A cruise ship on the rocks in Italy. Counterinsurgents urinating on their targets in Afghanistan. The military-industrial complex is in such crisis it is now parodying itself. And the President went to Disneyland.

The cruise ship disaster is now being viewed as a metaphor for the crisis in Italy.  This reflection is certainly preferable to the continued silence in the U.S. over the latest videotaped military scandal, in which Marines urinated on Afghan corpses. The ongoing interface between the crisis of counterinsurgency and the financial crisis that is producing the widespread crisis of authority cannot be acknowledged but continues to surface irrepressibly.

The wreck of the Costa Concordia

The Ship of State?

The shipwreck of the Costa Concordia falls so neatly into the pattern of imagining Italy that it cannot be avoided. The ship-of-state runs aground, steered by the hapless womanizing Captain Schettino. The Captain is Berlusconi to the coastguard’s play-by-the-rules parallel with the Troika-imposed technocrat Mario Monti. As details emerge, it just gets worse. The extraordinary injunction from one of the Costa crew that: “Everything is under control. Go back to your cabins” is this week’s version of “move on, there’s nothing to see here.”

The real priorities, according to the Corriere della Sera, were financial:

Captain Schettino spoke on the phone three times to Roberto Ferrarini, the man in charge of Costa’s crisis unit.

It seems likely that their discussion was as to whether a very costly evacuation could be avoided. Costa is a subsidiary of the giant Carnival Cruise Lines, a $15 billion-a-year outfit controlling 50% of the global cruise market. Labor conditions on cruise ships are predicatably appalling, with all the usual coercive stratagems of low-cost, low job security. The giant cruise ships, literal symbols of the circulation of capital, need to be cost-effective even when sinking.

The crew of the Costa Concordia were mostly Philippino, as is common in modern  shipping. They in effect mutinied to begin the rescue of passengers before they were belatedly ordered to do so. Benigno Ignacio, a chef on the ship, described the Captain’s actions to the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper:

His fault was he abandoned the ship while the ship’s crew including us Filipinos were busy saving the lives of the passengers.

In short, the real parallel is not with “Italy” but with multinational corporations sacrificing people for profit. The Captain will go to jail and he should: but Carnival will sail on into the corporate sunset.

The Collapse of Counterinsurgency

Meanwhile, the globalized counterinsurgency launched with such fanfare in 2005 as the “surge” in Iraq has been reduced to a condition that would be farcical, if it did not again involve such loss of life on all sides. With no apparent sense of irony, the US airforce now call their sorties over Afghanistan “overwatch,” just as I have argued that visuality is derived from the “oversight” practiced by a plantation overseer.

The Marines video barely caused a ripple in the US news cycle, as if it was only to be expected. There will be some charges against the individuals involved and no consideration of the culture of racialized contempt that a decade of “war on terror” has produced. The stresses of this culture were made clear today:

For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While that is shocking, it is made more so by the spike in sexual assault within the military reported yesterday: 19,000 assaults, 95% of which were on women, who comprise 14% of the services. These two sets of figures are undoubtedly related and it must also be likely that male-on-male assaults are under reported.

After four French soldiers were killed and 15 injured, eight seriously, by an Afghan soldier, the French government, one of the last non US “partners” in Afghanistan, is today suspending its operations in the country, prior to a withdrawal.

The “Coalition” is fighting itself, attacking each other directly and indirectly, because the mission is a patent disaster. The “military” part of the military-industrial complex is accelerating the crisis of authority that it is above all supposed to sustain.

Yes We Can?

This was the response of the “change we can believe in” crew yesterday, taken from Walt Disney World News. Words fail me. Supply a caption for me in the comments or elsewhere and I’ll add the best one tomorrow.