the luttwak piece is really pretty funny---and it only makes sense as a satire. which makes sense: luttwak is an interesting cat---here's a reasonably well written blog-like piece on him and a few others, which is worth a read through:
http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/lists_...es-l/2776.html
====================
in a manner of speaking, reconmike and powerclown above demonstrate the apparent a priori status of facile, one-dimensional critiques of the un in the context of the ever-diminishing space of conservativeland....i have long found it curious that such claims had any traction anywhere, given that they are little more than retreads of old school john birch society nonsense, the fear of a rootless cosmpolitanism destroying the authentic backwoods nationalism of righteous amuricans...the rabid and fundamentally anti-semitic anti-communism of the birchers was geared around the equation of the un with an international bolshevik conspiracy, with the protocols of the elders of zion actually functioning as a logical lynchpin. it is truly a glorious ideological legacy the right drew on for this particular element of its collage politics, reaching way into the lower depths of the jurassic park of reactionary ideology that is the united states. in the retread version, the historical ignorance of the conservative set is taken for granted, the facile appeal of blood-and-soil politics is taken on as a structuring trope and the attending paranoia deployed as a mobilizing tool.
this is ultimately about rightwing identity politics--the logic functions to link a vague image of a very large-scale phenomenon to imagined threats to blood and soil and the virtuous toil of the volk---er..."patriots"....within this schema, you see a marketing device for the neocon geopolitical phantasm that shaped the logic of the iraq debacle itself---you see the linkages between the ideology of conservativeland in its more respectable-seeming form and that of the black helicopter set----here as elsewhere, the logic is basically pavlovian--rooted in a sense of being-threatened by outside forces beyond comprehension or control (a classical feature of petit bourgeois fascism everywhere)----and so is rooted in class anxiety, in status anxiety----this johnbirchsociety schema does nothing but condense and rechannel, requiring no particular thought, only a reaction. a third element of this johnbichsociety idiocy emerges in the way the term "socialism" operates in conservativeland: which refers typically to some undefined and undefinable Evil, one that collapses a vague image of stalinism into the history of social-democratic politics into a fear of the state, which is in turn refigured as a correlate of the international conspiracy of rootless cosmoplitans that it is the duty of righteous volk/patriots to oppose.
it'd be funny, this bizarreo identity politics, if it hadnt been a considerable force in the states over the past few years, had it not been a central element in the fabrication of a sense of being-threatened by saddam hussein/al queada/pick your Villain----within such a schema, the Source of the Threat hardly matters: anyone or anything can be plugged into the position occupied by the un in johnbirchland and the effect is the same---
so it is that the retread version can drop the centrality of the protocols of the elders of zion and replace it with something else--it doesnt matter, really, the logic works with or without explicit reference to the ur-text---and
was a perfect devise for structuring and selling the "war on terror" hallucination, the "threatened by iraq" hallucination--all of it.
and it worked: in responses even in this thread from ace, for example, it is pretty clear that the problem--the root problem--is that this is less about the validity of claims made to market the neocon's war than about maintaining a space for a conservative identity, which is a visceral construct, not a logical one. threats to the ideology or to the signifiers organized by it are ultimately threats to indentity that have to be swatted away. the motivation is psychological, but the arguments are routed through the discourse of politics.
the effects of conservative identity politics linger still, like the smell of some nasty flower. the ideological context has changed around them, and they cannot deal with this simple fact. as the context changes, the choice it presents simplifies: denial or vertigo. so it goes.