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The Cascade of Evil or the Double Negative Effect of Digital Totalitarianism

Internationalist Observer | 28.12.2013 16:29 | Analysis | Globalisation | Technology | World

It is a blatantly obvious contradiction – on one hand the worst regimes on the planet (in terms of overall historical record not current rating) are wasting horrendous efforts to oppress the most advanced people, on the other these same regimes are totally failing to heal any of the wounds their destructive forces leave on the record of the species and its environment. The terror regime in the name of the people has become so bad that everything it is allegedly meant to protect against is happening by accident because nobody cares. The signs are visible to the unaided eye that the atmosphere may not take it any longer and produce a climate collapse smashing the face of the Earth, but the regimes decide to squander the resources for harassment and abuse rather than dedicate them to a solution of the planetary problems. The wisdom of total abolition is whispered along by every natural being, but the machinery of hopelessness is running hotter every time it is being switched up a gear, and its growling and howling is getting lost in the skies. Since regimes need people but people do not need regimes, it is not just an ideal failure but one of these gross inappropriatenesses of the current which later on tend to be recognised as its defining elements and can only be done with by its complete breakdown. What is hence required is a coherent theory of digital totalitarianism that allows gaining explanations and making predictions useful for the disassembly of it. What is this monstrous conglomerate that has become of the system of nation states and how can its vast and complex problems be described in a way more useful against them than for their obfuscation?

The theory of the oppressive primacy of digital totalitarianism in the political system of the capitalist economy argues that the when capitalist globalisation takes a totalitarian turn the digital totalitarianism it brings about will obtain an oppressive position overruling even the system´s economic interests, and that this becomes most visible not so much in the totalitarian democratic state (i.e. the state which has turned the two words into synonyms) itself because it overshadows every sign of life there, but in the mathematics of international relations between states. When capitalist globalisation is no longer foremost being driven by economic interests dictating the associations of the states, but by the operational interests of totalitarianism, then the grouping of the states and structure thereof is entirely different from purely economic situations, and so are the political implications for any emancipatory struggle to escape such scenarios. While the surface of the international system remains apparently unchanged, the skeleton which keeps these many parts together is undergoing sclerotic change because the exploitation of profit is no longer its highest purpose but cedes that position to the particular interest of totalitarianism. When the oppressive primacy comes to the fore, it is not only a sign of the failure of the general business model with its one-dimensional fixation on growth, but of the totalitarian apparatuses and their manipulations as well.

It is here where the double negative effect of it is being generated: When states do spy more against people than against each other, then their spying against people will be a significant share of the content of their spying against each other as well. Only once it is being assumed that with a large number of states all totalitarian apparatuses no matter of political differences between their host states would be directly or indirectly linked to each other, and giving to or taking from each other data one of them originally stole from people, the international politics of these days can be meaningfully understood. To put it simply, all nation states are now rivaling factions of one multinational totalitarianism – and since they are feeding from each other, any antagonism between states, be it of economical or political nature, will be subject to the double negative effect.

Disinformation is based on the negation of information, but the negation of disinformation does not necessarily lead back to truth. In the best case it leads to a distortion openly identifying itself as that, but more often than not it remains ambiguous in decisive aspects. In the worst case it descends into groundless speculation. This is self-evident to anyone who knows of the lack of scientific value of improperly obtained data, but not within the ideological configuration of digital totalitarianism which is driven by an illusion of total power over the oppressed. The oppressor has its preconfigured projection which it is attempting to decorate with stolen details. The totalitarian rival might invert that projection when deeming it useful to do so, but it is still dealing with a distortion, even though it might not actively be contributing to it. Within this cascade, the center of gravity of the meltdown-ridden system sinks down like a reactor blob in the groundwater, with both economic investments and political aspects of it moving and creating the illusion of something new appearing in the currencies and apparatuses they move through.

Even an independent observer seeing only the leaks would be in a position akin to reconstructing the menu from the compost pile, and have to keep in mind that the double negation does not reproduce the original. A rivaling oppressor though, by its own totalitarian configuration, might easily be deceived that it would. As a result all factions of the totalitarian state are basing themselves on distortions of one sort or another and therefore stick much closer to each other than they would under normal circumstances, i.e. no spying against people taking place, and all the more so the stronger the pressure of the people against the oppressors does grow. Such a system will respond to a fundamental challenge posed from outside its ideological configuration not with intelligent behaviour, but with rivaling attempts of inclusion into this or that kind of oppression, which instead of a clean disassembly cause a hardening of the structure preceding its sudden breakdown.

The dialectics of double negation also includes the possibility that such distortions may entirely collapse like an economic speculation and therefore the oppressed be enabled to redefine the outcome of the effect. The possibility to pronounce such definition when the moment for it comes across is being opened up by the use of the model of the cascade of evil. With the digital totalitarianism feeding from only a few major proliferators of asymmetric disinformation, a hierarchy of nations can be reconstructed based on their respective guilt in its crimes. Once that arrangement is understood, the oppression and the proliferation of stolen data resulting out of it technically become like a sonar allowing to send signals into a structured apparatus, and its response can be measured in public and used to obtain transparency over it. It can reasonably be assumed that the political segmentations of the international spying conglomerate determine the fault lines of double negation. For a person targeted by this, the situation may be that these who directly and indirectly spy against the person could have rivaling interests in the content of the material, but even if there was a sympathiser sitting behind some leak from a hostile government to a non-hostile one, that perception is still being determined by the double negative effect and therefore of no value for the targeted person.

The "Our Bastards" doctrine that led to the horrendous proxy wars of the late 20th century, out of which the totalitarian-democratic menace of this one came about, is still at work – the military dictatorship abusing the social movements in Egypt being the crassest example – but it does no longer carry the promise of a system collapse, since the spying conglomerate claims all such characters for inclusion, among others. The international system of nation states is now in a condition of being only the facade of a spying conglomerate that not only must be destroyed to enable freedom for the people of the world, but at the same time also must not be allowed to destroy itself. Against the political primacy of totalitarianism over economy there stands the political primacy of self-determination over destruction. The most destructive forces of imperialism have to be destroyed, there is no predictable alternative to that necessity, which is obvious from a historical perspective on their efforts.

The following question could have been the title of this essay if it was not just a specific case where the theory of digital totalitarianism applies: Can the United Nations Organisation be expected to be a reliable containment vessel for this most poisonous remainder of the military-industrial complex? The theory of digital totalitarianism does answer this with the observation that the failure of that structure is taking a different form than expected – instead of a fragmentation along past lines, division, walk-out or crash there is a meltdown of the entire structure from the inside, nothing that could spontaneously be fixed or avoided like an accident, but a depreciation of all political, ethical and moral concepts it attempts to associate itself with and a danger to observers exposed to it as well. It does not fail by dis- or lack of engagement, it fails by engagement. With the military aggression against Timbuktu being the most visible sign of its demise on the proverbial rot pile of history, it has become a mere packaging of colonialism, paradoxically not even economically profitable colonialism although such is there as well, but ideologically driven colonialism allowing the colonialist political gains, such as exporting its instability, as opposed to monetary ones. France has overtaken Italy in that role, and although the colonialist occupation of Mali is an example of this primacy it is not the politically defining moment of this year, it is only an example how the United Nations failure works out: Not by causing an upheaval of international solidarity to prevent such aggression, but in a way that can only be meaningfully compensated when all colonialist soldiers are disarmed and their fate left to be decided by the people of the place.

Similarly the cyber virus attack against Persia (and anyone who might get exposed to radioactive leaks that could be caused by it) should result in handing over the perpetrators. But feeding from disinformation coming from the same entities as the malware, the so-called "Revolutionary Leader" acted as if it had come from an independent researcher in a garage rather than from a hostile regime apparatus with a long record of serious injustices against the country. The Geneva agreement might be as meaningless as the Paris treaty turned out to be a decade ago, but the fact that it leaves out what happened in the meantime is an indication that even under the claim to produce the most antagonistic diplomacy towards American imperialism and its European proxies there is a likemindedness when it comes to spying – without the described condition of the international system, the totalitarian primacy, there would be no such agreement which signifies that despite his self-image Khamenei is more about greed than about revolution.

But diplomatically feeding from the distortion of the distortion of the distortion coming down the cascade of evil from the spying targets to the evildoers to the accomplices and the guilty bystanders, the Persian negotiators are fully exposed to the double negative effects of spying, and once one such agency at the top of an attack against people begins to hallucinate, that is cascading down the entire disinformation food chain. What reaches them from the propaganda of their European neighbours obviously is so far away from reality that the once so vocal antiimperialism in the place is ending up politically helpless. If there is a political bracket encompassing the spying scandals in North America and Europe, the bigoted agitation in India and confused irritation in China, the spontaneous rage in Africa and grotesque ego trips in Russia, the capitalist intimidation in South America and yearning for change across the Pacific, it is that all these locations are not only affected by disinformation cascading down the hierarchies but very material challenges as well.

As the ongoing currency crisis of the worst weapons proliferators keeps them in self-inflicted dependency on such blood money, others are bound by the gold standard and find it difficult to admit that this is a concept of a past era when there were enough technical obstacles against mining to keep the commodity limited enough to store other values in it without only creating incentives for horrible destructions of the Earth. Neither can they safely detach themselves from gold as long as the globe is plagued by economies of war imposing organised forgery efforts against their currencies to try to prolong the lifetimes of their war machines. It cannot be overlooked that the affinity of the regimes towards digital totalitarianism is corresponding with their economic aberrations. It does require a certain standard of economic independence to allow for any political independence from the global spying network. And the pattern of a world largely in lockstep with a self-destructive political and economical system makes it that the current conflict is not among big associations, but between all of them and their accomplices on one side and the fittest of the small ones on the other.

It is this structural asymmetry of a world system overstretched in multiple regards, that is there for no other purpose than attempting to delay necessary and long known changes to the administration of the commons which must precede so many individual changes that can hardly wait any longer. Precisely this condition makes it that the defining event of this year has been the cancellation of the Korean armistice. This bold choice of the Communist side in response to the forerunners of the spying scandal that wrecked the last remaining social fabric in many capitalist countries beyond commercial and/or authoritarian associations, is the decisive event of this year, since it is not only national politics in a small country besieged by imperialist overkill but a historical blow to the fraudulent consensus of 20th century diplomacy after the second world war which could never decide whether it wanted to implement its plans.

Now even in Europe American military occupation is becoming an issue, so much that the Washington regime is panically stocking up in some place to compensate for expected shutdowns in others. The North Korean deterrence is no longer only a matter of containing aggressive forces in the South of the peninsula, but an available interpunctation at the end of the cascade of evil. And with the failure of the United Nations Organisation due to its own delusions of power in the responsibility of a fraudulent South Korean apparatchik it might be a necessary one as well. If the respective branches of it choose to open the floodgates for irreversible radioactive contamination of the oceans, the strategic threshold is below zero.

Internationalist Observer

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