This is a link to a book by an American soldier called 'Imperial Secrets' which has been published by some Military Intelligence College to ramp up the proactive demoralization of officers serving abroad as part of a wider stab-in-the-back of its Allies. As such it is an eminently silly book, which touches base with every cliche thrown up by Deleuze, Spivak, Negre and other such fuckwits, while demonstrating that particular levity of spirit characteristic of 'military intelligence' which makes it so easily assimilable to belles lettres.
It contains not a single original or intelligent observation.
This is the author's experience in Tamil Nadu, India.
The author had spent the previous chapter suggesting that the ornate and flowery portions of Persian epistles may have contained information. But, the example he quotes does not confirm this notion. Rather, it calls his sanity into question. He says he produced academic theses or tactical appreciations while with the Indians which they found acceptable. These writings must have been shit. How do we know? Because the author is stupid. What other explanation could there be for his writing so stupidly for us?The Indians had no problem accepting the stupid shit he wrote. They were soldiers and soldiers probably write stupid shit, at least when embedded with a foreign army. But the Indians insisted this fuckwit sign off according to their protocol not his own. So what? That's what soldiers do. They're supposed to be stupid but faultlessly correct when it comes to ceremonial usages. Here, the guy puts up a ceremonial resistance, till honor is satisfied, but then capitulates so everybody is happy. He has shown his preference for the ceremony of his own army but finally bent the knee to the higher principle of subordination. There is nothing noteworthy about this. Nor indeed is there anything noteworthy or interesting about the remainder of this soldier's book.
That's what makes it interesting. Its recycling of Gesture Political academic cliches- alterity, the subaltern, Panopticon, Orientalism, the rhizome, the guy even mentions barzakh though he doesn't seem to understand what the word means- shows how fucking stupid that class of post '68, pseudo-Leftie, acid-flashback, paranoid, pulp fiction, bullshit theories are. Indeed they were designed to be stupid, because they were designed for draft dodgers from the Hegelian struggle for recognition- those, that is, who, like this author, render absurd the mise en abyme of Power by bucking for promotion within it.
This isn't a bad thing.
Power isn't about rules, it's about deeds. It isn't a methodenstriet- an academic argument about methods- its about looting and raping and killing and taking what you want. It isn't about surveillance. It's about killing people, regardless of what they have done, 'pour encourager les autres'.
Still, what this book advertises is the American Army's determination to stab its Allies in the back so caveat emptor guys! don't buy into the Trident of this Neptune whose oceans are its own self-pitying tears.
I notice this author has actually learnt Hindi and that he quotes a lot of crap Indian academics- mainly Bengalis- who were pretending to be all Left-wing and hip while, in fact, they were simply careerists playing the Race card for all they were worth in the struggle for tenure. Has India contributed to the enstoopidification of Major Kelley? Perhaps, but only because, though as Borges observed 'India is larger than the world', it's actually pulp fiction.
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