Radical media, politics and culture.

Gideon Polya writes:

"Non-Reportage of Huge Iraqi Civilian Deaths"

Gideon Polya

Aside from the sustained lying, massive public deception, illegality, the horrendous "collateral" civilian casualties and immense US corporate benefit (nearly US$400 billion extra military expenditure by the US alone since 9/11), there is a further outrageous scandal associated with the post-9/11 US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, namely the NON-REPORTAGE of horrendous civilian casualties by mainstream global mass media.

SOME mainstream global media have FINALLY permitted their readers to glimpse the horrendous reality of Iraq civilian deaths thanks to a scientific article in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet — however the figure typically quoted of "100,000 over 18 months" is a MINIMUM ESTIMATE as outlined in estimates #1-4 below.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Theo Van Gogh: His Views and After


Theo van Gogh, murdered in Amsterdam. Was he a hero, anti-Semite, misogynist, or Islamophobe? To find out, we have to look at his own words, translated for English speakers. What will be the consequences of this murder?

The murder of Dutch film maker and columnist Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam on 2 November 2004 in Amsterdam shocked many people. Not only in The Netherlands, but also abroad, reactions were, understandably, often emotional. Many of them described Van Gogh as a martyr for free speech. That leaves the question: free speech for himself and people of his views, or also for his targets?

Many reactions by people in, e.g., England, were by people who didn't know the writings of either Van Gogh or his critics first hand in Dutch. I will try in this article to help provide this information, necessary for a rational assessment.

Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies
  Sam Parry
Consortium News


  George W. Bush's vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable.

While it's extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote total that exceeds his party's registration in any voting jurisdiction - because of non-voters - Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush more than tripled the number.

  

hydrarchist writes: "This text was originally published in Green Pepper's 'Information Issue', December 2003. You can find the other articles online at their web-site."


"Pirate Practice, Information Insurgency and Its Limits"

Alan Toner

Autonomous communications systems require three
functional elements: the means of production, transmission
facilities and informational raw materials. The
spread of the commodity PC has taken care of the
first. The second has been confronted through innovative
digital techniques — peer to peer [p2p] networks
to pool bandwidth and streaming technologies — and
through the illegal occupation of the airwaves by
pirate radios and more recently street televisions
[Telestreet], and in some countries through public
cable access and even independent satellite broadcasting
initiatives [DeepDish TV, NoWarTV, Global
Radio].


The last element has proven the most challenging
as access to the audio-visual lexicon that can
engage a wider public is constrained by a system of
property rights — copyrights and trademarks — that
denies the possibility of recycling the works of others
— whether to convey our argument or contest that of
another.

"On Media and the Election"

Robert W. McChesney, FreePress.net

Perhaps the most important function our media serves is to provide voters with the information they need to make sound decisions in the voting booth. If people don't know what they're voting for, our democracy is in serious trouble.


Unfortunately, it appears that we're in serious trouble.

"Ten Years Into the Zapatista Rebellion"

John Ross and Chris Arsenault

[John Ross has written several books on the Zapatista struggle including
Rebellion from the Roots and The War Against Oblivion. La Journada,
Mexico’s foremost independent daily, describes Ross as “the new John Reed
covering the new Mexican revolution”. Chris Arsenault is coordinator of Students Taking Action in Chiapas. He is
currently on a speaking tour talking about Chiapas ten years after the
uprising, and promoting participatory Zapatista economic structures. Arsenault sat
down with Ross at his home on the first floor of the Hotel Isabel in
Mexico City to talk about current realities in Zapatistas territory.]

It’s been ten years since the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, launched
their rebellion to create ‘a world where many worlds fit’. Once the
darlings of progressive movements around the world, the continuing
struggle and development of autonomous institutions in Chiapas is taking
place with little media fanfare.

M.Kressi writes:

"I've Got You Under My Skin:

Digging Kerry Out and Burying the Bones(men)"

Morrissey Kressi, Co-founder, Jerry Fohn Kuck Society

A telling event happened in the theater a few months ago when I viewed "The Manchurian Candidate" remake. An audible gasp and bodily revulsion rippled throughout the audience during the scene where Raymond Shaw receives his updated brain implant. Now, this in itself is unsurprising, as an extreme closeup of such an invasive procedure often provokes such results. The event is odd, however, when juxtaposed with a succeeding scene in which Bennett Marco uses a knife to dig out an implant in his own shoulder blade. This scene produced some mild reactions, but remarkably subdued in comparison. The crude, awkward, bloody, and self-inflicted invasion of the second scene provided a stark counterpoint to the clinical, precise, bloodless, and other-inflicted invasion of the first.


So what can "The Manchurian Candidate," and especially these two scenes, tell us about the current stage of spectacular politics? For one thing, the film reminds us of the pageantry of the electoral process. "Let's put on a good show," says an anonymous spectacle planner just as the campaign victory party is about to get underway. Both the two-bit children's theater and the hyperreal victory pageant take place on election day, acting almost as a condensed history of the spectacle.

"Cinema and the 2004 United States Presidential Election"
Domingo de Santa Clara


The last thing I feel like writing about at the moment is, of course, the election. The ending of the whole saga was, like a poorly scripted sit-com, depressingly predictable with a promise of more of the same, week after morbid week. I wish I could simply turn off the T.V. and they would all go away but of course, I can’t.

One of the only positive aspects of this “most important election in our lifetimes” is that the stakes were/are so high that a whole slew of artists have gotten politicized. It seems that it takes a grotesquely insane president to make filmmakers tear their attention away from the latest issue of Res magazine, if only for a couple of seconds.

eh writes:

"Nine Viable Proposals to Save the World"
Global Institute for Alternative Thought


How to return America to American values of democracy, liberty, and minding one's own garden instead of spying on and imprisoning one's neighbor? Glad you asked! You are welcome to borrow or steal, unattributed, the following ideas, generated by the Think Tankers from the Global Institute of Alternative Thought, generously funded by myself and staffed by 1 person. Of course we borrow and steal ideas too. Here's what G.I.A.T. recommends over the next few months to save the world. In fact, we believe that these modest steps, absent any revolution, represent the last best hope before the end of civilization as we know it:

"Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster"

William Rivers Pitt

Everyone remembers Florida's 2000 election debacle, and all of the new terms it introduced to our political lexicon: Hanging chads, dimpled chads, pregnant chads, overvotes, undervotes, Sore Losermans, Jews for Buchanan and so forth. It took several weeks, battalions of lawyers and a questionable decision from the U.S. Supreme Court to show the nation and the world how messy democracy can be. By any standard, what happened in Florida during the 2000 Presidential election was a disaster.

What happened during the Presidential election of 2004, in Florida, in Ohio, and in a number of other states as well, was worse.

Pages