Radical media, politics and culture.

intheheartist writes:

This emerging figure, spoken-word artist, American Indian Movement speaker, is beginning to achieve a well-deserved respect. Unlike most of today's known demystifyers, John Trudell's insights and analysis goes much deeper towards demystifying what few, even Chomsky, have done in helping individual people understand the *War Games* played upon all of us systematically, and it's about time we started to understand, just like so many indigenous peoples of the world have been FORCED to understand.

"A Note on 9/11 and the Reichstag Fire"

By George Caffentzis

Many commentators on the events of 9/11/2001 have compared it to the Reichstag fire of February 27-28, 1933. It is true that the aftermath of both events gave the government in power the opportunity to pass new repressive legislation.

hydrarchist writes"This is an extract from a new work in german and english, produced by the Kolinko collective entitled 'hotlines - Call Centre | Inquiry | Communism".
The full text of the book is available at Nadir

Fiat-Call Centre in Milano/Italy


At the beginning everything looks really nice when you enter Fiat's call
centre in Milan. Lots of space, multi-coloured cubicle walls and little
flags, lots of young people sitting in front of large monitors, wandering
around or relaxing and smoking in the corner by the vending machines. They
speak all kinds of languages: Italian, French, German, Spanish, Dutch,
Polish... Something between an internet cafe, a children's day care centre
and one of those newsrooms in an American TV soap.
Work begins quite relaxed, too. You get a training course where you're told
that the call centre won a prize last year. That everyone is nice to each
other because that way work is fun. That we're supposed to smile all the
time - even on the phone - because then customers get a good impression and
keep buying those Fiats, Alfa Romeos and Lancias. Some weeks and many calls
later you realise where you've ended up. The surroundings have ceased to
cast a spell on you: Welcome to the world of call centres!

Conscientious Objection and the US Military

MoveOn Bulletin, Wednesday, October 16, 2002

Editor: susan.thompson@moveon.org

Editorial Assistant: leah@moveon.org

Subscribe online at:
move on bulletin

CONTENTS:

1. Introduction: Saying No to War, Drafted or Otherwise

2. One Link: All About Conscientious Objection

3. Conscientious Objection and the Draft

4. Conscientious Objection and Taxes

5. Conscientious Objection, the "War on Terrorism", and Iraq

6. Conscientious Objection in the Past: Some Examples

7. Actions, Organizations, and Links

8. About the MoveOn bulletin and MoveOn.org

INTRODUCTION: SAYING NO TO WAR, DRAFTED OR OTHERWISE

Our readers may already be wondering why we've chosen to spend a bulletin on the topic of conscientious objection when US citizens aren't facing a draft.



It is important to remember that conscientious objection does not only affect draftees -- it affects anyone who is considering or is currently involved in military service. And it's more about determining one's personal beliefs and opinions that it is about legally qualifying as an objector.



But while we are not currently facing a draft, it is not outside of the realm of possibility. In every war since Vietnam, the US has managed to conduct military operations using the resources of the volunteer-based military alone. The campaign against Iraq may buck that trend. According to plans leaked to the New York Times, it's likely that after a war the US will occupy Iraq and put a military government in control for five years or more. And US military personnel remain engaged in operations around the globe, from the Philippines to Georgia. As the armed forces are stretched thinner, the likelihood of needing to find the personnel to supplement them increases.

Notes on the US Left

Julio Huato, October 14, 2002

Introduction

On 10/6/02 I went to the Not-In-Our-Name rally in NYC Central Park's East
Meadow. According to some, there was a crowd of about 25 thousand demanding
to stop the war on Iraq and the violations of individual liberties at home.
Not bad, if viewed in context. A step in the right direction. It has great
potential, but I'd like to focus here on the challenges as future
demonstrations are being planned.

[1] A Critical Assessment of the Peace Rally

The last two paragraphs in the New York Times' note about the rally are very
telling:

First, the fatalistic quote attributed to a New York University professor:
She
referred, apparently, to the war on Iraq.

Then, the words by the Bard College student: concentrated teen angst," she said of the rally. "The rhetoric is too
heavy-handed. That's the problem with American activists. They need to
simplify." Someone on stage railed against police brutality and she rolled
her eyes.>

Actually, these two things go together: (1) our ability to actually change
US policy in a reasonable period of time and (2) the composition and tone of
the movement.

In my opinion, besides the lack of focus exhibited at the rally, the tone
was set to a large extent by the apparently radical youth. In the second
part of the rally, most speeches I heard were of this type. Of course, the
participation of young people is necessary -- it must be welcomed and
encouraged. But if we expect working-class and middle-class Americans to
shift on to the left and approach the views of dyed-haired,
pierced-and-tatooed college students about this matter of grave concern
then, indeed, the war will start and go on (and may even finish) before that
happens.

In fact, the only way I can imagine for that to happen is if the war goes
on for a long while and begins to turn in a steady stream of US casualties.
That's a big if. And who desires such a thing? Not me.

Iraq is not Vietnam. In my view, the argument against the war on Iraq is
not that it will prove costly or impossible for the US to pull off. I think
the US alone can win the war and overthrow Saddam at a relatively low cost.
The issue is not that the US cannot. The issue is that the US should not!
But even if Iraq were like Vietnam (Kristoff in the New York Times warns
that people in Iraq will fight back). Still, if we wait for "average"
Americans to radicalize, by then a lot of the damage would have been done
already.

No. The movement has to be much broader to succeed. In fact, only until
the parents of those college kids that were cursing yesterday from the stage
(i.e., people who work, are taxed, vote regularly, and fund political
campaigns) take action massively, a change in policy will be effected.
Otherwise it won't or it'll take much longer. The argument, tone, and style
of the movement have to adjust to appeal to these people. The sooner we
realize that, the better.

Working-class and middle-class Americans will actively oppose the current
policies, foreign and domestic, if they perceive their interests to be
threatened by such policies. And, in my opinion, it is very clear that
their interests, both in the short and long run, are jeopardized by the Bush
doctrine abroad and the Ashcroft doctrine at home. In spite of the
relatively low turnout at the rally, I believe a great deal of Americans are
ready to embrace this. I believe, they just need a more cogent rationale.

The case can be made that waging a war on Iraq will not help things in the
short run and will prove disastrous in the long run. Maybe the case has to
be made in layers, on different levels, adjusted to different audiences.
There are issues that cannot be ignored. For example, the rationale has to
state how specifically the US should deal with Saddam's threat (which does
exist, particularly to people in the Middle East).

To give an outrageous example of what I have in mind, consider
BusinessWeek. In its last issue, the magazine ran an editorial criticizing
the US unilateralism. It was not a very shy critique considering its
source. This week's issue will feature an excerpt from a book by Jeffrey
Garten, The Politics of Fortune. This book is a critique of the Bush
unilateralist doctrine in foreign policy from the perspective of American
capitalists. Garten is no lefty. In fact, he is an academic at Yale and
worked for Kissinger and Cyrus Vance in the past. (Upon request I'll send
the BusinessWeek's piece titled "A Foreign Policy Harmful to Business.")

We all know what an average reader of BusinessWeek magazine looks like.
That's why, in my opinion, in the political debate, arguments like Garten's
pull a lot of weight. These opinions are seriously pondered by the average
BusinessWeek reader. Again, radical college students and the old Left
should not be dismissed. For now, they are a catalytic force. Let's hope
they don't drag the movement backwards in the coming months. The immediate
goal is to switch the country's policy tracks. In order to do that, the
Left cannot afford to reject allies like Garten, that is, if it wants to
win.

But why should we try to attract people with liberal inclinations instead
of appealing to people with radical inclinations? Shifting the tone towards
liberalism will put off the latter and it may not attract the former. Well,
the left has to take the chances if it wants to get anything done.

hydrarchist writes:

"The European Social Forum: Sovereign and Multitude"

J.J. King [jamie@jamie.com]

'There are [...] two primary positions in the response to today's dominant
forces of globalization: either one can work to reinforce the sovereignty of
nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and
global capital, or one can strive towards a non-national alternative to the
present form of globalization that is equally global.' [1] (Michael Hardt.)

'Rarely has the corruption of political and administrative life been so
deeply corrosive; rarely has there been such a crisis of representation;
rarely has disillusionment with democracy been so radical. When people talk
about a "crisis of politics", they are effectively saying that the
democratic State no longer functions — and that in fact it has become
irreversibly corrupt in all its principles and organs; the division of
powers; the principles of guarantee; the single individual powers; the rules
of representation; the unitarian dynamic of powers; and the functions of
legality, efficiency and administrative legitimacy. There has been talk of
an "end of history," and if such a thing exists we might certainy identify
it in the end of the constitutional dialectic tto which liberalism and the
mature capitalist State have tied us.' [2] (Antonio Negri.)

Depth Squad Distro writes:

"Another Stupid War"

Will all great Neptune’s ocean this blood clean from my hand?
No; this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine,
making the green one red murder. — Shakespeare, Macbeth, II.ii

Those who defiantly survive police-state violence tend to develop a wracking, dark humor. In 1970, our friend and surrealist co-worker Haifa Zangana* was jailed in Saddam Hussein’s horrendous Qasir al-Nihaia political prison as an enemy of the State. In her grim but poetic memoir, Haifa recalls the taste of blood in her mouth and the sight of blood on her thighs, the hot tears she shed for friends executed by security police, and the cool gorgeous springs of water in her ancestral homeland of Kurdistan that were plugged silent with cement by Hussein’s troops. Yet today, she says with a tough, sad chuckle, she finds herself (objectively at least) on the side of the dictatorship that tortured her and against the Western governments who vow to "liberate" Iraq.

"Where Do We Go From Here?"*

Jenny Marketou interviews Ricardo Dominguez thing

The events of the recent history which followed 9/11 have changed the term of the debate about hacking, hacktivism and electronic disobedience leading often uncritically to a term of threat,criminality,cyberterrorism and bad things in the name of the public security. As we all know there are many kinds of " hacking" as it is the nature of hacking to be destructive and constructive as well as "to discover freely, to invent freely, to create and to produce freely", to quote McKenzie Wark.

An article by Ferruccio Gambino analyzing Du Bois and his views
on Black Reconstruction from an autonomist perspective is now up
on the Collective Action Notes web page:

Du Bois

Fascists, Anti-Fascists And The State

by Flint, Roundhouse Collective (NEFAC — Baltimore)

"The totalitarian vision of fascists often resonates with the many
statists who wish to unbind their hands from the pretense of 'democratic'
government and civil liberties." — Call for a Revolutionary Anti-Fascist
Bloc

Over the last two years, the neo-nazi National Alliance (NA) has held a
variety of public demonstrations. The NA is the largest, most
well-financed, white supremacist fascist organization in North America.
The most successful venue for them has been Washington, DC. On May 11th,
they had their fifth demonstration. The May demonstration outside the
Israeli embassy, the largest public display of fascists in the U.S. in
decades, numbered over 300 hundred fascists.

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