Radical media, politics and culture.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"What Did Stephen Harper Actually Win?"

John Chuckman

There has been a lot of noise about the victory of Stephen Harper, leader of Canada’s new Conservative party, but just what did he win?

Votes in the recent election for progressive parties — Liberals, New Democrats, and Bloc Quebecois (quite progressive on social issues) — went from 64.8% in the 2004 election to 58.2% in 2006, a handsome majority that would be rated a landslide in an American presidential election.

Hijacking the Internet: How Big Cable and Phone Companies' Plans for Broadband Threaten Democracy

Jeff Chester, Center for Digital Democracy/b>

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies have a vision for the Internet's future. Verizon, AT&T (formerly SBC), Comcast, and Bell South want to create a privately run and branded "pay-as-you-go" Internet, making everything we do online a "billable," revenue-generating service. Our every cyberspace move will be tracked and stored so we can be better marketed to (a data collection system that might even rival the NSA's!). Those with the deepest pockets--think corporate special interest groups and major advertisers--will get preferred treatment. Their content will show up (and be processed) the fastest on our computer and television screens. Content seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, may be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out, say "white papers" and other documents given to the cable and phone industry.

Under the plans they are considering, all of us--from large to small content providers to individual users--will have to pay more when surfing online, streaming videos, or perhaps even sending and receiving email. Companies are mulling the imposition of new subscription plans that will limit our online experience. There will be "gold," bronze," and "silver" forms of Internet access that tightly define what they call our "level of service" (limiting how much downloading we can do, etc.)

Gone will be the more open and nondiscriminatory network of today.

To help ensure that their "vision" succeeds, the phone and cable lobbies are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the nation's communication policy laws. Both the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering proposals that will have a far-reaching impact on the Internet's future. They want the federal government to permit them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as "private" networks--without policy safeguards or governmental oversight. Telephone and cable companies are now using the same kind of political snake oil that helped them pass the now-infamous 1996 Telecommunications Act (ten years ago on Feb 8, 1996). They have unleashed the tried-and-true rhetoric designed to lure compromised and clueless lawmakers. Our proposals, they claim, will "empower the consumer" and lead to "innovation." But these are code words used to cloak their real goal: to turn the Internet into a turbocharged digital retail machine.

"Are You There God? It's Me, Monica"

How Nice Girls Got So Casual About Oral Sex

Caitlin Flanagan,

Atlantic Monthly

The first time I heard a mother of girls talk about the teenage oral-sex craze,
I made her cry. The story she told me — about a bar mitzvah dinner dance on the
North Shore of Chicago, where the girls serviced all the boys on the chartered
bus from the temple to the reception hall — was so preposterous that I burst out
laughing. The thought of thirteen-year-old girls in party dresses performing a
sex act once considered the province of prostitutes (we are talking here about
the on-your-knees variety given to a series of near strangers) was so ludicrous
that all I could do was giggle.

It was as though I had taken lightly the news that a pedophile had moved into my
friend's neighborhood. It was as though I had laughed about a leukemia cluster
or a lethal stretch of freeway. I apologized profusely; I told her I hadn't
known.

The moms in my set are convinced — they're certain; they know for a fact — that
all over the city, in the very best schools, in the nicest families, in the
leafiest neighborhoods, twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls are performing oral
sex on as many boys as they can. They're ducking into janitors' closets between
classes to do it; they're doing it on school buses, and in bathrooms, libraries,
and stairwells. They're making bar mitzvah presents of the act, and performing
it at "train parties": boys lined up on one side of the room, girls working
their way down the row.

Marc garrett & Ruth Catlow writes:

"States of Interdependence"

NODE.London

A collaborative text written by Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow, for Media Mutandis: A Node.London Reader (to be published in February 2006)

There is a Sufi fable in which a group of foreigners sit at breakfast, excitedly discussing their previous night’s exploration. One starts saying “…and what about that great beast we came across in the darkest part of the Jungle? It was like a massive, rough wall.” The others look perplexed. “No it wasn’t!” says one, “It was some kind of python”. “Yeah…” another half-agrees, “…but it also had powerful wings”. The shortest of the group looks bemused — “well it felt like a tree trunk to me.”

This fable aptly illustrates many aspects of the NODE.London experience. The name, which stands for Networked Open Distributed Events in London, indicates the open, lateral structure adopted to develop a season of media arts. It is intentionally extensible, suggesting possible future NODE(s), Rio, Moscow, Mumbai etc. As participants/instigators in the project’s ongoing conceptualization and praxis, we are just two individuals positioned on the interlaced, scale-free networks of NODE.L (more on these later). As such, our descriptions of this collectively authored project are inevitably incomplete and contestable, with a complete picture emerging only in negotiation with others.

"Real Threat Is From Imperial Fundamentalism"

Tariq Ali Inteviewd by Marcus Dam, The Hindu

Writer and political activist Tariq Ali describes himself as a "person of the Left." In a recent interview in Kolkata, he talked about his concerns over an Asia which is "politically undetermined and economically over-determined," and of an Indian political leadership "obsessed with money and markets."

Q: You were initiated into political activism during the Vietnam War and have been engaged in it ever since. How has the world changed since the late sixties? What has become of the human condition and the dignity of man?


We are living in a different epoch than we were 40 years ago. There has been a sea change since then. We have seen a big triumph of global capitalism, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have collapsed, and China is today the most dynamic capitalist state in the world. What we are seeing now are problems of a different sort and a growing opposition in some parts of the world to the American Empire... History never progresses in a straight line, it moves forward, backwards, it zig-zags, and there is no guarantee of progress — it has to be fought for and maintained.

"Thirty Years Later, A Celebration
for How Europe Underdeveloped Africa"
Peter Kimani

Many independent African and Third World states were born amidst intense ideological struggles in the 1960s, and lived to the end of the 1980s through heated debates about, among other things, whether capitalism or socialism was the best path to prosperity. No single individual was at the heart of those contestations more than Dr Walter Rodney. Born in the Caribbean, Rodney was schooled in Europe and fated to work in Africa, where while at Dar es Salaam University he produced his influential work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. His assassination in June 1980 due to his radical political views opened a troubling chapter in Guyana.

Peter Kimani attended a recent conference in Dar es Salaam that celebrated Rodney's life and reflected on his legacy.

"Walter Rodney lives!" proclaims a message beneath the image of a man in an Afro hairstyle, scraggly beard and spectacles.
The simple poster said many things: the hairstyle echoed the Black Power movement that dominated the USA of the civil rights movement, and permanently altered the history of America.

"Why an Economic Boycott of Israel is Justified"

Norman G. Finkelstein

The recent proposal that Norway boycott Israeli goods has provoked passionate debate. In my view, a rational examination of this issue would pose two questions:

1) Do Israeli human rights violations warrant an economic boycott? and

2) Can such a boycott make a meaningful contribution toward ending these violations? I would argue that both these questions should be answered in the affirmative.


Although the subject of many reports by human rights organizations, Israel's real human rights record in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is generally not well known abroad. This is primarily due to the formidable public relations industry of Israel's defenders as well as the effectiveness of their tactics of intimidation, such as labeling critics of Israeli policy anti-Semitic.


Yet, it is an incontestable fact that Israel has committed a broad range of human rights violations, many rising to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"God Bless Canada!"

John Chuckman

I hadn't realized until recently that Stephen Harper was using "God Bless Canada!" as a tagline for his speeches. Some may think this a harmless, or even beneficent, expression for a politician to use, but for those with knowledge of history, nothing could be a more frightening.


I do believe we all know to whom Harper is tipping his hat with these words. George Bush, author of two wars which have killed more than a hundred thousand innocent people and the champion of an ugly set of repressive laws in the United States, says "God Bless America!" every chance he gets.


Some might say Bush uses the line because he has nothing else to say, and I don't doubt this is part of the truth. But slogans of this kind are always used to protect dangerous people from criticism. The words are used also as code, a kind of insidious political wink, to bloodthirsty supporters, the Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell types. They say things that cannot be uttered in public.

An anonymous coward writes:

"The Anti-Semitism of the 68ers"
Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke Talk with Tilman Fichter

On November 9, 1969, on the anniversary of "Kristallnacht", over two hundred people were gathered in Berlin's Jewish Community Centre in commemoration of the victims of Nazi Germany. Unbeknownst to them, a member of the radical Left student movement "Tupamaros West Berlin" planted a bomb in the building. The device failed to explode because the clock meant to trigger it off was connected by a rusty wire.

The Tupamaros saw themselves as Germany's first urban guerillas, inspired by the Latin American role model. The brains behind the plot was Dieter Kunzelmann, a leftist radical political clown, founder of the "Kommune 1" and self-proclaimed "Kingpin of Chaos". In the wake of the six-day war of 1967, Kunzelmann saw Israel as an imperial state and oppressor of the Palestinians, which must be resisted with force. His opponents inside the Left, who maintained a more nuanced view of the situation in the Middle East, accused him of having a "Jew complex".

This summer, Wolfgang Kraushaar published Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus (The Bomb in the Jewish Community Centre). The book reveals previously unknown information on the 1969 plot, and sparked a heated debate about anti-Semitism in the German Left in general and in the 68er movement specifically.

An anonymous coward writes:


"Are 500,000 Keys to Paradise Enough?
Germany 'Confronts' Ahmadinejad"
Matthias Küntzel

In pondering the behavior of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I cannot help but think of the 500,000 plastic keys that Iran imported from Taiwan during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88. At the time, an Iranian law laid down that children as young as 12 could be used to clear mine fields. Before every mission, a plastic key would be hung around each of the children’s necks. It was supposed to open for them the gates to paradise.

The “child-martyrs” belonged to the so-called “Basij” movement created by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Basij Mostazafan – the “mobilization of the oppressed” – were volunteers of all ages that embraced death with religious enthusiasm. They provided the model for the first Hezbollah suicide bombers in Lebanon. To this day, they remain a kind of SA of the Islamic revolution. Sometimes they serve as a “vice squad”, monitoring public morals; sometimes they rage against the opposition – as in 1999, when they were used to break the student movement. At all times, they celebrate the cult of self sacrifice.

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