<underfire> structured chaos

[Alain Joxe]

There was once, in the past century, the 20th, a "free world" and a
"Communist world," each obeying its laws, its images, its lies and its
idols, and a "Third World" which attempted to separate itself from the two
others thanks to its size and despite its weakness.  When the tripartite
world of bipolar nuclear stand-off seemed to disappear with the end of the
Cold War, it was believed that the earth would finally become peaceful, or
at least conform to the order outlined in the UN charter. This belief buoyed
the courage and conscience of the nations allied against the Iraqi dictator
after his invasion of Kuwait.  But the illusion did not last long.  Why?
 
The World has by definition retained its "shape," but the UN must bow before
the whims of its leader.  The United States is determined to shape the world
in its own image.  It is a world united by a principle of disorder, a
world-chaos, which is nothing like an orderly French garden.  It took ten
years for this project to take shape in the United States and spread across
the earth, with its own particular debates, truths, stakes, methods,
vocabulary, myths and lies.
 
A "chaos" has now completely, and for years to come, replaced the orderly
world of the Cold War.  Nonetheless it has a dynamic morphology:  an
overdeveloped core, zones forming constellations of democracy or free market
clusters in circular form, then, further away, zones separated by flexible
or ephemeral institutional, economic or military membranes; zones in crisis,
zones of barbaric violence, social wastelands and slow or rapid genocide; a
surveillance system consisting of observational satellites and of
bureaucracies to interpret their observations and databases; a
non-hierarchical system of communication, telephone, internet, cyberspace,
an infosphere structured as an anarchic, but diversified, space.  A system
of repression as well:  mobile or fixed military bases and stockpiles all in
coordination to maintain the logistics of global military intervention;
systems of alliances and Euro-American command systems under American
control.
 
This structured chaos follows a fractal model.  Its zoning appears at every
scale:  on the global scale, the continental scale, the regional, national,
and provincial levels, and perhaps even at the level of cities,
neighborhoods, families or individuals, since the crisis reaches all levels.
 
Tell me what your cross-fortress is, your social wasteland, your genocide
and your logistical means of expeditionary intervention, and I will tell you
who you are.  Emperor, king, Mafia boss, respected citizen, angry ghetto
resident, junkie, madman, suicide victim:  this empire of disorder is not a
super-state; it imposes itself at every level.