Radical media, politics and culture.

"The Michael Moore Conservatives:

Meet Britain's Anti-American Tories"

Adrian Wooldridge, Weekly Standard

There are many things that can be said against Michael Moore. An odd
combination of Howard Stern and Paul Krugman, Moore is the king of
all left-wing media, from films to books, who specializes in trashing
everything that conservative America holds dear. For Moore,
businessmen are always trampling on the faces of the poor,
Republicans are always the tools of sinister vested interests, and
America is always up to no good in the world. But say this for the
pudgy auteur, he has his uses as a timesaver at dinner parties in
hyper-partisan America. If the woman next to you admires Moore, she
probably dated Dean and is now firmly married to Kerry; if she
regards Moore as a bilious blowhard, then she is probably going to
vote for George W. Bush.

hydrarchist writes ... this is just the introduction from a reader produced for a conference of the same title by some friends in Australia. The link to the rest of the texts can be found at the end.

The State of Emergency - A Reader

She is married to a man she loathes but who has her almost completely in his power... [So] Sue Ellen’s... alcoholism functions as a metaphor for her enduring state of crisis... Such a state of crisis is not at all exceptional or uncommon in the context of the soap opera genre. On the contrary, crisis can be said to be endemic to it.- Ien Ang on Sue Ellen from Dallas.

In 1940, Walter Benjamin - a Marxist Jew in exile in France - wrote that “[t]he tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception, but the rule.” Just as crisis is the normal state for a soap opera about oil fortunes (i.e., Dallas), crisis is the normal state for the soap opera about oil fortunes in which we live (i.e., the world).

Frank Wallis writes

The War on Terror: Massacre in Fallujah, April 2004

New Report Questions Bush Government's Claims

"It's not that I encourage my son to hate Americans. It's not that I make him want to join the resistance. Americans do that for me." – Abdul Razak al-Muaimy, resident of Fallujah

"People will bend to our will if they are afraid of us." – USMC Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne

A year before the massacre of April 2004 the citizens of Fallujah witnessed an American invasion and the deaths of eighteen people at the hands of the US military. Fallujah (pop. 200,000) is 35 miles west of Baghdad on the Euphrates River. The massacre of April 2004 cannot be understood without reference to a series of tragic events that took place in the previous year. The sixty-eight page report by historian Frank Wallis shows that the hundreds of deaths which took place in Fallujah met the definition of massacre, and were the result of a poorly planned and badly managed political and military campaign aimed at Saddam Hussein and foreign terrorists. The military arm of the George W. Bush government thrust itself into Fallujah to destroy an enemy that did not exist, and concluded the operation with a futile status quo ante. The same people that Bush's government sought to drive out of Fallujah returned to power. Resistance to the American intrusion was homegrown, and not under the direction of foreign terrorists. Culpability for the massacre rises to the top of the military chain of command, and hence to the Bush government.

____________________

Copyright 2004 by Frank Wallis. All rights reserved.

"Ashcroft, Snoops and Gag Orders:

The Secrets of
Surveillance"

Elaine Cassell, Counterpunch

Everyone knows by now (or should) that the Patriot Act
allows the FBI to conduct surveillance on Internet and
email usage. Using so-called National Security Letters
(NSLs), the FBI directs Internet Service Providers
(ISPs) to provide passwords and identifying information
that will allow the government to target people who are
plotting terrorism or who are otherwise potentially
dangerous to national security. I am sure that many of
you reading this (and I, likely) have the government in
our computers.

"Don't Get High Without It:

The Vaults of Erowid Supplies the Ultimate Trip Buddy — Information"

Erik Davis

Early last February, a 19-year-old sophomore dragged himself into the
psychiatric emergency ward at a large American university hospital,
complaining that his friends and family were plotting against him.
Though the fellow knew his thoughts were irrational, he could not shake
his bout of paranoia. He also told the receiving staff that six weeks
earlier he had swallowed an unknown amount of 2C-I, a recreational drug
that, in his case, produced bright colors and swirling patterns and a
suffocating onslaught of cosmic dread. The bad vibes had recurred with
increasing ferocity in the intervening weeks, until he finally decided to
check himself in.

simulacrum writes:

The "New" Europe

The European Union as from May 1 has ten new member-countries. It extended its membership after years of debate and indecisiveness and became the world's single biggest market with a population of 450 million. Not only that the extended EU increased its economic potential, and eventually its worldwide influence and economic power, but it created a part of the world which will presumably be a respective, almost equal, competitor to the US on the global political landscape in quest for global dominance.

As it is, there are some significant downsides to this spectacular "Europeanization of Europe". Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, as some of the new members are societies with a dreadful recent past of unsuccessful communism. Their economies were systematically ruined by the overwhelming influence of Stalinist Soviet Union and the population of those countries as a whole lack, if we can call it like that, a basic training course in democracy. Of course, some countries, like for example Slovenia, had more ideological and geographical contacts with Western Europe, and therefore have developed a stronger sense of what "capitalism" and "democracy" as abstract concepts mean. Thus, this Slovenian experience reflected itself to certain extent in the current socio-political situation in the country which is, along with Cyprus, the richest newcomer in EU with a GDP per head of 69% of EU average.

"Cruel Science: The Long Shadow of CIA Torture Research"

Alfred W. McCoy, Boston Globe, May 15, 2004

The photos from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are snapshots, not of simple
brutality or a breakdown in discipline, but of CIA torture techniques
that have metastasized, over the past 50 years, like an undetected
cancer inside the US intelligence community.


From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led massive, secret research into coercion
and consciousness that reached a billion dollars at peak. After
experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shocks, and sensory
deprivation, this CIA research produced a new method of torture that
was psychological, not physical — best described as "no touch torture."


The CIA's discovery of psychological torture was a counter-intuitive
break-through — indeed, the first real revolution in this cruel
science since the 17th century. In its modern application, the
physical approach required interrogators to inflict pain, usually by
crude beatings that often produced heightened resistance or
unreliable information. Under the CIA's new psychological paradigm,
however, interrogators used two essential methods, disorientation and
self-inflicted pain, to make victims feel responsible for their own
suffering.

Bringing "Maximum Security" to Iraq

Yoshie Furuhashi

One of the most astonishing remarks that George W. Bush made in his Army War College speech laying out a five-step plan to re-engineer the occupation is his declaration that "America will fund the construction of a modern maximum security prison. When that prison is completed detainees at Abu Ghraib will be relocated. Then with the approval of the Iraqi government we will demolish the Abu Ghraib prison as a fitting symbol of Iraq's new beginning" ("Transcript of Bush Speech on US Strategy in Iraq," Financial Times, May 25 2004). Then again, it is quite fitting that an empire built by a prison state -- "a nation that incarcerates 2.2 million people -- one-quarter of all the world's prisoners" (Alan Elsner, "If US Plays Global Prison Ratings Game, It Ought to Play by Its Own Rules," Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 2004) -- will be a prison empire.

"Dangerous Philosophy:

Threat, Risk, and Security"

Irving Goh, CTheory

"We have seen [the State war machine] set its sights on a new
type of enemy, no longer another State, nor even another regime,
but the 'unspecified enemy'; we have seen it put its
counter-guerilla elements into place, so that it can be caught
by surprise once, but not twice... Yet the conditions that make
the State or World war machine possible, in other words constant
capital (resources and equipment) and human variable capital,
constantly recreate unexpected possibilities for counterattack,
unforeseen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular,
minority, mutant machines. The definition of the Unspecified
Enemy testifies to this... 'multiform, maneuvering and
omnipresent... of the moral, political, subversive or economic
order, etc.,' the unassignable material Saboteur or human
Deserter assuming the most diverse forms." — Deleuze and Guattari [1]

"We plan a comprehensive assault on terrorism. This will be a
different kind of conflict against a different kind of enemy.
This is a conflict without battlefields or beachheads, a
conflict with opponents who believe they are invisible." — George W. Bush [2]


"Words can be turned against me." — Jean Baudrillard [3]

Questions of Philosophy


If Deleuze and Guattari were to write and publish their philosophy of
the nomadological war machine today, in the still dark light of the
omnipresent retaliatory and aggressive political discourse that has
emerged from the ruins of September 11, would their philosophy have a
chance?

"Deconstruct to Reconstruct:

An Interview with Maurice Godelier

Paul Eiss and Thomas C. Wolfe

At the end of March, 2004, Maurice Godelier spent a week at the University as a guest of the Institute for the Humanities. Professer Godelier is currently the Directeur de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and Professor of Anthropology. It is safe to say that he is one of the two most famous anthropologists in France, along with his former teacher, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Professor Godelier gave several formal lectures, met privately with students and faculty, and he agreed to let Paul Eiss, a graduate student in the Program in History and Anthropology, tape a lunchtime conversation.

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