Response

You identified one of my critiques of your ostentatious expertise in this argument, but not the important one. Yes, the bureaucratic liberalism of international human rights defenders is shockingly ineffective and yes it is merely a reactionary cover which primarily serves to fight against fights against injustice and never finds itself in the position of actually fighting against injustice. But the worst part about “expertise” is the tendency to go fucking transcendental with it. This statement, the one we’re discussing, is not a statement that is related to foreign policy expertise. At all. It’s a cultural statement, one that expresses an aesthetic affinity for a certain approach to third-world justice that is counter to the dominant western capitalist trend of subverting all resistance, but violent resistance first. This approach seeks to free up the moral ground around those issues generally called “terrorism” but the dominant capitalists, and to assert that there is a value to certain struggles underneath and away from their characterization by a given hegemon. I’m sure you disagree with none of this, because you keep agreeing with the actual points I’m making and then asserting that I’m still aiding the Sri Lankan overclass in it’s desire for natioanlist warfare (either as some useful idiot or more probably through my obvious ignorance). But I’m not. I’m actually responding to the statement without applying some cryptoliberal measure, where every statement needs to be countered as if it were academically rigorous. That which I “get behind” is the rejection of pacifism in MIA’s cheap and dumb detournement (who gives a fuck if it’s 40 years old, don’t be a faddish asshole). Of course I didn’t call for anyone to fight a war for my ideological satisfaction. Nor do I support perpetuating wars for the benefits of oligarchs. But you knew you that, you were just arguing like a prick. What I do actually support is the content of the phrase expressed:

"‘Give peace a chance’ is a stupid and simplistic way of thinking about third world violence, one that effectively restates Burkean conservatism for vapid drug addicted capitalists, denying the potential for revolutionary production whenever it might overflow the utilitarian assessments of the more constant (and therefore more legitimate) state violence. In turning around this statement to its vulgar inverse, the emptiness become more stark against the ideological background which produces the international violence and its abhorrers. At the same time, we remain sufficiently ensnared in an ideological moment and, as such, are fully aware that we could never (want to) enact ‘give war a chance’ even in the lazy and masturbatory sense a prior generation gave to their similarly retarded slogan. The more the sense is given positively, the more complete the negative meaning becomes; not only are we aware this is a stupid thing to say, we know it because your thing was stupid and we’d rather be saying our violent dumb thing while still caring about the poor and oppressed peoples than your shitty peace things which washes itself of responsibility for third-world catastrophes with some pointlessly “right” moral bearing."

If nothing else, and of course nothing else because this is the essence of the statement from the beginning, it expresses the type and intensity of contempt we might have for someone willing to say, ‘give peace a chance’.