Radical media, politics and culture.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"These Colours Don't Run"

John Chuckman

Given its strutting brownshirt quality, here is a slogan that might well have been coined by America's most articulate political thug, Pat Buchanan.


But the slogan, with little waving-flag pictures, is being used for bumper stickers selling John Kerry. Good marketers know that you want an offering for every niche, so here's Kerry for the belly-over-the-belt, beer-belching, walrus-mustache set.

Frank Wallis writes:

"Bush, Torture, and American Values in Iraq"

Frank Wallis


The highest levels of the Bush government authorized torture. What is more astonishing is the active participation of religious Christians in policy-making which led to crimes against humanity. Bush warned Iraq about mistreating American POWs, and spoke of dignity, good vs. evil, morality, values, and compassion. This fully sourced article shows Bush to be a hypocrite: complaining about rape rooms under Saddam, while at US-administered Abu Ghraib captive Iraqis were tortured.


Full article here: http://www.powerskeptic.net/abu.htm. A 25 page report with 90 footnotes is also available for download from the same web page.

Sureyyya Evren writes:

"Torture and Its Show"

Sureyyya Evren


It is a known fact that children unable to feel pain tend to die early and require an extra diligent care. Painlessness is not a gift but a disguised curse for them.

On the other hand, the painless adult is usually imagined as a fantasy, a super power. In some adventure novels and movies, we see characters who went through a certain operation with their nerve system so that they do not feel pain anymore, they usually find themselves in most dreadful tasks and because they are painless, it is not possible to torture them. Painlessness is introduced as a kind of superhuman peculiarity. But even in these stargazing of painless superhumans, painless person has a sufferer side; for example 'they' use him as a hit man, a homicide, always on the front line in most difficult tasks, and then 'they' throw him away. When he gets kidnapped, 'enemies' operate new techniques to find his weak point. In a way, you feel like his humanity has gone with his sense of pain. You can be insensitive to him, as much as you are afraid of him. It is difficult to feel pity for him, his senselessness and dehumanization makes him away from good and bad. Painless hero is like a robot-man, far away as an android –and wasn't this tragedy, one of the strong themes of Blade Runner?

Anonymous Comrade writes

"Insanity in America"

John Chuckman

It's always satisfying to have a pet theory supported by new data. A large and authoritative study, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, confirms a favorite hypothesis of mine, that there is more mental illness and insanity, far more, in America than you find in other advanced societies.

Remembering the Common Hood
Soweto and Runnymede
Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch


I flew from Detroit, with one stop, to the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to participate in an international conference, "The Promise of Freedom and its Practice: Global Perspectives on South Africa's Decade of Democracy."

I arrived on the heels of students protesting the cut in university 'bursaries' forcing many to terminate their studies, especially the poorer students. When the university responded by calling in armed police, helicopters, and 'bouncers' from neighborhood gangs, some faculty remonstrated, "this seems very much like Bantu education in a different guise," they wrote the Vice Chancellor, alluding to the apartheid system of education that prevailed during the third quarter of the 20th century. The difference now is that the IMF-imposed cutbacks, unlike apartheid, are truly pan-African, whose effect is the destruction of the independent university in the mother continent as a whole. (The Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa has been ringing this alarm for years.)

During a break in the conference I strolled down the hill from Wits (as they call the university), across Mandela Bridge, over the railway tracks (O so many!) and mini-bus yards, down the African street with its hawkers, colors, and fragrances, in order to meet the comrades of the Anti-Privatization Forum, the Landless People's Movement, Jubilee South Africa, and the Indymedia Center who were gathering at the Worker's Library in an anti-war coalition. They were to be evicted at the end of the month from that venue by the Johannesburg city council.

Berg Katse writes "From the archives: The best, most appropriate, and mysteriously prophetic comment about the late Ronald Reagan was made by J.G. Ballard in 1967, an innocent time when the idea of a lousy B-movie actors running for political office was still considered an utterly ridiculous idea

[At the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco a copy of the Reagan text, minus its title and the running sideheads, and furnished with the seal of the Republican Party, was distributed by some puckish pro-situationists to the RNC delegates. It was accepted for what it resembled: a psychological position paper on the candidate's subliminal appeal, commissioned by some maverick think-tank.]

================================================
WHY I WANT TO FUCK RONALD REAGAN [1967] by JG Ballard [excerpt from "The Atrocity Exhibition" ]

RONALD REAGAN AND THE CONCEPTUAL AUTO DISASTER. Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (GPI), placing Reagan in a series of simulated auto crashes, e.g. multiple pileups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subject showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields and rear trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic surrounded the image of the Presidential contender.

"Why The CIA Will Always Be A Costly Flop"
John Chuckman


The resignation of both the director and an important deputy director of any large organization is noteworthy, but when that organization is the CIA we have an event of global interest.


Several official, and likely-embarrassing, reports concerning CIA activities - including one dealing with the Agency's generous estimates of Iraq's non-existent weapons - are expected to appear soon. The timing of the resignations may well reflect these coming reports.


You might think the men who resigned, Director George Tenet and Deputy Director for Operations James Parvitt, should have been fired long ago. Never mind the nonexistent weapons in Iraq or phony invoices for uranium, the Agency's failure around the events leading to 9/11 was stunning, but the intelligence business is one of the few where job performance is almost unconnected with keeping your job.

Anonymous Comrade writes

Argentina: From Popular Rebellion to "Normal Capitalism",
by James Petras.


The mass assemblies have largely dissolved, or else got co-opted, "middle class" former participants now seem mostly concerned with crime. The mass pickets (piqueterors) have split into pro-gov't, critical supporters of the gov't and anti-gov't factions, couldn't even stage a joint demo on the 3rd anniversary of the '01 revolution. The Kirchner gov't has managed to co-opt the opposition with the image of standing up to the IMF and multinationals, while giving them pretty much what they wanted. The structures of direct democracy never moved towards confronting capitalism, and instead got channeled into promoting self-help programs, like work schemes that pay $50/month (vs the $140/month necessary for basic food basket) but give the illusion of "a job", and distributing such jobs as if a new patronage set-up. Temporary improvements due to world market conditions (better prices for Argentine products) have created an image of improvement which is already wearing out, but enough to make people think the system works.


Petras puts a large part of the blame on politics which promoted the mass assemblies as an end in themselves, without a party and a program to take state power, ie the Leninist notion of social transformation. This has to be rejected, but so is the retarded idea that the form is everything, that any programmatic notions are "totalitarian" and verbotten. The autonomist followers of Negri and John Holloway (Edinburgh U) have melted away, joining the various political factions. A failure to actually confront capitalism explicitely and propose a different way of living has led to an overall failure.


If you give a damn at all about social transformation, critiques such as Petras's will have to be confronted and dealt with, and without simply restating slogans about autonomy and workers' control. WE NEED TO DISCUSS THIS."

Chuck Morse writes "

(From Perspectives
on Anarchist Theory
, the biannual newsletter of the Institute for Anarchist
Studies, Spring 2004 - Volume 8, Number 1)

The Life--or Death--of the Anti-Globalization
Movement

The anti-globalization movement that erupted
onto the scene in Seattle 1999 frightened elites and inspired activists around
the world to fight the system in a utopian, anti-authoritarian way. However,
this movement has occupied a much less significant place on the public stage
since the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001. Is it over?

We asked Marina Sitrin (IAS grant recipient)
and Chuck Morse (IAS board member) for their thoughts on this question.

Marina
Sitrin's Response
/ Chuck
Morse's Response

hydrarchist writes....from australia......this is a translation someone did for the State of Emergency conference of a recent article to multitudes, previously unavailable in english as far as i know.also might be worth putting up on autonomedia...


The State of Emergency as the Empire's Mode of Governance.


by Jean-Claude Paye

translated by Patrice Riemens

Originally published in Multitudes 16, March 2004.

The atrocities of September 11, 2001 caused an unprecedented acceleration
in the transformation of the corpus of criminal and criminal procedure
laws in Western countries. In the months following the outrage, and
sometimes within days, governments have enacted measures curtailing public
and private liberties. In our opinion, a real break is taking place,
because it is the very existence of the rule of law as we know it which is
at stake.

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