Radical media, politics and culture.

nolympics writes:

"Vigilante Man"

Mike Davis

"The local people whipped themselves into a mold of cruelty. Then they formed units, squads, and armed them -- armed them with clubs, with gas, with guns. We own the country. We can't let these Okies get out of hand." -- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

The vigilantes are back. In the 1850s, they lynched Irishmen; in the 1870s, they terrorized the Chinese; in the first decade of the twentieth century, they murdered striking Wobblies; in the 1920s, they organized "Bash a Jap" campaigns; and in the 1930s, they welcomed the Joads and other Dust Bowl refugees with tear gas and buckshot.

Vigilantes have always been to the American West what the Ku Klux Klan was to the South: vicious and cowardly bigotry organized into a self-righteous mob. Almost every decade, some sinister group of self-proclaimed patriots mobilizes to repel a new invasion from some subversive threat or other.

Prisoners of Conscience
Peace Doesn't Come Easily

By Camilo Mejia
Counterpunch

Just about a year a go I was tried by a special Court-martial at Fort Stewart, Georgia. The charge: desertion with the intent to avoid hazardous duty. My case received a lot of attention from the media, mainly because I was the first Iraq veteran to have been to combat, returned on a two-week furlough, and publicly refused to return to Iraq while denouncing the war as illegal, and who then surrendered himself to military authorities. For the first time since the invasion of Iraq the military had to deal with the delicate issue of public dissent within the ranks.

"Iraq: A Message From the Insurgents"

David Baran & Mathieu Guidere

Le Monde diplomatique (France)


The occupying forces in Iraq have managed to set up a national assembly, government and presidency; yet they are making little headway against armed resistance fighters. Who are these fighters, what do they want and how do they operate? There are some clues in their videos and texts.


IRAQ'S armed opposition, though routinely accused of speaking only the language of terror, makes a priority of communications strategy. Combatant groups produce an astonishingly large and varied range of texts and images, not limited to the visions of brutality we have seen on television.

stevphen writes

"In Support of David Graeber"
Andrej Grubacic


Recently David Graeber and I wrote an article together attempting to explain why anarchist ideas have received almost no attention in the academy. When you think of it, academia is full of Marxist radicals, but only a handful of professed anarchists. We came to a conclusion that it must have something to do with anarchism's concern with forms of
practice; with its insistence that one's means most be consonant with one's ends; with its stubborn rejection of the idea that we can create freedom through authoritarian means, embracing instead the position that we should embody the society we wish to create. All of this does not square very well with operating within a university. The university has survived in much the same form since the middle ages, waging intellectual battles at conferences, re-enforcing class distinctions, making cabalistic decisions in secret rooms. As we stated in our article: "At the very least, one would imagine being an openly anarchist professor would mean challenging the way universities are run and that, of course, is going to get one in far more trouble than anything one could ever write".

"The Problem With Music"
Steve Albini, negativland

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke". And he does of course.

Corporate Watch writes:

"Bringing The G8 Home"

Corporate Watch


"Corporate Watch's new hard-hitting report, 'Bringing the G8 home: corporate involvement in and around the G8 in Scotland 2005' is now on the web, available to read, print and distribute. Go to Corporate Watch and follow the links.

The report brings together a lot of relevant information and exposes the links between corporate power, poverty and climate change. It also focuses on the summit's location this year in Scotland and includes an analysis of "Scotland Plc" as a microcosm of the current global capitalist system.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

The Peculiar State

John Chuckman

A lawyer gave a brief opinion piece on Canada's public radio, the CBC, in which he flatly said that criticism of Israel is a form of anti-Semitism.


I guess we should be grateful that people in Canada are much less violent in their opinions than people in the U.S. where one lawyer wrote an essay, published on the Internet, seriously advocating the execution of the families of those who commit terrorist acts in Israel. Another American lawyer, a very prominent one, has advocated protocols governing the legal use of torture in the United States.

Dan Clore writes:

Garbage Guerrilla

Jon McMillian, New York Press

In the late 1960s, Ben Morea was the notorious leader of an unsavory Lower East Side anarchist collective called Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker. As a young historian who studies that period, I'd spent almost three years trying to locate him. All the leads I'd followed went nowhere. It was as if Morea had vanished, every bit as thoroughly as a jet contrail.

s0metim3s writes:

"Racism, Nationalism and Biopolitics:
Foucault's Society Must Be Defended"
Mark Kelly, Contretemps

The year 2003 saw the appearance in English of Michel Foucault's 1976 lectures from the Collège de France. Society Must Be Defended contains much to excite Foucault scholars, but this article concentrates solely on the final lecture of the series, which takes quite a different tack from the rest, concerned primarily with the history of the understanding of society and politics on the model of warfare, and brings this history into the present, with a consideration of where this mode of understanding has led in the twentieth century. Central is the consideration of the phenomenon of ‘State racism'.

Some months ago there was a lot of controversey and interest provoked by a brief piece about the anti-deutsch. The following piece delineates some of its contours.

Hex writes
Communism, anti-German criticism and Israel
An Interview with Stephan Grigat by Jens Misera


Jens Misera: You are a member of the Viennese group "Café Critique", a pool of anti-German communists. What is your definition of communism?

Stephan Grigat: Communism is a concept which cannot be defined in terms of the established social sciences. Strictly speaking, communism is nothing more than the movement of materialistic criticism. And communists, who detest propaganda, should refuse to deliver too detailed descriptions of a possible communist society. Not because one could not imagine a society beyond the utilization imperative of capital and the domination imperative of the state, but rather because of the simple reason that people should talk about and criticise the existing reality in the first place.

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