by the television announcers (“a game will break out—a real game,” a despondent Marv Albert unconvincingly reassured his audience in 2013). The running gag that the All-Star Game is not really a game at all but simply an excuse to see a lot of cool dunks has been turned on its head; to suggest that the players might expend any effort at all on defence is to elicit laughter today. Thanks to the ceaseless chattering of Marv Albert and his accomplices, both participants and audience have stumbled into a sort of joke-induced hyperreality, unable to apprehend what the All-Star Game really is any more, let alone what it ought to be.

The result of all this is that the NBA’s modern stars are, in the words of Aram Goudsouzian, “boiled down to commercial symbols, icons of the global marketplace.” They do not play exciting basketball; they perform exciting basketball by rote (thereby stripping it of excitement).

Here we see the power of jokes at work. Jokes are not trivial at all; they are deeply serious. Jokes influence reality. They can disarm and make an audience receptive to otherwise unpalatable ideas[2]. Jokes also reveal intent:

A joke can also be an expression of power. There are those who would have us believe that maintaining a detached, sardonic demeanour and joking about very serious contemporary issues is a sophisticated and wise mode of engaging with the world. This sort of approach is often confused with good adversarial journalism. As Tom Mills observed of Jeremy Paxman, his “bumptious posturing” has a great deal more to do with the glib, self-congratulatory Oxbridge debating society culture of which he is a product than with any desire to speak truth to power.

This was a milieu with which Malcolm X became closely acquainted in December 1964. Invited to participate in a debate at the Oxford Union by its president Eric Anthony Abrahams, Malcolm, who took the debate[3] quite seriously,  was subjected to a barrage of smirking, sneering, and hectoring from his unbearably smug opponents (for whom nothing whatsoever was at stake). The event sounded more like a stand-up comedy gig than a serious debate, an audience of cretinous aristocrats-in-training erupting in hoots of laugher after every clever inside joke or humble-brag (a remark about the “great colonial experience” of a Tory peer elicited merry laughter from these contemptuous jackals).

By their serious remarks, the chief antagonists Humphrey Berkeley and Lord Stonham portrayed themselves as very reasonable and progressive people indeed who were of course opposed to any kind of racism or apartheid. It was their humorous remarks that betrayed their true character—their ridiculing Malcolm X for adopting a pseudonym and joking about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of British politics. During the open forum, a speaker whose identity isn’t clear delivered a sort of horseshoe manifesto, stressing the importance of “justice for the oppressed, and justice for the oppressor too[4]!”

But what is going to happen to the Black Muslims? […]. Will it not mean…that the, er, there would be, perhaps, a black Ku Klux Klan of extremists who, in alleged defence of their liberty, would repeat in reverse the vicious extremes o-o-of white oppressors? […]. Extremes…will not provide a solution, will not provide true liberty or freedom. […]. Moderation is not synonymous with cowardice!

Lebert Bethune, who had accompanied Malcolm to the debate, later remarked that the “flippant, drawing-room comedy manner” of the speakers had angered Malcolm. Are contemporary pundits and podcasters, in their ironic detachment and affected vulgarity, really any better? Who do they think they are, and what are they trying to accomplish? Let us consider the most idealised view of such people, the romantic myth of the court jester:

Later in this same talk, Alan Watts goes on to describe the fool as “an analogue of the Sage[5].” Is it possible that these comedians, from celebrity left clowns to edgy internet ironists, perceive themselves as wise and daring, dispensing enlightenment by bravely subverting social norms and cleverly behaving like credulous imbeciles?[6] Or is it possible that all such people are merely climbers, eagerly peddling ruling class propaganda under the guise of humour while earning a pile of money?

The prohibited impulse may be tolerated if there is no doubt that the final aim is its elimination—this is the case with jokes or fun, the miserable parody of fulfilment. As a despised and despising characteristic, the mimetic function is enjoyed craftily. Anyone who seeks out “bad” smells, in order to destroy them, may imitate sniffing to his heart’s content, taking unrationalised pleasure in the experience. The civilised man “disinfects” the forbidden impulse by his unconditional identification with the authority which has prohibited it; in this way the action is made acceptable. If he goes beyond the permitted bounds, laughter ensues[7].

It is not the case that all jokes are bad, or that political satire is inherently dangerous. As Lenin said of art and literature, “partisan literature and art will be truly free, because it will further the freedom of millions of people.” By the same token, jokes in the service of communism may further the freedom of millions of people, while jokes which promote imperialism will lead to the immiseration of millions.

Exciting basketball cannot be simulated. Exciting basketball is so precisely because it is spontaneous and unscripted. Any attempt to make a formal obligation of fun and exciting basketball will inevitably produce the sort of facile basketball exhibitionism we have become accustomed to seeing at the All-Star Game. Good basketball is produced through struggle between offensive players and defensive players. Likewise, good jokes are not the product of a practiced and reflexive cynicism; they are the fruit of struggle—class struggle.

 

[1] This is a Gramsci quote.

[2] According to Kierkegaard, when an audience does not want to hear a speaker’s message, the speaker needs to communicate in an indirect fashion, and the queen of indirectness is irony. The CIA is adept at utilising humour for its Hollywood propaganda, at using comedy as a Trojan Horse. Often it isn’t very subtle.

[3] The motion for the debate was a statement made by the US right-winger Barry Goldwater when he accepted the Republican nomination for the presidential election: “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Despite Malcolm X’s brilliant and persuasive speech, the motion was defeated 449 to 225. What a surprise!

[4] In other words, are there civil liberties for the fascists? As Stephen Gowans put it,

Moralist positions on human rights are not only beside the point; they’re nonsensical, inasmuch as they assume rights are absolute and that antagonisms between the rights of oppressor classes and nations and the classes and nations they oppress can be mediated. In the real world, it is not possible to build a socialist society if the capitalist class is allowed the freedom to organize to restore its power. It is not possible for a government of national liberation to achieve its country’s independence if it grants political and civil liberties to all, including agents of the oppressor nation who seek to restore that nation’s formerly privileged position.

…

The battlefield of human rights isn’t one in which the object of Left forces should be the securing of absolute rights for all (for there is no such thing as liberty and democracy for all) but the securing of the rights of oppressed classes and nations at the expense of those of their enemies. The right of the sheep to be free from predation comes at the expense of the wolf’s right to eat the sheep. The question is never whether you’re for human rights or not. The question is always whose rights are you for?

[5] That this myth of the jester as wise and subversive gadfly probably isn’t true doesn’t really matter. Wise fools may not have existed, but the idea that there existed wise fools does exist, and it is pervasive.

[6] I know a stand-up comedian personally, and he is absolutely insufferable. This is definitely how he sees himself.

[7] This one’s Adorno and Horkheimer.

Hercules and the Hydra

Basketball, Myth, and the Symbionese Liberation Army

From the beginning of English colonial expansion in the early seventeenth century through the metropolitan industrialisation of the early nineteenth, rulers referred to the Hercules-hydra myth to describe the difficulty of imposing order on increasingly global systems of labour. They variously designated dispossessed commoners, transported felons, indentured servants, religious radicals, pirates, urban labourers, soldiers, sailors, and African slaves as the numerous, ever-changing heads of the monster. But the heads, though originally brought into productive combination by their Herculean rulers, soon developed among themselves new forms of cooperation against those rulers, from mutinies and strikes to riots and insurrections and revolution.

Regular readers of this blog will no doubt have noticed the image of the seven-headed snake that sits at the top of the page [edit: I’ve since replaced it with something nicer]. It is of course the logo of the SLA, an apparently revolutionary organisation which was briefly active in the Bay Area during the 1970s, and which has since been the subject of a great deal of controversy. I first became aware of the SLA after listening to Third Sight’s Symbionese Liberation Album, and, after tracking down their audio dispatches and hearing of their audacious attempts to distribute free food to the poor and hungry people of California by extorting media baron and raving fascist Randolph Hearst[1], I decided I rather liked them.

It wasn’t until several years later that I stumbled upon rumours and allegations that Donald DeFreeze (the group’s leader) was an informant for the Los Angeles Police Department, and that the SLA was essentially a CIA-orchestrated false flag operation. I find this perfectly plausible, though I will leave it to readers to conduct their own research into the SLA if they’re interested (it’s not really within the scope of this blog post, though it is all quite fascinating). What I intend to focus on below is the question of whether or not the fact that the SLA was almost certainly a fake left-wing revolutionary group whose purpose was to discredit the so-called “New Left” really matters, and, naturally, the implications this may have for the 2017 NBA Finals.

After kidnapping Patty Hearst (Randolph’s daughter, then a student at UC Berkeley) from her apartment on 4 February 1974, the SLA released a series of communiques to local media (issued between 12 February and 2 April), which they stipulated were to be broadcast in full, no editing. In hindsight, these tapes may well have been cynical attempts to caricature the kind of language used by the stereotypical white bourgeois “radicals” that UC Berkeley is famous for, and thus were intended to sound ludicrous and off-putting to ordinary, sensible Americans[2].

Yet some of Donald DeFreeze’s speeches were actually surprisingly good. Patty Hearst frequently spoke of “fascist America,” with its “concentration camps” and “fascist pig media.” This is perfectly reasonable language which accurately describes the society in which she lived (and which remains accurate to this day). If these were attempts to make a mockery of idealistic young revolutionaries, they were not successful. In fact, the SLA’s message inspired me to read about (real) revolutionary movements around the world and throughout history, and ultimately to join a communist party.

The logo of the SLA is reminiscent of the mythical hydra of Lerna, a many-headed monster that Hercules was apparently obliged to kill in exchange for immortality. This is significant because rulers and exploiters have throughout history used this myth to represent the struggle between themselves and the people they seek to oppress. Naturally, the ruling class identified with Hercules, the powerful and heroic individual who overcomes challenges and is rewarded handsomely for his efforts. The role of the hydra was reserved for the exploited, the working class, whom the rulers feared and despised. The hydra, write Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, was regarded as “an antithetical symbol of disorder and resistance, a powerful threat to the building of state, empire, and capitalism.”

Implicit in the hydra myth is the fundamental truth that the working class vastly outnumber the craven capitalist dogs who struggle to contain them, and therefore pose a permanent threat to the capitalist system. When Hercules lopped off one of the hydra’s heads, two new ones grew in its place. Likewise, cut down one revolutionary and you only create more. As Hearst explained in her eulogy to her fallen comrades after they were brutally massacred by the LAPD on live television,

I know that the pigs are proud of themselves; they’ve killed another black leader. […]. But no matter how many leaders are killed, the pig can’t kill their ideals. […]. They live on in the hearts and minds of millions of people in fascist America. […]. The SLA terrifies the pigs, because it calls all oppressed people in this country to arms, to fight in a united front to overthrow this fascist dictatorship. The pigs think that they can deal with a handful of revolutionaries, but they know they can’t defeat the incredible power which the people, once united, represent.

Is it possible that ideological projects which were intended for one thing may be requisitioned, rehabilitated, and redeployed for something entirely different, to take on a life of their own?[3] Consider the example presented by Richard King in Orientalism and Religion of the faux Vedic text which, when originally forged by French Jesuits, was intended to lampoon Indian culture, but, when later read by Voltaire, impressed him with its sophistication! Discourses, concluded King, “cannot be controlled once they have entered the public arena and become subject to contestation, appropriation, and inversion by others.” Of course, this is by no means a new idea. As Roland Barthes[4] wrote,

We know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

We may well be able to dismiss the author of a text, but can we dismiss the authors of events, of whole systems of ideas? Consider the particular brand of Zen Buddhism that was famously popular in the Bay Area a few years before the SLA emerged. The Zen of the Beat Generation was largely the product of Japanese ultranationalists and bore little resemblance to Zen as it was practiced in Japan. Rather than dismiss it as corrupted and inauthentic, however, I think it is more useful to understand Beat Zen as Californian Buddhism. Religions do change; they are adapted to suit different cultures and periods, and this can happen in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. As far as I’m concerned, Californian Buddhism functions as a religion and is therefore legitimate (though of course it is important to understand it in context).

The classically educated architects of the Atlantic economy found in Hercules—the mythical hero of the ancients who achieved immortality by performing twelve labours—a symbol of power and order. For inspiration they looked to the Greeks, for whom Hercules was a unifier of the centralised territorial state, and to the Romans, for whom he signified vast imperial ambition. The labours of Hercules symbolised economic development: the clearing of land, the draining of swamps, and the development of agriculture, as well as the domestication of livestock, the establishment of commerce, and the introduction of technology. Rulers placed the image of Hercules on money and seals, in pictures, sculptures and palaces, and on arches of triumph. Among English royalty, William III, George I, and George II’s brother, the “Butcher of Culloden,” all fancied themselves Hercules. John Adams, for his part, proposed in 1776 that “The Judgement of Hercules” be the seal for the new United States of America. The hero represented progress: Giambattista Vico, the philosopher of Naples, used Hercules to develop the stadial theory of history, while Francis Bacon, philosopher and politician, cited him to advance modern science and to suggest that capitalism was very nearly divine.

By arranging for the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers to face one another in the NBA Finals for the third year in a row, Adam Silver was clearly attempting to revive and re-present the Hercules-hydra myth for a contemporary basketball audience. This time around, the hydra was permitted to overpower Hercules. Were LeBron James to have cut down one Finals MVP, another would simply have risen from the bench to take his place! The team of perfect unity and cooperation won against the outmoded brute force of capitalist domination. The Cavaliers could not overcome their own internal contradictions.

Or so the NBA would have us believe!

By signing Kevin Durant in 2016, the Golden State Warriors became the best basketball team that has ever existed. They are incredibly fun to watch, and, I think, even quite likable. As a basketball enjoyer, I love watching teams that rely on isolations get crushed by teams that move the ball, and the 2017 NBA Finals would have entertained me ten years ago.

However, things are not as they are made to appear. In fact, the Warriors are not a hydra but a team of Herculean individuals. The signing of Durant not only represented the further concentration of unimaginable wealth in the hands of the already filthy rich (the Warriors won a record 73 games last season before Durant arrived), but Durant himself did not join the team due to any high-minded basketball ideals. He does not play in a beautifully planned and executed offence because he wants to liberate the NBA from the tyranny of isolation ball. Rather, Durant was bedazzled by the promise of Silicon Valley riches offered to him by his venture capitalist teammates.

Like the SLA, the Golden State Warriors are presented to us as a revolutionary organisation. But just as the SLA were in fact puppets of the CIA, so the Warriors actually represent the ideology of another terrorist organisation—the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley (who “saw the 3-point line as a market inefficiency”). The SLA was indeed revolutionary—their gruesome end, broadcast live on national television, resulted in a revolution in US policing, in the militarisation of American cops. As they watched the murders unfold, fascist police across America were beguiled by the Kevlar vests and incendiary grenades of the SWAT team that had been called in to murder the entire SLA, and subsequently set about arming themselves in a similar vein. By the same token, the revolution the Warriors are ushering in is one of mass surveillance and the tyranny of technology.

So where does all of this leave us? Is it advisable to enjoy watching the Golden State Warriors, or is their very existence a duplicitous scheme to foster within us sympathy for Silicon Valley and its evil plots? Critics of the secularisation thesis, from Émile Durkheim to Rachel Wagener, have pointed out that truth claims by religious authorities and sacred texts in fact mean relatively little to most religious people[5]—what matters is community, tradition, ritual, identity, and so on. Perhaps, then, the truth that Donald DeFreeze and Kevin Durant are agents provocateurs does not matter very much after all so long as alternative ideas, inspirations, and significances can be drawn from their escapades. Viewed this way, they become as much a myth as the Hercules-hydra drama they echo. As Nancy Isenberg writes, the Patty Hearst saga resists one single meaning:

This surfeit of information generated by the SLA, and the overproduction of meaning by the media, suggests why Patty Hearst is perhaps the best of all postmodern subjects. Her story at once registers and resists the desire to find a single meaning. Despite all attempts by journalists, psychiatrists, and jurists to explain her persona through either the tragic story of a female captive/brainwashed victim or the dark comedy of the spoiled rich girl/pseudo revolutionary, her gendered identity cannot be fixed. […]. The Patty Hearst case obliges us to reassess the meaning of identity through a postmodern lens. In a profound way, Hearst’s trial problematizes the meaning of human agency, volition, and the “truthful” representation of facts—cultural categories central to the law and a postmodern critique of bourgeois individualism and “reality.”

The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author.

In both instances, the battle between Hercules and the hydra turns out to be an illusion, a theatrical production. Both the Warriors and the Cavaliers are owned by vile plutocrats whose only goal is capital accumulation at the expense of you and I. As for the SLA, it was created by the CIA and destroyed by the LAPD; the SLA saga was essentially a puppet show between two arms of the fascist American state (two heads of the fascist American hydra?). Yet, as Stuart Hall argued, audiences are not passive and stupid, and though a certain message may be encoded within a text, this message can be contested, subverted, rejected.

According to Brad Screiber (an author who investigated the SLA fairly thoroughly), “neither Hearst nor the white radicals who followed DeFreeze realized that he was molded by a CIA officer and allowed to escape, thanks to collusion with the California Department of Corrections.” Screiber claims that Patty Hearst was a “closet radical,” and that most of the SLA’s members were unaware that they were being manipulated and led to their deaths. It is possible that some members of the Golden State Warriors are trapped in a similar predicament, believing naïvely that they are simply members of a basketball team when really their job is to crush any and all resistance to capitalist expansion. I think perhaps we owe it to the idealistic young souls who died in that tragic shootout with the LAPD to rescue what we can from the wreckage of the SLA, just as we owe it to innocent and idealistic basketball players to sometimes simply enjoy a basketball game. I enjoyed watching the Warriors beat the Cavs, and I think Patty Hearst was right about her parents.

The SLA’s rhetoric was imaginative and invigorating, and the principles that they outlined—of racial harmony, of men and women working side by side in a united front against fascist America—are laudable. I like the image and the idea of the hydra, even though the hydra myth was selected by the ruling class because they felt as though it cohered with their worldview, and, moreover, despite the fact that Hercules defeats the hydra in the original myth. I don’t believe in myths. In reality, the hydra (the workers of the world, united) would win every time.

In conclusion, I think I have established beyond any reasonable doubt that the purpose of the 2017 NBA Finals was ultimately to trick the public into thinking that the Warriors’ (i.e. Silicon Valley’s) “disruptive” and “innovative” style represents something different, something in opposition to LeBron James’ (i.e. the real estate mogul’s) more “traditional” Herculean approach to crushing their opponent (i.e. you and I), and as such to foster within us a false sense of security and a trust in the methods, products, and institutions of Silicon Valley.

Regardless of what we each think about the SLA and the Golden State Warriors, there is one thing that I’m confident we can all agree upon:

[1] Incidentally, Hearst Communications Inc., the “fascist media empire” (DeFreeze’s words) established by William Randolph Hearst (Patty’s grandfather), owns 20% of ESPN, and we would be wise not to discount the possibility that they are working to insert fascist messages into their basketball broadcasts right now.

[2] Brad Screiber, who wrote a book about the SLA, believes that these communiques were probably written by Nancy Ling Perry, rather than DeFreeze or Colston Westbrook (the alleged CIA contractor and mastermind behind the SLA), and, moreover, that she was probably quite unaware that the SLA was not what it seemed to be. They may therefore have been written in earnest, making them “authentic.”

[3] Similarly, can one enjoy a Radiohead song knowing that Thom Yorke doesn’t give a shit about Palestinians and appeals to the authority or J. K. Rowling in order to excuse his apathy towards the disgusting violence of Israeli settlers?

[4] The CIA was, incidentally, quite fond of Barthes, promoting his work in the belief that it would lead well-meaning academics into a dead end. They weren’t necessarily right, however. Is it possible that, just as a discarded weapon, which may have been a tool of state repression, can be picked up by a revolutionary and used to murder the agents of capitalism, images, symbols, myths, rhetoric, and theoretical concepts can also be turned against their creators? To be clear, I am not asserting that they can, but it is an interesting and important question to consider.

[5] The secularisation thesis was perhaps most famously advocated by Max Weber, who declared that scientific advances would result in the “disenchantment” of the world. However, in spite of the rise of science and the increasing scrutiny under which religious truth claims are placed, the demise of religion predicted by proponents of the secularisation thesis has yet to occur. Émile Durkheim was more prescient, in my opinion, arguing that although it “seems natural…that religion should progressively fade as science becomes more adept at completing its task,” “insofar as religion is action, insofar as it is a human way of living, science could not possibly take its place.” Religion, according to Durkheim, has ceded one of its original functions to science: that is, its speculative function, its “right to be dogmatic about the nature of things.” Durkheim recognised that “religion clearly cannot play the same role in the future that it has in the past,” but had the foresight to recognise that “it seems called upon to transform itself rather than to disappear.”

Breaking the Press (Part 2): Everything in this Universe is a PSYOP

Basketball, Fascism, and the Limits of Permissible Punditry

Perhaps you know the story of the investigator who watched the dunk contest for this purpose, and equipped himself with pencil and paper to record, at the moment of awakening, whatever revelation might have been given to him. Fortunately, the expected experience took place, and, for a brief period, the investigator had the vivid conviction of complete comprehension of this universe, of life and death. He regained waking consciousness with the tail-end of the sensation still upon him, grabbed the pencil, and swiftly recorded the essential content of the experience just before it faded. After several minutes, during which his mind returned to its normal state, he looked at what he had written, and there upon the paper was the following immensely profound observation: everything in this universe is a PSYOP.

I’ve been meaning to write about the 2012 dunk contest for a while now. It remains, five years on, one of the most ludicrous and unsettling spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. It is so thoroughly saturated with signs and messages, along with the obligatory US State Department propaganda, that to do it justice would require a book-length write-up (a project I fully intend to pursue). In the meantime, with the UK general election nearing its conclusion, I would like to begin my formal investigation of the 2012 dunk contest by considering what it can tell us about parliamentary democracy.

The 2012 dunk contest was the first to completely dispense with judges (representatives) and implement a kind of direct dunkmocracy in which the audience voted (via text or Twitter) for their favourite performer. Phrases like “America votes” and “America, you decide” were repeated throughout the broadcast (evidently NBA basketball was not yet a #GlobalGame), but was this really a democratic process?

Even setting aside the obvious fact that its opaque electronic voting system was open to abuse, the democracy of the 2012 dunk contest, like the representative democracies of the United States and those of its allies, is illusory. Fans were permitted to vote for whichever dunker they preferred, but could select only from a field of four (horrible, insulting) candidates that they had played no part in nominating. There exists no mechanism which allows the public to select candidates for the dunk contest, to determine how many there will be, or to alter the format of the contest itself (which changes arbitrarily every year).

Thus, in 2012, television viewers watched four obscure and unexciting nobodies stumble about before an almost silent audience as the arena hype man screamed at them that what was taking place was entertaining. The public is well aware that there are other, better dunkers in the NBA than Derrick Williams, but such individuals are almost never invited to participate. On the rare occasions that a superior dunker is permitted to enter the dunk contest, we quickly find that they are curiously unable to perform the very dunks that made them popular in the first place. These populist dunkers invariably find that, in the face of the bright lights and insipid pageantry of the dunk contest, their dunking principles either desert them or are downplayed by the pundits on the sidelines.

This is no coincidence, nor is it the result of nerves; the current dunk contest system, by its very structure, prohibits original dunks. As with conventional parliamentary democracy, participants who are dedicated to progressive dunking are refused entry, and those few that do succeed in gaining admittance do so at the expense of whatever radical dunking ideology they may once have possessed.

Consider Jeremy Corbyn, an ostensibly principled politician who has, throughout his long career, condemned the criminal organisations of NATO and the EU, voted against one imperialist war after another, and campaigned for the UK’s nuclear disarmament. After two years of unrelenting pressure from the Blairite ghouls that dominate the parliamentary Labour Party as well as the craven stenographers of the capitalist press, his party’s manifesto ultimately turned out to be a pro-business, pro-war pile of shit (though, predictably, the usual suspects in the “progressive media” ate it up). Now that Corbyn’s election campaign is underway, Labour is “committed to NATO,” will ensure UK membership of the Single Market (i.e. membership of the capitalist EU in all but name), will continue funding Trident, and will put an extra 10,000 cops on the streets[1].

The challenge for organisers and administrators—whether of dunk contests or elections—is to keep the audience engaged in spite of the necessarily unpopular and uninteresting candidates from which they are expected to choose. This is achieved in two main ways. The first involves the inclusion of candidates so wildly inappropriate that the other contestants seem appealing by comparison: just as the 2012 dunk contest included Chase Buddinger, so elections in the US and Europe increasingly feature openly fascist candidates. How, for example, were French voters recently convinced to elect an investment banker as president? Simply by having him run against a repellent fascist[2].

It is in this way that liberalism and fascism exist in symbiosis: whether voters opt to thwart “the rising tide of right wing extremism” or to reject the liberal values of the bourgeois media, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen both ultimately exist to serve the interests of capital and of empire. No matter who wins, our class enemies always remain in power, yet the election of Macron—a former finance minister who referred to himself as a political “outsider” (a claim unquestioningly accepted by journalists and, as we shall see, even “critical voices” like Noam Chomsky)—was hailed as a victory for “progressive” values.

Which brings us to the second method by which interest and faith in these spectacles is maintained: the pundits. The 2012 dunk contest was narrated by the usual gang (Kevin Harlan, Kenny Smith, Charles Barkley, Reggie Miller, and Shaquille O’Neal). Through catchphrases and feigned excitement, their job is to infuse the contest with energy and legitimacy. The fact that it takes a team of five to fill the horrified silence in the arena and give the television audience a sense that something is happening when in fact nothing of interest is taking place says a lot about how boring and irrelevant these contests are to ordinary people.

Likewise, political elections in the United States and Europe would not be complete without an assortment of familiar and trusted journalists and academics whose job it is to mediate these processes for us. The role of these pundits is not to inform, however; it is to lend an air of legitimacy to proceedings, justifying the obviously undemocratic nature of capitalist society, and to help police the boundaries of acceptable discourse. Two of the most famous and highly regarded of these intellectuals-for-hire gave their pronouncements on the UK election earlier this month.

The problems, the men agreed, fell into three categories. First was the question of ‘communist sympathisers’ and ‘communist agents’ working at the BBC. Second was the possibility that ‘communist inspired speakers’ might be able to put their views across via programmes. The third problem the men discussed was, they agreed, the most difficult. This was the possibility that the BBC itself might become the location of industrial conflict and that the management of the Corporation might in a moment of ‘national crisis’ find itself vulnerable to ‘sabotage’ by BBC engineers.

Up first, Noam Chomsky was interviewed for the BBC’s flagship programme Newsnight by Evan Davis, an animatronic puppet with a PPE degree from Oxford who has published books on such edifying subjects as why the privatisation of public services is actually really good and why you should definitely trust the BBC. To his credit, Chomsky managed—to the visible discomfort of Davis—to slip in a couple of salient remarks about class (there exist “divides on all sorts of things, but a fundamental divide is the class divide”). Yet the bulk of the 22 minute interview was spent parroting Tory Party talking points (he agrees with Davis’ assessment that “there’s a sense of a lack of clarity about quite what [Jeremy Corbyn] stands for,” and claims that Corbyn is “evidently not inspiring the population,” despite all available evidence contradicting such a claim) and slowly muttering other insipid and barely audible clichés (Chomsky does not “go along with those who say that we have incipient fascism[3],” and apparently believes that Emmanuel Macron “came from the outside[4]”).

He is invited to repeat his claim that the Republican Party is “the most dangerous organisation in human history,” but very conveniently elides the innumerable and unforgivable crimes of the Democratic Party, the organisation that he has consistently urged American voters to support. As Michael Parenti recounts:

Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into detention camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to infiltrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later on leaders of the Communist Party for their political beliefs; detention camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a “national emergency”; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco’s fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated. And for the better part of a century, the Congressional leadership of the Democratic Party protected racial segregation and stymied all anti-lynching and fair employment bills. Yet all these crimes, bringing ruination and death to many, have not moved the liberals, the social democrats, and the “democratic socialist” anticommunists to insist repeatedly that we issue blanket condemnations of either the Democratic Party or the political system that produced it, certainly not with the intolerant fervor that has been directed against existing communism.

Whoops. Of course, Chomsky is perfectly happy to criticise the Democratic Party provided these criticisms do not undermine his audience’s willingness to vote for them again and again and again. He points out in his BBC interview that, despite the campaign rhetoric with which people were swept up in 2008, “there was no hope and there was no change” under the Obama regime. “The Democrats,” he observes, “gave up on the working class forty years ago. The working class is not their constituency. No one in the political system [represents the working class].” Yet despite this apparently damning indictment of American democracy (a representative system in which the majority of people are not represented is obviously not democratic), Chomsky frames this as an internal problem that the Democratic Party must address by itself.

His assessment of the situation in the UK is identical: the Labour Party, like the Democratic Party in the US, “did not represent the working class” through the neoliberal years, and is currently “split between the constituency and the parliamentary party” (in other words, the working class are not represented by their bourgeois representatives in parliament). Despite explaining in plain language that the UK’s political system is fundamentally and necessarily undemocratic, Chomsky simply declares that “the Labour Party has internal problems it has to deal with,” encouraging viewers to internalise the logic of the political spectacle, identify with their oppressors, and understand this lack of representation as a failure of the Labour Party to market itself successfully and not as an inevitable symptom of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. “These are internal problems to these decaying centrist institutions,” he concludes.

I am aware, of course, that Noam Chomsky knows a thing or two about how the media manufactures consent by filtering out critical voices. I think it is fair to argue, however, that if in exchange for being permitted to periodically remind people that class is important Chomsky is obliged to promote the Democratic Party (and by implication America’s sham democracy and aggressive imperialism) and insist that communism is evil and revolution impossible, he is not compromising but collaborating.

Before becoming a global celebrity, Žižek was the chief ideologist of the anti-communist, pseudo-left, ethnic separatist Liberal Democratic Party of Slovenia, but over the 1990s he transformed himself for the Anglophone market into a vaudeville Communist. This he accomplished by simply declaring himself a “Stalinist” and then proceeding to recycle Hitlerian anti-communist propaganda and vent Hitlerian complaints about liberalism to the already confused audiences of the imperial core university circuit.

A few days after Chomsky’s BBC appearance, Slavoj Žižek was invited to give a similarly enlightening interview for Channel 4 News. Like Chomsky, Žižek appears to have been briefed on the most essential Tory talking points before being allowed on air (Jeremy Corbyn is too “chaotic,” has no chance of winning, no clear vision, and so on and so on). He proceeds to extol the wisdom of inept empire theory (“President Obama, he did many stupid things…”), lament the EU referendum result when in fact it should be celebrated, and, channelling the “erratic Marxism” of Yanis Varoufakis, issue a few of his patented meaningless-but-“provocative” statements[5] (“I’m here a good Marxist—by this I mean…I have a deep admiration for capitalism. Let’s face it, capitalism is a wonder…”).

But the most striking thing about Žižek’s election interview is his obvious and craven policing of the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. “I’m not a Leninist, don’t be afraid,” he remarks early on, before repeating himself later: “we need…a stronger alternative—and don’t be afraid, I’m not talking about some new Leninist party or something.” At no point does he offer any explanation as to why “some new Leninist party or something” would be a bad thing, nor does his interviewer (Cathy Newman, another cardboard Oxford graduate) ask him to elaborate; successful socialist revolutions are simply forbidden territory for these “subversive” academics (unless it is to dismiss them out of hand). Fascism, on the other hand, is apparently a proposition that we must now consider thoroughly, weighing its “merits” as well as its unfortunate drawbacks…

“The left…doesn’t have an answer,” Žižek continues, embracing the impotent and diversionary hand-wringing that has become a defining characteristic of the celebrity left pundit. “We do not yet have the formula of what to do.” That we do in fact have a tried and tested formula of what to do is something that will never be discussed on national television, either in the UK or in the US, and to say this is not to offer some sort of fringe conspiracy theory. I have already written about the American press and its troubling relationship with the CIA, but a similar arrangement exists here in the United Kingdom. Defence of the status quo and a rigid anti-communist stance have been fundamental components of the BBC’s ethos since its creation. In 1933, following a Lunch with the Controller of Programmes, Brigadier Oswald ‘Jasper’ Harker, then head of MI5’s counter-espionage and counter-subversion branch, wrote approvingly of the BBC that its

general line is the one which we ourselves try to follow; that is to say that any political views which look upon the ballot box as the proper solution of their problems are reasonable politics; anything that goes outside the ballot box—such as communism or fascism[6]—is considered to be subversive if not seditious.

As Tom Mills explains in his recent book on the history of the Corporation, the BBC secretly and systematically vetted its staff, rooting out suspected communists and pacifists over a period of fifty years and only abandoning the practice in 1985 after a team of investigative journalists exposed what was happening. Of course, political vetting did not cease (the system was “revised and radically changed”), and senior BBC employees maintain close contact with MI5 and MI6, publishing and broadcasting whatever feckless propaganda is deemed expedient by the state.

It is sometimes imagined that the ‘death of deference’ in the 1960s, and the impact this had on journalistic culture, led to the combative style of political interviewing exemplified at the BBC by figures like Jeremy Paxman and John Humphreys. While not entirely erroneous, this is something of a misreading. The social change of that era no doubt opened up space for this type of journalism; but the irreverent style stems less from the egalitarian spirit of the 1960s and ‘70s, and more from the bumptious posturing of the public school and Oxbridge debating societies, or the ‘moots’ at which would-be barristers pit their wits against one another.

Since the election was called, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg has been caught passing off a Tory campaign slogan for political analysis and regularly uses her Twitter account to assist the Tories and smear Jeremy Corbyn. Earlier this month, BBC political correspondent Eleanor Garnier, the daughter of Tory MP Edward Garnier, was sent to question Theresa May. You get the idea.

Faced with a critical and restless public increasingly uninclined to take for granted the credibility and authority of establishment journalism (the European Broadcasting Union has found the UK press the least trusted in Europe), the BBC has resorted to the same sort of desperate appeal we’ve seen from other decaying legacy media, casting itself as “the most trusted brand in news” in a recent advert. There is, of course, quite an important distinction between being trusted and being trustworthy, but I imagine the marketing geniuses at the BBC are very proud of themselves for this clever sleight of hand that will no doubt keep the proles fooled.

It’s not just the big transnational newspapers and broadcasters that find themselves edging towards the precipice, either. Regional newspapers across the UK have invented something called “trusted news day,” a perfectly natural event that you’d expect to see in any free society with a robust and healthy press. My own local newspaper, the Hastings Obscurer, recently published a series of very convincing features assuring its readers that it really is a very credible paper interested in facts and truth and things like that.

It is helpful, in my opinion, to view the election in this context—not as part of a supposed proliferation of “populist” movements in which Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and Marine Le Pen are all lumped together and cast as “anti-establishment” (not one of them is), but as part of a battle between the working class and their oppressors. The “unexpected” and “undesirable” results we’ve seen in recent months signify a weakening of the capitalist news media’s hegemony, and this is a welcome development. The Guardian, for example, is currently haemorrhaging money as its readers become increasingly perplexed and frustrated by its hollow claims of conducting “independent, investigative journalism” while simultaneously publishing articles in praise of George Bush and Tony Blair. With any luck a Labour victory will finish it off.

What the 2012 dunk contest sought to do (among other things) was establish in the minds of its audience, through procedural rhetoric, the legitimacy of these sham democracies. Dunk contests, along with other kinds of interactive reality television, reinforce the logic of representative democracies in which voters collectively exercise only a limited control over superficial issues and are prohibited from addressing fundamental problems. The dunk contest will be sponsored by Sprite, whether we like it or not, just as the next prime minister of the United Kingdom will inevitably be sponsored by BAE Systems.

Thank you for listening.

[1] Obviously, I would be happier with a Labour victory than a Tory victory (the Tories will kill countless people both here and abroad); the point is that we are never presented with an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist choice, and thus are condemned to suffer in one way or another under the current bourgeois dictatorship.

[2] Incidentally, this was the first French election in my lifetime during which I could actually name more than two of the candidates—and this is not because I have recently taken a special interest in French politics. Even here in the UK, it was common for BBC news bulletins to lead with stories about Marine Le Pen, as though she were the most important person in Europe, her election inevitable.

[3] I disagree. Rather than erroneously referring to them as populists, we should call our political leaders what they are: fascists. The Tory Party is indeed a fascist party. They have rendered UKIP, formerly the UK’s burgeoning outsider fascist threat, utterly irrelevant politically by adopting all of its worst policies. The Tories adhere to any definition of fascism you might care to use. Thus, here in the UK, we are faced with precisely the same dilemma as in France: a fascist or a faux-outsider/collaborator.

[4] For all of Žižek’s faults (and there are many), at least he didn’t fall for this one during his Channel 4 interview.

[5] Some more of Žižek’s greatest hits, from The Fragile Absolute, a few pages of which I occasionally read when on the toilet: “…it is multicultural tolerance and permissiveness which induce real boredom”; “Marx’s fundamental mistake was to conclude…that a new, higher social order (Communism) is possible”; “…the critics of Communism were right when they claimed that Marxian Communism is an impossible fantasy”; “…’actually existing Socialism’ failed because it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism, an ideological attempt to ‘have one’s cake and eat it’, to break out of capitalism while retaining its key ingredient.”

[6] This apparently anti-fascist orientation was never sincere, however (or, if it was, it was quickly abandoned). As Mills writes of the BBC’s arrangements in anticipation for the outbreak of war: “Speakers hostile to fascism were barred from broadcasting and Winston Churchill, who was unusual among his class for his antipathy to Nazism if not fascism per se, complained in 1938 that he had been ‘muzzled by the BBC’ following his last broadcast on German rearmament four years earlier.”

Breaking the Press (Part 1): Escape To Hell

Basketball, Hegemony, and the Central Intelligence Agency

The vast majority of professionals in the field of journalism share similar ideals of empiricism, objectivity, and neutrality. The problem is that these ideals as such, while most certainly worthwhile, can never be fully attained. One might even say that repeated and overconfident claims about their being easily attained every day does in certain respects do more harm than good, because they hide the contingent, socio-historically embedded nature of these truth-claims from critical scrutiny and invite excessive confidence in their universal validity. Is it possible to look well at anything at all if one does not choose a vantage point and maybe use some aids, such as binoculars or glasses, a telescopic lens or a microscope? These refract the light, place some things in the centre of our field of vision, and temporarily exclude others from it. I claim that it is not possible to maintain complete objectivity; only a certain degree of intersubjectivity is possible, but this intersubjectivity is always situated and shaped socio-historically. — Kyrie Irving

What is real, and whom can we trust?

When Kyrie Irving announced on a podcast earlier this month his belief that the earth is flat, he was widely ridiculed. John Chick speculated that Irving, like so many credulous Trump and “Brexit” voters, had fallen prey to the post-truth zeitgeist: seduced and corrupted by the myriad Kremlin-backed conspiracy blogs that saturate and pollute the web in 2017. These dangerous websites eschew journalistic orthodoxy (which is sober and rigorous!) in favour of sensational and incredible claims backed with little to no compelling evidence. Readers, we’re told, are thus free to indulge in whatever kind of false reality they wish.

The plot thickened somewhat over All-Star Weekend, however, as Irving subsequently implied that he was just fooling around in order to make a point about the absurdity of the news media, what audiences are prepared to believe of celebrities, and what journalists are prepared to report as meaningful news. This narrative was cemented when arch reptile Adam Silver stepped in and confirmed that, at least officially, Irving was indeed offering a critique of fake news.

Whether a discussion about so-called fake news was Irving’s sincere intention (it is after all perfectly plausible that he does believe in a flat Earth; thousands of people do, and their videos are, frankly, fascinating) or merely Adam Silver’s attempt at damage control is really not important. What is interesting is that this was not the only public statement against the supposed threat of fake news to issue from the NBA community this month.

On the first of February, Steve Kerr, Zach Lowe, and JJ Redick (among others) bragged to their Twitter followers that they had courageously paid for subscriptions to establishment garbage rags like the Washington Post and the New York Times, “because,” Kerr announced, “facts matter.” This was part of a campaign called #PressOn, a sort of synthesis of conspicuous consumption and online activism that requires participants to spend money on prestige news products (and post screenshots to prove it) in order to combat the apparent scourge of dubious alternative media outlets that supposedly swept Donald Trump to power. Now more than ever, these concerned citizens claim, we need to cultivate and support a robust free press capable of holding power to account!

But does pledging support for the New York Times differ in any meaningful way from vowing to buy more Starbucks coffee after the company cynically announced its intention to hire 10,000 refugees over the next five years? Like ethical consumerism, the #PressOn campaign encourages its participants to conceive of themselves not as active and engaged citizens, but primarily as consumers who affect change in the world simply by purchasing goods and services. Buying more Starbucks coffee simply encourages the company to commit more crimes; it serves as a sanitised substitute for useful actions like not buying Starbucks coffee.

But this is far from the only problem with #PressOn. Let us consider the papers in question, the New York Times and the Washington Post. These publications, according to obsequious liberal coward John Oliver, perform “actual journalism” and are desperately in need of your financial support! This is, of course, grossly inaccurate (more on that below), and the willingness of somebody like Zach Lowe (a journalist, technically) to endorse such a view suggests, at best, ignorance and naiveté.

To promote America’s corporate press in this way is not to take a defiant political stand, to breach the comfortable sports media bubble, as the lightweights of American sports journalism would have you and I believe. On the contrary, it betrays a desire to reconstruct that very bubble, to return to a world in which the horrific crimes of empire are not absent, but merely softened, made sufficiently palatable, by a charismatic and handsome president, and mediated by a credible paper of record.

News is a form of collective therapy. Possible threats to our world order and our world-views are evoked, identified, labelled, categorised, dealt with and dispatched again. For this purpose, journalists summon a daily parade of authorities and experts. They put our minds at rest, so that we can go to bed reassured. — Wilson Chandler

A charitable reading of this sudden compulsion to address the perceived rupture in America’s status quo (which is not really a rupture but an amplification/acceleration of existing patterns) would see it as a craven desire to retreat back into the cocoon of privilege, a longing for the freedom to disengage from political struggle—which is difficult, time-consuming, and often thankless—and inhabit once more the orderly and reassuring world sold by the Times and the Post. But it is precisely this urge that must be resisted. Those who only now see the US government for what it is, only when its leader is the grotesque personification of bourgeois America’s most vulgar excesses, must not turn back, but instead press on! Having finally arrived in reality, they must acquaint themselves with its permanent inhabitants—those who cannot afford to escape, who are offered no refuge in the parallel dimensions of the corporate media. All are welcome here, and we must work together towards something better.

Yet there is a further possibility lurking behind Lowe’s call to support the establishment press; something entirely more sinister. In order to understand what this is we must consider the sordid history of American news media and its relationship with US intelligence agencies.

Before that, however, I’d like to address the cultish liberal faith in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the erroneous belief that these publications conduct “actual journalism,” that they are concerned with objective “facts,” and that they have a monopoly on “the truth.” To imply that any American news organisation—let alone ones as thoroughly compromised as the Times and the Post—will produce neutral reporting free of ideological baggage is laughable. Having monitored the fake news narrative for some months now, it has become apparent that there exists a great deal of confusion regarding what news is and how it is produced, so let’s get some things straight.

News—all news—is not what has happened. It is what someone says has happened (or will happen). Reporters are seldom in a position to witness events first-hand. They have to rely on the accounts of others. Readers, whether they are ESPN columnists or NBA coaches, tend to lose sight of the fact that news is not—is never—reality, but a sampling of sources’ portrayals of reality, mediated by news organisations[1]. To coordinate the activities of their staffs with a modicum of efficiency, newspapers can do little more than establish some standard operating procedures for sampling potential sources. Whatever procedure they adopt unavoidably biases their selection of content[2].

The professional insistence that objective journalism is desirable, and that objective determinations of newsworthiness are possible, arose during the nineteenth century as part of the sweeping intellectual movement towards scientific detachment and the culture-wide separation of fact from value. As an abstract ideal towards which one might strive, objectivity is useful. But to actually believe that such an ideal is realistic and within one’s grasp is the signature of bad journalism.

Many people think that the political mainstream of the West has no ideological views but only scientific ones, that only right-wing and left-wing ‘extremists’ in the First World have ideologies, as well as all those extremists in the Second and Third Worlds. This is the very hallmark of an effective ideology: that it is not recognised as an ideology at all, but is naturalised as common sense. It is impossible not to have an ideology: without it one could never find one’s place in the nation and society. — Draymond Green

These days, most Western media and news-gathering organisations are primarily run as businesses. That is to say, the owners expect a return on their investment. They want income up and costs down. They want advertisers pleased, major sources available, no libel suits from powerful individuals or institutions, no bothersome controversies. As a result, it is the public official who is the most frequently cited source of news: they are available, cooperative, and they invest reports with an air of authority and professionalism.

In his 1973 study Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking, Lion Sigal analysed a representative sample of 2,850 domestic and foreign news stories that appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post over a twenty-five year period. He discovered that public officials were the source of 78 per cent of those stories. According to Sigal,

as a consequence of reporters’ social location, newsgathering routines, and journalistic conventions, nearly half of the sources for all national and foreign news stories on page one of the New York Times and the Washington Post were officials in the United States government. Most transmitted information through routine newsgathering channels—press releases, conferences and official proceedings.

It should therefore come as no surprise to hear that the New York Times has supported every single US war for the past thirty years, and that Washington Post associate editor Karen DeYoung described her paper as “inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power.” Indeed, the stenographers of American journalism want to honour the current political-economic system as a whole since their very power and prestige deeply presuppose that system. They are committed, like members of any other corporate elite, to their own particular economic and political advantage. As Todd Gitlin writes,

The news routines are skewed toward representing demands, individuals, and frames which do not fundamentally contradict the dominant hegemonic[3] principles: the legitimacy of private control of commodity production; the legitimacy of the national security State; the legitimacy of technocratic experts; the right and ability of authorized agencies to manage conflict and make the necessary reforms; the legitimacy of the social order secured and defined by the dominant elites; and the value of individualism as the measure of social existence. The news routines do not easily represent demands, movements, and frames which are inchoate, subtle, and most deeply subversive of these core principles. Political news is treated as if it were crime news—what went wrong today, not what goes wrong every day. A demonstration is treated as a potential or actual disruption of legitimate order, not as a statement about the world. The assumptions automatically divert coverage away from critical treatment of the institutional, systemic, and everyday workings of property and the state.

Every month, thousands upon thousands of people around the globe die unnecessarily due to poverty, but the major media do not paint this as an acute disaster which warrants immediate foregrounding. Rather, it is treated as a chronic situation which remains in the background. Preventable deaths from malnutrition and poverty are generally depicted as a fact of life, which is the fault or responsibility of no one in particular—not even those who could have done something about it. If these same poor people stage an armed rebellion, however, they are held responsible for the ensuing bloodshed. Of course, this view might well be defended; that is not the point. The point is that it is a view which is unnoticeably woven into the “neutral presentation” of “objective facts” in the world of news.

It is for this reason that so much of the current coverage regarding Tump is incoherent and facile. Trump didn’t appear out of nowhere: the material, cultural, and political conditions that enabled him to become president were left to fester for decades beyond journalistic scrutiny because they were both outside the scope of what papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post regard as newsworthy, and, moreover, because they cohere with the ideological stance of both editorial boards anyway. Only a fool or a propagandist would advocate looking to these papers for guidance.

The first article of the Bill of Rights was placed there as a pledge of safety to the people, and therefore the primary obligation of the newspaper in general and of the reporter in particular is to the people. He does not owe that primary allegiance to his managing editor, or to his government, or to the sources of his information; he owes it to the people. — Steve Kerr

For proof of this we need only consider the recent output of these two papers. The Washington Post continues to assiduously promote the New Cold War narrative, while the New York Times, when it isn’t smearing millennials, is busy raising awareness about the very serious problems facing America’s billionaire class. In a recent op-ed, bourgeois pundit and partially preserved bog mummy David Brooks laments the death of the entrepreneurial spirit among today’s youth:

Americans used to be entrepreneurial, but there has been a decline in start-ups as a share of all business activity over the last generation. Millennials may be the least entrepreneurial generation in American history. The share of Americans under 30 who own a business has fallen 65 percent since the 1980s.

Since the 1980s, you say? Brooks concludes by implying that nobody has offered any alternative to capitalism, that there is no social movement with a compelling plan. “If Trump is not the answer,” he demands, “what is?” Indeed, maybe we just need to give Trump a chance!

In an article reminiscent of Catholic Vote’s infamous Not Alone advert, which tastelessly subverted the language of aggrieved victims in order to elicit sympathy for bigots, nonentity Sabrina Tavernise asks whether mean “liberals” are in fact helping Trump. Tavernise relates a series of chilling case studies, including a man struggling to get dates and a couple of old people who no longer want to watch Meryl Streep films. It certainly makes you think: who are the real fascists?

This is only the tip of the iceberg, however. Towards the end of the Vietnam War, US congressional committees launched several investigations into suspicions of repeated media manipulation by the CIA and the FBI. The official reports were censored (at the insistence of former CIA directors William Colby and George H. W. Bush, among others), but investigative journalists were nevertheless able to reconstruct the suppressed information.

The former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein wrote in Rolling Stone magazine (20 October 1977: 55–67) that “more than 400 American journalists” had “in the previous 25 years secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.” This included only those who were specifically “tasked”—still more journalists “occasionally traded favours” with the agency. Media which knowingly cooperated, he said, included all major news agencies, AP, UPI, and Reuters; major daily newspapers such as the New York Times, the major Hearst and Scripps-Howard newspaper groups; both major news weeklies, Time and Newsweek; and all major broadcasting networks, ABC, CBS and NBC. Assignments ranged from spying to “planting subtly concocted pieces of misinformation.” After this publication, two reporters from the New York Times itself delved into the issue (New York Times, 25–27 December, 1977):

The CIA has at various times owned or subsidized more than 50 newspapers, news services, radio stations, periodicals and other communication entities … Another dozen foreign-based news organizations, while not financed by the CIA, were infiltrated by paid CIA agents. Nearly a dozen American publishing houses, including some of the most prominent names of the industry, have printed at least a score of more than 250 English-language books financed or produced by the CIA … Since the closing days of World War II, more than 30 and perhaps as many as 100 American journalists employed by a score of American news organizations have worked as salaried intelligence operatives while performing their reportorial duties … At one time, according to agency sources, there were as many as 800 such ‘propaganda assets’, mostly foreign journalists. Asked in an interview last year whether the CIA had ever told such agents what to write, William E. Colby, the former CIA director, replied: ‘Oh, sure, all the time’… Almost at the push of a button, or so Mr. Wisner [the first chief of the agency’s covert action staff] liked to think, the ‘Wurlitzer’ became the means of orchestrating, in almost any language anywhere in the world, whatever tune the CIA was in the mood to hear.

A journalist who is a leading expert on the Internet Research Agency claimed that some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015. The likely financier of the so-called Internet Research Agency of professional trolls located in Saint Petersburg is a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence. — Zach Lowe

In the wake of these publications, official promises were made that such anti-democratic tampering would never be allowed to happen again (at least in America; media manipulation would of course have to continue abroad). However, during the Reagan and Bush presidencies (1980–92) the practice flourished once again. Successive American interventions in Cuba, Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua, and Panama were all preceded, accompanied, and followed by massive campaigns of media manipulation, as well as the allied intervention in the Gulf.

Are the CIA directly controlling the New York Times and the Washington Post today? Probably not. We have no way of knowing for sure. It is extremely unlikely that they do not exert at least some control, however.

Last month I borrowed John Amaechi’s argument that sports can serve as platforms for social change. This isn’t a particularly sophisticated idea, and the CIA—currently involved in a global culture war—is almost certainly aware of the potential power and reach of sports. Could they have infiltrated ESPN? I think the answer is obvious.

When he isn’t promoting the Washington Post, Zach Lowe busies himself by celebrating advanced stats and SportVU cameras, which, as I have demonstrated, are dangerous tools of capitalist oppression. I asked Lowe about his alleged CIA affiliation, but he did not return my tweet. I do not think it unreasonable to speculate that Lowe has indeed been hired as a kind of basketball Peter Pomerantsev, a friendly and relatable young face with credibility among educated “millennials” who can, by subtle means, help the CIA to promote the goals of empire through yet another channel.

To be continued.

[1] Now, this is not to say that all news is entirely worthless, or that everything you read is a lie, or that people who read the New York Times and the Washington Post have necessarily been brainwashed. It is simply a reminder to be cautious and critical at all times.  “The press is significantly more than a purveyor of information and opinion,” wrote Bernard Cohen in his 1963 study The Press and Foreign Policy. “It may not be successful in telling its readers what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.”

[2] According to Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge’s 1965 study The Structure of Foreign News, this unfolds in the following way: 1. The more events satisfy the arbitrary criteria for newsworthiness, the more likely that they will be registered as news (selection); 2. Once a news item has been selected what makes it newsworthy according to the arbitrary criteria will be accentuated (distortion); 3. Both the process of selection and the process of distortion will take place at all steps in the chain of news production, from event to reader (replication).

[3] Gramsci’s concept can be defined this way: hegemony is a ruling class’s (or alliance’s) domination of subordinate classes and groups through the elaboration and penetration of ideology (ideas and assumptions) into their common sense and everyday practice; it is the systematic (but not necessarily or even usually deliberate) engineering of mass consent to the established order. No hard and fast line can be drawn between the mechanisms of hegemony and the mechanisms of coercion; the hold of hegemony rests on elements of coercion, just as the force of coercion over the dominated both presupposes and reinforces elements of hegemony. In any given society, hegemony and coercion are interwoven. […]. Further, hegemony is, in the end, a process that is entered into by both dominators and dominated. Both rulers and ruled derive psychological and material rewards in the course of confirming and reconfirming their inequality. The hegemonic sense of the world seeps into popular ‘common sense’ and gets reproduced there; it may even appear to be generated by that common sense.

“I Don’t Even Celebrate That Shit”

Basketball, Semiology, and Pax Americana

Expansion, as the ‘Wisconsin school’ of American historiography has demonstrated, has been at the very core of the American experience. Empire constitutes the habitus—the dispositions that generate perceptions, practices and policies—of US elites. Imperial outlooks permeated the US as much as they did the European imperial societies where empire is a past that has never really or entirely passed. The United States emerged as a nation state in a global political economy of empires. Its expansion was conditioned by the overall expansion of the Euro-Atlantic imperial system. Notwithstanding American exceptionalist mythologies, expansion was founded on concepts of racial and cultural differences that were common to all the nineteenth-century empires. — Josh Howard

In 2008 a video surfaced in which Josh Howard, filmed during the performance of the American national anthem at Allen Iverson‘s “Celebrity Flag Football game,” looked into the camera and declared, “I don’t even celebrate that shit. I’m black.”

In the wake of Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protests, and in light of the various comparisons that have been drawn between him and other principled,  politically aware athletes like Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and Craig Hodges, I wanted to draw some attention to—and express appreciation for—Josh Howard’s less celebrated and more succinct critique of American patriotism.

While Howard did (eventually) apologise for his remarks, it wasn’t an especially convincing apology. Already a pariah in the eyes of fans and journalists due to his open marijuana use (which, as he has correctly pointed out, is his own choice and did not prevent him from doing his job), Howard probably understood that there would be no pleasing white America regardless of what he chose to say. Interestingly, during the same press conference at which he formally apologised for “disrespecting” the USA, Howard was asked what he thought about the prospect of playing alongside newly-acquired point guard Jason Kidd, a serial spousal abuser who would go on to drink-drive his car into a telephone pole in 2012 (behaviour apparently warranting back-to-back sportsmanship awards for “ethical behaviour” and “integrity”[1]).

Following his anthem scandal, Howard would play only one more full season of basketball in Dallas before injuries effectively derailed his career. This conveniently eliminated any need for the NBA to actively blackball him like it had Abdul-Rauf and Hodges (although Howard, a former All-Star and indisputably talented scorer, has apparently been attempting—unsuccessfully, so far—to make a comeback, so it’s quite possible that he is being frozen out after all).

Had he known how things would turn out, I’d like to believe that Howard, understanding that he had nothing to lose, would have stuck to his guns and refused to apologise. After all, what exactly was he apologising for? He hadn’t broken any rules or laws, and, moreover, he was expressing a view that is perfectly rational and correct.

With some notable exceptions, a great deal of the print and airtime devoted to Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protests has focused on form rather than substance. The pressing issues, according to establishment sports media, are whether white America is ready to have its beloved sports politicised, or whether Kaepernick’s kneeling will be sufficiently effective in ending racism. Missing from this narrative are, of course, the “bodies in the streets” that Kaepernick has cited as prompting his disobedience, and the fact that “[police] are being given paid leave for killing people.”

I don’t want to waste any time recounting what Kaepernick and other athletes are currently doing (I’ll assume that if you’re reading this you’re familiar with the situation). Nor am I going to belabour the point that Kaepernick is, of course, completely right about police brutality. Not only are racist cops all over America regularly rewarded for shooting innocent black people with impunity, they are punished if they don’t!

Colin Kaepernick has done a tremendous job drawing renewed attention to one of the most serious problems plaguing American society, and has at the same time made white conservatives deservedly uncomfortable. He has sparked a public debate, and I intend to contribute to that debate. The focus of my (constructive and well-meaning) critique of Kaepernick’s position will concern not police brutality but the brutality routinely inflicted on civilians all over the world by the military forces of the American Empire.

Following the discovery of his initially discreet and unremarkable protest (Kaepernick began by sitting down during anthem performances and only started kneeling to appease the belligerent turbo-patriots who control the NFL and American sports media), Kaepernick was grilled by journalists on the specific meaning of his disobedience. Predictably, he was asked what he thought about the American military, and, regrettably, he capitulated immediately: “I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country. […]. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice, for everyone.”

While some have argued, understandably, that it was something of a non-sequitur to request that Kaepernick issue a statement outlining his position on the military, it was—unintentionally, I’m sure—a salient question. First, it demonstrates a recognition that one cannot condemn American police for killing innocent people without also condemning the American military for perpetrating worse crimes on a far, far larger scale. Second, it inadvertently reveals the true and precise meaning of the American flag and national anthem: empire.

The development of publicity, of a national press, of radio, of illustrated news, not to speak of the survival of a myriad rites of communication which rule social appearances makes the development of a semiological science more urgent than ever. In a single day, how many really non-signifying fields do we cross? Very few, sometimes none. Here I am, before the field; it is true that it bears no message. But on the bleachers, what material for semiology! Flags, slogans, signals, sign-boards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages to me. — Roland Barthes

According to Roland Barthes, a sign (in this case The Star-Spangled Banner) is composed of both signifier (particular lyrics sung to a particular tune) and signified (military adventurism, white supremacy, capitalism). Likewise, the sign that is the American flag is composed of signifier (a piece of cloth) and signified (military adventurism, white supremacy, capitalism). We know that this is what the flag and anthem signify because these are the things that the American public scrambled to defend. Nobody accused Colin Kaepernick of disrespecting jazz, breakdancing, or Tom Waits, because the American national anthem does not signify these things. Rather, it signifies the overthrowing of democratically elected leaders and the installation of dictators; it signifies the plundering of resources; it signifies slavery; it signifies genocide. That an assortment of bellowing white men leapt to defend the American war machine in the wake of Kaepernick’s anthem protests tells you all you need to know about what it means to be an American patriot.

The Star-Spangled Banner doesn’t just signify racism in the semiological sense; the lyrics themselves are overtly racist! What I’ve outlined above isn’t just what America represents in some abstract sense—it is what the American ruling class has undertaken every single day for centuries. America’s empire surpasses all previous empires in its cruelty and destructiveness. If territorial expansion and the “removal” of indigenous populations falls within the settler colonial norm, the institutionalisation of domestic despotism is, according to Philip S. Golub, a singularity of the liberal American state: while the European imperial states exported their violence and subjugated peoples overseas, the United States applied despotism within large areas of its constantly expanding sphere of continental sovereignty. Slavery is one of the major distinguishing features of the early American empire.

We needn’t spend long dwelling on specific instances from America’s endless list of sins—this is a basketball blog, after all—but the following two examples are representative of America’s despotism at home and abroad. Speaking about the Native American population in 1868, beloved American war hero General William Tecumseh Sherman remarked: “we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” Two years later, Sherman, evidently in a lighter mood, wrote, “the more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization are simply ridiculous.” In the twenty years that followed, the US army waged—in the words of General Philip Sheridan—a “campaign of annihilation, obliteration and complete destruction” against Native Americans.

Not content with spreading freedom and democracy at home, the United States’ military applied itself abroad in the same spirit. Senator Alfred Beveridge considered the conquest and subjugation of the Philippines (1899–1902) a necessary step to “establish the supremacy of the American republic throughout the East till the end of time.” Admonishing those of his peers who recoiled at the atrocities being committed by American forces in the archipelago, he advocated the extermination of all nationalist Filipino insurgents: “The Philippines are ours forever. […]. A lasting peace can be secured only by overwhelming forces in ceaseless action until universal and absolutely final defeat is inflicted on the enemy. To halt before every guerrilla band opposing us is dispersed or exterminated will prolong hostilities and leave alive the seeds of perpetual insurrection.”

But all of this is old news, ancient history. From the early 1950s until today, the United States has either been at war, supporting war-making, or sustaining predatory states almost constantly in one or another part of the empire: the Philippines, 1948–1954; Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; Indonesia, 1955–1975; Congo/Zaire, 1960–1965; Cuba, 1961; Brazil, 1960s; Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, 1963–1975; Chile, 1973; Angola, 1975–1992; Nicaragua, 1980s; Grenada, 1983; Panama, 1989–1990; Afghanistan, 1980–1988; Iran–Iraq war, 1980–1988; Iraq, 1990–1991; and so on and so on. The notion that following the conclusion—by gratuitous nuclear genocide—of the Second World War, a period of peace, a Pax Americana, has spread across the globe, is an utter fantasy.

The vast and informal sphere of American Empire has always rested on a planetary security structure established during the Second World War whose forward points, the archipelago of land-based and floating military platforms disseminated throughout the world, constitute the mobile frontiers of American sovereignty. These platforms can and should be understood as the territorialised nodes of empire. The potential and often actualised violence of the security structure secures the wider informal sphere and allows the US, in the worlds of former Pentagon official Alberto Coll, to “move the international order in a favourable direction.” — Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf

The American ruling class still conceives of the United States as an empire, and their actions reflect this. America has polluted the world with military bases which, once established as “lily-pads” (what a pleasant euphemism!), grow aggressively, like tumours. The inherently expansionist character of America’s self-perpetuating military-industrial establishment requires, in the words of sociologist C. Wright Mills, “war or a high state of war preparedness” and a state of “emergency without foreseeable end.”

By the end of the 1990s, journalists (stenographers) and academics (propagandists) routinely compared the United Sates to “the greatest empires of the past,” and influential forces began dreaming of a new “American Century” along with a renewed and much expanded “American Peace.” In 1998, soon after an American bombing raid on Iraq, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asserted: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America.  We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” In a particularly telling act soon after the George W. Bush administration was sworn in, the Office of the Secretary of Defense commissioned a still classified comparative study of ancient and modern empires to ascertain how they had “maintained their dominance.”

America’s commitment to permanent strategic supremacy cannot be considered a response to September 11. It was articulated in the early 1990s and is a state-centric approach that has nothing whatsoever to do with any presumed threat from transnational terrorism. No large-scale mobilisation was required to deter or destroy so-called “rogue states.” For that, pre-existing military capabilities were, as Afghanistan and Iraq proved, largely sufficient. Rather, America’s military adventures are invariably undertaken to further the economic interests of its ruling class. As Dick Chaney explained while testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 1991: “In addition to southwest Asia, we have important interests in Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and Central and Latin America. In each of these regions there are opportunities and potential future threats to our interests. We must configure our policies and our forces to effectively deter, or quickly defeat, such future regional threats.”

War is just a racket. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I served two years with the Navy, and during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. — David Robinson

The problems that Colin Kaepernick identifies regarding the US military—that veterans returning from war don’t receive adequate support or treatment for mental health issues, and that the actions of racist police dishonour their “sacrifices”—barely scratch the surface. The military and the police exhibit many of the same problems in America: both are thoroughly corrupt institutions whose criminal behaviour and attempted cover-ups have been exposed for all to see. Both put guns in the hands of aggressive young men without providing them with adequate training or education, and both are utterly opaque and accountable to no one.

When questioned about his protest, Kaepernick cited “bodies in the streets” and cops “getting away with murder,” yet he doesn’t acknowledge the fact that these complaints can—and should—be levelled at the American military as well. Civilians all over the world are brutalised, raped, and killed by US military personnel daily. The ever-increasing militarisation of American police has simply given US citizens a taste of what people outside America have experienced for decades.  Kaepernick must interrogate why he has “respect” for this institution, and why anybody who disrespects it is excommunicated.

 

I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country. […]. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice, for everyone.

Police are slave catchers; soldiers are gangsters for capitalism; Colin Kaepernick is Yanis Varoufakis. A popular and charismatic pseudo-Marxist career politician, Varoufakis continues to promote a bizarre and incoherent critique of the EU that both acknowledges the impossibility of democratising it while at the same time proposing to democratise it. Varoufakis will no doubt enjoy a long and lucrative career giving TED talks to imbecile Guardian readers, perhaps even making his way back into mainstream politics, but his self-serving Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 is a pointless red herring that will serve only to waste everybody’s time and energy.  Similarly, Kaepernick, in maintaining that the United States can live up to its own myth without ending imperialism, presents a critique of American patriotism that is of severely limited scope.

Despite his shortcomings, Colin Kaepernick has shown infinitely more courage than the soft and obsequious Stephen Curry, who refuses to protest the anthem at all despite his coach’s blessing, and who has publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton, the candidate of Silicon Valley. But when discussing or celebrating the various anthem protests that have followed Kaepernick’s, it is crucial to acknowledge not just the informal backlash of marginal racist sports fans, but the official backlash of the various sports leagues themselves. The NBA has so far successfully conspired to prevent any kind of salient political statement from reaching its audience, replacing real protest with cowardly and depoliticised gestures that mean absolutely nothing.

Sevyn Streeter, for example, was told at the last minute that she would not be permitted to perform the national anthem on opening night in Philadelphia simply because she’d decided to wear a shirt that displayed the words “we matter.” Streeter later explained, “I…felt it was important to express the ongoing challenges and ongoing injustice we face as a black community within the United States of America—that’s very important to me. Yes, we live in the greatest country in the world, but there are issues that we cannot ignore.”

Yes, we live in the greatest country in the world.

The USA is a backward and oppressive country where to publicly assert that black people matter is obscene and forbidden. It is not great, or good, or even average. Streeter isn’t alone in citing this peculiar fantasy about American greatness in the face of indisputable evidence to the contrary. Even the more thoughtful responses to Colin Kaepernick’s protests have framed him as some sort of true American patriot bravely representing the real values that America stands for. But this is just more of the same delusional American exceptionalism that underpins the arguments of Kaepernick’s racist and conservative critics. To pat the American public on the back and assure them that Colin Kaepernick is fighting the good fight like a real American hero is to elide the reality of its brutal crimes against humanity, and unwittingly kills any serious and constructive discourse.

America is not a land of freedom-dispensing soldier-heroes who work tirelessly to promote democracy throughout the world; nor is it a bastion of free expression and progressive ideas. Rather than fighting over ownership of a phantasmagorical America that never actually existed, those prepared to challenge American empire must abandon any notion of patriotism and understand that to be labelled “un-American” or a “traitor” is a great honour.

The NBA, which likes to portray itself as a relatively progressive sports league, will do all it can to squash dissent and wring any political content from its players’ anthem-related demonstrations. To anybody anticipating a fresh wave of protests now that the NBA season is underway, understand that the NBA is not your friend; Adam Silver is a cold-blooded reptilian plutocrat whose words are emptier than the Smoothie King Center.

Radical NBA players need to take their cues not from acquiescent American football players, or from false prophets like Stephen Curry, but from real human beings like Josh Howard—people who say what’s in their heart and speak uncompromisingly. A protest isn’t really a protest if it’s sanctioned by the NBA. If your team tells you that you’re not allowed to wear a shirt with a particular slogan, wear it anyway. If your team tells you they don’t want you to sit during the national anthem, set the American flag on fire and boycott the league.

Until next time, death to America.

[1] I’m aware that the award is for “ethical behaviour” and “integrity” on the basketball court, but NBA teams each select one player from their roster to be considered for the award. Why even nominate Jason Kidd for an award like this? Were the rest of the Mavs and Knicks so unsportsmanlike? Are we really to believe that Jason Kidd, while he may regularly beat his wife and endanger people’s lives by driving drunk, is in all other respects a really nice guy? It is evident that the NBA conducts damage-control for its stars, provided they’ve only committed a mild transgression like abusing their wife for years on end, and nothing serious like sitting down.

 

Scooter Barry and the Eye of Power

Basketball, Solutionism, and Medium Theory

Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in wearable sports tech! — Scooter Barry

So we went down the bank of the foul ditch,
Going a little further into the pit
Which is stuffed with all the evil of the universe.

I recently happened across a video by BBALLBREAKDOWN creator and fellow communist Coach Nick in which he and Scooter Barry attempted to entice their viewers with the SOLIDshot smart sleeve. SOLIDshot, headquartered in Mountain View, California, have apparently created a compression sleeve—made from imported, high performance Italian fabric—that incorporates electronic sensors and promises its users “instant feedback + analytics.” The sensors in the sleeve track the movement of your arm, recording your shooting data, telling you whether your form is good or bad, and suggesting adjustments you may wish to make. Your data is stored on the sleeve, but you are encouraged to use the SOLIDshot app in order to “sync your data to the cloud.”

Sounds useful. So what’s the problem? Before we get into that, I’d like to make it absolutely clear from the outset that I am not anti-technology. I’m quite aware that quaint theories warning of the inherent evils of new technologies have been formulated (and invariably dismissed) since at least the fourth century BCE when Plato cautioned in the Phaedrus that the advent of writing would cause people’s memories to atrophy. Neither am I about to suggest that the use of such technology is a form of “cheating.” Media, as defined by Marshall McLuhan, can be “any extension of ourselves”—glasses, for instance—or “any new technology.” Professional basketball has always incorporated such things: players wear shoes, uniforms, headbands, mouth guards, use fitness equipment, etc. That basketball players make use of new technologies to augment their bodies is not of concern (although players who engage in body modification surgery in order to gain a competitive advantage must be policed more vigorously).

We can clearly see how this new smart sleeve has evolved from a long line of familiar low-tech ancestors (including an eerily similar product peddled by Scooter’s own father), so if its forerunners are merely harmless gadgets, what makes SOLIDshot’s latest product so dangerous? To invoke McLuhan[1] again, the medium is the message: “the personal and social consequences of any medium…result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs.”

The “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The SOLIDshot smart sleeve did not introduce surveillance or data-collection into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of basketball players. — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 8.

And it is precisely in terms of scale, the sheer quantity of data collected and shared, that these new-fangled smart devices—that is, any device with sensors that harvest data—differ from their predecessors. NBA players already operate under the all-seeing eye of the SportVU camera (another Silicon Valley innovation), which tracks and records their every move while on the court. The media establishment was swift and uncritical in its gushing endorsement of the SportVU system, hailing its leaguewide adoption as a revolution. Now, three years on, the unremittent surveillance of NBA players, the hoarding of data by teams—data to which players have limited access and which teams use to make personnel decisions—has been completely normalised. And we should not doubt for a moment that smart sleeves and other similar devices will soon become equally ubiquitous at the professional level. If the notion of players wearing smart tracking devices during live games sounds implausible to you, head on over to SOLIDshot’s FAQ section:

It will not be long, maybe a decade, before full-body smart suits (perhaps funded by EA Sports, the better to realistically capture and render player movements for their games) are adopted as part of the NBA’s compulsory uniform code. Just think of all that extra space for corporate logos! These suits, combined with the camera’s gaze, will provide an unprecedented quantity of data to be harvested and put to the service of private interests. Such innovations will not be limited to the professional sphere, either; amateur and recreational players will continue to mimic the pros, generating staggering amounts of data, most of which will be utterly meaningless to them and will no doubt be sold on to third parties without knowledge or consent.

We have, after all, been given every incentive in today’s nightmare hell-world to self-surveil wherever possible: sharing our location and our interests will allow us to view more relevant and personalised content online; diet and fitness apps will help us live healthier lives if we let them track us; “personal assistants” like Google Now or, more recently, Allo’s Google Assistant[2] will afford us more free time if we simply surrender all of our personal data, and so on. The basketball community in particular has been carefully primed to accept such concessions to Silicon Valley tech companies, viewing them as inevitable—even desirable.

Observers of the NBA cannot have failed to notice the swift rise of so-called “analytics” in recent years, as well as the accompanying rhetoric of efficiency, disruption, and other Silicon Valley jargon. While there are legitimate reasons to be sceptical of the kind of mass surveillance engendered by SportVU cameras and smart sleeves—its potential consequences for contract negotiations, for instance—these are rarely discussed. Instead, professional straw man Charles Barkley, the de facto leader of the NBA’s counter-analytics contingent, has plunged the discourse into the depths of the figurative toilet bowl with his inane blathering: “All these guys…who talk about analytics, they have one thing in common: they a bunch of guys who ain’t never played the game, and they never got the girls in high school.”

More circumspect and critical observers have either had their voices drowned out by a parade of anachronistic technophobes and chauvinistic macho men or are reluctant to speak up for fear of being associated with this crowd. Who, after all, would want to align themselves with Charles Barkley? His analytics tirade on Inside the NBA could have come straight from the script of Moneyball, a film in which Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill harness the arcane power of analytics to outwit and ridicule rooms full of befuddled old-school scouts, constructing their improbable super-team by reducing baseball to a maths equation. Disruptive!

You’re not even looking at the problem.

The language in this scene is particularly interesting. Of note is the focus on solving problems by thinking differently: the film is a transparent love letter to the solutionists of Silicon Valley. The solution that Brad Pitt has in mind does not, of course, involve collectively addressing the systemic problem that “it’s an unfair game,” that the uneven distribution of wealth precludes certain teams from competing. Rather, in the style of the glib tech nerd in his t-shirt and jeans, the solution our protagonist is searching for is wholly superficial, a stopgap measure that may work for his team, and for a time, but ultimately does nothing to promote parity in baseball (it is perhaps worth noting that since Billy Beane took over as general manager of the Oakland As in 1997, his team has managed to win a total of one playoff series). Likewise, the “solution” Silicon Valley has proposed to remedy the stagnant wages, unemployment, and obscene inequality inherent to capitalism is for workers to engage in increasingly precarious work, front all of the costs that would previously have been covered by their employer, and work incessantly for poverty wages. Your day belongs to you.

To reiterate, with Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the NBA itself all insisting that analytics and the invasive data-gathering techniques that fuel it are bringing about a new golden age of basketball, there is unlikely to be any real resistance from players or fans when the time comes to introduce smart uniforms. NBA teams will soon be granted access to a pool of data drawn from every complicit player on Earth, and once that happens they will inevitably contrive an arbitrary set of criteria for prospective players (must replicate a particular shooting form, possess certain physical qualities, take x number of shots per day, etc.). This predictive scouting will usher in a horde of counterfeit Stephen Currys, the original’s own movements and habits having been digitally captured and rendered as a formula for basketball greatness. The Curry blueprint[3], which will be sold to every other NBA team, and then to college teams and international teams, will serve as the standard for all incoming players, against which they can be measured “objectively” by algorithms.

Here we run into the perennial problem of algorithms: their presumed objectivity and quite real lack of transparency. We can’t examine Amazon’s algorithms; they are completely opaque and have not been subject to outside scrutiny. Amazon claims, perhaps correctly, that secrecy allows it to stay competitive. But can the same logic be applied to basketball? If no one can examine the algorithms—which is likely to be the case as predictive-scouting software will be built by private companies—we won’t know what biases and discriminatory practices are built into them. — Karl Malone

If the word “algorithm” doesn’t immediately fill you with dread, consider the fact that the supposedly objective algorithms increasingly utilised in the American criminal justice system have turned out to be blatantly racist tools of oppression. What, then, are the implications of predictive scouting for basketball? Firstly, it will erect a new and expensive barrier for entry into the world of professional basketball. Aspiring players will need to purchase costly basketball suits and other smart devices to monitor and record their body’s every move and function, and they will have to adhere to whatever strict regime has been determined—objectively, remember—to produce the best players. Those who cannot or will not submit to such invasive practices will simply drop off the basketball radar. Just as you are considered a deviant today if you do not maintain a social media presence, refusal to plug yourself into the basketball matrix will undoubtedly be viewed as evidence that you have something to hide.

As for those who are lucky enough to make it to the NBA in this grim dystopia, they will all play the same—most efficient—way for coaches who all coach the same—most efficient—way, rendering basketball games bland and joyless. Kemba Walker will languish on the bench; DeMar DeRozan, last of the dunk contest purists, will be excommunicated; John Shurna will be given an NBA contract (after using the SOLIDshot smart sleeve to fix his shooting mechanics, of course). “Nudging” and “incentivisation” will inevitably produce a particular kind of basketball subjectivity. Not only will all players be encouraged to master only one of a limited selection of skillsets, they will not have had cause to cultivate any sense of flair or creativity at any point in their playing lives (streetball and even idle practice having also been subordinated to the dictates of predictive algorithms). The NBA of tomorrow will penalise players who are short, inefficient, and who love to isolate. Who is such a system likely to exclude?

Solutionism is an unhealthy preoccupation with sexy, monumental, and narrow-minded solutions—the kind of stuff that wows audiences at TED Conferences—to problems that are extremely complex, fluid, and contentious. […]. It’s not only that many problems are not suited to the quick-and-easy solutionist toolkit. It’s also that what many solutionists presume to be “problems” in need of solving are not problems at all; a deeper investigation into the very nature of these “problems” would reveal that the inefficiency, ambiguity, and opacity—whether in politics, sports, or everyday life—that the newly empowered geeks and solutionists are rallying against are not in any sense problematic. — Allen Iverson, Basketball Hall of Fame induction speech, 09/09/2016.

But what about the Spurs? Perhaps you enjoy watching five basketball androids dispassionately firing the ball around the court until they can find the best shot. Perhaps you can live without seeing Pierre Jackson score 30 points per game. Let’s examine the likelihood that the new analytics order will in fact deliver on its promise of crisp, efficient basketball.

Consider Uber, that ubiquitous and villainous taxi service posing as a technology company. Its standard sales pitch has always been that it offers individualised services (for the sacred bourgeois individual), and that these services are more convenient and efficient than anything the bloated government bureaucracies can hope to offer by way of public transportation. However, Uber has been able to provide its services at such competitive rates only because its backers are prepared to operate at a (staggering and unsustainable) loss in order to maintain their stranglehold on the market. Moreover, Uber has been quietly moving away from its individualised services, offering customers various incentives to walk to “unique pick-up spots” rather than have a driver come directly to their location, and to share rides with other passengers.

If Uber customers end up waiting at designated pick-up spots and catching rides that they share with other passengers, in what way will Uber’s service differ from public transport as it is currently deployed? Could it be that those responsible for administering public transport for decades did in fact know a thing or two about efficiency and sustainability after all? For all of its blustering about efficiency and personalisation, Uber has proven itself to be nothing more than a cuckoo in the nest, supplanting existing forms of public and private transportation without actually improving on their services in any appreciable way. What we’ll soon be left with, then, is the same expensive and inefficient transport system most of us are used to, only it’ll be run by a private monopoly, utterly opaque, unaccountable, and profit-driven. If you have any doubts whatsoever about the very serious dangers of letting private monopolies handle essential public transport, I invite you to catch a train in the UK.

By the same token, we should be suspicious of the transformative rhetoric issuing from the sports media establishment concerning the rise of analytics. Could smart suits help NBA teams uncover talented players that would otherwise have slipped through the net? Certainly this will be the pitch from the grinning Silicon Valley ghoul as he reclines in Vivek Ranadivé’s office. You want the next Stephen Curry? Our algorithms will find him for you by matching his data against our index of player profiles from around the world.

One, two, three, NICK ROCKS!

[1] McLuhan was a big fan of electronic mass media and probably would have loved the internet, and possibly even the Silicon Valley perverts who wish to colonise it for themselves: “Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree” could, with a little tweaking, be Facebook’s new slogan. But insofar as medium theorists like McLuhan invite us to consider more thoroughly the profound effects that new media can have on all aspects of a society, their work remains extremely valuable.

[2] Google Assistant promises to save you time by reading all of your messages, learning to mimic the way you communicate, and then replying to your messages on your behalf so that you don’t have to interact with your friends. I’m not making this up.

[3] Followed to its logical end, the current paradigm will bring us cybernetic body suits that can be programmed to imbue the wearer with the playing style and abilities of specific NBA players. The most talented basketball players will no longer compete professionally: a small elite will provide the suits with their abilities and professional basketball will be played by only the biggest and most athletically gifted people. Basketball will subsequently become a tactical game in which one’s strategy consists in determining when to deploy a particular player’s skillset: driving? Activate James Harden; shooting free throws?  Activate Stephen Curry; committing a personal foul? Activate Giannis Antetokounmpo. But enough of this—I don’t want to give tech leeches any big ideas. If you want to make this into a big-budget dystopian sports film, get at me.

Lin in the Art of Archery (Part 2)

Basketball, Postcolonial Theory, and the Mystic East

What is Zen? There can be no final and satisfactory answer to this question in intelligible words (except in my books). Zen is the conquest of dualism and the inward realisation of the Buddha-nature which is the raison d’être of all things. The true essence of all things is the Eternal Principle of which all phenomena are manifestations—in Sanskrit it is called Tathata (Suchness) and it is quite impossible to apply to it any form of logical analysis. — Phil Jackson

A wise man once asked, “What purpose is Phil Jackson serving?”

Phil Jackson is known in the basketball world as the “Zen Master,” but what does this really mean? Naturally, it has nothing whatsoever to do with Zen. Rather, the nickname is derived from Jackson’s consumption of popular culture: Jackson claims to draw inspiration from the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a bestselling New Age self-help manual named after an older and even more fraudulent work of orientalist trash. Jackson even offered his own trite contribution to the genre with the publication of his book Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior in 1995, profiting handsomely from his association with a legacy of dubious scholarship stemming from the likes of D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts.

So what is this “Zen,” and how/why did it come to be commodified by cantankerous basketball coaches? My friend, grab a cup of matcha, settle down on the dirt floor of your elegantly austere hut, and I will dispense satori.

Our story begins in the seventeenth century, at the dawn of the political and ideological project known as the European Enlightenment. It was at this time that significant changes occurred in the way that religion and science were understood in Europe: challenges emerged—both for Christian theologians and for secular scholars of religion—in the form of empiricism and cultural pluralism. For the theologians, empiricism introduced the problem of verifying all truth claims with empirical evidence, while cultural pluralism made it impossible for them to ignore non-Christian traditions, or to blithely assert the superiority of their faith. Scholars of religion, on the other hand, had to come to grips with the knowledge that “religion” as a category was itself a cultural product. Furthermore, they found themselves having to field challenges from experts in other academic disciplines claiming to possess the necessary tools to analyse religion, and thus threatened their job security. And so it was in the hastily constructed category of “mysticism” that European intellectuals found a refuge from the distressing verities of historical contingency and cultural pluralism.

The adjective “mystical”—derived from the Greek root mūo, meaning “to close”—can be used in everyday language to describe any object, person, event, or belief that has a vaguely mysterious aspect to it (such as LeBron James’ hairline, the Sacramento Kings’ front office, Bruno Caboclo), to religious experiences, the supernatural, the magical, and the occult. “Mysticism” is, of course, a term which arose in a specific cultural and historical context. Like “religion,” it has no ready equivalent in many foreign languages. But no matter!

Modern conceptions of mysticism place an emphasis on so-called “mystical experience.” William James and Rudolph Otto both provided influential definitions should you care to read about them. Another important component of mysticism as we’ve come to understand it is the theological position known as perennialism, according to which all religious traditions, regardless of where or when they occur, share a common essence, invariably described by its advocates—such as Aldous Huxley—as “mystical.”

In contemporary academic usage, “the mystical” can, on the one hand, be understood to denote certain experiences that transcend the range and scope of ordinary sensory experience (the hot hand, for example). On the other hand, it can be taken to refer to the ineffable—that about which one should not and cannot speak. Proponents of mysticism thus sought to reframe popular conceptions of the religious, such that a core of spiritual and moral values would survive the inevitable headlong clash with secular philosophy, science, and technological progress. They were led, conveniently, to posit an “essential core” of religion, conceived of as a private, veridical, ineffable experience inaccessible to empirical scientific analysis.

The search for the “essence” of religion or the various religions, or of “mysticism,” is misguided since it is operating under the aegis of the essentialist fallacy that the phenomena included in the category of religion (for instance) must have something universally in common to be meaningfully classified as religious. The claim, frequently made from the methodological stance of the phenomenology of religion, that religion is sui generis—that it is a fundamental category of its own—is often put forward as a defence of the autonomy and irreducibility of religious phenomena in the overwhelmingly secular institution of the modern university. — Jerry Krause

And so it was Zen that came to the rescue of counter-Enlightenment scholars, appearing on the scene at precisely the right historical moment. The allure of Zen, as it was presented to its Western audience, lay in the fact that it appeared to confirm the fashionable theories of mysticism propounded by Otto, James, Huxley, and their intellectual descendants: here was an authentic mystical tradition of considerable antiquity that clearly articulated the crucial distinction between unmediated mystical experience per se and the culturally determined symbols used to express it. The purported anti-intellectualism, anti-ritualism, and iconoclasm of Zen were ample evidence that it had not lost touch with its mystical and experiential roots. Zen, it was declared, is immune to Enlightenment critiques of religion precisely because it is not a religion in the institutional sense at all; it is, on the contrary, an uncompromisingly empirical, rational, and scientific mode of inquiry into the nature of things.

Zen was not introduced to the Western imagination in the usual way, by the efforts of orientalist scholars, but rather through the activities of an elite circle of internationally-minded Japanese intellectuals and globe-trotting Zen priests, whose missionary zeal was second only to their vexed fascination with Western culture. These Japanese Zen apologists emerged, in turn, out of the profound social and political turmoil engendered by the rapid Westernisation and modernisation undertaken by Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912). With new ideas and technologies flooding the country and the Meiji government tasked with constructing a coherent national identity for Japanese people, Buddhism was caught in the crossfire, cast as both a foreign “Other” and as a corrupt and superstitious creed incompatible with modern scientific and technological advancements. The influence of the late nineteenth-century European zeitgeist had permeated university campuses in Meiji Japan, and Japanese scholars, seeking to bring their nation into the modern world, were naturally drawn to European critiques of institutional religion, to the rationalism and empiricism of the Enlightenment.

It was in response to this intellectual climate that a vanguard of Buddhist intellectuals, drawing upon popular Darwinian evolutionary models of religion, argued the case for Japanese Buddhism, suggesting that it represented the most spiritually pure and evolutionarily advanced form of Buddhism in Asia, and painting Japan as the sole heir to the spiritual and ethical heritage of the East precisely at a time of heightened imperial ambitions and military adventurism. This successful discourse was subsequently adopted and further refined by adherents of Japanese Zen. It is crucial to understand that these Japanese representatives of Zen abroad were invariably products of European-style educations, formulating their understandings of Zen and of mysticism in a European intellectual context: when D. T. Suzuki or Nishida Kitarō emphasised experience as the central feature of Zen, it was as a result of their exposure to the works of Western scholars of religion like James and Otto.

Suzuki, the most influential and well-known of these Zen proselytisers, was also quite the nationalist. Theories purporting the uniqueness—and, by implication, the superiority—of the Japanese were referred to as nihonjinron. Famous examples of nihonjinron literature include Nitobe Inazō’s Bushido: The Soul of Japan and Okakura Kakuzō’s Book of Tea, both of which were published in English around the turn of the century. Thus, a generation of unsuspecting Europeans and Americans were subjected to Meiji caricatures of the lofty spirituality, the selflessness, and the refined aesthetic sensibilities of the Japanese race.

Phil Jackson and D. T. Suzuki share more than a pathological conviction that Zen consists of pure and unmediated (except by them) experience; they also possess surprisingly questionable credentials. Jackson famously stole his entire coaching philosophy from Tex Winter and fraudulently portrayed it as something mysterious and undecipherable. Dennis Rodman let the cat out of the bag a couple of years ago when he said of Jackson’s triangle offence that it could be learned in just fifteen minutes. “It’s not that difficult,” he continued. “It’s a triangle.”

As for Suzuki, he was never ordained, and his formal monastic education was desultory at best. He never received institutional sanction as a Zen teacher, and, despite emphasising the importance of Zen in the sphere of Japanese arts, conceded that he had absolutely no business talking about such things: “To speak the truth, I am not qualified to say anything at all about the arts, because I have no artistic instincts, no artistic education, and have not had many opportunities to appreciate good works of art.”

Throughout his career, Suzuki exhibited a preoccupation with nationalistic nihonjinron ideology and the dichotomy of Occident and Orient, authoring book after book with titles like Zen and the Character of the Japanese People (1935), Zen and Japanese Culture (1940), More on Zen and Japanese Culture (1942), East and West (1948), The Revival of the East (1954), The Oriental Outlook (1963), and so on and so on. Suzuki’s lifelong project of exporting Zen to the West was bound inextricably to a studied contempt for his new audience, whose cultural arrogance and imperialistic inclinations Suzuki had come to know all too well. Having lived through the military humiliation of Japan at the hands of the culturally inferior United States, Suzuki would make it his mission to prove that Zen is mystically superior to Christianity—indeed, that it constitutes the highest form of mysticism! This strategy had the felicitous result of thwarting the Enlightenment critique of religion on the one hand and the threat of Western cultural hegemony on the other.

Names like St. Augustine, Origen, Cyril and Tertullian are not unfamiliar. They are Japanese. More pertinent to our subject is the fact that what today we call Greek or Western philosophy is copied from the indigenous Japanese philosophy of “Zen.” All the values of Zen were adopted by the Greeks and Ionians who came to Japan to study, or studied elsewhere under Japanese-trained teachers. These included Herodotus, Socrates, Hypocrates, Anaxagoras, Plato, Aristotle and others. Are we not taught that Socrates is the first man to say “Man know thyself?” Yet this expression was found commonly inscribed on Japanese temple doors centuries before Socrates was born. — D. T. Suzuki

Despite making no attempt to disguise his distaste for the West, Suzuki’s Zen proved to be an ideal export to the disaffected but spiritually inclined Westerner searching for an exotic alternative to institutional Christianity in the religions of the “Mystic East.” Suzuki’s jingoistic propaganda thus served both to bolster Japan’s prestige abroad and to tantalise a legion of disenchanted Western intellectuals with the dream of an Oriental enlightenment they would ultimately never grasp. You can’t help but admire him, really.

One such disenchanted Western intellectual was German philosopher and Nazi sympathiser Eugen Herrigel, whose 1953 book Zen in the Art of Archery (based on his 1948 essay Zen in der Kunst des Bogenschiessens, or The Knightly Art of Archery) set the gold standard for derivative orientalist writing, and, rather worryingly, remains one of the most widely read studies of Japanese culture. Before its Japanese translation and publication in 1956, Japanese archery (kyūdō) had not been associated with Zen at all; it was only after Herrigel’s book, in which he recounts his experiences learning archery in Japan as a means of spiritual training, that such a connection was assumed to exist.

This was by no means the first example of such mischief: so-called “Zen gardens,” to give another example, are essentially Japanese versions of the Chinese landscape gardens that were popular among the Song aristocracy. The earliest reference to the notion that the dry-landscape gardens associated with Zen temples are manifestations of Zen realisation is found in an English-language guide to Kyoto gardens written in 1935 by Loraine Kuck (oddly enough, a one-time neighbour of D. T. Suzuki).

Despite Herrigel’s emphasis on archery as a mode of Zen training, his archery instructor, Awa Kenzō, had no experience or interest in Zen at the time he and Herrigel trained together. This, of course, was but a minor inconvenience to Herrigel, who, having been introduced to Zen through the writings of Suzuki, arrived in Japan determined to undertake a mystical journey aided by the practice of a traditional Japanese art. This was a recipe for misunderstanding. We now know that the complex spiritual episodes recounted in the book were either the products of Herrigel’s fanciful misinterpretations (aided by his interpreter’s intentionally liberal translations), or the result of interactions for which no interpreter was present. Awa, for his part, was probably flattered to have a distinguished foreign scholar as a disciple, and would have been prepared to indulge Herrigel’s curiosity for all things Zen. Thus, while there may have been a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding throughout this collaboration, both parties got precisely what they wanted in the end.

I could go on, but by now I’m sure you get the picture.

The kind of orientalism I’ve been describing in this and the previous essay deviates somewhat from Edward Said’s original notion of “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” The “European superiority over Oriental backwardness” is inverted in the case of Zen, producing what Bernard Faure has termed “secondary orientalism.” Orientalism, we must conclude, always involves a degree of intercultural mimesis and can therefore never represent a unilateral projection of the Western imagination onto a colonised and passive Orient.

Japan was never colonised (at least in the conventional sense; it remains littered with American military bases today), and Germany had no Eastern empire to manipulate and dominate. Popular discourses about Zen were concocted as much by the Japanese themselves as by Westerners, and ignoring the role played by Japanese scholars in the construction of orientalist discourses surrounding Zen and mysticism serves only to perpetuate the myth of the passive Oriental. By moving beyond the automatic association of Orientalist discourses with Western colonial aspirations, one avoids the tendency to deny agency to the colonial subject, as well as the tendency to see colonialism as a peculiarly Western disease (a view that is itself a form of Occidentalism). Ultimately, the seemingly felicitous convergence of Eastern and Western intellectual and spiritual agendas prevented those on both sides from recognising the historical mischief entailed in the radical decontextualisation of the Zen tradition.

Yet in all cases, whether the “Oriental” or “primitive Other” is caricatured or idealised, the ethnocentric and orientalist premises of Western discourse are similar. One signature of orientalist writing is a preoccupation with the past, usually grounded in an evolutionary history of humankind. “Oriental” cultures are conceived of as throw-backs to the childhood of civilisation; while Europe and the New World were undergoing enormous social and political changes during the Enlightenment period, other societies seemed—from the outside, at any rate—to have remained unchanged for thousands of years, representing a crucial example of static archaism with which the dynamic modernity of the West could be successfully contrasted. We can observe this habit even in the sympathetic writings of enthusiasts like Herrigel, who describes his beloved kyūdō as “a time-honoured and unbroken tradition,” and, later, Alan Watts, who portrayed Asian systems of thought as “very old, very wise.”

The irony…is that the “Zen” that so captured the mind of the West was in fact the product of the New Buddhism of the Meiji. Moreover, those aspects of Zen most attractive to the Occident—the emphasis on spiritual experience and the devaluation of institutional forms—were derived in large part from Occidental sources. Like Narcissus, Western enthusiasts failed to recognise their own reflection in the mirror being held out to them. An excellent example of the instability of colonial discourses can be seen in the case of the Ezourvedam, a spurious French “translation” of a Hindu Veda. Voltaire used this text to demonstrate the subtlety and superiority of Indian thought in comparison to a decadent Christianity. The text, however, was a fake originally composed by Jesuit missionaries in Pondicherry to demonstrate the inferiority of idolatrous Indians in comparison to Christians. Discourses, therefore, cannot be controlled once they have entered the public arena and become subject to contestation, appropriation, and inversion by others. — Drake

By choosing to concentrate, as Phil Jackson does, on a supposed mystical essence common to all religions, one endorses the globalising ideologies of a literary (and largely male) elite. Such ideologies might fit in well with the modern Western (and capitalistic) emphasis on internationalism and globalised interaction in the economic, cultural, and political spheres, but it is important to realise that the “world religions” as they are usually portrayed are idealised and largely theoretical constructs that bear some relationship to—but are by no means identical with—the actual religious expression of humankind.

And so we arrive in Silicon Valley once more, home of the “California Ideology,” a noxious combination of the myopic and culturally impoverished worldview of the nouveau riche tech nerd and the pompous faux-enlightenment of the Bay Area’s former New Left. This poisonous synthesis has given rise to, among other crimes, “Knightman,” a plastic robot that patrols the Sacramento Kings’ carpark so that Vivek Ranadivé doesn’t have to hire human beings and pay them a living wage. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism, and if we don’t put a stop to it now we will all die under an avalanche of derivative self-help books penned by our magnanimous tech gods: The Tao of Capital; The I Ching of Things; The Smart of War; Zen and the Art of Disruption.

It is for the reasons outlined above that I will never call Phil Jackson “Zen Master”—not because I’m bitter about his success (I’m not especially impressed by all those rings; wake me up when he wins something without the aid of Michael Jordan or Derek Fisher), but because in cultivating this “Zen” persona he is, in a roundabout way, providing ideological sanction for the technofascist tendencies of Silicon Valley’s most dangerous villains.

This is worse than Allan Houston, potentially.