Gay d’accord, Pride c’est à voir...

Gay d’accord, Pride c’est à voir...

La Gay Pride de San Francisco, ville progressiste par excellence et berceau du mouvement Gay aux USA, aura lieu les 28 et 29 juin prochain. Des remous puissant agitent cette organisation depuis le 26 avril, et la décision prise par la direction de cette manifestation de destituer le soldat Manning de son rang de Grand Marshall de la manifestation.

L’un ou l’autre membre de l’organisation, ou l’un ou l’autre militant, avait pris sur lui, ou sur eux s’ils sont plusieurs, d’instituer le soldat Bradley Manning comme héros (Grand Marshall) de la Parade. Manning est notoirement homosexuel, en plus d’être le héros à l’incroyable courage qui a passé à WikiLeaks les centaines de milliers de cables confidentiels des organisations de sécurité (Pentagone, département d’État, etc.) du système de l’américanisme, principal organisme du Système. Identifié et arrêté, Manning subit depuis plus d'un an, d’une façon absolument arbitraire et même totalitaire, à l’image des pires dictatures, un traitement inhumain et cruel d’une barbarie sans précédent. (Nous disons bien “sans précédent” parce que, dans sa sophistication infâme, dans sa vindicte aveugle, dans sa haine absolue de tout ce qui n’est pas elle, dans sa volonté également absolue de déshumanisation par la torture, la pression psychologique, l’humiliation permanente, dans la durée qu’elle imprime à toutes ces pratiques, etc., la barbarie moderniste enfantée par le Système et pratiquée dans nombre d'organisations de sécurité des USA est littéralement sans précédent.) Faire de Manning le héros de la Gay Pride, c’était l’évidence même selon ce qu’on suppose que devrait être “l’esprit gay”, si la chose existe. Le 26 avril 2013, la “president of the Board of SF Pride”, Lisa L Williams, a pris la décision d’annuler presto subito cette décision.

• On trouvera tous les détails de cette opération infâme dans une chronique absolument furieuse de Glenn Greenwald, dans le Guardian du 27 avril 2013. Greenwald dit non seulement son mépris pour cette décision, mais il rajoute les précisions selon lesquelles la Gay Pride est activement soutenue par l’élément-clef du Système dans cette analyse, le corporate power... Il s’agit d’une démonstration à couper le souffle de l’asservissement total au Système de cet événement “sociétal” qu’est l’évolution statutaire de la “communauté gay”. (Cela n’a évidemment rien à voir avec le sentiment des gay-militants, selon ce qu’il en est. C’est à eux de comprendre ce qui se passe précisément, ce qui est fait en leur nom et quel but servent d’abord la sollicitude officielle qui les entoure et les réformes fondamentales qui leur sont offertes. C'est un défi redoutable qu'ils ont à relever.)

«News reports yesterday indicated that Bradley Manning, widely known to be gay, had been selected to be one of the Grand Marshals of the annual San Francisco gay pride parade, named by the LGBT Pride Celebration Committee. When the predictable backlash instantly ensued, the president of the Board of SF Pride, Lisa L Williams, quickly capitulated, issuing a cowardly, imperious statement that has to be read to be believed. [...] I originally had no intention of writing about this episode, but the more I discovered about it, the more revealing it became. So let's just consider a few of the points raised by all of this.

»First, while even a hint of support for Manning will not be tolerated, there is a long roster of large corporations serving as the event's sponsors who are welcomed with open arms. The list is here. It includes AT&T and Verizon, the telecom giants that enabled the illegal warrantless eavesdropping on US citizens by the Bush administration and its NSA, only to get retroactively immunized from Congress and thus shielded from all criminal and civil liability (including a lawsuit brought in San Francisco against those corporations by their customers who were illegally spied on). [...] The list of SF Pride sponsors also includes Bank of America, now being sued for $1 billion by the US government for allegedly engaging in a systematic scheme of mortgage fraud which the US Attorney called "spectacularly brazen in scope". Just last month, the same SF Pride sponsor received a record fine for ignoring a court order and instead trying to collect mortgage payments from bankrupt homeowners to which it was not entitled. [...] So apparently, the very high-minded ethical standards of Lisa L Williams and the SF Pride Board apply only to young and powerless Army Privates who engage in an act of conscience against the US war machine, but instantly disappear for large corporations and banks that hand over cash. What we really see here is how the largest and most corrupt corporations own not just the government but also the culture. [...]

»Second, the authoritarian, state-and-military-revering mentality pervading Williams' statement is striking. It isn't just the imperious decree that “even a hint of support” for Manning “will not be tolerated”, though that is certainly creepy. Nor is it the weird announcement that the wrongdoer “has been disciplined”. Even worse is the mindless embrace of the baseless claims of US military officials (that Manning “placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform”) along with the supremely authoritarian view that any actions barred by the state are, ipso facto, ignoble and wrong. Conduct can be illegal and yet still be noble and commendable: see, for instance, Daniel Ellsberg, or most of the leaders of the civil rights movement in the US. Indeed, acts of civil disobedience and conscience by people who risk their own interests to battle injustices are often the most commendable acts. Equating illegal behavior with ignominious behavior is the defining mentality of an authoritarian - and is particularly notable coming from what was once viewed as a bastion of liberal dissent.

»But the more one learns about the parties involved here, the less surprising it becomes. According to her biography, Williams “organized satellite offices for the Obama campaign” and also works for various Democratic politicians. It was President Obama, of course, who so notoriously decreed Bradley Manning guilty in public before his trial by military officers serving under Obama even began, and whose administration was found by the UN's top torture investigator to have abused him and is now so harshly prosecuting him. It's anything but surprising that a person who was a loyal Obama campaign aide finds Bradley Manning anathema while adoring big corporations and banks (which funded the Obama campaign and who, in the case of telecoms, Obama voted to immunize).

»What we see here is how even many of the most liberal precincts in America are now the leading spokespeople for and loyalists to state power as a result of their loyalty to President Obama. Thus do we have the President of the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade sounding exactly like the Chairman of the Joints Chief, or Sarah Palin, or gay war-loving neocons, in depicting any meaningful opposition to the National Security State as the supreme sin. I'd be willing to bet large amounts of money that Williams has never condemned the Obama administration's abuse of Manning in detention or its dangerously radical prosecution of him for “aiding the enemy”. I have no doubt that the people who did all of that would be showered with gratitude by Parade officials if they attended...»

• Là-dessus, nous nous tournons vers Justin Raimondo, avec sa chronique d’Antiwar.com du 29 avril 2013. Justin n’allait pas rater l'événement : libertarien de la droite extrême, antiguerre et isolationniste, et... homosexuel qui se garde bien d’être militant au nom de cette seule caractéristique. Néanmoins, il faisait partie de la première Gay Pride, non autorisée, non sponsorisée, à San Francisco en 1972. A cette époque, la Gay Pride pouvait, selon Raimondo, éprouver une certaine fierté (pride) d’être, puisqu’elle s’affichait d’abord dissidente et adversaire de l’establishment, du National Security State, – bref, de ce que nous avons coutume de nommer le Système.

... Aujourd’hui, constate Raimondo, c’est le contraire. Le mouvement gay, c’est le Système même ; complètement récupéré, noyauté par les partisans d’Obama, devenus quasiment militariste, ce sont les supplétifs des flics du Système, sinon les flics du Système eux-mêmes. C’est Raimondo qui parle, certes, mais nous aurions vraiment beaucoup de peine à lui donner tort...

«[...Gay Pride’s President] Lisa Williams is a small-time political servitor, which means she is a big wheel in the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club. As proprietor of a political consulting firm, One Source Consulting, she was firmly ensconced in the local party machine before moving up the ladder to coordinate Obama’s's pro forma campaign in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s no ideologue: she’s a careerist, pure and simple. Her motive is pragmatic rather than ideological: she is terrified that her organization – the Gay Pride committee – already discredited by its gross financial mismanagement of the millions that flow into its coffers will suffer further embarrassment as the purveyor of an inconvenient radicalism offensive to the higher-ups she is lobbying for a promotion.

»The putrid icing on this foul-tasting cake is her replacement for Manning as parade Grand Marshal: California Attorney General Kamala Harris, a rising star in the Democratic party firmament, former San Francisco City Attorney – not to mention a former One Source Consulting client. So there’s a pecuniary interest here, too – and isn’t that just so typical of the crony-capitalist regime we suffer under today? It’s all about politicians enriching themselves at everyone else’s expense – or, in this case, at the expense of a gay guy who’s been tortured, according to the UN, and held in prison without trial for three years, because he exposed the lies, the shitty little betrayals, and the murderous arrogance of our rulers as they rampage across the globe.

The de-Marshaling of Bradley Manning might seem like a trivial matter to some, but it is in reality a real cultural turning point. It used to be that what passes for the “left” in American politics was identified with a principled opposition to the American conceit that we are the inheritors of the British empire, and that now that the British lion has turned into a bit of a pussycat it’s up to the American eagle to police the world. Opposition to this arrogant nonsense was once central to any American liberal or leftist’s self-conception (with the exception of those “cold war liberals” who today would be called neoconservatives). Today, in Obama’s America, they have embraced the cause of yesteryear’s Anglophiles and taken up what we used to call the White Man’s Burden – except today it is the Multi-Cultural Multi-Gendered LGBT Man’s Person’s Burden... [...]

»Under this “progressive” President, government secrecy has been raised to a sacred principle, and presidential supremacism taken to new heights undreamed of by his predecessor. The Obamaites have gone after whistleblowers, like Manning – and this poor guy – hammer and tongs, and the “progressive” community is silent – although Chris Hayes did bring up the jailing of John Kiriakou, the ex-CIA man who revealed that the US was waterboarding “enemy combatants,” (albeit without, as far as I can tell, actually denouncing it).

»And while Washington’s “progressive” policy wonks might debate this amongst themselves, out in the field the troops are insensitive to such arcane subjects. To a political hack like Lisa Williams, and her crew at the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, Bradley Manning is a figure to be shunned. In the 1960s, liberals of her ilk lionized people like Daniel Ellsberg: today, they’d be denouncing him for putting “in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform” and howling for a long jail sentence.

»I have to note that the various “gay veterans” organizations, which pushed so hard to reverse the ban on “open” gays in the military, are cheering Williams on. That Manning is a soldier, and a gay one, too, matters not at all to these losers. I heard one hard-bitten old Lesbian officer even accuse Manning of “treason,” echoing the worst of the warmongering neocons. It’s scary, really, to see all these leather queens rallying to Williams’s defense. Having assimilated the military culture of an imperialist power, they have become its purveyors within the gay community. With gays in the military comes the frightful phenomenon of gay militarism: I wonder how long before these people start pushing for a war against Russia because Putin won’t allow Gay Pride Day in Moscow. [...]

»After a long evolution from a free-spirited and totally non-governmental phenomenon, San Francisco’s Gay Pride parade has become a veritable arm of the city’s political establishment. I marched in the first Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco, way back in 1972, I believe, as part of the official Libertarian Party contingent. We gathered in a Pacific Heights park, and marched down Polk Street, about 5,000 people – much to the consternation of the police, who had the good sense not to try to stop us. We had no permit, no corporate sponsors, and not a single politician showed up to speak. [...]

Straight politicos have “evolved” since then, or so they tell us, but the point is that the gay movement, as a political phenomenon, has “evolved,” too – and not in a good way, as the Manning de-Grand Marshaling demonstrates. These people are nothing but liberals shorn of their best impulses and mired in a soggy swamp of identity politics, political correctness-gone-bonkers, and an instinctual authortarianism. They care no more about the preservation of our constitutional rights and protections than, say, the membership of the Chinese Communist Party. Indeed, they regard any talk of the Constitution – a document written by straight white men – as politically suspect. After all, isn’t it those right-wing extremists who are always going on about the Constitution?

»They don’t care about civil liberties – not when they’re the cops – and they don’t even want to talk about foreign policy, except to complain about how long it’s taking us to intervene in Syria. (That’s you, Carl Levin: why don’t you hurry up and retire?) All they care about is getting more Free Stuff from the government, and pushing for “gay marriage.”»

Il est impossible d’ignorer cet événement autour de la Gay Pride de San Francisco, et de ne pas le rapprocher du houleux débat autour du “mariage gay” en France. La décision de la direction de la Gay Pride de San Francisco est un alignement typique sur le conformisme-Système, instrumenté par des gens qui appartiennent eux-mêmes au Système et qui ont pénétré l’organisation en son nom, c’est-à-dire une évolution fondamentale d’un mouvement qu’on avait coutume de percevoir comme “militant” et qu’on pouvait juger comme opposé à l’establishment et antiSystème. Le “mariage gay” en France pourrait, de même, bénéficier d’une révision d’appréciation et être considéré, avec bien des arguments comme le signe de l’entrée majestueuse du mouvement gay, bariolé de diverses couleurs et de quelques soupirs type-Taubira sur “la République” et “la laïcité”, dans le conformisme-Système le plus évident. Dans ce cas, il s’agirait de réviser les approches très conventionnelles qu’on a en général des différents acteurs de la farce, notamment en faisant des paléos-conservateurs et autres qui organisent les manifestations dont la gauche progressiste se daube et s’effraie à la fois, c’est selon, la véritable force antiSystème en action.

Il est évident que les étiquettes habituelles se trouvent singulièrement bousculées et qu’un reclassement s’impose pour exactement définir la substance et l’identité de ces événements, beaucoup plus en fonction d’eux-mêmes considérés par rapport à l'environnement politique et idéologique dominant et selon les forces qui y interviennent débarrassées de leurs faux-nez, que du point de vue de leurs significations idéologiques traditionnelles qui sont données par les uns et les autres selon leurs propres conceptions. C’est-à-dire qu’ils méritent une considération et une mesure spécifique par rapport au principal enjeu d’aujourd’hui, qui est le Système, sa surpuissance et sa dynamique d’autodestruction, et par conséquent la nécessaire bataille antiSystème. C’est de ce point de vue, à notre sens, qu’ils sont particulièrement intéressants et d’un poids certain, et qu'ils méritent d'être évalués. Nous nous y emploierons très prochainement, dans un texte que nous préparions avant même que l’affaire du soldat Manning, exclu de la Gay Pride pour trahison à l’encontre du Système, ait éclaté aux USA.

Mis en ligne le 29 juillet 2013 à 16H24