Radical media, politics and culture.

Anonymous Comrade submits:


Hempfest 2003: A Report

Rob Waddell

Hempfest 2003 rocked on for 3 days and two nights deep in the forest of Northern Ontario. With world class entertainment and an impressive lineup of speakers the citizens of Hempfest 2003, all 960 and 238 dogs were blessed with amazing weather all weekend long. The rains came down on Thursday but the skys cleared by evening and gave us an entertaining show with the Aurora Borealis dancing through the sky. The people started arriving on Thursday to stake their campsite for the weekend to come and to set up their "art installations".

NOT BORED! writes "Translator's introduction to
Words and Bullets The Condemned of the Lebovici Affair





The Lebovici Affair (new translation)

At 6:30 pm on 5 March 1984, Gerard Lebovici -- a prominent Parisian film producer and publisher -- left his office and went to meet someone who claimed in a telelphone call received earlier in the day to be acting on behalf of Sabrina Mesrine. Lebovici was very close to Sabrina, who was the daughter of the infamous bank-robber Jacques Mesrine, who'd been killed in a police ambush in 1979. Not only had Lebovici officially adopted Sabrina as his daughter, but he'd also reprinted her father's book, L'instinct de mort, which had been suppressed by the Ministry of Justice several years earlier.

Emrah Göker writes "

CONSCRIPTING TURKEY: IMPERIAL MERCENARIES WANTED


Emrah Göker
On December 30th, 1900, amidst the heated debates about US military campaigns in Asia and the Philippines and about the “burden” on the shoulders of British gentlemen serving the Empire in her “savage” colonies, Mark Twain bitterly saluted the new century: “I bring you the stately matron called Christendom – returning bedraggled, besmirched and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiaochow, Manchuria, South Africa and the Philippines; with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass. Give her the glass; it may from error free her / When she shall see herself as others see her.”[1]

Anonymous Comrade submits:

Giorgio Agamben. Stato di eccezione.

Torino: Bollati Borighieri. 2003

Brett Neilson
University of Western Sydney

Review by Brett Neilson (University of Western Sydney)

At a time when Australians face trial before U.S. military tribunals,
asylum seekers languish in camps like Baxter and Nauru, and new government
legislation allows the detention of Australian citizens themselves, the
prose of Giorgio Agamben burns with relevance for those who live on the
southern continent. Stato di eccezione is Agamben's latest offering, an
extension and deepening of Homo sacer (1995)--of which it announces itself
as Volume II, Part 1. Growing more directly from this earlier text than
Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998), Volume III of Homo sacer, the book is
at once more historically grounded and more politically audacious. Agamben
steps away from the pessimistic analytic of 'bare life' to recover some of
the redemptive energy that inhabits La communità che viene (1990), his
best-known work among English language readers. Perhaps it is the force
with which emergency powers have gripped the world in the past two years
that lends Stato di eccezione a political intensity that remains wholly
current even as it interrogates Roman republican law and plummets the
ontological depths of early 20th-century thinkers like Carl Schmitt and
Walter Benjamin.

Todd Brizendine submits:

"Apologies Now Being Accepted"

Mike McArdle

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/0 8/p/22_apologies.html

Well, it looks like the wimpy, irrelevant UN Security Council was right,
the cheese-eating surrender-monkey French were right, the British people
(as opposed to their government) were right, and those hate-America
peacenik anti-war demonstrators were right.

The Iraq war has degenerated into a complete disaster, an utterly
unwinnable quagmire that threatens to become a treasury-emptying ten
year guerilla war that will kill thousands, and - as an added bonus -
become a enormously successful recruiting device for the Islamic
fundamentalists who want to drive both America and Israel from the
Middle East. So take a bow, Susan Sarandon and Janeane Garofalo - you
called it. You were right on the money but unfortunately the powers that
be didn't listen to you.

Antasofia writes: "Here is an interview with Noam Chomsky in which he speaks about the relation between intellectuals and the dominion of the new world order, criticizing intellectuals such as Foucault and Negri."



"The Dominion and The Intellectuals"

Antasofia Interviews Noam Chomsky



Q: Last year we worked on a seminar, made by the students, called Genealogy of Dominion. We studied Max Stirner, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Etienne De la Boetie and Hannah Arendt. I worked on Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own. He believes language has a disciplinary effect that through the words goes straight to ideology. So for Stirner, you have to free yourself from this kind of language and have a personal rebellion, not a revolution. This is something different from your language conception that is free and creative. I want to know what you think about that.

polo submits "Stupid White Men

Michael Moore in Belfast

"amongst those who are oppressed are many who like to oppress..."

Anthony McIntyre • August 19, 2003


When Tommy Gorman phoned me on a Saturday evening and asked if I would like to accompany him to the Michael Moore talk - a roar would be a more apt description - at the West Belfast Feile, I was delighted to get the chance. Previous to his call I had assumed no tickets were available due to such a high early demand. The Feile's Carol Jackson later explained that within an hour of release the tickets were gone. Not that surprising given that they went gratis and few would have survived the opening rush once made available to a hungry public.



Moore has assumed something of iconographic status for many on the left seeking alternatives to the less than inspirational clowns that the left have been wont to worship over the years. Breezy and irreverent he has made a reputation for ridiculing the sacred cows of the right. Amongst the issues he has tackled, according to one report in Dissent magazine, are the increased use of prison labour; botched urban renewal schemes; the temping of the workforce; and problems of welfare, violence and racism. The prospect of hearing him thunder live was not to be turned down.



Although it is cliché to say, her beauty and serenity evoke an aging Virgin Mary, especially in this setting. She sits on her donkey expression unchanged as she bounces along among the olive trees through the rocky valley pass eyes glancing outward, watchful and placid.


    Her donkey has an open sore on its behind and she has a grotesquely bulbous and purple arm irritated to elephantine proportions by the holes made to clean her blood three times a week.


      It is this arm that she offers to the soldier as proof of her right to pass. The man she travels with, also a dialysis patient, on a healthier donkey with less corroded looking track marks, speaks English,“Please”, he says looking up at the two boys lounging on the hill, guns cocked,

“Dialysis, we are dialysis.”


    Nidal has no common language with these people. She offers the arm and a slight faraway smile.

"Hollywood Isn't Holding Its Lines Against the Pentagon"

Jonathan Turley, LA Times

With the reality of entrenched opposition in Iraq resulting in increasing U.S. fatalities there, the opposition at home to the occupation is hardening by the day. The military appears to have come up with a solution: Change reality.

In what has been described as a "Pentagon infomercial," the Defense Department has hired a former producer of the TV show "Cops" to film postwar Iraq from its perspective. Though producer Bertram van Munster has denied that he is shooting a propaganda piece, it is clear that the Pentagon is gearing up to frame its own account — and history — of the Iraq war.

"Lessons in How to Lie About Iraq"

Brian Eno, August 17, 2003 by the Observer/UK

When I first visited Russia, in 1986, I made friends with a
musician whose father had been Brezhnev's personal doctor.
One day we were talking about life during 'the period of
stagnation' -- the Brezhnev era. 'It must have been strange
being so completely immersed in propaganda,' I said.

'Ah, but there is the difference. We knew it was
propaganda,' replied Sacha.

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