Corporate watchdogs, poker aficionados and concerned citizens will all have reason to delight in The Ruckus Society's newest bid to expose the "War Profiteers" who benefit from combat at the expense of Iraqis and Americans alike, engagingly rendered on a harmless-looking set of playing cards.
Their tone is humorous, but make no mistake: these cards are an essential weapon. Their faux-camouflage finish makes them perfect for stealth viewing on the bus or at work. And while you may never actually come face-to-face with the enemy, they ensure that you'll be well armed.
They're an inspired spoof of the "Iraq's Most Wanted" deck, which was issued to coalition troops in April by the U.S. Defense Department and included photos and descriptions of individuals integral to Saddam Hussein's regime. Soon the flag-buying segment of the American public had another product to covet, and sales skyrocketed.
Ruckus is a well-respected progressive organization that specializes in training others in the latest in activism tools from internet organizing to rope climbing but its latest project is homegrown. The deck focuses on the multitude of incestuous relationships between oil, gas, military and defense corporations, government officials, and media groups, the conflicts of interest they evoke, and their lucrative involvement in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The "shadow governments" of world policy top this stacked deck, with the WTO, IMF and World Bank as the ace of spades, clubs and diamonds, respectively. Henry Kissinger ("Architect of Evil") reigns as the Queen of Hearts, with Dick Cheney as his King, and humorous photos of Tom Ridge and Donald Rumsfeld accompany enlightening facts about their political careers. Players can learn how Monsanto and Lockheed Martin are in bed together and how deep Bechtel and ExxonMobil's special interests go. And there's only one "Jerk" (Joker) in this deck "Petty Dictator" George W. Bush.
The scheme was born under typical circumstances for Ruckus. Mojgone Azemun, the group's training director, first approached fellow activist and graphic designer Innosanto Nagara about the project at a ChevronTexaco civil disobedience action in mid-April. She pitched it in the time it took for him to get arrested.
"He disappeared for a couple of days after that," recalls Azemun. "But he got out and asked me, 'Remember that idea? Let's do it.'" Together they spawned a plan for a different way to educate the public about corporate abuses, one that would probably not result in anyone's arrest.
As it happened, fellow activists Pratap Chatterjee and Jeff Conant of the Hesperian Foundation had been planning the same project. They fused their creative efforts and individual expertise with those of Gopal Dayaneni, a trainer with Ruckus; John Sellers, Ruckus' executive director, and others. Some worked nights and weekends, staying up till 2 AM; they found a local unionized print broker, used recycled paper with soy-based inks. The cards went from concept to product in less than four weeks.
But they weren't the only ones with a good idea. Several similar-minded spoof decks emerged in the meantime, including one from Gatt.org with pictures of officials they recommended be "removed from power" to ensure real world peace; sarcastic "Republican Chickenhawk" cards (officials and pundits who have avoided serving their country); Greenpeace's "Nuclear Solitaire Game;" far-out "Psychedelic Republicans;" and from the right, "The Deck of Weasels," taking jabs at The Dixie Chicks, Hans Blix, Jacques Chirac and others.
Ruckus is keeping the cards' price down in the interest of selling as many as possible through the War Profiteers website, www.warprofiteers.com, for a $10 donation to the nonprofit.
The site also acts as a portal to other activist organizations, divided up by suit (e.g. hearts for government officials "because they love you"). It's no coincidence that many of the "profiteers" are associated with institutions that activists have been focusing on. And clicking on a card online reveals extra intelligence on companies and officials.
Compiling that information was an important part of the project for Azemun. As they were working, "I was finally being educated about the players that some people only hear about. Take Sam Nunn, for instance. A lot of people recognize his name from Congress, but now he has positions on three or four executive boards," she explained.
The cards also give crucial attention to influential but lesser-known right-wing groups, such as editor William Kristol's Project for a New American Century, or the Grace News Network, a Christian media group that was handpicked by the Bush administration to produce Arabic TV news for Iraq.
Early response to the cards has been overwhelming. Ruckus is printing 10,000 decks due to the volume of orders; the website gets 3,000 hits a day, many of which are from different countries in Europe. They've heard from art galleries, magicians, high school history teachers, and even a California woman who ordered several decks for her poker club. Democracy Now's Amy Goodman cracked up as she read them out on the air.
In short, they've become the perfect "culture jamming" tool. "We should be putting our messages on vectors of culture to exploit our message, the same way Pepsi does with hip-hop," said Azemun. Ruckus may create a new international deck featuring Tony Blair, Hamid Karzai and other figures complicit in the exploitation of the Iraq war.
There's also talk of sending them to members of Congress. Chatterjee, a journalist who created the text for the military and defense-themed cards, calls them "a good political education tool for youth" that could have a dual use in the 2004 elections. At a recent peace conference in Indonesia, he passed along several decks to activists from Afghanistan and Iraq "To see if they caught any of the criminals."
The cards' sly, comic flavor does not detract from the seriousness of the issues they're concerned with. "If you can poke fun at something, it's no longer taboo to talk about," Sellers asserts. He says it was important to him that there be humor, which was almost too easy to do: "These are the best straight guys in the world."
At the same time, remarks Nagara, "I don't see global capitalism capitulating to humor. Ultimately, we're going to have to get people organized on a much larger scale."
While the deck can be used to play any cardgame, from "bullshit" to bridge, there is an obvious candidate.
"I've been using them to play War with my friends," said Dayaneni, who compiled the information on the oil, gas and energy companies. "Once in a while you have to stop and say, 'Wait a minute: Paul Wolfowitz is an 8 and [Boeing CEO] Philip Condit's a 9? Let's reconsider this.' It makes you think.'"
Julia Scott is a San Francisco-based freelence writer and Associate Editor with Independent Arts and Media.
AlterNet: America's Most Wanted: War Profiteer Cards
By Amy Goodman and Chris Hedges, Democracy Now! May 22, 2003
Transcript of May 21, 2003 interview on the national listener-sponsored radio and television show "Democracy Now!"
"Speaker disrupts RC graduation" this is the headline in the Rockford Register Star in Illinois. The article describes how commencement speaker Chris Hedges was booed off the stage for making an anti-war speech at the Rockford College graduation on Saturday. The paper reports that two days later, graduates and family members are "still reeling." They had envisioned a "go out and make your mark send-off." Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and veteran war correspondent who has reported from war-torn countries for 15 years. He is also the author of the acclaimed "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning."
But Rockford College officials pulled the plug on his microphone three minutes after he began to speak. The college president told Hedges to wrap it up, and he resumed his speech to the sound of boos and foghorns. Some graduates and audience members turned their backs to Hedges. Others rushed up the aisle to protest the remarks; one student tossed his cap and gown to the stage before leaving.
Chris Hedges joined Democracy Now! in our studio on May 21, 2003 to speak with host Amy Goodman about what happened.
AMY GOODMAN: Just tell us what happened this weekend. Why did you go to Rockford College in Illinois?
CHRIS HEDGES: I was invited to give the commencement address. Given that the book is an explication of war and the poison that war is and what it does to individuals and societies and that since the book came out I have spoken extensively about that, that is, of course, what I was prepared to speak about when I got to Rockford. What I was not prepared for was the response. I have certainly spoken at events where people disagreed that is to be expected. But to be silenced and to have people clamber onto the platform with the threat of physical violence was something new, and frightening.
Did the police actually have to take you off?
People had to be escorted. I was trying to read the speech so I wasn't sort of watching what was going around me but I believe about three students managed to get on the platform, they had to be escorted off. And then as the diplomas were being handed out, campus security took me off campus. I left before the graduation ceremony was concluded.
And what was the response of other officials on the stage?
I think all of us were surprised at how vociferous the reaction was and how angry people were. It began almost before I said anything and I think you'll hear that in the tape. I really didn't manage to get much out before significant sectors of the crowd began to drown me out and made it very hard for anyone, I think, in the audience to hear what I was saying. So I really didn't have much of a chance to say anything.
You decided to continue the speech though, from beginning to end.
The speech was longer than it was, it should have been a little longer, it was cut short. But I was determined not to let them determine when I would finish speaking and I think the college president felt the same way. At the same time he didn't want it to go on for another hour. But he didn't want to let the crowd determine that it was over, but I didn't finish, no.
The mic was pulled twice? Was cut off?
Right.
Who cut it?
I don't know. I don't know who cut it. It was probably cut at the source because I didn't see any activity around the podium.
We're talking to Chris Hedges, we're going to go to break. When we come back we'll hear the address that he gave at the graduation of Rockford College students this past weekend.
BROADCAST OF CHRIS HEDGES SPEECH...
I'm Amy Goodman with Chris Hedges, the commencement speaker at the Rockford College graduation this past Saturday in Illinois. I'm looking at the Rockford Register Star, the latest report out of there, as it says: "The Rockford College family debated what went wrong at its Spring graduation ceremony that featured New York Times reporter and anti-war advocate Chris Hedges. When do people listen to ideas? When do people think critically and disagree? When do people sit respectfully and is there a time for civility to be lost? These and more questions discussed at a meeting on the campus, the Alma Mater of Jane Addams. Students, faculty and staff didn't reach a consensus, but college President Paul Pribbenow maintains students should be challenged by commencement speakers. He said, 'commencement is one of the last moments you have with students. I want commencement to be more than just a pop speech.' Well, Chris Hedges, you went to Jane Addams' school, to Rockford College. Who was Jane Addams?
Well, she was one of the great moral and intellectual figures of the 20th Century. She founded Hull House, which was for immigrants this was sort of before the state got involved in social welfare and she did amazing things like gather immigrants at Hull House they produced the first production of Sophocles' Ajax. She was just a remarkable figure, a remarkable intellect and a pacifist who won the Nobel Prize for Peace and spoke out against World War I, against American entry into the war and she was booed off the stage, for instance, at Carnegie Hall. So all I knew about Rockford College was this titanic figure in American intellectual thought and one of the great sort of, moral leaders of our country. So, to be shouted down at her Alma Mater there's a very sad kind of irony to that, of course.
So you were taken off by security?
Well yeah. I think what was so disturbing was that the crowd wasn't just angry, but there was that undercurrent or possibility of violence. The fact that people actually stormed up past those to get onto the podium and there was a feeling that it was better to have me removed from the ceremony before the conclusion, before the awarding of the diplomas. So the campus security sort of hustled me out as they were handing out the diplomas.
I wonder if Jane Addams was treated in the same way when she was booed off the stage. Jane Addams who, in addition to be the founder of Hull House in Chicago, was the first international President of WILPF, the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom and won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Yeah, she was a great figure and if I take any comfort it's that she would have not only understood but I believe probably applauded.
And so, let's talk about the conclusions you've arrived at that you've shared with the students. Did anyone come up to you afterwards to talk about why they had responded and did you have a sense that it was a majority or just a vocal minority?
I don't think it was a majority, but it was a significant minority, I mean, large enough that they disrupted the commencement exercises. No, no one could really ... a few people or two, I believe it was all sort of a rush, as I was escorted to leave I think two students just came up to me to say thank you. But I wasn't really able to talk to students afterwards.
Which you had originally planned to do?
Yes. I certainly didn't plan to leave immediately.
You are the author of "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning." You have reported from many war zones, you've been in Guatemala, you've been in El Salvador, you've been in Bosnia, you were in the Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, you were held by Iraqi Republican Guard. Can you talk about some of those experiences?
You know, as I looked out on the crowd, that is exactly what my book is about. It is about the suspension of individual conscience, and probably consciousness, for the contagion of the crowd for that euphoria that comes with patriotism. The tragedy is that and I've seen it in conflict after conflict or society after society that plunges into war with that kind of rabid nationalism comes racism and intolerance and a dehumanization of the other. And it's an emotional response. People find a kind of ecstasy, a kind of belonging, a kind of obliteration of their alienation in that patriotic fervor that always does come in war time.
As I gave my talk and I looked out on the crowd, I was essentially witnessing things that I had witnessed in the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina or in squares in Belgrade or anywhere else. Crowds, especially crowds that become hunting packs are very frightening. People chanted the kind of cliches and aphorisms and jingoes that are handed to you by the state. "God Bless America" or people were chanting "send him to France" this kind of stuff and that kind of contagion leads ultimately to tyranny, it's very dangerous and it has to be stopped.
I've seen it in effect and take over countries. But of course, it breaks my heart when I see it in my country. That's essentially what I was looking at was in some ways a mirror of what I was trying to speak about. And I think I managed to touch upon it somewhat when I talked upon this notion of comradeship as a suppression of self awareness and self-possession to sort of follow along, locked in the embrace of a nation, or of a group, or of a national group unthinkingly, blindly. And there is a kind of undeniable euphoria in that. And that's what I was looking at.
I mean this was a visceral and an emotional reaction. Nobody really spent much time, or I didn't have much time to begin to explain the thoughts that I was getting across. And, of course, it was interpreted as anti-military which it is not. I mean, what I write about in the book and what I speak about is about war: how war is used as an instrument, the danger of war, why war should always be a last resort. What happens when we wage war without justifiable cause. What happens to ourselves? What happens to others? I mean this is the currency of the book and something I'm sort of ringing the alarm bells against. And there was a kind of symbiotic relationship between everything that I've experienced and everything that was happening in that crowd.
What has been the response of your newspaper, The New York Times?
Well, they're looking into whether I breached the protocol in terms of my very pointed statements about the Iraqi War. I mean, that's something that makes them uncomfortable. I don't think they have a problem with the book, because the book talks more generically about what war does to societies although it certainly does mention what it has done to us since 9/11. So that's something that they're looking at.
What pressures do you face? The New York Times, in their reporting of the invasion, like many other papers you don't have to single them out, including television news, are very much beating the drums for war. You take a very different stance.
Well up until now, I haven't faced any pressure at all and I have spoken before. But because of the anger that this talk elicited, I think there's been more attention to the kinds of things that I've said. So one of the pressures I face is the proliferation of hate phone calls and hate emails. Which I had had periodically, but of course now I have daily.
We'll continue to follow what happens in this. The right-wing media has certainly picked this up.
Right.
What's happening? Are you getting a lot of calls?
Yeah, well I don't do trash talk radio. I didn't before and I'm not going to start now. And since I don't own a television I'm sort of spared being inflicted with this stuff.
And you've written a new book?
Yes I have. It's called "What Every Person Should Know About War." It's really in some ways geared towards those 17- and 18-year-old kids who believe the myth of war. I think both books are an attempt to demythologize war and explain war as it is. The army has studies at length what war does to individuals, how to create more efficient killers and it goes through and answers a lot of those questions, that if they get asked, often don't get answered.
The text of Chris Hedges' commencement address can be found at the Rockford Register.
From Democracy Now
New York Times reporter Chris Hedges was booed off the stage and had his microphone cut twice as he delivered a graduation speech on war and empire at Rockford College in Illinois.
As I looked out on the crowd, I was witnessing things I had witnessed in the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina or in squares in Belgrade it breaks my heart when I see it in my country.
Speaker Disrupts RC Graduation this is the headline in the Rockford Register Star in Illinois.
The article describes how a commencement speaker was booed of the stage for making an antiwar speech at the Rockford College graduation on Saturday. The paper reports that two days later, graduates and family members are still reeling. They had envisioned a go out and make your mark send-off.
The speaker wasnt an antiwar student. It wasnt an antiwar faculty member. It was New York Times reporter and veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges. Hedges reported from war-torn countries for fifteen years. Hedges spent the last year covering Al Qaida cells in Europe and North Africa. He was a member of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the papers coverage of global terrorism.
In his new book War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, Hedges writes: War and conflict have marked most of my adult life. I began covering insurgencies in El Salvador, where I spent five years, then went on to Guatemala and Nicaragua and Colombia, through the first intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, the civil war in the Sudan and Yemen, the uprisings in Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellion in southeast Turkey and northern Iraq, the war in Bosnia, and finally to Kosovo. I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of road in Central America, shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by Iraqi Republican Guard, strafed by Russian Migs-2IS in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo.
But this didnt stop Rockford College officials from pulling the plug on his microphone three minutes after he began to speak. The college president told Hedges to wrap it up. He resumed his speech as to the sound of boos and foghorns. Some graduates and audience members turned their backs to Hedges. Others rushed up the aisle to protest the remarks; one student tossed his cap and gown to the stage before leaving.
Rockford Colleges most prominent alum is Jane Addams, a pacifist who was booed off the Carnegie Hall stage for opposing US intervention in World War I. Addams was the founder of Hull House, a non-profit social service agency, the first president the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom and a Nobel Peace Prize Winner.
Transcript of Chris Hedges Speech
Dear MoveOn member,
We now know that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And while most nations are trying to control the spread of such weapons globally, the Bush administration is pursuing the invention of even more dangerous portable weapons -- including "usable" mini-nukes -- that could make arms control impossible.
Our Senators are about to vote on supporting the Administration's request to repeal current law banning the creation of new, low-yield nuclear weapons. "Low-yield" is defined as less than five kilotons - approximately one-third the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The development of new low-yield weapons will also require nuclear testing, which hasnt been done in over a decade.
Please call now and ask your Senator to oppose lifting the ban on building new nuclear weapons in the Defense Authorization Bill.
Senator Charles E. Schumer
DC Phone: 202-224-6542
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton
DC Phone: 202-224-4451
Please let us know you're making these important calls, at:
http://www.moveon.org/call5.html?id=1372-728724-yW0gq0VXqghJipKwH6ACAg
Make sure the staffers know you're a constituent. Here are some talking points:
- We have conventional weapons that will work anywhere in the world against any target. We dont need new nuclear weapons. And there is no military requirement to develop new nuclear weapons.
- The development of low-yield nuclear weapons will provide incentives for other countries and rogue states to develop nuclear weapons of their own.
- The more nuclear weapons there are in the world, the easier it will be for terrorists to gain access to these weapons of mass destruction.
- Developing new nuclear weapons will hinder the U.S.s ability to persuade others to disarm and will make the world a more dangerous place.
Of course, your own words are always best.
Thanks for your patience with the number of issues we're highlighting this month. The far right is moving on many fronts at once, but weve got to keep fighting. If we can blunt the worst of these attacks, we can turn the tide. Thanks for your support,
- Wes Boyd and Joan Blades
MoveOn.org
May 19, 2003
P.S. Weve attached an excerpt from a good article on new battlefield nukes below.
Thanks to everyone for their help on the tax and budget countdown last week. By all reports, Senate phones were ringing off the hook on Wednesday. Last week, our TV ad played in 23 markets throughout the nation, and it got great free news coverage. The Senate narrowly voted for a $350 billion version of the tax bill that doesnt fit well with the House bill, so theres likely to be opportunities in conference. Please stay tuned. _______
Los Angeles Times
May 13, 2003
A NUCLEAR ROAD OF NO RETURN
Bush's bid for new kinds of weapons
could put the world on a suicidal course.
By Robert Scheer http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-scheer13may13,0,5142385.column
It turns out the threat is not from Iraq but from us.
On Sunday, the Washington Post wrote the obituary for the United States' effort to find Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. "Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq," read the headline, confirming what has become an embarrassing truth - that the central rationale for the invasion and occupation of oil-rich Iraq was in fact one of history's great frauds.
The arms inspectors "are winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms," reported the Post, putting the lie to Colin Powell's Feb. 6 claim at the United Nations that Iraq possessed a functioning program to build nuclear bombs and had hoarded hundreds of tons of chemical and biological materials.
Unfortunately, this does not necessarily mean the world is a safer place. The deadly weapons of mass destruction have proved phantom in Iraq, but the Bush administration is now doing its best to ensure that the world becomes increasingly unstable and armed to the teeth. Although the nuclear threat from Iraq proved to be nonexistent, the United States' threat to use nuclear weapons and make a shambles of nuclear arms control is alarmingly vibrant.
In its latest bid to frighten the planet into a constant state of shock and awe, our government is accelerating its own leading-edge weapons-of-mass-destruction program: President Bush's allies on the Senate Armed Services Committee have approved ending a decade-old ban on developing atomic battlefield weapons and endorsed moving ahead with creating a nuclear "bunker-buster" bomb. They also rubber-stamped the administration's request for funds to prepare for a quick resumption of nuclear weapons testing.
What's going on here? Having failed to stop a gang of marauders armed with nothing more intimidating than box cutters, the U.S. is now using the "war on terror" to pursue a long-held hawkish Republican dream of a "winnable nuclear war," as the president's father memorably described it to me in a 1980 Times interview. In such a scenario, nukes can be preemptively used against a much weaker enemy - millions of dead civilians, widespread environmental devastation and centuries of political blowback be damned...
Dear Friend of Women Artists,
As you know, the USA PATRIOT Act gave the federal government unfettered access to a whole host of personal information, including library and bookstore records. Librarians and bookstore owners are not even allowed to alert customers to the fact that they have been approached for information. This power infringes on one of our most basic rights, the right to be an informed citizenry, the right to read.
Happily, booksellers, librarians and members of Congress have launched a campaign to restore protections for the privacy of bookstore and library records. The introduction of H.R. 1157, the Freedom to Read Protection Act of 2003, was announced at a Washington press conference on March 6 by Congressman Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Further discussion of the issues and list of Congressmembers who have now signed on as co-sponsors of the bill can be found at the web site of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee: http://www.bordc.org/freedomtoread.htm - current. The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression web sit is also helpful: http://www.abffe.com/.
ACTION:
Please contact your member of Congress and urge him or her to cosponsor the bill. If (s)he is already a co-sponsor, please thank her/him and urge them to oppose any further roll-backs of our constitutional rights (e.g. PATRIOT II.) To find contact information for your Congressional Representative, or to find out who your representative is, go to: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/You can use language from the Talking Points below in composing your letter; or use your own words!
Talking Points from ABFFE
Freedom to Read Protection Act (H.R. 1157)
Privacy is an essential element of First Amendment freedom.
Our society places the highest value on the ability to speak freely on any subject. But freedom of speech depends on the freedom to explore ideas privately. Customers in a bookstore and patrons of a library must feel free to request books about health, religion, politics, the law or any other subject without fear that their choices may be made public. If they are uncertain that their privacy will be respected, they lose the freedom to buy and borrow the books they need to form and express opinions. For this reason, several courts have ruled that bookstore records enjoy First Amendment protection. In 1998, a federal court blocked Kenneth Starr's efforts to obtain Monica Lewinsky's book purchase records. In April 2002, the justice of the Colorado Supreme Court unanimously suppressed a search warrant that had been issued to the Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver.
The Patriot Act threatens the privacy of bookstore and library records.
Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act eliminates several important safeguards that prevent law enforcement officials in foreign intelligence investigations from engaging in fishing expeditions in bookstore and library records. FBI agents can search the bookstore or library records of anyone who they believe may have information relevant to their investigations, including people who are not suspected of committing a crime. The request for a court order authorizing the search is heard by a judge in a secret proceeding, which prevents a bookseller or librarian from objecting on First Amendment grounds. The court order contains a gag provision that forbids a bookseller or librarian to alert anyone to the fact that a search has occurred. As a result, it is impossible to protest the search even after the fact.
H.R. 1157 restores the privacy protections that were eliminated by the Patriot Act
The Freedom to Read Protection Act restores the protections for the privacy of bookstore and library records that existed before the passage of the Patriot Act. Introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on March 6 by Congressman Bernie Sanders (I-VT), H.R. 1157 is co-sponsored by 58 House members, including Democrats and Republicans representing every political perspective-liberal, conservative and moderate.
Many thanks and best wishes,
Sarah Browning
Associate Director
The Fund for Women Artists
P.O. Box 60637
Florence, MA 01062
413-585-5968 phone
413-586-1303 fax
browning@womenarts.org
http://www.womenarts.org/
Saturday, May 31st
1:00p.m. to 5:00p.m.
National City Christian Church
5 Thomas Circle, Washington DC NW
(3 blocks North of the McPherson Square Blue/Orange line Metro)
Free and Open to the Public!
Speakers include:
Arundhati Roy, Author/Activist via satellite
Cynthia McKinney, Former Congresswoman from Georgia
Edward Said, Professor at Columbia University
Gene Bruskin, US Labor Against the War and the AFL-CIO
Howard Zinn, via satellite
Hussein Ibish, Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee
Kathy Kelly, Voices in the Wilderness via satellite
Michael Klare, Hampshire College and author of Resource Wars (invited)
Miles Solay, Not in Our Name
Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies
Rania Masri, Southern Peace Research and Education Center
Ralph Nader
We invite you to join United for Peace and Justice to learn about and discuss issues in three major areas...
The domestic consequences of war:
-- Building a free and open society based on respect for democracy, civil liberties, and civil rights. How can we reverse the tide of our eroding rights and stop the attacks on people from the Middle East and other immigrant groups?
-- Reordering US spending priorities that favor tax cuts for the rich and increased spending on war toward more spending for education, health care, and needed social programs. How can we support the real needs of veterans while cutting wasteful military spending to remedy our state and local budget crises and save critical social programs?
A U.S. occupation of Iraq:
-- The impacts of the war on food supplies, water, and electricity for the people of Iraq. How can we build solidarity and support for an Iraq-led redevelopment effort even after the cameras are gone?
-- How the "second invasion" of Iraq is underway by profit-seeking U.S. corporations.
U.S. Empire
-- Building a safer world through an alternative foreign policy based on international law, cooperation, and economic & social justice.
-- Reversing the Bush doctrine of "preemptive war," to prevent attacks on the people of Syria, Iran, North Korea, or Cuba.
-- The need for a rapid shift to clean, renewable energy sources
The event will be re-broadcast on Free Speech TV several times following the event. Check our website in the coming days for broadcast dates at http://www.unitedforpeace.org
In addition, the event will be taped and available for local screenings shortly after the event. Sponsor a local viewing party so that people in your community can discuss the future direction of the peace movement. United for Peace and Justice will distribute the videotape to your organization at our National Conference, June 6-8 in Chicago or you will be able to order a copy on-line. Check the website: http://www.unitedforpeace.org for updates.
For more information on organizational participation, local activities and/or organizational tabling opportunities, contact Henry Moses at the DC UFPJ office at 202-234-2000 or hmoses3@yahoo.com. To volunteer for the event in the areas of outreach/publicity, technology, media or day-of logistics, please contact Kristen Arant at the Quixote Center 301-699-3443 x114 or kristena@quixote-center.org. There will be a reception for speakers, organizers and volunteers following the event.
[Here's a site that lets you download "patriotic" cursors that run on Windows. Someone has to explain to me how some of these are expressions of "patriotism" -- you mean if you're have a flashing speech bubble coming out of your mouth you're not American? But the hard, silent stare makes you a patriot? I'm sure there's a Chomsky one out there with "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" in the bubble.]
[Posting this mostly because of the picture, which alludes to the Iraqi playing cards that were distributed to the soldiers. It's also a pretty bizarre story.]
Has anyone seen these men? Representative Dan Branch, Republican of Dallas, with playing cards featuring Texas House Democratic members.
AUSTIN, Tex., May 13 A battle over redistricting virtually shut down the work of the Texas Legislature for a second day today and turned into a Keystone Kops affair.
Although a few Democrats showed up for work, more than 50 of them remained across the border, out of the reach of Texas troopers, who had been ordered to round them up on Monday.
The trouble began when Republicans, encouraged by the United States House majority leader, Tom DeLay, a Texan, pressed legislation on Monday to redraw the Congressional map in their favor. Miffed by what they see as meddling from Washington, nearly all the Democrats did not show up for work. And that meant there was no quorum.
Speaker Tom Craddick, a Republican, locked the House chamber to prevent further flight.
Angry Republicans asked the state government to help sniff out their colleagues. The state's Department of Public Safety put out an alert asking for the public's assistance. A toll free number was set up. The Texas Rangers gave chase.
On Monday night, the delinquent Democrats were found at a Denny's restaurant in Ardmore, Okla., 30 miles north of the Texas border. They were holed up at a nearby Holiday Inn, where they said they were discussing strategy.
Texas' Republicans Fume; Democrats Remain AWOL
Last week, Cecilia Vicuna asked me to read from Armand Schwerners The Tablets (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1999) at an event she was organizing at New Yorks Poets House on May 12 to protest, and lament, the looting of the Baghdad museum, and other cultural sites. Schwerners Tablets is based on a scholar/translators reconstruction of a set of Sumero-Arkkadian clay tables from 4,000 years ago, as Schwerner frames the poem, which is, nonetheless, entirely his own creation.
The event opened with a presentation by Marc Van De Mieroop, of Columbia University, in which he speculated that the destruction of artifacts that took place in Iraq last month was part of an American program to wipe out the cultural past of Iraq. I presented an alternative, equally dark, speculation: that the destruction might not be the result of a deliberate American campaign to target Iraqi antiquities but rather a product of the brutal indifference to culture, foreign and domestic, that has been the hallmark of the current Executive Branch of the U.S. government.
The evening consisted largely of readings in translation of contemporary Iraqui poets, almost all poets in exile. Schwerner, who was born in Belgium in 1929 and came to the U.S. a decade later, is also a poet of exile, but one who became an American poet; indeed, a native American poet, if you believe, as I do, that exile is a native, indeed foundational, experience for American poetry.
A few days after I received Cecilias invitation, something odd occurred. A received an email from a trusted confederate in the Washington, D.C. area, that a new Tablet had been discovered in the subbasement level below the residence of Paul Wolfowitz. Startling news. Although we cant yet be sure of authenticity of the Tablet and our verification team has not been given enough time with the Tablet to verify it preliminary evidence suggests that this Tablet is the work of Donald Rumsfeld and that it was composed between April 10 and 12. After reading Schwerners Tablet II, I gave the first public reading of the Rumsfeld Tablet:
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Dear MoveOn member,
This is it -- the culmination of our countdown. We need your help. Today, hundreds of thousands of people will call on their Senators to vote against new tax cuts for millionaires, so we can save our kids' schools and other vital programs from the budget axe. Will you join us and call today? The final votes could come as soon as tomorrow.
Many members of the Bush administration stand to benefit handsomely from the new cuts: "Treasury Secretary John Snow tops the list with a $275,000 windfall... Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could pocket an extra $184,000. And not far behind is the $181,000 that could go to Secretary of Commerce Don Evans," according to AFSCME.*
In fact, many Senators themselves are likely to reap enormous windfalls. For example, Bill Frist, the Senate Republican leader, has an estimated net worth of $20 million.** What do these Senators and their well-off friends stand to gain from these cuts? Let's ask them.
Please call your Senators now, at:
Senator Charles E. Schumer
DC Phone: 202-224-6542
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton
DC Phone: 202-224-4451
Make sure the staffers know you're a constituent, and urge your Senators to please OPPOSE all new tax cuts. Then, if you like, ask them how much they will personally pocket if these cuts pass.
Or, if you prefer, tell them some of the reasons you're personally opposed to the cuts.
Please let us know you're making these important calls, at:
http://www.moveon.org/callmade3.html?id=1359-728724-IHWCTfMys4gE3k1pn3GXAw
The IRS has a special form for tax refunds of one million dollars or more. Why not download it from the link below, and fax it to your Senators, with a note scrawled across it, saying:
"Thought you might need this."
Heres the form:
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f8302.pdf
Your Senators' fax numbers are:
Charles E. Schumer
Fax: 202-228-3027
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Fax: 202-228-0282
Our "Pain and Gain" campaign this week has been a terrific success. All week, Americans have stepped forward to demand that our Senators and Representatives take care of our schools, our fire departments, our local hospitals, and our economy, before creating hundreds of billions in new tax breaks for millionaires.
A powerful coalition of organizations has rallied to the cause, including the Campaign for America's Future, the Children's Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, People for the American Way, True Majority, USAction, the Service Employees International Union, Working Assets, the AFL-CIO, the Democratic National Committee, and many other members of the Fair Taxes for All Coalition. Collectively, we are directly reaching more than 5 million people in this campaign.
In just the past week, we've:
- Run TV ads telling the story of parents in Oregon who gave blood to cover a teacher's salary as their local school grappled with budget cuts. These parents literally opened their veins to make sure our schools are funded. MoveOn members contributed more than $200,000 in 48 hours to make sure Washington heard their story.*** Our special thanks go out to the members of Arizona Citizen Action: Cox cable in Arizona initially refuse our ad, but these folks swung into action, drawing attention to Cox' censorship and winning a reversal -- Cox is now airing our ad. - We've gathered and delivered the personal stories of more than 50,000 Americans opposed to new tax and budget cuts, among more than 100,000 signatures, on our petition to "Save our Schools from Budget Disaster." - We've sent more than 50,000 faxes to Senators and more than 500 letters to newspaper editors.
- We've generated news stories on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, FOX, and the Associated Press. See below for one recent story. Thanks for making all this possible. It's been an amazing campaign. Please help make the final impact as big as possible by calling your Senators now.
Thanks again.
Sincerely,
- Carrie, Eli, Joan, Peter, Wes, and Zack The MoveOn Team May 14th, 2003
* See: http://www.afscme.org/press/pr030501.htm
** http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2002-12-23-senate-leader_x.htm
*** You can see the ad for yourself on our homepage:
http://www.moveon.org/
P.S.: Here's a great article about our campaign from yesterday's edition of the newspaper The Hill:
Tax cut opponents mobilize to combat all-out lobbying efforts by White House MAY 13, 2003 By Michael S. Gerber
With the tax debate due to reach the Senate floor this week, a coalition of groups that oppose cutting taxes has launched an all-out lobbying effort to press key lawmakers on the issue.
Members of the Fair Taxes for All Coalition, a group of labor unions and progressive activists, have planned a weeklong blitz of television, radio and newspaper ads here in Washington and in the home states of key senators, as well as grassroots and lobbying activities on Capitol Hill.
The highlight of the grassroots efforts should come Wednesday, when activists hope to enlist half a million Americans to call their senators and representatives to voice an anti-tax-cut message.
Organizers say this week is the culmination of months of mobilizing against the White Houses plan for a $726 billion tax cut. The House approved a $550 billion bill last week; senators were scheduled to take up a $421 billion proposal Monday.
"Its all coming to a head," said Marge Baker, a co-chair of the coalitions lobbying group and director of public policy for People for the American Way. "This is a massive coalition with millions of members. Many of these organizations are ones that typically dont get involved with financial issues. Were concerned about [the tax cut] crowding out other priorities."
As many of the coalitions members learned in 2001, fighting President Bush and a GOP-controlled Congress on a tax cut is an uphill fight. But thats not stopping them from trying to get their message out, even as the president uses the bully pulpit and Treasury Secretary John Snow makes the TV talk show circuit.
The White House also has powerful allies in the business community who have organized their own grassroots effort.
"We just had 850 people take a day off of work and come to Washington to rally for tax cuts [last week]," said Dan Clifton, a spokesman for Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax group. "We had 150 people from North Carolina come on a bus at one in the morning to hear the president. We went out and found average American families. We had small businesses here."
But the Fair Taxes for All Coalition has more members and more money than tax-cut opponents had in 2001, funds that can help bring people to lobby Congress and pay for advertising campaigns in key states. A television ad paid for by MoveOn.org began running on cable news networks in the D.C. area and in 22 cities in 11 other states, including Maine, Nebraska and Ohio, homes of three of the debates key senators - Olympia Snowe (R), Ben Nelson (D), and George Voinovich (R). The ad tells the story of parents in Eugene, Ore., who sold their own plasma to raise money to cover the salary of a schoolteacher whose job was in danger because of budget cuts.
MoveOn.org also is coordinating the national call-in day on Wednesday, working with other coalition groups to encourage several hundred thousand of the groups members to phone Congress in opposition to the tax cut. Earlier this year, the group organized a similar grassroots phone drive to oppose the war in Iraq.
Other members of the coalition are holding press conferences to highlight issues - from healthcare to education - that they say would be affected by the tax cut.
Business leaders who oppose the tax cut will be on Capitol Hill as part of an effort by Responsible Wealth, a group of affluent people who oppose the White House tax cut.
"We share a common agenda that this tax cut is unwise, unaffordable and unfair," said Jeff Blum, executive director of consumer advocacy group USAction, and co-chair of the grassroots efforts of the anti-tax-cut coalition. "Theres no surplus.
Nobody can think that their program can be funded if we give hundreds of billions more dollars to a bunch of millionaires."
He said the funding issue was why the National Education Association, veterans groups and MoveOn were "putting in their own resources to do expensive things from very different constituencies."
Activists who oppose the presidents plan remain upbeat even as Congress appears ready to pass a tax cut. Already, they say, their efforts have been successful in cutting the proposal by hundreds of billions of dollars. And they take some credit for the infighting now occurring among several business constituencies because of offsets in the Senate Finance Committees legislation.
"Every poll right now shows that Americans think this tax cut is fiscally irresponsible," said Zack Exley, the national organizing director for MoveOn.org, which originated during the 1998 impeachment as a website for constituents to tell members of Congress to censure President Clinton and "move on."
"Weve gotten a huge response from our membership. This isnt an anti- tax-cut movement," Exley added. "Its a fiscal responsibility movement."
The Fair Taxes for All Coalition grew from a smaller organization that fought the 2001 tax cut to one composed of more than 300 member groups.
Coalition leaders said the group has been energized by what they see as evidence of success, like the presidents plan being slashed in half by the Senate. They also have more money invested than two years ago, including enough to fund a small full-time staff.
After seeing news reports that the administration would pursue major tax cuts every year it remained in power, opponents of the tax plan said their efforts would only get more powerful and more vocal.
"To the extent that they continue to push further tax cuts," said Chuck Loveless, another coalition co-chair and legislative director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, "there is very much room for this coalition to continue.
[There's a great little feature about the Saudi Arabia bombings on bushwarsblog.com with tons of links.]
Spam notwithstanding, the question is hard to avoid: Has the little block of thermoplastic and silicon rendered irrelevant and impotent the large hunk of concrete? Has the stateless on-line realm given the people a direct detour around the dictator, the closed state, the walled community? Has the Internet, as many people predicted, become a force of democratic revolution?
That is a big question this week, as Iraq begins to be wired with public Internet technology for the first time in its history (Saddam Hussein limited access to a handful of closely monitored government officials). Electronic Berlin Walls now surround only a handful of countries: North Korea, Cuba (whose government has Internet equipment but largely forbids it to the people), Myanmar, some central Asian states and large regions of Africa, whose economic deprivation prevents any more than rudimentary telephone or Internet lines.
[We've been bandying around the word "detournement" a lot on this site, occasionally rather inaccurately -- a lot of what's been going up is simply collage of some sort, rarely wit the symbolic, even utopian charge that classic "detournements" emit. The link below is to images of detourned items from the May 68 uprisings, along with several links to "pro-situ" detournements on things like punk record jackets, etc.]
Picturebooks @ nothingness.org: Paris -- May 1968
In his May 1 op-ed piece, Will Marshall praised presidential candidates Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry and John Edwards as "Blair Democrats" -- internationalists who are willing "to use force in the national interest." He rejoiced that the Democratic Party "is moving away from McGovernism and back to its international roots."
One wonders why Marshall went to Britain for an example of how American Democrats ought to behave. It is more puzzling why he concluded that I'm opposed to internationalism and the "use of force in the national interest." I first used force in the national interest during World War II, when I flew 35 combat missions in Europe. American involvement in that war was clearly in our national interest, and that is why I volunteered at the age of 19 to be part of it.
It is true that I opposed the American war in Vietnam, but not because I had ceased to be an internationalist. That war was a disastrous folly, as all literate people now acknowledge. We were never more isolated from the international community than when our troops were deepest in the Vietnam jungle. A close second in isolating us from the international community was the invasion of Iraq, a largely defenseless little desert state that posed no threat to us and had taken no action against us.
The best way to support our troops is to keep them out of needless wars such as Iraq and Vietnam. The best way for America to play a constructive role internationally is to support the United Nations and to work toward expanding international trade, aid and investment while protecting our workers and the environment. An internationalist would also support the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the International Criminal Court, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and an international ban on land mines.
An internationalist also would support the International Food for Peace Program, which I directed during the Kennedy administration, as well as the efforts I carried forward to reduce global hunger during my service as a Clinton administration ambassador to the U.N. Food and Agriculture agencies in Rome. Former senator Bob Dole and I have teamed up to press for an international school lunch program that would reach 300 million elementary school children who are not being fed.
I am opposed to the Bush doctrine of "preemptive war" -- what heretofore has been known as aggression or invasion. I am also opposed to congressional resolutions that give the president a blank check to go to war when he pleases.
I have always thought America to be the greatest country on earth. One of the reasons I think so is because of our great founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, who spoke of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." Is there any doubt that the opinion of mankind was overwhelmingly against our wars in Vietnam and Iraq?
We don't measure a nation's internationalism by the number of troops it sends to other countries. By that test, Adolf Hitler would be the greatest internationalist of the 20th century. I might add for Marshall's edification that I would not have won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 -- winning 11 primaries, including the two largest states, New York and California -- if I had been perceived as an isolationist. I also believe that if the disgraceful conduct of President Richard Nixon during that campaign had been known before the election, I would have been elected. If so, I would have led as an internationalist unafraid to use force in the national interest.
A More Constructive Internationalism
The antiwar movement returns to the Port of Oakland this evening to picket war profiteer American President Lines (APL) and corporate colonist Stevedoring Services of America (SSA), with an additional message for OPD and Mayor Brown: "No police violence at the docks or in our communities!" Last month's picket was the scene of a "less-lethal" police onslaught as riot cops opened fire with wooden bullets and concussion grenades, injuring dozens of protesters and portworkers -- none of whom have been charged with any crime. At a meeting with organizers on Friday, OPD backed off on their threat to force picketers into a protest pen a mile away from the companies, but made few guarantees for the rights or safety of protesters. Enemy Combatant Radio will provide live coverage from 5pm, when protesters are to gather at West Oakland BART, until late (call-in 415-864-1006).
San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Someone called "invisible worm" dropped these links and message into the comments section of the story Korean News & Information Sites. I'm making the links live here, not knowing just yet whether these sites are any good.]
Base21
http://base21.org/
Korea Times
http://times.hankooki.com/
JoongAng Daily
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/
ZNet Korea Watch
http://www.zmag.org/asiawatch/koreawatch.htm
There are also a number of blogs from Korea. I'm living in Korea now and although I (http://www10.brinkster.com/invisibleworm/) don't focus on Korea on a daily basis I certainly try to keep on top of any major developments. Also check out:
Empty Bottle
http://www.emptybottle.org/index.php
The Magnificant Melting Object
http://meltingobject.blogspot.com/
locrianRhapsody
http://www14.brinkster.com/locrianrhapsody/
Korea Life Blog
http://korealife.blogspot.com/
The Korean Blog List
http://korea.banoffeepie.com/
[Here's a poem I wrote several years ago, probably about 1997, that appeared in my book Gulf, and which seems more relevant in the aftermath of the "war" than during it. I'm not sure that it expresses anything more than a mood, but it's a bad mood! My father never brought back shoes from the war.]
(It is nothing like revolution, it is more like de-
volution.) (Rabbits in the patch dying
from artificially induced suffocation for law and limp
order.) (Shore leave or compromise, all
the same in the hyperbolic star of an
infant with nipple needs.) (They keep the borg
tape-mouthed, wrists cuffed in the
closet.)
1. And fomented emigration
to the city births an anemia, crock issues won't
desist; able and willing (presaging a
deformity / of country codes) valors and
creativity - take it to the mountains, and sleep
on soles. 2. Hiccough under prose, slack averting
of the verbatim, shy guy slumping
in a corner, hair greasy, attitude unadjus-
ted to society, puns. 3. It's all just a loose-
lipped (we'll weep about it later) calibration
of poetry; two socks mismatched, and the
strumming of a lyre. 4. Marks the air before his fore-
head with an index finger, shaping a
colon, paratactic similitude of cogent theorem,
puns. 5. No panic attacks, the mind stays easy,
strays free in Symbolist "white space," re-
turns, always, to the assurance of mean-
ings - policies that park. 6. Pun only semi-in-
flectional, not "intended" (but indented) streams like
shit of meaning. 7. So that the sun settles
in its pocket. 8. Strategies to choose from
are presented by court ardor - the mayor resents but
greets the categorical crowd of half-
baked, irresolute plangent reformers. 9. Sum-
mer and evenings, by the ocean, face
blended with the winds and palms of some stereo-
typic entrapment - there is little here
that speaks. 10. The position is empty / of a grown
man without envy. 11. The party dances
on, without him, crass comedic urges that he
has, connections still being made
in the lights of syntax that is sobriety; the pairing
of lovers slalom forth on the "accurate
impulses" of undebatable relevance. 12 Watch-
ing from the gables and attics, children with pro-
lix complaints and commitments; suburbs
are theory of the wide-eyed preter-adolescent, stuck in
shoes Papa brought back from the war.
After five years spent working to end the sanctions on Iraq, I find myself in an odd position. I'm opposed to the current U.S. plans to end the sanctions.
The new situation is fascinating. For a dozen years, every time we in the anti-sanctions movement talked about the appalling suffering caused by the sanctions, the constant refrain from the Bush administration, the Clinton administration, and the second Bush administration was that the suffering was not caused by sanctions but by the regime. Once the regime is destroyed, the Bush administration miraculously realizes overnight sanctions were actually harmful and that it's necessary to remove that burden from the Iraqi people in order to provide humanitarian aid and reconstruction.
Adding to the confusion, the two countries on the Security Council previously most against continuation of the sanctions, France and Russia, did an about-face and opposed the U.S. plans. Both (especially Russia) have insisted that sanctions cannot be lifted until UN weapons inspectors certify that Iraq is disarmed of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This is true even though Vladimir Putin of Russia openly mocked Tony Blair about the dramatically unconfirmed claims by "coalition" members that Iraq possessed WMD that posed a threat to the world.
Did this administration, which tried to keep Iraqi infants from being vaccinated for diphtheria and limited imports of streptomycin into the country, see a blinding light on the road to Baghdad? And did other countries suddenly decide that the deaths of Iraqi children was, as Madeleine Albright put it in an interview in 1996, a price worth paying, and this time merely in order to uphold a trivial legalistic argument?
Actually, it's not so confusing. The United States has moved to consolidate control over Iraq. The talks being held by selected members of the "Iraqi opposition" under the control of the U.S. military are not intended to create an independent government, but rather one which is tightly controlled by the United States, just as in Afghanistan. As in Afghanistan, the meetings are excluding entire segments of the political spectrum. They are being done with express disregard of calls across that spectrum for meetings to be held under neutral UN auspices rather than under those of an occupying power with clear plans for increased regional domination.
Those plans have become clear as well. The Bush administration wants to set up permanent military bases in Iraq, making it the main Middle East staging area for U.S. "force projection." The massive political leverage given by this presence will be used as a club against Iran and Syria and also to force the Palestinians to acquiesce to the Israeli occupation through the latest "peace plan." The administration also wants not only to open up future Iraqi exploration to foreign corporations (with U.S. and maybe British corporations presumably favored) but to privatize, at least in part, the state oil companies and their currently producing wells.
All of these things can be obtained through the U.S. military presence and the creation of what will essentially be an Iraqi puppet government. However, some problems are the kind that can't be solved by bombs. Existing UN resolutions require Security Council approval for Iraqi oil sales and for disbursement of oil money to pay for other goods. Other countries may be leery of buying Iraqi oil without some clear understanding that what they're doing is legal, so the United States cannot simply declare those resolutions void by fiat, the way it declared war on Iraq.
The draft resolution being currently circulated would give the United States very open, explicit control over Iraq's oil industry and the money derived therefrom. Then, instead of being forced to disburse USAID funds to corporations like Bechtel that are closely tied to current and past administration figures in closed bidding processes with no foreign corporations allowed, the United States will be able to use Iraq's money to pay off mostly American corporations.
In the process, it will try to escape the legal obligation it shares with the United Kingdom: Since they committed an illegal, aggressive war (with no Security Council authorization) against Iraq, they are financially responsible for the reconstruction. Iraq should not have to pay for its own reconstruction, especially since for years to come its oil revenues will be barely enough to meet the basic needs of its people.
This fundamental violation of the rights of the Iraqi people is being done in the name of the immediate crisis faced. Yet the way that the sanctions work is not the way they used to. The Sanctions Committee automatically approves most imports without any requirement for deliberation. Furthermore, the biggest bureaucratic delays were created by deliberate U.S. understaffing, so that there were never enough people to review all the proposed contracts (see Joy Gordon's article "Cool War: Economic Sanctions as a Weapon of Mass Destruction, Harper's, November 2002). Finally, all members of the Security Council have indicated willingness to cooperate in expediting the release of all goods required for immediate needs.
In the long run, the sanctions must be lifted because they impose a highly inefficient foreign control of the Iraqi economy, causing the collapse of local economic activity and requiring money that should be spent internally to be spent on foreign corporations. In the short run, there is no compelling reason to lift them in the absence of a legitimate Iraqi government that has the right to make choices about how Iraq's oil wealth is to be used for the benefit of the Iraqi people.
France and Russia are opposing this move (France rather weakly), not because of any genuine concern about WMD, but for two reasons. First, the venal one: They don't want to be completely shut out of any lucrative postwar contracts, and certainly want to hang on to oil concession deals signed with the previous Iraqi regime. Second, a reason that activists in the United States and elsewhere should support fully: They don't want to retroactively legitimize U.S. aggression and thus contribute further to its more and more openly imperial role in the world.
In fact, overt subordination of the United Nations to the United States is a central part of the Bush administration agenda. It has served notice that the UN has no role in anything "important" not in weapons inspections, in the Iraqi political process, in major reconstruction decisions, nor in peacekeeping (where a multinational "coalition of the willing" is being assembled).
Instead, as George Bush said, the "vital role" of the UN is easily defined: "That means food. That means medicine. That means aid." Or, as Richard Perle said even more openly, in an op-ed shortly after the war began titled "Thank God for the death of the UN," "The 'good works' part will survive, the low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain, the chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat." No longer content with a system where nominally the UN is the ultimate authority but the United States dominates it by coercion and bribery, the Bush administration wants explicit recognition that the UN should play only the roles allowed to it by the United States.
An example from history helps to illuminate the fundamental principle regarding the sanctions. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, one of the first things it did was try to set up a puppet regime composed of Kuwaitis to rule the country as a satellite of Iraq. It would actually have withdrawn most of its army had that regime gotten any international recognition. Instead, the sanctions that were levied at U.S. insistence embargoed not only Iraq's oil sales but also Kuwait's. Kuwaiti oil was not to be sold so that an illegitimate regime could not plunder Kuwait's oil wealth for the benefit of the Iraqi government. Those sanctions were indefensible for reasons that don't apply today, including the almost complete termination of food imports into Iraq (although food was technically allowed under UN Security Council Resolution 666, in practice virtually none got in). The principle, however, was sound.
Today, the United States is willing to (partially) withdraw after it installs its own puppet regime (one that will presumably have more independence than the one Iraq tried to install, but will still be subservient to U.S. dictates). It also wants to plunder Iraq's oil wealth for its own political purposes and for the benefit of U.S. corporations. This is reason enough to keep the sanctions on until there is a legitimate Iraqi government. This can only happen if U.S. and other "coalition" forces withdraw, there is a multinational UN peacekeeping force with no participation from any of the aggressor nations, and the Iraqis are given a genuine chance to exercise their right to self-determination.
Rahul Mahajan is a member of the Nowar Collective. His newest book, "Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond" will be out in June 2003. His articles are collected at
AlterNet: Don't Lift the Sanctions Yet
Block the Empire has made the shocking discovery that there are massive research and production facilities for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Montreal. Tomorrow, activists and journalists will be treated to a frightening but enlightening Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction bus tour of the local military-industrial complex.
It took little effort for Block the Empire inspectors make several important finds. One of the tour organizers, Scott Weinstein, says that weapons producers have done very little to cover their tracks, This stuff is not hidden. They publish it on their Websites. Project Ploughshares and the Polaris Institute also provide excellent research on the companies and government agencies involved in the WMD industry.
BAGHDAD -- The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants.
The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been described from the start as the principal arm of the U.S. plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure, expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war.
Leaders of Task Force 75's diverse staff -- biologists, chemists, arms treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and special forces troops -- arrived with high hopes of early success. They said they expected to find what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell described at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 -- hundreds of tons of biological and chemical agents, missiles and rockets to deliver the agents, and evidence of an ongoing program to build a nuclear bomb.
Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force members said in interviews.
JOIN US IN PETITIONING CONGRESS AND THE FCC ON MEDIA ISSUES!
http://www.moveon.org/stopthefcc
Dear Friend of United for Peace and Justice,
Anyone who paid attention to the media coverage of the war on Iraq and the anti-war movement knows that peace and justice activists must prioritize wresting control of our media from profit-driven media corporations. In other parts of the world, TV viewers learned about the human costs of warfrom images of injured and dead Iraqi civilians to interviews with doctors and humanitarian workers. But on U.S. television, the war was presented as a video game, full of images that glorified U.S. weaponry and commentary by former military generals and embedded journalists whose identities blurred with those of their military units. This was the version of the war that the U.S. government wanted the public to believenot the reality on the ground in Iraq. This was also the version of the war that media outlets believed would bring them viewers and advertising dollars.
And it gets worse
While Secretary of State Colin Powell led the U.S. invasion against Iraq, his son, Michael Powell, head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), ramped up an attack on federal media regulations that could give the corporate media even more power than it already has. We have already seen the effects of the 1996 media deregulation: five television companies--General Electric (MSNBC and NBC), News Corp (Fox), Disney (ABC), AOL-Time Warner (CNN), and Viacom (CBS)--have a stranglehold on what information the public gets to know, and corporate radio behemoths like Clear Channel Communications devour local radio stations and replace them with McRadio. If Powell has his way, the situation will get even worse; there will be nothing standing in the way of media companies drive for profits at the expense of our democracy.
TAKE ACTIONTELL CONGRESS AND THE FCC TO STOP THE MEDIA DEREGULATION!
Please join United for Peace and Justice as we come together with Moveon.org, Media Alliance, CodePink and Global Exchange to say no to the Bush Administrations push to give free reign to the corporate media. We need to strengthen the media ownership rules, not eliminate them!
Go to http://www.moveon.org/stopthefcc to sign a petition to the FCC that will also be sent to your Congress members and Senators. We need thousands of people to sign this petition; this is our chance to speak out against media that puts corporate profit ahead of journalism and truth-telling!
In peace and solidarity,
Andrea Buffa
Leslie Cagan
Bill Fletcher Jr.
Co-chairs, United for Peace and Justice
BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON PROPOSED CHANGES TO MEDIA REGULATIONS
The following rules are being considered for modification or elimination by the FCC. A decision from the FCC is expected in early June 2003.
- Newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership prohibition. Prevents broadcast TV companies from buying newspapers in communities in which they have TV stations. (Practical effect: NBC cannot buy Gannett News Service)
- Local radio ownership limit. Limits the number of local radio stations that any one broadcaster can own in a single market. (Practical effect: right now Clear Channel can only own 8 stations in a local market.)
- National TV ownership limit. Limits the number of local broadcast stations any one broadcast company can own to systems serving 35% of the TV households in the U.S. (Practical effect: Prevents Viacom/CBS from buying anymore broadcast systems, because it currently owns systems that reach 41% of the public. Prevents Fox/Newscorp (Rupert Murdoch) from owning the other half.
- Local TV multiple ownership, aka duopoly rule. Allows a broadcast company to own two TV stations in the same market only if at least one of those stations is ranked below the top four stations and there are at least eight independently owned-and-operating, full-power and noncommercial television stations in that market. (Practical effect: Viacom/CBS can own PAX as long as PAX remains a low ranked station in that market.)
- Radio/TV Cross-Ownership restriction. Prevents one company from owning both a radio station and a television station in the same market. (Practical effect: Clear Channel cannot now own TV stations in markets where it owns radio stations. Disney/ABC cannot control radio and TV stations in the same market.)
For more information, see this article:
SHOWDOWN AT THE FCC (http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15796) Jeffrey Chester and Don Hazen, AlterNet
Despite wide protests and the Clear Channel debacle, the FCC is about to award the nation's biggest media conglomerates a new give-away that will further concentrate media ownership in fewer hands. The impact on the American media landscape could be disastrous. Recent TV coverage of the Iraq war already illustrates that US media companies aren't interested in providing a serious range of analysis and debate. This overview describes what's at stake and offers an introduction to several other articles.
Fifty years after Senator Joseph McCarthy began a communist witch hunt, the Senate has released transcripts of the secret hearings he held to try to intimidate witnesses before they appeared in public.
You can download .pdfs of the files from this page on the website of the United States Congress.
I confess to having gotten these links from Steve Perry's bushwarsblog.com, which contains more good links and a memorable Ashcroft joke.
Check out the new archives page by clicking "complete index by category..." above, or just by clicking here.
The stories are pretty disorganized at the moment, but I plan on cleaning them up, creating new categories, etc., over the next few weeks.
[Taken from the first new post to the blog since before the invasion.]
A Post From Baghdad Station
Note: Salam Pax sent me this in a Word attachment earlier today. After weeks of silence everything's happening at once: yesterday I received an email from his cousin with his satellite phone number. I called it; Salams father decided to play grumpy patriarch and told me to call back in two minutes," which I did. Salam sounds fine. We discussed as many things as we could in a short amount of time. Without further ado, I present his latest posts. Diana Moon PS Please excuse any formatting weirdnesses; I've already been warned not to blog at work, so can't take the time to clean anything up.
If you are reading this it means that things have gone as I hope and either Diana or my cousin has posted to the blog. One of the funniest things was talking to my boss in Beirut after the war (Thuraya should make an ad saying : Operation Iraqi Freedom, brought to you in association with Thuraya phones) and him telling me that someone called Diana Moon is bugging us about a certain Salam Pax. I cant even remember telling her where I work. Diana you are the wise oracle of Gotham. [Note: I didn't bug nobody. I sent him one email. Evil Boss Unit is undoubtedly a sexist]. .
Today while going thru Karada street I saw a sign saying Send and receive e-mail. Affordable prices I am checking out the place tomorrow. If the price really is affordable I might be able to update the blog every week or two.
Let me tell you one thing first. War sucks big time. Dont let yourself ever be talked into having one waged in the name of your freedom. Somehow when the bombs start dropping or you hear the sound of machine guns at the end of your street you dont think about your imminent liberation anymore.
There's no denying that George Bush knows how to stage patriotic spectacles at sea, but the reality back on shore is not so technicolor pretty. Did you know that Top Gun Bush is poised to become the first President since Herbert Hoover to preside over job destruction rather than job creation? Thanks to Daniel Gross's article, recently posted on Slate, we also know that Bush's last tax cut, the largest cut in American history, has so far "cost" America 1.7 million jobs and counting.
For a good comparison of how Bush's record of job destruction compares to previous presidencies since World War II, check out the following compilation by the International Association of Machinists, which looked at the average growth in monthly employment during the terms of the last fifteen presidential administrations.
Truman First Term: 60,000 jobs gained per month
Truman Second Term: 113,000 jobs gained per month
Eisenhower First Term: 58,000 jobs gained per month
Eisenhower Second Term: 15,000 jobs gained per month
Kennedy: 122,000 jobs gained per month
Johnson: 206,000 jobs gained per month
Nixon First Term: 129,000 jobs gained per month
Nixon/Ford : 105,000 jobs gained per month
Carter: 218,000 jobs gained per month
Reagan First Term: 109,000 jobs gained per month
Reagan Second Term: 224,000 jobs gained per month
G. Bush: 52,000 jobs gained per month
Clinton First Term: 242,000 jobs gained per month
Clinton Second Term: 235,000 jobs gained per month
G.W. Bush : 69,000 jobs LOST per month
Also back on shore: While this Administration stakes out the patriotic high ground, it is decimating programs that benefit veterans, their families and their communities to hand the super-rich another tax cut. (To find out what you can do to expose Bush's hypocrisy, support the national ad campaign by True Majority and Veterans for Common Sense .)
National unemployment has just increased to 6 percent, the highest in almost a decade. The states face the worst budget crisis since the 1930s. Primary services such as schools, basic health care, sanitation and law enforcement are being undermined. Lines at food banks are longer and longer. Homelessness is on the rise. Even the state agencies charged with combating terrorism are being gutted. As Bob Herbert wrote in his New York Times column, "There is a faint but unmistakable whiff of the Depression in the air."
No wonder Karl Rove predicts that the 2004 election is going to be "close," and "competitive." Maybe he's been reviewing other stats--like the one that says that since 1900, the only incumbent Republican Presidents to lose a second term have been named Hoover and Bush.
[The following is from Steve Perry's bushwarsblog.com concerning something he posted a few days ago, and to which I linked. I think it's very pertinent as I've linked to other sites on my site -- "humor" sites -- that were criticized as being racist. My own response to Steve is below.]
I admit I had some misgivings over posting the Snoop Dogg translation of Bush's victory speech yesterday. And an old friend of mine--a person who tends to be both hypersensitive and wise in matters of crypto-racism--wrote me as follows: "This isn't such a good idea. It reeks of coon show."
I know what he means, and the question comes down to this (I think): Is it prima facie racist to employ racially tinged stereotypes to make a point?
The point I wished to make between the lines was this: Gangsta culture is gangsta culture, and if you credit the reasoning of Bush's foreign policy, you have to respect the most hardcore gangsta rappers as well--and, needless to say, vice versa. Why? Because either it's all right to value getting paid over all else--sooner rather than later, and by any means available--or else it's not. Any which way, I see the Bush administration and the most grandiose of the hiphop gangstas in the same light.
But maybe this is all just so much rationalization, irrelevant even if it's correct in its own obscure way; maybe, for practical purposes, the most salient point is that employing racial stereotypes to any end is pernicious. Myself, I think we're past that point. But I'm not entirely sure. Tell me what you think: sperry@citypages.com
Dear Steve,
I run the website Circulars, and reposted the Shizzolatin piece, though with some reservations:
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000608.html
I didnt foreground the metaphor that you were making between gangsta culture and the Bush regime I dont think too many people would have gotten that, certainly not in the formulation that you made on your blog today.
(The point I wished to make between the lines was this: Gangsta culture is gangsta culture, and if you credit the reasoning of Bush's foreign policy, you have to respect the most hardcore gangsta rappers as well--and, needless to say, vice versa. Why? Because either it's all right to value getting paid over all else--sooner rather than later, and by any means available--or else it's not. Any which way, I see the Bush administration and the most grandiose of the hiphop gangstas in the same light.)
I put it up, though, because I see my site as a sort of clearing house for different ways of making political art, even if slightly tasteless. At times like when I make links to the site whitehouse.org racist stereotypes and language are involved. (Actually, its only that site that moves into racism other more or less tasteless political art seems to have no problem stereotyping gays and women, not to mention those with mental health issues.)
Here are the two times that I linked to whitehouse.org and/or took some of their art: http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000583.html. (I actually agree with Buford, that the piece, which I hadnt read entirely before posting, is pretty bad, though I think he is more full of hatred than I could ever be I would never fantasize about doing harm to someone the way he does.)
Heres the other one -- http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000480.html-- which seems to take shots at everybody, though the commenter didnt obviously think so.
This is because Im interested in the creative, non-discursive, surprise attack aspects of political art excess, even if it moves beyond positive formulations of what we should do, since I feel pretty desperate to fill in the void of wilder forms of protest art that seem to have been more prevalent in the last century. Here is something rather extreme, again having to do mostly with celebrities: http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000582.html.
In addition, I write about digital poetics and cover topics concerning how a text can move from an ethically neutral zone to one that is ethically charged based on the work of a simple algorithm the site pornolize.com is the example I use, but it seems the most recent crop tends to have to do with Black American English (there are tons of Ebonics translators out there).
I suppose, if this didnt come from a site actually created by Snoop Dogg Im assuming it was, or by his company then I wouldnt have posted it, as there is a pretty tedious new streak of web art these days (I assume by whites) that tries to make a good point that the internet, or at least most of the discourse around it, seems to be the domain mostly of whites and Asians by getting dirty, trying to be on the good cop by pretending to be the bad cop, and doing obnoxious things like this site -- http://rent-a-negro.com/ -- whose URL speaks for itself.
I myself am Korean American (half Korean), and was not raised in a Korean neighborhood, so Ive had my share of racial epithets tossed my way. I know that when I was in high school I attended an urban high school in Jersey City rather than my mostly white high school in the suburbs it was somewhat liberating for me and my friends there, who were mostly non-white, to play with racially-charged language we took it over, in a sense, though not to pathological extremes it still hurt when we heard it elsewhere.
Ive never mentioned that I was Korean American on the site, though, as I didnt think it mattered, in a way, and my hope was that the sensibility expressed on the site to which there are over 15 contributors would be general enough, beyond any need to psychoanalyze motives. But I confess that I was a bit afraid, also would it be acceptable to people out there that a site that is so obviously critical of the Bush administration was created by a Korean American? I dont want to know.
I guess I always hope that we can share a joke that racist stereotypes are bad by putting on the masks, switching identities, playing with the language, etc., but Im not sure how that plays out in the long run, in either reaffirming what we would like to destroy, etc. I may have lost some readers by posting the links to whitehouse.org, or even your site well, my readership has gone down anyway, since the war ended which is unfortunate, but Ive learned a lot by reading the comments section on my site in reaction to these pieces, even when they were flames.
There are certainly enough stereotypes about white people flying around in the political art of today, perhaps particularly Texans is the fact that it white Americans create this art important? Are the perspectives translating well across a broad spectrum of culture?
Anyway, I have no answers to any of this. One cant expect everyone to share ones sense of the range of permissible forms of expression something will always confuse or anger someone else negativity, whether in the form of punk rock, gangsta rap, Dada, even these language algorithms, can have its liberating aspects, but to many it might just seem vicious noise.
Thanks,
Brian
[A second email soon after...]
Hi Steve,
One last point I wanted to make was this that the ethnic make-up of the Bush cabinet seems to suggest that he is responding to a need for racial diversity in the government, and is in some ways progressive. Fine, but I think the issue is not just diversity but difference that the various races that live in America also play by different rules when they are existing in their own neighborhoods, cultures, etc. speak differently, also. Sometimes they dont even hear each other, though the Bush cabinet, working in exquisite concord, apparently does.
I suppose, though I am not sure, that creating obnoxious cartoons about difference at least suggest the contradictions and potential conflicts in American culture that the Bush cabinet seems to want to gloss over, as they have glossed over differences with their peers around the world. I prefer this harsh highlighting of recalcitrant social detail over the evangelical vision that guides our foreign and domestic policy at the moment. Perhaps I am the wrong person to foreground this Im pretty middle class but nonetheless it seems necessary.
Does this make sense?
Thanks
Brian
[Daniel Cohn-Bendit is the present-day Green politician who became known as spokesperson and leader of the May 68 revolutionary activities in Paris. Hugh MacDiarmid is the famous Scottish-nationalist, Marxist poet who early in his career created "Synthetic Scots."]
On the occasion of his candidature in Glasgow
University Rectorial Election, 1968
No man or group of men has any right
To force another man or other groups of men
To do anything he or they do not wish to do.
There is no right to govern without
The consent of the governed. Consent is not only
Important in itself, and as a nidus for freedom
And its attendant spontaneity (clearly valuable
As the opposed sense of frustration is detrimental)
But the sole
Basis of political obligation. There is nothing
Supplemental to or coequal with consent itself
And even if we had not the lessons of all history
-The endless evidence of 'man's inhumanity to man'
And overwhelming proof that all power debases
And that no man is good enough to have it
Or can exercise it without doing far more harm than good -
The contention is utterly indefensible - sheer humbug! mortmain!
That 'so long as the exercise of certain powers is good in itself
Or a means to the good... these powers are right
Whether or not anyone is of the opinion that they are,'
The time-dishonoured formula that attempts to conceal or excuse
All the hellish wrong of human history,
The fraud and loss inherent in all Government,
That age-long monstrous distortion of the faculties of man
It is the great historical task of the working-class
To eliminate today, no matter at what cost,
That human life, no longer wrenched hideously awry,
May spring up at last in its proper form.
Darren actually posted this a long time ago, but after investigating some of the personal blogs of the contributors I somehow got convinced this was some crazy, gun-toting hawkish venture, but I think I just hit one of the bad ones. Lots of good stuff here, with sections devoted to Iraq, North Korea, and the "War on Terrorism."
The Command Post - A Warblog Collective
A data-gathering company that was embroiled in the Florida 2000 election fiasco is being paid millions of dollars by the Bush administration to collect detailed personal information on the populations of foreign countries, enraging several governments who say the records may have been illegally obtained.
US government purchasing documents show that the company, ChoicePoint, received at least $11m (6.86m) from the Department of Justice last year to supply data - mainly on Latin Americans - that included names and addresses, occupations, dates of birth, passport numbers and "physical description". Even tax records and blood groups are reportedly included.
Nicaraguan police have raided two offices suspected of providing the information. The revelations threaten to shatter public trust in electoral institutions, especially in Mexico, where the government has begun an investigation.
The controversy is not the first to engulf ChoicePoint. The company's subsidiary, Database Technologies, was responsible for bungling an overhaul of Florida's voter registration records, with the result that thousands of people, disproportionately black, were disenfranchised in the 2000 election. Had they been able to vote, they might have swung the state, and thus the presidency, for Al Gore, who lost in Florida by a few hundred votes.
Also See:
How US Paid for Secret Files on Foreign Citizens
By Neil Mackay
The Bush administration has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had no weapons of mass destruction.
Senior officials in the Bush administration have admitted that they would be 'amazed' if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq.
According to administration sources, Saddam shut down and destroyed large parts of his WMD programmes before the invasion of Iraq.
Ironically, the claims came as US President George Bush yesterday repeatedly justified the war as necessary to remove Iraq's chemical and biological arms which posed a direct threat to America.
Bush claimed: 'Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We will find them.'
The comments from within the administration will add further weight to attacks on the Blair government by Labour backbenchers that there is no 'smoking gun' and that the war against Iraq -- which centred on claims that Saddam was a risk to Britain, America and the Middle East because of unconventional weapons -- was unjustified.
[Here's Bush's most recent speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln translated by Snoop Dogg's Shizzolator. Courtesy Steve Perry bushwarsblog.com. Don't ask me why this is interesting, or even if it is interesting -- silly mischief.]
Thank yo' ass, know what I'm sayin'? Thank yo' ass izzall hella much n' shit.
Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers 'n sailors of da USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq has ended, know what I'm sayin'? In da battle of Iraq, da United States 'n izzle allies has prevailed."
And now izzle coalition is engaged in securing 'n reconstructing that country, know what I'm sayin'?
In this battle, we has fought fo' da cause of liberty 'n fo' da peace of da world." Our nation 'n izzle coalition are proud of this accomplishment, yet that shiznit is yo' ass, da members of da United States military, who achieved that shiznit n' shit. Your courage, yo' willingness face danger fo' yo' country 'n fo' each other made this day possible, know what I'm sayin'?
Because of yo' ass izzle nation is mo' secure, know what I'm sayin'? Because of yo' ass da tyrant has fallen 'n Iraq is free, know what I'm sayin'?
Perry: Bush Wars : W's Victory Address, Shizzolated
Here are three sites covering issues pertaining to Korea, in some cases specifically North Korea. One of them, koreawatch.org, appears to be down, but I had just looked at it a few weeks ago and it didn't show signs of going away -- hmmm. Please note that I am not advocating the perspectives of any of these sites; just starting a collection. If you know of any other English-language Korea-oriented websites that are still actively updated, please send them along. Many, but not all, of these links come from world-newspapers.com, which has pages of links for both North and South Korea.
Human Rights Watch: Democratic Republic of Korea
koreawatch.org (temporarily down)
Korean Central News Agency of DPRK (official organ)
Lonely Planet Guide to North Korea (wtf!?)
North Korea Daily (aggregated North Korea news from international sources)
[Here is one of the more important considerations of digital technologies in relation to progressive political activism. Written in 1970, German poet Enzensberger (not unlike Erwin Piscator, who appears elsewhere on Circulars) was prescient in his critique of how unfounded optimism in the "communicative" aspects of technology often confuses the issue of who, really, is in "control" of the media realm, opinion, the will to act, etc.
It appears that some paragraphs are missing from this text, which I lifted from another site -- I'll see if I can locate them elsewhere.]
If you should think this is Utopian, then I would ask you to consider why it is Utopian.
-- Brecht: Theory of Radio
1. With the development of the electronic media, the industry that shapes consciousness has become the pacemaker for the social and economic development of societies in the late industrial age. It infiltrates into all other sectors of production, takes over more and more directional and control functions, and determines the standard of the prevailing technology.
(In lieu of normative definitions here is an incomplete list of new developments which have emerged in the last 20 years: news satellites, color television, cable relay television, cassettes, videotape, videotape recorders, video-phones, stereophony, laser techniques, electrostatic reproduction processes, electronic high-speed printing, composing and learning machines, microfiches with electronic access, printing by radio, time-sharing computers, data banks. All these new forms of media are constantly forming new connections both with each other and with older media like printing, radio, film, television, telephone, teletype, radar and so on. They are clearly coming together to form a universal system. (Illustrative material and asides, originally printed in a smaller type, are here enclosed in brackets.)
The general contradiction between productive forces and productive relationships emerges most sharply, however, when they are most advanced. (By contrast, protracted structural crises as in coal-mining can be solved merely by getting rid of a backlog, that is to say, essentially they can be solved within the terms of their own system and a revolutionary strategy that relied on them would be short-sighted.)
Monopoly capitalism develops the consciousness-shaping industry more quickly and more extensively than other sectors of production; it must at the same time fetter it. A socialist media theory has to work at this contradiction. Demonstrate that it cannot be solved within the given productive relationships -- rapidly increasing discrepancies -- potential destructive forces. ‘Certain demands of a prognostic nature musy not a problem. It is consciously prevented for understandable political reasons. The technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labor into producers and consumers, which in the consciousness industry becomes of particular political importance. It is based, in the last analysis, on the basic contradiction between the ruling class and the ruled class -- that is to say between monopoly capital or monopolistic bureaucracy on the one hand and the dependent masses on the other.
(This structural analogy can be worked out in detail. To the programs offered by the broadcasting cartels there correspond the politics offered by a power cartel consisting of parties constituted along authoritarian lines. In both cases marginal differences in their platforms reflect a competitive relationship which on essential questions is nonexistent. Minimal independent activity on the part of the voter/viewer. As is the case with parliamentary elections under the two-party system the feedback is reduced to indices. ‘Training in decision making’ is reduced to the response to a single, three-point switching process: Program 1; Program 2; Switch off (abstention).)
‘Radio must be changed from a means of distribution to a means of communication. Radio would be the most wonderful means of communication imaginable in public life, a huge linked system -- that is to say, it would be such if it were capable not only of transmitting but of receiving, of allowing the listener not only to hear but to speak, and did not isolate him but brought him into contact. Unrealizable in this social system, realizable in another, these proposals, which are, after all, only the natural consequences of technical development, help towards the propagation and shaping of the other system.’ (Bertolt Brecht: Theory of Radio (1932), Gesammelte Werke, Band VIII, pp. 129 seq., 134.)
The Orwellian Fantasy
3.George Orwell’s bogey of a monolithic consciousness industry derives from a view of the media which is undialectical and obsolete. The possibility of total control of such a system at a central point belongs not to the future but to the past. With the aid of systems theory, a discipline which is part of bourgeois science -- using, that is to say, categories which are immanent in the system -- it can be demonstrated that a linked series of communications or, to use the technical term, switchable network, to the degree that it exceeds a certain critical size, can no longer be centrally controlled but only dealt with statistically. This basic ‘leakiness’ of stochastic systems admittedly allows the calculation of probabilities based on sampling and extrapolations; but blanket supervision would demand a monitor that was bigger than the system itself. The monitoring of all telephone conversations, for instance, postulates an apparatus which would need to be n times more extensive and more complicated than that of the present telephone system. A censor’s office, which carried out its work extensively, would of necessity become the largest branch of industry in its society.
But supervision on the basis of approximation can only offer inadequate instruments for the self-regulation of the whole system in accordance with the concepts of those who govern it. It postulates a high degree of internal stability. If this precarious balance is upset, then crisis measures based on statistical methods of control are useless. Interference can penetrate the leaky nexus of the media, spreading and multiplying there with the utmost speed by resonance. The rgime so threatened will in such cases, insofar as it is still capable of action, use force and adopt police or military methods.
A state of emergency is therefore the only alternative to leakage in the consciousness industry; but it cannot be maintained in the long run. Societies in the late industrial age rely on the free exchange of information; the ‘objective pressures’ to which their controllers constantly appeal are thus turned against them. Every attempt to suppress the random factors, each diminution of the average flow and each distortion of the information structure must, in the long run, lead to an embolism.
The electronic media have not only built up the information network intensively, they have also spread it extensively. The radio wars of the fifties demonstrated that in the realm of communications, national sovereignty is condemned to wither away. The further development of satellites will deal it the coup de grce. Quarantine regulations for information, such as were promulgated by Fascism and Stalinism, are only possible today at the cost of deliberate industrial regression.
(Example. The Soviet bureaucracy, that is to say the most widespread and complicated bureaucracy in the world, has to deny itself almost entirely an elementary piece of organizational equipment, the duplicating machine, because this instrument potentially makes everyone a printer. The political risk involved, the possibility of a leakage in the information network, is accepted only at the highest levels, at exposed switchpoints in political, military and scientific areas. It is clear that Soviet society has to pay an immense price for the suppression of its own productive resources -- clumsy procedures, misinformation, faux frais. The phenomenon incidentally has its analogue in the capitalist West, if in a diluted form. The technically most advanced electrostatic copying machine, which operates with ordinary paper -- which cannot that is to say, be supervised and is independent of suppliers -- is the product of a monopoly (Xerox); on principle it is not sold but rented. the rates themselves ensure that it does not get into the wrong hands. The equipment crops up as if by magic where economic and political power are concentrated. Political control of the equipment goes hand in hand with maximization of profits for the manufacturer. Admittedly this control, as opposed to Soviet methods, is by no means ‘water-tight’ for the reasons indicated.)
The problem of censorship thus enters a new historical stage. The struggle for the freedom of the press and freedom of ideas has, up till now, been mainly an argument within the bourgeoisie itself; for the masses, freedom to express opinions was a fiction since they were, from the beginning, barred from the means of production -- above all from the press -- and thus were unable to join in freedom of expression from the start. Today censorship is threatened by the productive forces of the consciousness industry which is already, to some extent, gaining the upper hand over the prevailing relations of production. Long before the latter are overthrown, the contradiction between what is possible and what actually exists will become acute.
Cultural Archaism in the Left Critique
4. The New Left of the sixties has reduced the development of the media to a single concept -- that of manipulation. This concept was originally extremely useful for heuristic purposes and has made possible a great many individual analytical investigations, but it now threatens to degenerate into a mere slogan which conceals more than it is able to illuminate, and therefore itself requires analysis.
The current theory of manipulation on the Left is essentially defensive; its effects can lead the movement into defeatism. Subjectively speaking, behind the tendency to go on the defensive lies a sense of impotence. Objectively, it corresponds to the absolutely correct view that the decisive means of production are in enemy hands. But to react to this state of affairs with moral indignation is nave. There is in general an undertone of lamentation when people speak of manipulation which points to idealistic expectations -- as if the class enemy had ever stuck to the promises of fair play it occasionally utters. The liberal superstition that in political and social questions there is such a thing as pure, unmanipulated truth, seems to enjoy remarkable currency among the socialist Left. It is the unspoken basic premise of the manipulation thesis.
This thesis provides no incentive to push ahead. A socialist perspective which does not go beyond attacking existing property relationships is limited. The expropriation of Springer is a desirable goal but it would be good to know to whom the media should be handed over. The Party? To judge by all experience of that solution, it is not a possible alternative. It is perhaps no accident that the Left has not yet produced an analysis of the pattern of manipulation in countries with socialist rgimes.
The manipulation thesis also serves to exculpate oneself. To cast the enemy in the role of the devil is to conceal the weakness and lack of perspective in one’s own agitation. If the latter leads to self-isolation instead of mobilizing the masses, then its failure is attributed holus-bolus to the overwhelming power of the media.
The theory of repressive tolerance has also permeated discussion of the media by the Left. This concept, which was formulated by its author with the utmost care, has also, when whittled away in an undialectical manner, become a vehicle for resignation. Admittedly, when an office-equipment firm can attempt to recruit sales staff with the picture of Che Guevara and the text We would have hired him, the temptation to withdraw is great. But fear of handling shit is a luxury a sewer-man cannot necessarily afford.
The electronic media do away with cleanliness; they are by their nature ‘dirty’. That is part of their productive power. In terms of structure, they are anti-sectarian -- a further reason why the Left, insofar as it is not prepared to re-examine its traditions, has little idea what to do with them. The desire for a cleanly defined ‘line’ and for the suppression of ‘deviations’ is anachronistic and now serves only one’s own need for security. It weakens one’s own position by irrational purges, exclusions and fragmentation, instead of strengthening it by rational discussion.
These resistances and fears are strengthened by a series of cultural factors which, for the most part, operate unconsciously, and which are to be explained by the social history of the participants in today’s Left movement -- namely their bourgeois class background. It often seems as if it were precisely because of their progressive potential that the media are felt to be an immense threatening power; because for the first time they present a basic challenge to bourgeois culture and thereby to the privileges of the bourgeois intelligentsia-.--a challenge far more radical than any self-doubt this social group can display. In the New Left’s opposition to the media, old bourgeois fears such as the fear of ‘the masses’ seem to be reappearing along with equally old bourgeois longings for pre-industrial times dressed up in progressive clothing.
(At the very beginning of the student revolt, during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the computer was a favorite target for aggression. Interest in the Third World is not always free from motives based on antagonism towards civilization which has its source in conservative culture critique. During the May events in Paris the reversion to archaic forms of production was particularly characteristic. Instead of carrying out agitation among the workers in a modern offset press, the students printed their posters on the hand presses of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The political slogans were hand-painted; stencils would certainly have made it possible to produce them en masse, but it would have offended the creative imagination of the authors. The ability to make proper strategic use of the most advanced media was lacking. It was not the radio headquarters that were seized by the rebels, but the Odon Theatre, steeped in tradition.)
The obverse of this fear of contact with the media is the fascination they exert on left-wing movements in the great cities. On the one hand, the comrades take refuge in outdated forms of communication and esoteric arts and crafts instead of occupying themselves with the contradiction between the present constitution of the media and their revolutionary potential; on the other hand, they cannot escape from the consciousness industry’s program or from its aesthetic. This leads, subjectively, to a split between a puritanical view of political action and the area of private ‘leisure’; objectively, it leads to a split between politically active groups and sub-cultural groups.
In Western Europe the socialist movement mainly addresses itself to a public of converts through newspapers and journals which are exclusive in terms of language, content, and form. These news-sheets presuppose a structure of party members and sympathizers and a situation, where the media are concerned, that roughly corresponds to the historical situation in 1900; they are obviously fixated on the Iskra model. Presumably the people who produce them listen to the Rolling Stones, follow occupations and strikes on television, and go to the cinema to see a Western or a Goddard; only in their capacity as producers do they make an exception, and, in their analyses, the whole media sector is reduced to the slogan of ‘manipulation’. Every foray into this territory is regarded from the start with suspicion as a step towards integration. This suspicion is not unjustified; it can however also mask one’s own ambivalence and insecurity. Fear of being swallowed up by the system is a sign of weakness; it presupposes that capitalism could overcome any contradiction -- a conviction which can easily be refuted historically and is theoretically untenable.
If the socialist movement writes off the new productive forces of the consciousness industry and relegates work on the media to a subculture, then we have a vicious circle. For the Underground may be increasingly aware of the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the disc, of videotape, of the electronic camera, and so on, and is systematically exploring the terrain, but it has no political viewpoint of its own and therefore mostly falls a helpless victim to commercialism. The politically active groups then point to such cases with smug Schadenfreude. A process of un-learning is the result and both sides are the losers. Capitalism alone benefits from the Left’s antagonism to the media, as it does from the de-politicization of the counter-culture.
Democratic Manipulation
5. manipulation -- etymologically, handling -- means technical treatment of a given material with a particular goal in mind. When the technical intervention is of immediate social relevance, then manipulation is a political act. In the case of the media industry that is by definition the case.
Thus every use of the media presupposes manipulation. The most elementary processes in media production, from the choice of the medium itself to shooting, cutting, synchronization, dubbing, right up to distribution, are all operations carried out on the raw material. There is no such thing as unmanipulated writing, filming, or broadcasting. The question is therefore not whether the media are manipulated, but who manipulates them. A revolutionary plan should not require the manipulators to disappear; on the contrary, it must make everyone a manipulator.
All technical manipulations are potentially dangerous; the manipulation of the media cannot be countered, however, by old or new forms of censorship, but only by direct social control, that is to say, by the mass of the people, who will have become productive. To this end, the elimination of capitalistic property relationships is a necessary, but by no means sufficient condition. There have been no historical examples up until now of the mass self-regulating learning process which is made possible by the electronic media. The Communists’ fear of releasing this potential, of the mobilizing capabilities of the media, of the interaction of free producers. is one of the main reasons why even in the socialist countries, the old bourgeois culture, greatly disguised and distorted but structurally intact, continues to hold sway.
(As a historical explanation it may be pointed out that the consciousness industry in Russia at the time of the October Revolution was extraordinarily backward; their productive capacity has grown enormously since then, but the productive relationships have been artificially preserved, often by force. Then, as now, a primitively edited press, books and theatre, were the key media in the Soviet Union. The development of radio, film and television, is politically arrested. Foreign stations like the BBC, the Voice of America, and the Deutschland Welle, therefore, not only find listeners, but are received with almost boundless faith. Archaic media like the handwritten pamphlet and poems orally transmitted play an important role.)
6. The new media are egalitarian in structure. Anyone can take part in them by a simple switching process. The programs themselves are not material things and can be reproduced at will. In this sense the electronic media are entirely different from the older media like the book or the easel-painting, the exclusive class character of which is obvious. Television programs for privileged groups are certainly technically conceivable -- closed-circuit television -- but run counter to the structure. Potentially the new media do away with all educational privileges and thereby with the cultural monopoly of the bourgeois intelligentsia. This is one of the reasons for the intelligentsia’s resentment against the new industry. As for the ‘spirit’ which they are endeavoring to defend against ‘depersonalization’ and ‘mass culture’, the sooner they abandon it the better.
Properties of the new media
7. The new media are orientated towards action, not contemplation; present, not tradition. Their attitude to time is completely opposed to that of bourgeois culture which aspires to possession, that is to extension in time, best of all, to eternity. The media produce no objects that can be hoarded and auctioned. They do away completely with ‘intellectual property’ and liquidate the ‘heritage’, that is to say, the class specific handing-on of non-material capital.
That does not mean to say that they have no history or that they contribute to the loss of historical consciousness. On the contrary, they make it possible for the first time to record historical material so that it can be reproduced at will. By making this material available for present-day purposes, they make it obvious to anyone using it that the writing of history is always manipulation. But the memory they hold in readiness is not the preserve of a scholarly caste. It is social. The banked information is accessible to anyone and this accessibility is as instantaneous as its recording. It suffices to compare the model of a private library with that of a socialized data bank to recognize the structural difference between the two systems.
8. It is wrong to regard media equipment as mere means of consumption. It is always, in principle, also means of production and, indeed, since it is in the hands of the masses, socialized means of production. The contradiction between producers and consumers is not inherent in the electronic media; on the contrary, it has to be artificially reinforced by economic and administrative measures.
(An early example of this is provided by the difference between telegraph and telephone. Whereas the former, to this day, has remained in the hands of a bureaucratic institution which can scan and file every text transmitted, the telephone is directly accessible to all users. With the aid of conference circuits, it can even make possible collective intervention in a discussion by physically remote groups.
On the other hand those auditory and visual means of communication which rely on ‘wireless’ are still subject to state control (legislation on wireless installations). In the face of technical developments, which long ago made local and international radio-telephony possible, and which constantly opened up new wavebands for television -- in the UHF band alone, the dissemination of numerous programs in one locality is possible without interference, not to mention the possibilities offered by wired and satellite television -- the prevailing laws for control of the air are anachronistic. They recall the time when the operation of a printing press was dependent on an imperial license. The socialist movements will take up the struggle for their own wavelengths and must, within the foreseeable future, build their own transmitters and relay stations.)
9. One immediate consequence of the structural nature of the new media is that none of the rgimes at present in power can release their potential. Only a free socialist society will be able to make them fully productive. A further characteristic of the most advanced media -- probably the decisive one -- confirms this thesis: their collective structure.
For the prospect that in future, with the aid of the media, anyone can become a producer, would remain apolitical and limited were this productive effort to find an outlet in individual tinkering. Work on the media is possible for an individual only in so far as it remains socially and therefore aesthetically irrelevant. The collection of transparencies from the last holiday trip provides a model.
That is naturally what the prevailing market mechanisms have aimed at. It has long been clear from apparatus like miniature and 8 mm cine cameras, as well as the tape recorder, which are in actual fact already in the hands of the masses, that the individual, so long as he remains isolated, can become with their help at best an amateur but not a producer. Even so potent a means of production as the short-wave transmitter has been tamed in this way and reduced to a harmless and inconsequential hobby in the hands of scattered radio hams. The programs which the isolated amateur mounts are always only bad, outdated copies of what he in any case receives.
(Private production for the media is no more than licensed cottage industry. Even when it is made public it remains pure compromise. To this end, the men who own the media have developed special programs which are usually called ‘Democratic Forum’ or something of the kind. There, tucked away in the corner, ‘the reader (listener, viewer) has his say’, which can naturally be cut short at any time. As in the case of public opinion polling, he is only asked questions so that he may have a chance to confirm his own dependence. It is a control circuit where what is fed in has already made complete allowance for the feedback.
The concept of a license can also be used in another sense -- in an economic one; the system attempts to make each participant into a concessionaire of the monopoly that develops his films or plays back his cassettes. The aim is to nip in the bud in this way that independence which video-equipment, for instance, makes possible. Naturally, such tendencies go against the grain of the structure and the new productive forces not only permit but indeed demand their reversal.)
The poor, feeble and frequently humiliating results of this licensed activity are often referred to with contempt by the professional media producers. On top of the damage suffered by the masses comes triumphant mockery because they clearly do not know how to use the media properly. The sort of thing that goes on in certain popular television shows is taken as proof that they are completely incapable of articulating on their own.
Not only does this run counter to the results of the latest psychological and pedagogical research, but it can easily be seen to be a reactionary protective formulation; the ‘gifted’ people are quite simply defending their territories. Here we have a cultural analogue to the familiar political judgments concerning a working class which is presumed to be ‘stultified’ and incapable of any kind of self-determination. Curiously, one may hear the view that the masses could never govern themselves out of the mouths of people who consider themselves socialists. In the best of cases, these are economists who cannot conceive of socialism as anything other than nationalization.
A Socialist Strategy
10. Any socialist strategy for the media must, on the contrary, strive to end the isolation of the individual participants from the social learning and production process. This is impossible unless those concerned organize themselves. This is the political core of the question of the media. It is over this point that socialist concepts part company with the neo-liberal and technocratic ones. Anyone who expects to be emancipated by technological hardware, or by a system of hardware however structured, is the victim of an obscure belief in progress. Anyone who imagines that freedom for the media will be established if only everyone is busy transmitting and receiving is the dupe of a liberalism which, decked out in contemporary colors, merely peddles the faded concepts of a pre-ordained harmony of social interests.
In the face of such illusions, what must be firmly held on to is that the proper use of the media demands organization and makes it possible. Every production that deals with the interests of the producers postulates a collective method of production. It is itself already a form of self-organization of social needs. Tape recorders, ordinary cameras and cine cameras, are already extensively owned by wage-earners. The question is why these means of production do not turn up at workplaces, in schools, in the offices of the bureaucracy, in short, everywhere where there is social conflict. By producing aggressive forms of publicity which were their own, the masses could secure evidence of their daily experiences and draw effective lessons from them.
Naturally bourgeois society defends itself against such prospects with a battery of legal measures. It bases itself on the law of trespass, on commercial and official secrecy. While its secret services penetrate everywhere and plug in to the most intimate conversations, it pleads a touching concern for confidentiality, and makes a sensitive display of worrying about the question of a privacy in which all that is private is the interest of the exploiters. Only a collective, organized effort can tear down these paper walls.
Communication networks which are constructed for such purposes can, over and above their primary function, provide politically interesting organizational models. In the socialist movements the dialectic of discipline and spontaneity, centralism and decentralization, authoritarian leadership and anti-authoritarian disintegration has long ago reached deadlock. Network-like communications models built on the principal of reversibility of circuits might give indications of how to overcome this situation: a mass newspaper, written and distributed by its readers, a video network of politically active groups.
More radically than any good intention, more lastingly than existential flight from one’s own class, the media, once they have come into their own, destroy the private production methods of bourgeois intellectuals. Only in productive work and learning processes can their individualism be broken down in such a way that it is transformed from morally based (that is to say as individual as ever) self-sacrifice to a new kind of political self understanding and behavior.
11. An all too widely disseminated thesis maintains that present-day capitalism lives by the exploitation of unreal needs. That is at best a half-truth. The results obtained by popular American sociologists like Vance Packard are not unuseful but limited. What they have to say about the stimulation of needs through advertising and artificial obsolescence can in any case not be adequately explained by the hypnotic pull exerted on the wage-earners by mass consumption. The hypothesis of ‘consumer terror’ corresponds to the prejudices of a middle class, which considers itself politically enlightened, against the allegedly integrated proletariat, which has become petty-bourgeois and corrupt. The attractive power of mass consumption is based not on the dictates of false needs, but on the falsification and exploitation of quite real and legitimate ones without which the parasitic process of advertising would be redundant. A socialist movement ought not to denounce these needs, but take them seriously, investigate them and make them politically productive.
That is also valid for the consciousness industry. The electronic media do not owe their irresistible power to any sleight-of-hand but to the elemental power of deep social needs which come through even in the present depraved form of these media.
Precisely because no one bothers about them, the interests of the masses have remained a relatively unknown field, at least insofar as they are historically new. They certainly extend far beyond those goals which the traditional working class movement represented. Just as in the field of production, the industry which produces goods and the consciousness industry merge more and more, so too, subjectively, where needs are concerned, material and non-material factors are closely interwoven. In the process old psycho-social themes are firmly embedded -- social prestige, identification patterns -- but powerful new themes emerge which are utopian in nature. From a materialistic point of view neither the one nor the other must be suppressed.
Henri Lefbvre has proposed the concept of the spectacle, the exhibition, the show, to fit the present form of mass consumption. Goods and shop windows, traffic and advertisements, stores and the world of communications, news and packaging, architecture and media production come together to form a totality, a permanent theatre, which dominates not only the public city centers but also private interiors. The expression ‘beautiful living’ makes the most commonplace objects of general use into props for this universal festival, in which the fetishistic nature of the commodities triumphs completely over their use value. The swindle these festivals perpetrate is, and remains, a swindle within the present social structure. But it is the harbinger of something else. Consumption as spectacle contains the promise that want will disappear. The deceptive, brutal and obscene features of this festival derive from the fact that there can be no question of a real fulfillment of its promise. But so long as scarcity holds sway, use-value remains a decisive category which can only be abolished by trickery. Yet trickery on such a scale is only conceivable if it is based on mass need. This need -- it is a utopian one -- is there. It is the desire for a new ecology, for a breaking-down of environmental barriers, for an aesthetic which is not limited to the sphere of ‘the artistic’. These desires are not -- or are not primarily -- internalized rules of the game as played by the capitalist system. They have physiological roots and can no longer be suppressed. Consumption as spectacle is -- in parody form -- the anticipation of a Utopian situation.
The promises of the media demonstrate the same ambivalence. They are an answer to the mass need for non-material variety and mobility -- which at present finds its material realization in private car-ownership and tourism -- and they exploit it. Other collective wishes, which capital often recognizes more quickly and evaluates more correctly than its opponents but naturally only so as to trap them and rob them of their explosive force, are just as powerful, just as unequivocally emancipatory: the need to take part in the social process on a local, national and international scale; the need for new forms of interaction, for release from ignorance and tutelage; the need for self-determination. ‘Be everywhere!’ is one of the most successful slogans of the media industry. The readers’ parliament of Bild-Zeitung (The Springer press mass publication) direct democracy used against the interests of the demos. ‘Open spaces’ and ‘free time’ -- concepts which corral and neutralize the urgent wishes of the masses.
(The corresponding acceptance by the media of utopian stories. E.g. the story of the young Italo-American who hijacked a passenger plane to get home from California to Rome was taken up without protest even by the reactionary mass press and undoubtedly correctly understood by its readers. The identification is based on what has become a general need. Nobody can understand why such journeys should be reserved for politicians, functionaries, and business men. The role of the pop star could be analyzed from a similar angle; in it the authoritarian and emancipatory factors are mingled in an extraordinary way. It is perhaps not unimportant that beat music offers groups, not individuals, as identification models. In the productions of the Rolling Stones (and in the manner of their production) the utopian content is apparent. Events like the Woodstock Festival, the concerts in Hyde Park, on the Isle of Wight, and at Altamont, California, develop a mobilizing power which the political Left can only envy.)
It is absolutely clear that, within the present social forms, the consciousness industry can satisfy none of the needs on which it lives and which it must fan, except in the illusory form of games. The point, however, is not to demolish its promises but to take them literally and to show that they can be met only through a cultural revolution. Socialists and socialist rgimes which multiply the frustration of the masses by declaring their needs to be false, become the accomplices of the system they have undertaken to fight.
12. Summary.
Repressive use of media Emancipatory use of media
Centrally controlled program Decentralized program
One transmitter, many receivers Each receiver a potential
transmitter
Immobilization of isolated Mobilization of the masses
individuals
Passive consumer behavior Interaction of those involved,
feedback
Depoliticization A political learning process
Production by specialists Collective production
Control by property owners or Social control by self-bureaucracy organization
The Subversive Power of the New Media
13. As far as the objectively subversive potentialities of the electronic media are concerned, both sides in the international class struggle -- except for the fatalistic adherents of the thesis of manipulation in the metropoles -- are of one mind. Frantz Fanon was the first to draw attention to the fact that the transistor receiver was one of the most important weapons in the Third World’s fight for freedom. Albert Hertzog, ex-Minister of the South African Republic and the mouthpiece of the right wing of the ruling party, is of the opinion that ‘television will lead to the ruin of the white man in South Africa’ (Der Spiegel 20/10/1969). American imperialism has recognized the situation. It attempts to meet the ‘revolution of rising expectations in Latin America -- that is what its ideologues call it -- by scattering its own transmitters all over the continent and into the remotest regions of the Amazon basin, and by distributing single-frequency transistors to the native population. The attacks of the Nixon administration on the capitalist media in the USA reveals its understanding that their reporting, however one-sided and distorted, has become a decisive factor in mobilizing people against the war in Vietnam. Whereas only 25 years ago the French massacres in Madagascar, with almost one hundred thousand dead, became known only to the readers of Le Monde under the heading of ‘Other News’ and therefore remained unnoticed and without sequel in the capital city, today the media drag colonial wars into the centers of imperialism.
The direct mobilizing potentialities of the media become still more clear when they are consciously used for subversive ends. Their presence is a factor that immensely increases the demonstrative nature of any political act. The student movements in the USA, in Japan, and in Western Europe soon recognized this and, to begin with, achieved considerable momentary successes with the aid of the media. These effects have worn off. Nave trust in the magical power of reproduction cannot replace organizational work; only active and coherent groups can force the media to comply with the logic of their actions. That can be demonstrated from the example of the Tupamaros in Uruguay, whose revolutionary practice has implicit in it publicity for their actions. Thus the actors become authors. The abduction of the American Ambassador in Rio de Janeiro was planned with a view to its impact on the media. It was a television production. The Arab guerillas proceed in the same way. The first to experiment with these techniques internationally were the Cubans. Fidel appreciated the revolutionary potential of the media correctly from the first (Moncada 1953). Today illegal political action demands at one and the same time maximum security and maximum publicity.
14. Revolutionary situations always bring with them discontinuous, spontaneous changes brought about by the masses in the existing aggregate of the media. How far the changes thus brought about take root and how permanent they are demonstrates the extent to which a cultural revolution is successful. The situation in the media is the most accurate and sensitive barometer for the rise of bureaucratic or bonapartist anticyclones. So long as the cultural revolution has the initiative, the social imagination of the masses overcomes even technical backwardness and transforms the function of the old media so that their structures are exploded. ‘With our work the Revolution has achieved a colossal labor of propaganda and enlightenment. We ripped up the traditional book into single pages, magnified these a hundred times, printed them in color and stuck them up as posters in the streets . . . Our lack of printing equipment and the necessity for speed meant that, though the best work was hand-printed, the most rewarding was standardized, lapidary and adapted to the simplest mechanical form of reproduction. Thus State Decrees were printed as rolled-up illustrated leaflets, and Army Orders as illustrated pamphlets’ (El Lissitsky. The Future of the Book, New Left Review, No. 41, p. 42.). In the twenties, the Russian film reached a standard that was far in advance of the available productive forces. Pudovkin’s Kinoglas and Dziga Vertov’s Kinopravda were no ‘newsreels’ but political television magazine programs avant l’cran. The campaign against illiteracy in Cuba broke through the linear, exclusive, and isolating structure of the medium of the book. In the China of the Cultural Revolution, wall newspapers functioned like an electronic mass medium-- at least in the big towns. The resistance of the Czechoslovak population to the Soviet invasion gave rise to spontaneous productivity on the part of the masses, which ignored the institutional barriers of the media. (Details to be supplied.) Such situations are exceptional. It is precisely their utopian nature, which reaches out beyond the existing productive forces (it follows that the productive relationships are not to be permanently overthrown), that makes them precarious, leads to reversals and defeats. They demonstrate all the more clearly what enormous political and cultural energies are hidden in the enchained masses and with what imagination they are able, at the moment of liberation, to realize all the opportunities offered by the new media.
The Media: an empty category of Marxist Theory
15. That the Marxist Left should argue theoretically and act practically from the standpoint of the most advanced productive forces in their society, that they should develop in depth all the liberating factors immanent in these forces and use them strategically, is no academic expectation but a political necessity. However, with a single great exception, that of Walter Benjamin (and in his footsteps, Brecht), Marxists have not understood the consciousness industry and have been aware only of its bourgeois-capitalist dark side and not of its socialist possibilities. An author like Georg Lukcs is a perfect example of this theoretical and practical backwardness. Nor are the works of Horkheimer and Adorno free of a nostalgia which clings to early bourgeois media.
(Their view of the cultural industry cannot be discussed here. Much more typical of Marxism between the two wars is the position of Lukcs, which can be seen very clearly from an early essay on ‘Old Culture and New Culture’ (Kommunismus, Zeitschrift der Kommunistischen Internationale fr die Lnder Sdosteuropas, 1920 pp. 1538 -- 49). ‘Anything that culture produces’, can according to Lukcs, ‘have real cultural value only if it is in itself valuable, if the creation of each individual product is from the standpoint of its maker a single, finite process. It must, moreover, be a process conditioned by the human potentialities and capabilities of the creator. The most typical example of such a process is the work of art, where the entire genesis of the work is exclusively the result of the artist’s labor and each detail of the work that emerges is determined by the individual qualities of the artist. In highly developed mechanical industry on the other hand, any connection between the product and the creator is abolished. The human being serves the machine, he adapts to it. Production becomes completely independent of the human potentialities and capabilities of the worker.’ These ‘forces which destroy culture’ impair the work’s ‘truth to the material’, its ‘level’, and deal the final blow to the ‘work as an end in itself’. There is no more question of ‘the organic unity of the products of culture, its harmonious, joy-giving being’. Capitalist culture must lack ‘the simple and natural harmony and beauty of the old culture -- culture in the true, literal sense of the word.’ Fortunately things need not remain so. The ‘culture of proletarian society’ although ‘in the context of such scientific research as is possible at this time’ nothing more can be said about it, will certainly remedy these ills. Lukcs asks himself ‘which are the cultural values which, in accordance with the nature of this context, can be taken over from the old society by the new and further developed.’ Answer: Not the inhuman machines but ‘the idea of mankind as an end in itself, the basic idea of the new culture’, for it is ‘the inheritance of the classical idealism of the nineteenth century’. Quite right. ‘This is where the philistine concept of art turns up with all its deadly obtuseness -- an idea to which all technical considerations are foreign and which feels that with the provocative appearance of the new technology its end has come’ (Walter Benjamin: Kleine Geschichte der Photographie in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit Frankfurt 1963 p. 69).
These nostalgic backward glances at the landscape of the last century, these reactionary ideals, are already the forerunners of socialist realism, which mercilessly galvanized and then buried those very ‘cultural values’, which Lukcs rode out to rescue. Unfortunately, in the process, the Soviet cultural revolution was thrown to the wolves; but this aesthete can in any case hardly have thought any more highly of it than did J. V. Stalin)
The inadequate understanding which Marxists have shown of the media and the questionable use they have made of them has produced a vacuum in Western industrialized countries into which a stream of non-Marxist hypotheses and practices has consequently flowed. From the Cabaret Voltaire to Andy Warhol’s Factory, from the silent film comedians to the Beatles, from the first comic-strip artists to the present managers of the Underground, the apolitical have made much more radical progress in dealing with the media than any grouping of the Left. (Exception -- Mnzenberg). Innocents have put themselves in the forefront of the new productive forces on the basis of mere intuitions with which communism -- to its detriment -- has not wished to concern itself. Today this apolitical avant-garde has found its ventriloquist and prophet in Marshall McLuhan, an author who admittedly lacks any analytical categories for the understanding of social processes, but whose confused books serve as a quarry of undigested observations for the media industry. Certainly his little finger has experienced more of the productive power of the new media than all the ideological commissions of the CPSU and their endless resolutions and directives put together.
Incapable of any theoretical construction, McLuhan does not present his material as a concept but as the common denominator of a reactionary doctrine of salvation. He admittedly did not invent but was the first to formulate explicitly a mystique of the media which dissolves all political problems in smoke -- the same smoke as gets in the eyes of his followers. It promises the salvation of man through the technology of television and indeed of television as it is practiced today. Now McLuhan’s attempt to stand Marx on his head is not exactly new. He shares with his numerous predecessors the determination to suppress all problems of the economic base, their idealistic tendencies and their belittling of the class struggle in the nave terms of a vague humanism. A new Rousseau, like all copies only a pale version of the old, he preaches the gospel of the new primitive man who, naturally on a higher level, must return to prehistoric tribal existence in the ‘global village’.
It is scarcely worthwhile to deal with such concepts. This charlatan’s most famous saying -- ‘the medium is the message’ -- perhaps deserves more attention. In spite of its provocative idiocy, it betrays more than its author knows. It reveals in the most accurate way the tautological nature of the mystique of the media. The one remarkable thing about the television set, according to him, is that it moves -- a thesis which in view of the nature of American programs has, admittedly, something attractive about it.
(The complementary mistake consists in the widely spread illusion that media are neutral instruments with which any ‘messages’ one pleases can be transmitted without regard for their structure or for the structure of the medium. In the East European countries the television newsreaders read 15 minute-long conference communiqus and Central Committee resolutions which are not even suitable for printing in a newspaper, clearly under the delusion that they might fascinate a public of millions.)
The sentence -- the medium is the message -- transmits yet another message, however, and a much more important one. It tells us that the bourgeoisie does indeed have all possible means at its disposal to communicate something to us, but that it has nothing more to say. It is ideologically sterile. Its intention to hold on to the control of the means of production at any price, while being incapable of making the socially necessary use of them is here expressed with complete frankness in the superstructure. It wants the media as such and to no purpose.
This wish has been shared for decades and given symbolical expression by an artistic avant-garde whose program logically admits only the alternative of negative signals and amorphous noise. Example: the meanwhile outdated ‘literature of silence’, Warhol’s films in which everything can happen at once or nothing at all and John Cage’s 45-minute-long Lecture on Nothing(1959).
The Achievement of Benjamin
16. The revolution in the conditions of production in the superstructure has made the traditional aesthetic theory unusable, completely unhinging its fundamental categories and destroying its ‘standards’. The theory of knowledge on which it was based is outmoded. In the electronic media, a radically altered relationship between subject and object emerges with which the old critical concepts cannot deal. The idea of the self-sufficient work of art collapsed long ago. The long-drawn discussion over the death of art proceeds in a circle so long as it does not examine critically the aesthetic concept on which it is based, so long as it employs criteria which no longer correspond to the state of the productive forces. When constructing an aesthetic adapted to the changed situation, one must take as a starting point the work of the only Marxist theoretician who recognized the liberating potential of the new media. Thirty-five years ago, that is to say, at a time when the consciousness industry was relatively undeveloped, Walter Benjamin subjected this phenomenon to a penetrating dialectical-materialist analysis. His approach, has not been matched by any theory since then, far less further developed.
‘One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence and in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.’
‘For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. . . . But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice -- politics. . . . Today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value, the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental’ (‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illumination;, London 1970, pp. 223-7).
The trends which Benjamin recognized in his day in the film and the true import of which he grasped theoretically, have become patent today with the rapid development of the consciousness industry. What used to be called art, has now, in the strict Hegelian sense, been dialectically surpassed by and in the media. The quarrel about the end of art is otiose so long as this end is not understood dialectically. Artistic productivity reveals itself to be the extreme marginal case of a much more widespread productivity, and it is socially important only insofar as it surrenders all pretensions to autonomy and recognizes itself to be a marginal case. Wherever the professional producers make a virtue out of the necessity of their specialist skills and even derive a privileged status from them, their experience and knowledge have become useless. This means that as far as an aesthetic theory is concerned, a radical change in perspectives is needed. Instead of looking at the productions of the new media from the point of view of the older modes of production we must, on the contrary, analyze the products of the traditional ‘artistic’ media from the standpoint of modern conditions of production.
(‘Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question -- whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art -- was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film. But the difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child’s play as compared to those raised by the film.’ -- ibid., p. 229.)
The panic aroused by such a shift in perspectives is understandable. The process not only changes the old burdensome craft secrets in the superstructure into white elephants, it also conceals a genuinely destructive element. It is, in a word, risky. But the only chance for the aesthetic tradition lies in its dialectical supersession. In the same way, classical physics has survived as a marginal special case within the framework of a much more comprehensive theory.
This state of affairs can be identified in individual cases in all the traditional artistic disciplines. Their present-day developments remain incomprehensible so long as one attempts to deduce them from their own prehistory. On the other hand, their usefulness or otherwise can be judged as soon as one regards them as special cases in a general aesthetic of the media. Some indications of the possible critical approaches which stem from this will be made below, taking literature as an example.
The Supersession of Written Culture
17. Written literature has, historically speaking, played a dominant role for only a few centuries. Even today, the predominance of the book has an episodic air. An incomparably longer time preceded it in which literature was oral. Now it is being succeeded by the age of the electronic media which tend once more to make people speak. At its period of fullest development the book to some extent usurped the place of the more primitive but generally more accessible methods of production of the past; on the other hand, it was a stand-in for future methods which make it possible for everyone to become a producer.
The revolutionary role of the printed book has been described often enough and it would be absurd to deny it. From the point of view of its structure as a medium, written literature, like the bourgeoisie who produced it and whom it served, was progressive. (See the Communist Manifesto.) On the analogy of the economic development of capitalism, which was indispensable for the development of the industrial revolution, the non-material productive forces could not have developed without their own capital accumulation. (We also owe the accumulation of Das Kapital and its teachings to the medium of the book.)
Nevertheless, almost everybody speaks better than he writes. (This also applies to authors.) Writing is a highly formalized technique which, in purely physiological terms, demands a peculiarly rigid bodily posture. To this there corresponds the high degree of social specialization that it demands. Professional writers have always tended to think in caste terms. The class character of their work is unquestionable, even in the age of universal compulsory education. The whole process is extraordinarily beset with taboos. Spelling mistakes, which are completely immaterial in terms of communication, are punished by the social disqualification of the writer. The rules that govern this technique have a normative power attributed to them for which there is no rational basis. Intimidation through the written word has remained a widespread and class-specific phenomenon even in advanced industrial societies.
These alienating factors cannot be eradicated from written literature. They are reinforced by the methods by which society transmits its writing techniques. While people learn to speak very early, and mostly in psychologically favorable conditions, learning to write forms an important part of authoritarian socialization by the school (‘good writing’ as a kind of breaking-in). This sets its stamp for ever on written communication -- on its tone, its syntax, and its whole style. This also applies to the text on this page.)
The formalization of written language permits and encourages the repression of opposition. ‘in speech, unresolved contradictions betray themselves by pauses, hesitations, slips of the tongue, repetitions, anacoluthons, quite apart from phrasing, mimicry, gesticulation, pace and volume. The aesthetic of written literature scorns such involuntary factors as ‘mistakes’. It demands, explicitly or implicitly, the smoothing out of contradictions, rationalization,‚�ƒ�„�…�†�‡�ˆ�‰�Š�‹�Œ�Ž‘’""•–—˜�™�š�›�œ�žŸ� ������������������� regularization of the spoken form irrespective of content. Even as a child, the writer is urged to hide his unsolved problems behind a protective screen of correctness.
Structurally, the printed book is a medium that operates as a monologue, isolating producer and reader. Feedback and interaction are extremely limited, demand elaborate procedures, and only in the rarest cases lead to corrections. Once an edition has been printed it cannot be corrected; at best it can be pulped. The control circuit in the case of literary criticism is extremely cumbersome and elitist. It excludes the public on principle.
None of the characteristics that distinguish written and printed literature apply to the electronic media. Microphone and camera abolish the class character of the mode of production (not of the production itself). The normative rules become unimportant. Oral interviews, arguments, demonstrations, neither demand nor allow orthography or ‘good writing’. The television screen exposes the aesthetic smoothing-out of contradictions as camouflage. Admittedly, swarms of liars appear on it, but anyone can see from a long way off that they are peddling something. As at present constituted, radio, film, and television, are burdened to excess with authoritarian characteristics, the characteristics of the monologue, which they have inherited from older methods of production -- and that is no accident. These outworn elements in today’s media aesthetics are demanded by the social relations. They do not follow from the structure of the media. On the contrary, they go against it, for the structure demands interaction.
It is extremely improbable, however, that writing as a special technique will disappear in the foreseeable future. That goes for the book as well, the practical advantages of which for many purposes remain obvious. It is admittedly less handy and takes up more room than other storage systems, but up to now it offers simpler methods of access than, for example, the microfilm or the tape bank. It ought to be integrated into the system as a marginal case and thereby forfeit its aura of cult and ritual.
(This can be deduced from technological developments. Electronics are noticeably taking over writing: teleprinters, reading machines, high-speed transmissions, automatic photographic and electronic composition, automatic writing devices, typesetters, electrostatic processes, ampex libraries, cassette encyclopaedias, photocopiers and magnetic copiers, speedprinters.
The outstanding Russian media expert El Lissitsky incidentally demanded an ‘electro-library’ as far back as 1923 -- a request which, given the technical conditions of the time, must have seemed ridiculous or at least incomprehensible. This is how far this man’s imagination reached into the future:
‘I draw the following analogy:
Inventions in the field Inventions in the field
of verbal traffic of general traffic
Articulated language Upright gait
Writing The wheel
Gutenberg’s printing press Carts drawn by animal power
? The automobile
? The airplane
I have produced this analogy to prove that so long as the book remains a palpable object, i.e. so long as it is not replaced by auto-vocalizing and kino-vocalizing representations, we must look to the field of the manufacture of books for basic innovations in the near future.
There are signs to hand suggesting that this basic innovation is likely to come from the neighborhood of the collotype.’ -- op. cit. p. 40. Today, writing has in many cases already become a secondary technique, a means of transcribing orally recorded speech; tape-recorded proceedings, attempts at speech-pattern recognition, and the conversion of speech into writing.)
18. The ineffectiveness of literary criticism when faced with so-called documentary literature is an indication of how far the critics’ thinking has lagged behind the stage of the productive forces. It stems from the fact that the media have eliminated one of the most fundamental categories of aesthetics up to now -- fiction. The fiction/non-fiction argument has been laid to rest just as was the 19th century’s favorite dialectic of ‘art’ and ‘life’. In his day, Benjamin demonstrated that the ‘apparatus’ (the concept of the medium was not yet available to him) abolishes authenticity. In the productions of the consciousness industry, the difference between the ‘genuine’ original and the reproduction disappears -- ‘that aspect of reality which is not dependent on the apparatus has now become its most artificial aspect’. The process of reproduction reacts on the object reproduced and alters it fundamentally. The effects of this have not yet been adequately explained epistemologically. The categorical uncertainties to which it gives rise also affect the concept of the documentary. Strictly speaking, it has shrunk to its legal dimensions. A document is something the ‘forging’, i.e. the reproduction of which, is punishable by imprisonment. This definition naturally has no theoretical meaning. The reason is that a reproduction, to the extent that its technical quality is good enough, cannot be distinguished in any way from the original, irrespective of whether it is a painting, a passport or a bank note. The legal concept of the documentary record is only pragmatically useful; it serves only to protect economic interests.
The productions of the electronic media, by their nature, evade such distinctions as those between documentary and feature films. They are in every case explicitly determined by the given situation. The producer can never pretend, like the traditional novelist, ‘to stand above things’. He is therefore partisan from the start. This fact finds formal expression in his techniques. Cutting, editing, dubbing -- these are techniques for conscious manipulation without which the use of the new media is inconceivable. It is precisely in these work processes that their productive power reveals itself -- and here it is completely immaterial whether one is dealing with the production of a reportage or a play. The material, whether ‘documentary’ or ‘fiction’, is in each case only a prototype, a half-finished article, and the more closely one examines its origins, the more blurred the difference becomes. (Develop more precisely. The reality in which a camera turns up is always faked, e.g. the moon-landing.)
The Desacralization of Art
19. The media also do away with the old category of works of art which can only be considered as separate objects, not as independent of their material infrastructure. The media do not produce such objects. They create programs. Their production is in the nature of a process. That does not mean only (or not primarily) that there is no foreseeable end to the program -- a fact which, in view of what we are at present presented with, admittedly makes a certain hostility to the media understandable. It means, above all, that the media program is open to its own consequences without structural limitations. (This is not an empirical description but a demand. A demand which admittedly is not made of the medium from without; it is a consequence of its nature, from which the much-vaunted open form can be derived -- and not as a modification of it -- from an old aesthetic.) The programs of the consciousness industry must subsume into themselves their own results, the reactions and the corrections which they call forth, otherwise they are already out of date. They are therefore to be thought of not as means of consumption but as means of their own production.
20. It is characteristic of artistic avant-gardes that they have, so to speak, a presentiment of the potentiality of media which still lie in the future. ‘It has always been one of the most important tasks of art to give rise to a demand, the time for the complete satisfaction of which has not yet come. The history of every art form has critical periods when that form strives towards effects which can only be easily achieved if the technical norm is changed, that is to say, in a new art form. The artistic extravagances and crudities which arise in this way, for instance in the so-called decadent period, really stem from art’s richest historical source of power. Dadaism in the end teemed with such barbarisms. We can only now recognize the nature of its striving. Dadaism was attempting to achieve those effects which the public today seeks in film with the means of painting (or of literature)’ (Benjamin, op. cit. p. 42). This is where the prognostic value of otherwise inessential productions such as happenings, flux and mixed media shows, is to be found. There are writers who in their work show an awareness of the fact that media, with the characteristics of the monologue, today have only a residual use-value. Many of them admittedly draw fairly short-sighted conclusions from this glimpse of the truth. For example, they offer the user the opportunity to arrange the material provided by arbitrary permutations. Every reader as it were should write his own book. When carried to extremes, such attempts to produce interaction, even when it goes against the structure of the medium employed, are nothing
more than invitations to freewheel. Mere noise permits of no articulated interactions. Short cuts, of the kind that Concept Art peddles, are based on the banal and false conclusion that the development of the productive forces renders all work superfluous. With the same justification, one could leave a computer to its own devices on the assumption that a random generator will organize material production by itself. Fortunately cybernetics experts are not given to such childish games.
21. For the old fashioned ‘artist’ -- let us call him the author -- it follows from these reflections that he must see it as his goal to make himself redundant as a specialist in much the same way as a teacher of literacy only fulfills his task when he is no longer necessary. Like every learning process, this process too is reciprocal. The specialist will learn as much or more from the non-specialists as the other way round. Only then can he contrive to make himself dispensable.
Meanwhile his social usefulness can best be measured by the degree to which he is capable of using the liberating factors in the media and bringing them to fruition. The tactical contradictions in which he must become involved in the process can neither be denied nor covered up in any way. But strategically his role is clear. The author has to work as the agent of the masses. He can lose himself in them I only when they themselves become authors, the authors of history.
21. ‘Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will’ (Antonio Gramsci).
Constituents of a Theory of the Media
The U.S. government this week launched its Arabic language satellite TV news station for mostly Muslim Iraq. It is being produced in a studio Grace Digital Media controlled by fundamentalist Christians who are rabidly pro-Israel. That's grace as in "by the grace of God."
Grace Digital Media is controlled by a fundamentalist Christian millionaire, Cheryl Reagan, who last year wrested control of Federal News Service, a transcription news service, from its former owner, Cortes Randell. Randell says he met Reagan at a prayer meeting, brought her in as an investor in Federal News Service, and then she forced him out of his own company.
Grace Digital Media and Federal News Service are housed in a downtown Washington, D.C. office building, along with Grace News Network. When you call the number for Grace News Network, you get a person answering "Grace Digital Media/Federal News Service." According to its web site, Grace News Network is "dedicated to transmitting the evidence of God's presence in the world today."
Join United for Peace and Justice for a national day of education and action on Saturday, May 31 in Washington, DC. Events in the world and the nation are unfolding quickly and people from all walks of life are asking questions, looking for reliable information. Now is the time to speak boldly and honestly about the alternatives we face as a country.
As millions of peace and justice activists around the globe tried to prevent the United States from launching an attack on Iraq, a new movement was born. While the Bush Administration and mainstream U.S. media declare the war on Iraq a "success," we know that an unprovoked attack remains just as wrong after the bombing has stopped as it was before the war started. We must speak out loudly and clearly to demand that the U.S. government account for the thousands of civilian deaths that were inflicted by our bombs.
We oppose any U.S. military occupation of Iraq, and especially one in which corporations with close ties to the Bush Administration will reap huge profits from the post-war, post-sanctions reconstruction. We say "no!" to a huge and growing $400 billion military budget while veterans' benefits are being slashed, public schools are crumbling and millions go without healthcare. We must articulate our vision for achieving a better society and world through international cooperation and peaceful means.
TAKE ACTION
Now is the time to nurture the movement, to help us grow into the next phases of our work. On May 31, United for Peace and Justice will hold a mass teach-in on the Iraq crisis in Washington, DC. We invite people from throughout the region to join us to learn about and discuss issues in three major areas:
--The domestic consequences of occupation and empire-building: attacks on people from the Middle East and other immigrants, erosion of basic Constitutional rights and civil liberties, the need to stand up to a climate of fear and intimidation, the implications of ignoring huge state and local budget deficits all over the country, opposing cutbacks in needed social programs, a positive economic program to get us out of recession.
--A U.S. occupation of Iraq: the "second invasion" by profit-seeking U.S. corporations, what occupation will mean for the Iraqi people, how it will be seen by the rest of the world, the role of the United Nations, and what real liberation and democracy would look like.
--The ongoing drive for empire and a militarized foreign policy: the new U.S. doctrine of "preemptive war," who is next: Syria, Iran, North Korea, Cuba?, the need for a rapid shift to clean, renewable energy sources rather than greater dependence on polluting oil, an alternative foreign policy based on international law, cooperation and economic and social justice.
Teach-in speakers and other information will be available soon at on this website. We are working on plans to broadcast the event on television, radio and the Internet.
This teach-in will be a springboard for ongoing grassroots organizing and educational work continuing throughout the summer all over the country. We must deepen and broaden our movement, talking with our neighbors, co-workers and fellow students about the urgent need for a peace and justice alternative and how they can help to build it.
Even if you cannot make the trip to Washington, DC, you can participate in this national day of action in one of the following ways:
--Sponsor a viewing party so that people in your community can watch and participate in the teach-in from wherever you are.
--Organize your own teach-in with speakers from your community.
--Hold another type of peace and justice event that will educate members of your community about the future of Iraq and why we must continue to push for alternatives to war-a peace rally, community meeting, vigil, outreach day, nonviolent civil disobedience, or whatever activity makes sense to you.
Please list your events on this site so we can publicize nationwide local events and the teach-in as a unified national day of action and education. For more information, call the UFPJ office at 212-603-3700.
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by Greg Van Alstyne
In this essay I have tried to elucidate a number of crucial theses from Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle by reexamining them in view of conditions within the growing digital economy. I have also considered what the spectacle is not in the hope of avoiding the kind of oversimplification of Debord's theory which is all too common.
"The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." (Guy Debord,The Society of the Spectacle, thesis 1)
Originally published in Paris in 1967 as La Societ du spectacle, Debord's text, a collection of 221 brief theses organized into nine chapters, is a Marxian aphoristic analysis of the conditions of life in the modern, industrialized world. Here "spectacular society" is arraigned in terms that are simultaneously poetic and precise: deceit, false consciousness, separation, unreality. Debord's influence today is beyond dispute.
Upon revisiting this book I have been impressed by the immediacy of the theory. For Debord seemed to be describing the most intensively promoted phenomenon of this decade, the planet-wide network of existing and promised digital commodities, services and environments: cyberspace.
Cyberspace is supposed to be about interactivity, connectivity and community. Yet if cyberspace exemplifies the spectacle through the relationships which we will investigate here, it is not about connection at all -- paradoxically, it is about separation.
[She'll be in Wburg soon -- see announcement below. I'm not going, of course, I hate crowds. Here's an excerpt from the interview.]
Have you gotten a lot of hate mail?
Garofalo: Oh shit, yeah. I had to change my home phone number. A lot of the hate mail I get is clearly misogynist. I am a proud liberal, feminist woman, and the hate mail I get for those three things is not about me. It's about those signifiers, and about what the right in this country has managed to do to perpetuate anger over what they mean.
Then there is a lot of the hate mail that says actors are too wealthy to understand what's going on. The actors live in Hollywood, all this kind of nonsense. Do they realize how wealthy the Bush family is or the Cheney family? The Ashcrofts? Bill O'Reilly? Tom Brokaw? Do they realize that if you are talking about the Administration now, Bush and Cheney in particular, the life of privilege, wealth, and elitism they have lived? If you are going to talk about somebody not understanding the common man, then look no further than the Beltway.
It is shocking that some people's lives are enriched by this nonsense these boycotts and e-mails. They are proving themselves to be fundamentally anti-American and anti-democratic. They are against the First Amendment, so what are they defending? Unless they are trying to build a fascist Administration, unless they are trying to bring the American people to a point that we exist under a totalitarian regime.
AlterNet: Q&A: Janeane Garofalo Won't Back Down
Steve Perry has started a weblog, subtitled "Daily notes and links on the adventures of the Bushmen of the Beltway." Latest entry:
"It says so right here at CNN.com--when W arrives on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln later today, he'll be in the co-pilot's seat:
[Capt. Kevin] Albright said Bush could fly the plane en route to the carrier if he so desires."I imagine he will. He's an old fighter pilot," he said. "It shouldn't take a very long time, but I imagine if he wants to fly around a little bit, it'll take a little longer. We'll have a ready deck when he gets here."
(Gothic News Service, May 1, 2003) This May Day morning - at the busy rush-hour crossroad traffic around Piccadilly Circus - foot, bus and commercial traffic were brought to a stand still by the sight of four coffin sized aquarium tanks, each elevated on metal stands directly below the famous roundabouts statue of Eros.
Carefully spaced and diagonally situated to face each other, the aquariums at first appeared to be another sensationalist sculptural work by Damian Hirst. However, instead of a lamb, a shark, or a cows head suspended in formaldehyde, a much different sight hypnotically stopped pedestrians and vehicles alike.
Naked mannequins of President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair lay face up, suspended in a pale yellow liquid perhaps a refined, though relatively thick lubrication oil. Both figures were centered between the aquariums transparent glass walls. Ironically, what appeared to be anatomical hearts were floated suspended towards the top of the tank, each held by a single thick artery attached to the cavity inside of each of the mens chests, both of which appeared to have been surgically opened.
In the other two aquariums each at adjoining angles to those of the President and the Prime Minister the contents were quite dissimilar. Also similarly suspended and frozen in the pale yellow liquid, one contained another figure apparently tilted to face the street. It appeared to be an adult male, however one made difficult to identify because of the absence of a head, its neck area tightly covered over with a dark scarf. The rest of the body lay dressed in a loose blue tank-top, light gray, black oil smeared trousers and black flip-flops. Sharp red flesh wounds haphazardly appeared over exposed areas of the figures shoulders, arms and feet.
Curiously the other aquarium did not contain a body, but the model of an upright, golden harp, one with nine vertical strings, similar to those played in the courts of ancient Sumeria. In the angle of the morning sun even through the density of the light yellow - the singular harp appeared particularly radiant, invoking an ironic sense of absent royalty and song.
Pedestrians who were able to get close enough to the works discovered each aquarium to be meticulously subtitled with inlaid inscriptions on each of the metal tank frames. Under the figures of Bush and Blair, viewers could read an enigmatic, perhaps haunting phrase:
I Dont Speak German.
The words under the headless, dressed figure were a little more obvious:
Unknown Iraqi Civilian. Cluster.
Under the golden harp there was a simple phrase, perhaps more difficult to immediately interpret, a seeming exhortation:
Lament for the Makers.
At first the immediate crowd appeared stunned by the content of the works and then variously sad and furious. "Is this supposed to be us?" many asked while others resisted, "This is not us," repeating it over and over again, as if in disbelief that anybody would do this. Occasionally, a particularly angry person yelled out, "Why not Hussein? Why not Hussein?"
It took more than a hour for Londons Bobbies to break up the crowd and carry the works away in a Yard van for booking as evidence, and that still without any knowledge of the perpetrator. Indeed some of crowd argued whether or not the work was by Damian Hirst and how or why he could have gone "this far." "I cannot imagine Hirst being foolish enough to make this kind of career move," a man with a kind of knowing authority spoke. "His work, as the critics say, might be into interrupting urban boredom, but this kind of publicity will kill him. Rich collectors, politically conservative as most of them are unless maybe they are Arabs - will just say no way."
"It's hard to believe anyone can be this cynical," someone added. "The Iraq invasion and Occupation is just not this bad."
Damian Hirsts galleries in London, Germany, Paris and New York were not available for comment on whether or not the artist was involved.
It took hours for normal traffic to resume at Piccadilly. In fact, the rest of the morning Londons Bobbies worked themselves to pull down dozens of climbers down from holding on to the wings of Eros.
Gothic News Service 2003