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The State

May 28, 2003 - 4:41pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Anonymous Comrade submits:

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

An Interpretation of Bush's Character

John Chuckman

While I find those images on the Internet of a blunt little mustache digitally-scribbled onto President Bush's upper lip feeble and unhelpful, still, there are parts of Bush's character and behavior that strikingly resemble at least one major biographer's interpretation of Hitler. Ian Kershaw's two-volume life of Hitler puts great emphasis on his being a driving high-stakes gambler - with innate, animal-cunning about human psychology, few gifts of statesmanship or strategy, and little systematic learning - attributing most of his success and all of his failure to his compulsive quality.

May 24, 2003 - 2:40am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

by Franck Düvell writes:

"The Globalisation of Migration Control"

Franck Düvell,[1] 19.May.03

The IOM recommended the Turkish government "to prevent irregular migration and to fight trafficking".[2] Later a daily paper reported, "in Turkey, nine people are shot and five other injured at an attempt to illegally cross the border. 139 people from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh had tried to cross the Iranian-Turkish border".[3]

May 24, 2003 - 2:21am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"Business As Usual"

Tariq Ali, The Guardian, Saturday May 24, 2003

Unsurprisingly, the UN security council has capitulated completely,
recognised the occupation of Iraq and approved its re-colonisation by the US
and its bloodshot British adjutant. The timing of the mea culpa by the
"international community" was perfect. Yesterday, senior executives from
more than 1,000 companies gathered in London to bask in the sunshine of the
re-established consensus under the giant umbrella of Bechtel, the American
empire's most favoured construction company. A tiny proportion of the loot
will be shared.

May 20, 2003 - 12:52pm -- jim
Announcements
The State

These groups and comrades are organizing around initiatives of many municipalities and regions in the USA to defy the Patriot Act and other elements of federal internal repression and control.

Bill of Rights Defense Committee

May 7, 2003 - 9:25am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"What Is Happening in the United States?"

Edward Said,
April 22, 2003

"If it was their war, it was also their government and their
politics. For the defenders of democracy to conspire with
plotters of a coup d'etat, no matter how cogent the reasons,
could not be hailed in the history books as the American
way. It was a step in the folly of self-betrayal." -- Barabara Tuchman, The March of Folly

 In a scarcely reported speech given on the Senate floor on March 19, the
day the war was launched against Iraq, Robert Byrd, Democrat of West
Virginia and the most eloquent speaker in that chamber, asked "what is
happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores
and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining
international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to
using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomacy when
the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?" No one bothered to
answer him, but as the vast American military machine now planted in
Iraq begins to stir restlessly in other directions in the name of the
American people, their love of freedom, and their deep-seated values,
these questions give urgency to the failure, if not the corruption of
democracy that we are living through.

 

May 6, 2003 - 9:51pm -- jim
News
The State

"Broad Domestic Role Asked for C.I.A. and the Pentagon"

By Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, The New York Times


WASHINGTON, May 1 -- The Bush administration and leading Senate Republicans sought today to give the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon far-reaching new powers to demand personal and financial records on people in the United States as part of foreign intelligence and terrorism operations, officials said.

May 5, 2003 - 10:22am -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
The State

nolympics submits "http://counterpunch.org/hamod05032003.html"

May 2, 2003 - 10:35am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

jim submits:

"Bothersome Reality"

Thomas Zummer

. . . all bothersome reality appears as if wiped away.
-- Alfred Polgar, 1912

It is 2003.

In 1912, Alfred Polgar had been speaking of the cinema, drawing a comparison
between its economies and those of the stage, where the possibility of
puncturing the illusion of theater is always in potentia directed to a
fragile and unstable image. Perhaps we have to return, again, to such
instances to remind ourselves of the genealogical chain of virtualities by
which media stabilizes its image -- that is to say, its world -- putting the
world into a picture, as Heidegger might have said, advancing a tactical
isomorphism, as a reflection, a conduit to the realities that are taking
place. In, for example, a war.


The problem is that there are TOO MANY reasons for the attack...

May 2, 2003 - 5:33am -- hydrarchist
News
The State

nolympics submits

My name is Scott Fleming. I am an Oakland resident and an attorney. On April
7, the Oakland Police Department shot me five times with wooden bullets, four
times in the back, as I ran away from them during a completely peaceful protest
at the Port of Oakland. I am speaking here today on behalf of all of the
anti-war protesters who were attacked and injured by the Oakland Police
Department.

April 29, 2003 - 12:54pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

jim submits:

"May Day at Kut & Kienthal"

Peter Linebaugh

Inasmuch as the historian's craft depends on written records, then the answer to the question posed in the title of V. Gordon Childe's classic book about the Tigris and Euphrates, What Happened in History? is well answered in the title of another classic book on the same subject by Samuel Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, because that's where writing began. With the American "liberation" of Iraq and the subsequent destruction of the library of Baghdad and its museum of antiquities, we could say, therefore, that history while not quite coming to an end has become impossible to write.

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