http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/murdering_the_wretched_of_the_earth_20130814/
Murdering the Wretched of the Earth
Radical Islam is the last refuge of the Muslim poor. The mandated five prayers a day give the only real structure to the lives of impoverished believers. The careful rituals of washing before prayers in the mosque, the strict moral code, along with the understanding that life has an ultimate purpose and meaning, keep hundreds of millions of destitute Muslims from despair. The fundamentalist ideology that rises from oppression is rigid and unforgiving. It radically splits the world into black and white, good and evil, apostates and believers. It is bigoted and cruel to women, Jews, Christians and secularists, along with gays and lesbians. But at the same time it offers to those on the very bottom of society a final refuge and hope. The massacres of hundreds of believers in the streets of Cairo signal not only an assault against a religious ideology, not only a return to the brutal police state of Hosni Mubarak, but the start of a holy war that will turn Egypt and other poor regions of the globe into a caldron of blood and suffering.
The only way to break the hold of radical Islam is to give its followers a stake in the wider economy, the possibility of a life where the future is not dominated by grinding poverty, repression and hopelessness. If you live in the sprawling slums of Cairo or the refugee camps in Gaza or the concrete hovels in New Delhi, every avenue of escape is closed. You cannot get an education. You cannot get a job. You do not have the resources to marry. You cannot challenge the domination of the economy by the oligarchs and the generals. The only way left for you to affirm yourself is to become a martyr, or shahid. Then you will get what you cannot get in life—a brief moment of fame and glory. And while what will take place in Egypt will be defined as a religious war, and the acts of violence by the insurgents who will rise from the bloodied squares of Cairo will be defined as terrorism, the engine for this chaos is not religion but the collapsing economy of a world where the wretched of the earth are to be subjugated and starved or shot. The lines of battle are being drawn in Egypt and across the globe. Adli Mansour, the titular president appointed by the military dictator of Egypt, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, has imposed a military-led government, a curfew and a state of emergency. They will not be lifted soon.
The lifeblood of radical movements is martyrdom. The Egyptian military has provided an ample supply. The faces and the names of the sanctified dead will be used by enraged clerics to call for holy vengeance. And as violence grows and the lists of martyrs expand, a war will be ignited that will tear Egypt apart. Police, Coptic Christians, secularists, Westerners, businesses, banks, the tourism industry and the military will become targets. Those radical Islamists who were persuaded by the Muslim Brotherhood that electoral politics could work and brought into the system will go back underground, and many of the rank and file of the Muslim Brotherhood will join them. Crude bombs will be set off. Random attacks and assassinations by gunmen will puncture daily life in Egypt as they did in the 1990s when I was in Cairo for The New York Times, although this time the attacks will be wider and more fierce, far harder to control or ultimately crush.
What is happening in Egypt is a precursor to a wider global war between the world’s elites and the world’s poor, a war caused by diminishing resources, chronic unemployment and underemployment, overpopulation, declining crop yields caused by climate change, and rising food prices. Thirty-three percent of Egypt’s 80 million people are 14 or younger, and millions live under or just above the poverty line, which the World Bank sets at a daily income of $2 in that nation. The poor in Egypt spend more than half their income on food—often food that has little nutritional value. An estimated 13.7 million Egyptians, or 17 percent of the population, suffered from food insecurity in 2011, compared with 14 percent in 2009, according to a report by the U.N. World Food Program and the Egyptian Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). Malnutrition is endemic among poor children, with 31 percent under 5 years old stunted in growth. Illiteracy runs at more than 70 percent.
In “Les Misérables” Victor Hugo described war with the poor as one between the “egoists” and the “outcasts.” The egoists, Hugo wrote, had “the bemusement of prosperity, which blunts the sense, the fear of suffering which is some cases goes so far as to hate all sufferers, and unshakable complacency, the ego so inflated that is stifles the soul.” The outcasts, who were ignored until their persecution and deprivation morphed into violence, had “greed and envy, resentment at the happiness of others, the turmoil of the human element in search of personal fulfillment, hearts filled with fog, misery, needs, and fatalism, and simple, impure ignorance.”
The belief systems the oppressed embrace can be intolerant, but these belief systems are a response to the injustice, state violence and cruelty inflicted on them by the global elites. Our enemy is not radical Islam. It is global capitalism. It is a world where the wretched of the earth are forced to bow before the dictates of the marketplace, where children go hungry as global corporate elites siphon away the world’s wealth and natural resources and where our troops and U.S.-backed militaries carry out massacres on city streets. Egypt offers a window into the coming dystopia. The wars of survival will mark the final stage of human habitation of the planet. And if you want to know what they will look like, visit any city morgue in Cairo.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
SC118-10
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/obamas-new-cold-war/
Obama’s New Cold War
Well folks, it’s official! The new cold war between Russia and the USA has commenced. It was declared by Obama himself in several news conferences this week.
Obama holds pre-vacation news conference, laments ‘backward’ Russian thinking
Obama Compares Russia’s President Putin to a Bored Kid
Obama: U.S. Pausing To Reassess Relations With Russia
Is this guy for real? Is this the “pause” that refreshes or a stagnation in a long drawn-out slushy thaw that refreezes? Is it not obvious who is the pouty fat kid picking his nose in the back of the classroom? The warrior mentality that has infected much of our country and our corporate policy is now solidly embedded in the political infrastructure of this hegemony. If anyone dares to have an alternative opinion or point of view regarding our behavior, or demonstrates policies we find distasteful (i.e., not in our elites best interests), well then we are ready to cast them as the enemy and proceed directly with crucifixion. A very Roman behavior, don’t you think?
Again, I say, the self-righteous extremism of such an attitude is overwhelming. And when the present hegemon was asked during a press conference if Mr. Snowden was a “patriot” he answered:
‘I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot,’ Obama said…’The fact is, is that Mr. Snowden’s been charged with three felonies…’
Really, you don’t say. And just who was it that saw he was charged with said felonies Mr. Obomber? You and your Justice Department; is that not correct? And why did you take away his passport if you believed he had the right to prove his rectitude, not his innocence because he committed no crime but simply disclosed the most illegal and heinous of actions committed by our government and its corporate oligarchs? Did you not already label him guilty, as charged? Do you not see how your entire administration along with the controlling media propaganda machine have already found him guilty? Have you become so blind to your own selfish ambitions that you fail to see a real community activist in the flesh before your eyes? Are you so profoundly in bed with your corporate benefactors that any attempt to unveil the charade you all are playing-for- keeps is punishable by death? Or by life in political prison?… prisons themselves privatized and run by your own corporate goon squads, the same goons who are up-armored in your police forces and rent-a-warrior camos that soak the American taxpayer, while protecting big corporate interests abroad, and your beloved elite lifestyle at home, while the rest of the citizenry – those unwashed masses – sweat and toil so that you, your monied sponsors (overlords), and your cronies, can keep this party going until the entire globe is fucked?
What nerve you have, sir, to belittle Vladimir Putin for making a decision of conscience just because it is at odds with your own imperial plans, and embarrasses you, just as Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and others have embarrassed you over the past six years. Is there no introspection of which you are capable? Are you nothing but surfaces, without any interior? It is a rhetorical question, sir. Of course you are without substance… just a smiley face, a pitchman, there to do the bidding of those robbing the world of its beauty and people of their lives and livelihood. You have finally done all Americans a huge favor… you have disclosed without a shred of embarrassment the vacuousness of the American presidency, the sham of our political system, and the concept of democracy in general… and you have accomplished all of this in record time, just six years. The constitutional lawyer has shredded the beloved Constitution; or to put a finer point on it sir, you have shown us – shown the world – that the US Constitution is nothing, of no more significance than any other corporate policy statement; that it was so constructed (as are all laws and policies) simply to protect the property of those who wrote them; that it is capable (as are all laws) of being reinterpreted by the whim and fancy of any corporate lawyer or constitutional law professor to fit whatever the exigencies of the moment demand; to make it amenable to the needs and desires of those in power, without regard for the citizenry, other peoples or the planet.
Whether its fracking the crap out of the earth just to prop up the semblance of empire, rerouting and downing another sovereign’s plane to satisfy your curiosity, calling your counterpart in Russia names, stirring up international rebellions to get better control of global resources and markets for your corporate bosses, assassinating American citizens abroad or terrorizing them at home with your constant drone-ing, surveillance, and militarized police forces, killing innocents in Pakistan to satisfy your godly aspirations, allowing your thieving bankers to go unmolested while continuing to run your casino economy operation, you have shown us how to do it while remaining aloof and as smug as an ass, even denying that Mr. Snowden’s whistle-blowing was in any way a causal factor in your decision to revamp the NSA surveillance programs. And you still call him a traitor, while dissing Putin for protecting him. Enjoy your new cold war, sir, and enjoy your political debauchery while still in office; I am sure the next clown will do no better.
Obama’s New Cold War
Well folks, it’s official! The new cold war between Russia and the USA has commenced. It was declared by Obama himself in several news conferences this week.
Obama holds pre-vacation news conference, laments ‘backward’ Russian thinking
Obama Compares Russia’s President Putin to a Bored Kid
Obama: U.S. Pausing To Reassess Relations With Russia
Is this guy for real? Is this the “pause” that refreshes or a stagnation in a long drawn-out slushy thaw that refreezes? Is it not obvious who is the pouty fat kid picking his nose in the back of the classroom? The warrior mentality that has infected much of our country and our corporate policy is now solidly embedded in the political infrastructure of this hegemony. If anyone dares to have an alternative opinion or point of view regarding our behavior, or demonstrates policies we find distasteful (i.e., not in our elites best interests), well then we are ready to cast them as the enemy and proceed directly with crucifixion. A very Roman behavior, don’t you think?
Again, I say, the self-righteous extremism of such an attitude is overwhelming. And when the present hegemon was asked during a press conference if Mr. Snowden was a “patriot” he answered:
‘I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot,’ Obama said…’The fact is, is that Mr. Snowden’s been charged with three felonies…’
Really, you don’t say. And just who was it that saw he was charged with said felonies Mr. Obomber? You and your Justice Department; is that not correct? And why did you take away his passport if you believed he had the right to prove his rectitude, not his innocence because he committed no crime but simply disclosed the most illegal and heinous of actions committed by our government and its corporate oligarchs? Did you not already label him guilty, as charged? Do you not see how your entire administration along with the controlling media propaganda machine have already found him guilty? Have you become so blind to your own selfish ambitions that you fail to see a real community activist in the flesh before your eyes? Are you so profoundly in bed with your corporate benefactors that any attempt to unveil the charade you all are playing-for- keeps is punishable by death? Or by life in political prison?… prisons themselves privatized and run by your own corporate goon squads, the same goons who are up-armored in your police forces and rent-a-warrior camos that soak the American taxpayer, while protecting big corporate interests abroad, and your beloved elite lifestyle at home, while the rest of the citizenry – those unwashed masses – sweat and toil so that you, your monied sponsors (overlords), and your cronies, can keep this party going until the entire globe is fucked?
What nerve you have, sir, to belittle Vladimir Putin for making a decision of conscience just because it is at odds with your own imperial plans, and embarrasses you, just as Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and others have embarrassed you over the past six years. Is there no introspection of which you are capable? Are you nothing but surfaces, without any interior? It is a rhetorical question, sir. Of course you are without substance… just a smiley face, a pitchman, there to do the bidding of those robbing the world of its beauty and people of their lives and livelihood. You have finally done all Americans a huge favor… you have disclosed without a shred of embarrassment the vacuousness of the American presidency, the sham of our political system, and the concept of democracy in general… and you have accomplished all of this in record time, just six years. The constitutional lawyer has shredded the beloved Constitution; or to put a finer point on it sir, you have shown us – shown the world – that the US Constitution is nothing, of no more significance than any other corporate policy statement; that it was so constructed (as are all laws and policies) simply to protect the property of those who wrote them; that it is capable (as are all laws) of being reinterpreted by the whim and fancy of any corporate lawyer or constitutional law professor to fit whatever the exigencies of the moment demand; to make it amenable to the needs and desires of those in power, without regard for the citizenry, other peoples or the planet.
Whether its fracking the crap out of the earth just to prop up the semblance of empire, rerouting and downing another sovereign’s plane to satisfy your curiosity, calling your counterpart in Russia names, stirring up international rebellions to get better control of global resources and markets for your corporate bosses, assassinating American citizens abroad or terrorizing them at home with your constant drone-ing, surveillance, and militarized police forces, killing innocents in Pakistan to satisfy your godly aspirations, allowing your thieving bankers to go unmolested while continuing to run your casino economy operation, you have shown us how to do it while remaining aloof and as smug as an ass, even denying that Mr. Snowden’s whistle-blowing was in any way a causal factor in your decision to revamp the NSA surveillance programs. And you still call him a traitor, while dissing Putin for protecting him. Enjoy your new cold war, sir, and enjoy your political debauchery while still in office; I am sure the next clown will do no better.
Monday, August 5, 2013
SC118-9
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/locking_out_the_voices_of_dissent_20130714//
Locking Out the Voices of Dissent
The security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising. The legal system has been grotesquely deformed in most cities to, in essence, shut public space to protesters, eradicating our right to free speech and peaceful assembly. The goal of the corporate state is to criminalize democratic, popular dissent before there is another popular eruption. The vast state surveillance system, detailed in Edward Snowden’s revelations to the British newspaper The Guardian, at the same time ensures that no action or protest can occur without the advanced knowledge of our internal security apparatus. This foreknowledge has allowed the internal security systems to proactively block activists from public spaces as well as carry out pre-emptive harassment, interrogation, intimidation, detention and arrests before protests can begin. There is a word for this type of political system—tyranny.
If the state is ultimately successful in preventing us from mobilizing in public spaces, then dissent will mutate from nonviolent mass protests to clandestine and perhaps violent acts of resistance. Some demonstrators have already been branded “domestic terrorists” under the law. The rear-guard effort by a handful of activists to protect our rights to be heard and peaceably assemble is perhaps the most crucial, though unseen, struggle we currently are engaged in with the corporate state. It is a struggle to salvage what is left of our civil society and our right to nonviolent resistance against corporate tyranny. This is why the New York City trial last week of members of Veterans for Peace, along with other activists, took on an importance that belied the simple trespassing charges against them.
The activists were arrested Oct. 7, 2012, while they were placing flowers in 11 vases and reading the names of the dead inscribed on the wall in New York’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza after the official closing time, 10 p.m. The defiance of the plaza’s official closing time—which appears to be enforced against political activists only—was spawned by a May 1, 2012, protest by Occupy Wall Street activists. The Occupy activists had attempted to hold a meeting in the plaza and been driven out by police. A number of Veterans for Peace activists, most of them veterans of the Vietnam War, formed a line in front of the advancing police that May night and refused to move. They were arrested.
Many of these veterans came back to the plaza on a rainy, windy night in October to protest on the 11th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan and again assert their right to carry out nonviolent protests in public spaces. They included Jay Wenk, an 86-year-old combat veteran of World War II who served with Gen. George Patton’s Third Army in Europe. When he was arrested Wenk was beating a gong in the downpour as the names of the dead were read. During the October protest 25 people were seized by police for refusing to leave the park after 10 p.m. Twelve went to trail last week. Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Robert Mandelbaum on Friday found the dozen activists guilty. The judge, however, quickly threw out his own verdict, calling the case a “unique circumstance.” “Justice,” he said, “cries out for a dismissal.” His dismissal shuts down the possibility of an appeal.
“The legislative system, the judicial system, the whole national security state that’s invading all of our privacy are taking away our right to dissent,” Dr. Margaret Flowers, one of the defendants, told me on a lunch break during the trial. “But everything that’s happening is happening legally. It’s a slippery slope. People will look at this case and they’re going to say, ‘So what? They were in a park. There was a rule. It was closing. The police arrested them. That makes sense to me!’ And they don’t put it in the bigger context. That’s how all of this is happening. It’s all being justified. The whole system is being flipped on its head. The judicial and law enforcement system should be protecting our rights. We have the right to dissent. It’s in the Bill of Rights. The question is, can we halt that slide for a second, maybe even reverse it a little bit?”
The executive, legislative and judicial branches of government have been taken over by corporations and used to protect and promote the criminal activity of Wall Street, the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, the looting of the U.S. Treasury by the banking industry and the corporate seizure of all major centers of power. The primacy of corporate profit trumps our right to a living wage, affordable and adequate health care, the regulation of industry and environmental controls, protection from corporate fraud and abuse, the right to a good and affordable public education, the ability to form labor unions, and having a government that serves the basic needs of ordinary citizens. Our voices, our rights and our aspirations are no longer of concern to the state. And if we try to assert them, the state now has mechanisms in place to shut us down.
Tarak Kauff, a 71-year-old veteran of the Army’s 111th Airborne and former professional boxer, was one of the organizers of the Oct. 7 protest. He has been on a hunger strike for more than a month to express solidarity with the hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay and in the Pelican Bay prison in California. He was gaunt. His skin was ashen and his cheeks sunken. He consumes 300 liquid calories a day and has lost 24 pounds. He was arrested in May and again in October.
“I saw clearly that the purpose of the arrest was not merely enforcing the 10 p.m. curfew,” he said of the May arrests, “but the purpose was very specific in restricting the right of assembly. We decided that October 7th would be a perfect day to do it. It was 11 years of war in Afghanistan. So when we came to the Vietnam Veterans Plaza that night we had four purposes. One was to call for an end to the war, the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The second was to call for an end to all U.S. wars of empire. The third was to remember and lament those who had fallen and been wounded in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, including the civilians, including the 5 million civilians in Vietnam. The fourth was to affirm our right to assemble. If we lose the right to address these issues and to organize in public places, we have absolutely nothing.”
“I’m fasting because it’s a sacrifice,” he said when I asked about his hunger strike. “I want to encourage other people in our movement of the necessity of sacrifice. If we want to establish anything, if we want to re-establish or ever establish any kind of democratic system, it’s not going to happen without sacrifice, some kind of sacrifice. And we have a choir. I want to see that choir inspired to start sacrificing more, to take risks. We have to be willing to put our bodies on the line in some way, shape, or form, nonviolently.”
According to several of the activists, some of the police officers said that they too were military veterans and disliked making the arrests but had been told by their superiors to take the demonstrators into custody to prevent another Occupy encampment.
“ ‘We can’t let you stay,’ ” Kauff said he was told by a police captain. “ ‘It sets a bad example for the Occupy movement.’ ”
“After the process of being arrested began, a police lieutenant told me the Occupy Wall Street people really screwed this up for you guys,” Sam Adams, who served in the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, said in his courtroom testimony. “You can thank them for this.”
The trial was a tiny window into how rattled the state was by Occupy, unfortunately now in disarray. The security organs know that as conditions worsen for the majority of Americans, as austerity cuts and chronic unemployment and underemployment drive tens of millions of families into desperation, as climate change continues to produce extreme and dangerous weather, there remains the threat of another popular backlash. The problem lies not, of course, with the Occupy movement, but with the reconfiguration of the government into a handmaiden of corporations that seek to squeeze profits out of the dying carcass of empire.
The corporate state’s quest to control all power includes using the military to carry out domestic policing, which is why I sued the president over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act. It is imperative to defend, as the activists did in New York City, what freedoms and rights we have left. If we remain passive, if we permit the state to continue to use the law to take away our right of political expression, we will have no legal protection of resistance when we will need it most.
Locking Out the Voices of Dissent
The security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising. The legal system has been grotesquely deformed in most cities to, in essence, shut public space to protesters, eradicating our right to free speech and peaceful assembly. The goal of the corporate state is to criminalize democratic, popular dissent before there is another popular eruption. The vast state surveillance system, detailed in Edward Snowden’s revelations to the British newspaper The Guardian, at the same time ensures that no action or protest can occur without the advanced knowledge of our internal security apparatus. This foreknowledge has allowed the internal security systems to proactively block activists from public spaces as well as carry out pre-emptive harassment, interrogation, intimidation, detention and arrests before protests can begin. There is a word for this type of political system—tyranny.
If the state is ultimately successful in preventing us from mobilizing in public spaces, then dissent will mutate from nonviolent mass protests to clandestine and perhaps violent acts of resistance. Some demonstrators have already been branded “domestic terrorists” under the law. The rear-guard effort by a handful of activists to protect our rights to be heard and peaceably assemble is perhaps the most crucial, though unseen, struggle we currently are engaged in with the corporate state. It is a struggle to salvage what is left of our civil society and our right to nonviolent resistance against corporate tyranny. This is why the New York City trial last week of members of Veterans for Peace, along with other activists, took on an importance that belied the simple trespassing charges against them.
The activists were arrested Oct. 7, 2012, while they were placing flowers in 11 vases and reading the names of the dead inscribed on the wall in New York’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza after the official closing time, 10 p.m. The defiance of the plaza’s official closing time—which appears to be enforced against political activists only—was spawned by a May 1, 2012, protest by Occupy Wall Street activists. The Occupy activists had attempted to hold a meeting in the plaza and been driven out by police. A number of Veterans for Peace activists, most of them veterans of the Vietnam War, formed a line in front of the advancing police that May night and refused to move. They were arrested.
Many of these veterans came back to the plaza on a rainy, windy night in October to protest on the 11th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan and again assert their right to carry out nonviolent protests in public spaces. They included Jay Wenk, an 86-year-old combat veteran of World War II who served with Gen. George Patton’s Third Army in Europe. When he was arrested Wenk was beating a gong in the downpour as the names of the dead were read. During the October protest 25 people were seized by police for refusing to leave the park after 10 p.m. Twelve went to trail last week. Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Robert Mandelbaum on Friday found the dozen activists guilty. The judge, however, quickly threw out his own verdict, calling the case a “unique circumstance.” “Justice,” he said, “cries out for a dismissal.” His dismissal shuts down the possibility of an appeal.
“The legislative system, the judicial system, the whole national security state that’s invading all of our privacy are taking away our right to dissent,” Dr. Margaret Flowers, one of the defendants, told me on a lunch break during the trial. “But everything that’s happening is happening legally. It’s a slippery slope. People will look at this case and they’re going to say, ‘So what? They were in a park. There was a rule. It was closing. The police arrested them. That makes sense to me!’ And they don’t put it in the bigger context. That’s how all of this is happening. It’s all being justified. The whole system is being flipped on its head. The judicial and law enforcement system should be protecting our rights. We have the right to dissent. It’s in the Bill of Rights. The question is, can we halt that slide for a second, maybe even reverse it a little bit?”
The executive, legislative and judicial branches of government have been taken over by corporations and used to protect and promote the criminal activity of Wall Street, the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, the looting of the U.S. Treasury by the banking industry and the corporate seizure of all major centers of power. The primacy of corporate profit trumps our right to a living wage, affordable and adequate health care, the regulation of industry and environmental controls, protection from corporate fraud and abuse, the right to a good and affordable public education, the ability to form labor unions, and having a government that serves the basic needs of ordinary citizens. Our voices, our rights and our aspirations are no longer of concern to the state. And if we try to assert them, the state now has mechanisms in place to shut us down.
Tarak Kauff, a 71-year-old veteran of the Army’s 111th Airborne and former professional boxer, was one of the organizers of the Oct. 7 protest. He has been on a hunger strike for more than a month to express solidarity with the hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay and in the Pelican Bay prison in California. He was gaunt. His skin was ashen and his cheeks sunken. He consumes 300 liquid calories a day and has lost 24 pounds. He was arrested in May and again in October.
“I saw clearly that the purpose of the arrest was not merely enforcing the 10 p.m. curfew,” he said of the May arrests, “but the purpose was very specific in restricting the right of assembly. We decided that October 7th would be a perfect day to do it. It was 11 years of war in Afghanistan. So when we came to the Vietnam Veterans Plaza that night we had four purposes. One was to call for an end to the war, the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The second was to call for an end to all U.S. wars of empire. The third was to remember and lament those who had fallen and been wounded in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, including the civilians, including the 5 million civilians in Vietnam. The fourth was to affirm our right to assemble. If we lose the right to address these issues and to organize in public places, we have absolutely nothing.”
“I’m fasting because it’s a sacrifice,” he said when I asked about his hunger strike. “I want to encourage other people in our movement of the necessity of sacrifice. If we want to establish anything, if we want to re-establish or ever establish any kind of democratic system, it’s not going to happen without sacrifice, some kind of sacrifice. And we have a choir. I want to see that choir inspired to start sacrificing more, to take risks. We have to be willing to put our bodies on the line in some way, shape, or form, nonviolently.”
According to several of the activists, some of the police officers said that they too were military veterans and disliked making the arrests but had been told by their superiors to take the demonstrators into custody to prevent another Occupy encampment.
“ ‘We can’t let you stay,’ ” Kauff said he was told by a police captain. “ ‘It sets a bad example for the Occupy movement.’ ”
“After the process of being arrested began, a police lieutenant told me the Occupy Wall Street people really screwed this up for you guys,” Sam Adams, who served in the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, said in his courtroom testimony. “You can thank them for this.”
The trial was a tiny window into how rattled the state was by Occupy, unfortunately now in disarray. The security organs know that as conditions worsen for the majority of Americans, as austerity cuts and chronic unemployment and underemployment drive tens of millions of families into desperation, as climate change continues to produce extreme and dangerous weather, there remains the threat of another popular backlash. The problem lies not, of course, with the Occupy movement, but with the reconfiguration of the government into a handmaiden of corporations that seek to squeeze profits out of the dying carcass of empire.
The corporate state’s quest to control all power includes using the military to carry out domestic policing, which is why I sued the president over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act. It is imperative to defend, as the activists did in New York City, what freedoms and rights we have left. If we remain passive, if we permit the state to continue to use the law to take away our right of political expression, we will have no legal protection of resistance when we will need it most.
Friday, July 26, 2013
SC118-8
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/prometheus-unbound/
Prometheus Unbound
As many of you know, I have been back in the ‘land of the free’ for about a month, where the eagle soars without constraint. The most enlightening aspect has been my access to the nightly news and the talking-head ‘news’ shows on the air virtually 24/7. What have I seen? Well, I can tell you that the channels I flipped through have been focused almost exclusively on the relatively minor, yet by no means insignificant, miscarriage of justice in the Trayvon Martin murder case. Again, I am not trying to minimize that clusterfuck by the Florida legal system. And its implications for further racial divisiveness in this country are clearly evident. The injustice of the system keeps manifesting itself. But that may just be another distraction. Certainly, there are other, bigger fish needing to be fried that are still lying raw and rotting under a fisherman’s tarp on the hot deck.
What fish? How about the story of the US government’s clandestine and illegal collection of any and all data records and metadata across the globe. But all the corporate media circus cares to ask about is the juvenile question – “where’s Waldo?” Waldo, of course, is Edward Snowden. They want to force feed the chattel-citizenry of this land on Snowden’s personal escapade and his public flight from some imagined ‘justice,’ while systematically ignoring the stench of the fetid fish rotting in the corner… the gross illegality, injustice and tyranny of the US Mega-Surveilance State. We have been driven full-steam ahead, back to the future of George Orwell’s 1984, and the general populace is still unwilling or unable to see through the smoke and the smoke-screens. They have us fret about the enemy out there that, if it does exist, is not nearly as dangerous as the enemy among us… the Media-Military-Industrial-Surveilance State that is swooping down on eagles’ wings to create enemies where none exist, to gather unto itself the artless or the artful moves of all players on the grand chessboard, including the casual peccadilloes of the average joe-sixpack. This is what the media goons throw in our faces while refusing to examine or debate the real issues, even if only as a charade.
The media outlets drink from the chalices of their owners and sponsors, and their political appointees; so they do what they are beckoned to do. They distract, entertain, and ignore the real issues. We only find these issues discussed online, and those who are discussing them are closely monitored by the State and its data mining machinery.
Perhaps the larger question is, why doesn’t the public respond to this gnawing, fascist inspired tyranny? I do not think the answer is anymore one of ‘complacency.’ After all the ‘American Dream’ – that nightmare dressed-up in seductive evening wear — has begun to evaporate for much of the populace… like hot breath on a mirror. I really believe the issue constraining any public ‘blowback’ is one of FEAR. After the military-style shut-down of Occupy Movements around the country, the armored closing of parts of the city of Boston in search of a lone and wounded nineteen year old ‘terror suspect,’ and our general apprehension at the growing apparatus of a full-blown security state with its tentacles fully extended (just look at our quiet uneasiness with TSA at the airports), I believe it is fear of reprisal that keeps citizens from responding, either by public assembly or other, perhaps more belligerent, means. Surely, it is far safer to go to the streets and rally against the legal decision in a case of apparently racially motivated murder. There is no real threat to the hegemony in that instance, at least no clear and present danger. It is much more dangerous to demonstrate against the king and his court directly. There the wheels of empire, with its newfound brutality and cynicism, can grind you into dust, and they will. Just watch how they try to get their long arms around Assange, Snowden, Manning, and others for embarrassing them on the world stage, or those veteran groups assembling at the New York City’s Vietnam Memorial municipal park after official closing hours. Even Chris Hedges has seen this heavy-hand of the State up close and personal with his own efforts at public assembly and civil disobedience. The inverted totalitarianism of which Chris has spoken eloquently over the past year is now starting to right itself, baring its teeth and flexing its muscle. Meanwhile, the hegemon perched atop this malicious hierarchy is only doing the evil bidding of his masters. It seems that slavery never dies, it merely changes its form… it is a classical shape-shifter… the better to keep us confused and confined.
So what is the citizenry supposed to do? Nothing? Just accept our fate, letting destiny take its course. Is our only recourse to obey the whims of a rolling tyranny? The virtual world of instant communication across the globe is the strangest of bedfellows. We can use it to steal fire from the gods, but can we use it to spark and illuminate the masses, or do we simply burn ourselves out as we become embroiled in the increasing terror of the State, a state which knows no limits, a regime that soars like an eagle only to feed on our liver again each and every day. This has become our fate for defiance of the gods.
I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver hurts. However, I don’t know beans about my pain, and I am not sure what is bothering me.
Perhaps we are like Dostoyevsky’s anti-hero. But why do we hurt? And how can Prometheus become unbound, freed from the tyranny of this state and its feeding on my liver? I too fear… for the future of this people, of all peoples, and for the planet we now share as we walk gently upon eggshells.
Prometheus Unbound
As many of you know, I have been back in the ‘land of the free’ for about a month, where the eagle soars without constraint. The most enlightening aspect has been my access to the nightly news and the talking-head ‘news’ shows on the air virtually 24/7. What have I seen? Well, I can tell you that the channels I flipped through have been focused almost exclusively on the relatively minor, yet by no means insignificant, miscarriage of justice in the Trayvon Martin murder case. Again, I am not trying to minimize that clusterfuck by the Florida legal system. And its implications for further racial divisiveness in this country are clearly evident. The injustice of the system keeps manifesting itself. But that may just be another distraction. Certainly, there are other, bigger fish needing to be fried that are still lying raw and rotting under a fisherman’s tarp on the hot deck.
What fish? How about the story of the US government’s clandestine and illegal collection of any and all data records and metadata across the globe. But all the corporate media circus cares to ask about is the juvenile question – “where’s Waldo?” Waldo, of course, is Edward Snowden. They want to force feed the chattel-citizenry of this land on Snowden’s personal escapade and his public flight from some imagined ‘justice,’ while systematically ignoring the stench of the fetid fish rotting in the corner… the gross illegality, injustice and tyranny of the US Mega-Surveilance State. We have been driven full-steam ahead, back to the future of George Orwell’s 1984, and the general populace is still unwilling or unable to see through the smoke and the smoke-screens. They have us fret about the enemy out there that, if it does exist, is not nearly as dangerous as the enemy among us… the Media-Military-Industrial-Surveilance State that is swooping down on eagles’ wings to create enemies where none exist, to gather unto itself the artless or the artful moves of all players on the grand chessboard, including the casual peccadilloes of the average joe-sixpack. This is what the media goons throw in our faces while refusing to examine or debate the real issues, even if only as a charade.
The media outlets drink from the chalices of their owners and sponsors, and their political appointees; so they do what they are beckoned to do. They distract, entertain, and ignore the real issues. We only find these issues discussed online, and those who are discussing them are closely monitored by the State and its data mining machinery.
Perhaps the larger question is, why doesn’t the public respond to this gnawing, fascist inspired tyranny? I do not think the answer is anymore one of ‘complacency.’ After all the ‘American Dream’ – that nightmare dressed-up in seductive evening wear — has begun to evaporate for much of the populace… like hot breath on a mirror. I really believe the issue constraining any public ‘blowback’ is one of FEAR. After the military-style shut-down of Occupy Movements around the country, the armored closing of parts of the city of Boston in search of a lone and wounded nineteen year old ‘terror suspect,’ and our general apprehension at the growing apparatus of a full-blown security state with its tentacles fully extended (just look at our quiet uneasiness with TSA at the airports), I believe it is fear of reprisal that keeps citizens from responding, either by public assembly or other, perhaps more belligerent, means. Surely, it is far safer to go to the streets and rally against the legal decision in a case of apparently racially motivated murder. There is no real threat to the hegemony in that instance, at least no clear and present danger. It is much more dangerous to demonstrate against the king and his court directly. There the wheels of empire, with its newfound brutality and cynicism, can grind you into dust, and they will. Just watch how they try to get their long arms around Assange, Snowden, Manning, and others for embarrassing them on the world stage, or those veteran groups assembling at the New York City’s Vietnam Memorial municipal park after official closing hours. Even Chris Hedges has seen this heavy-hand of the State up close and personal with his own efforts at public assembly and civil disobedience. The inverted totalitarianism of which Chris has spoken eloquently over the past year is now starting to right itself, baring its teeth and flexing its muscle. Meanwhile, the hegemon perched atop this malicious hierarchy is only doing the evil bidding of his masters. It seems that slavery never dies, it merely changes its form… it is a classical shape-shifter… the better to keep us confused and confined.
So what is the citizenry supposed to do? Nothing? Just accept our fate, letting destiny take its course. Is our only recourse to obey the whims of a rolling tyranny? The virtual world of instant communication across the globe is the strangest of bedfellows. We can use it to steal fire from the gods, but can we use it to spark and illuminate the masses, or do we simply burn ourselves out as we become embroiled in the increasing terror of the State, a state which knows no limits, a regime that soars like an eagle only to feed on our liver again each and every day. This has become our fate for defiance of the gods.
I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver hurts. However, I don’t know beans about my pain, and I am not sure what is bothering me.
Perhaps we are like Dostoyevsky’s anti-hero. But why do we hurt? And how can Prometheus become unbound, freed from the tyranny of this state and its feeding on my liver? I too fear… for the future of this people, of all peoples, and for the planet we now share as we walk gently upon eggshells.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
SC118-7
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175726/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_emerging_from_darkness%2C_the_edward_snowden_story/
Prometheus Among The Cannibals
Billions of us, from prime ministers to hackers, are watching a live espionage movie in which you are the protagonist and perhaps the sacrifice. Your way forward is clear to no one, least of all, I’m sure, you.
I fear for you; I think of you with a heavy heart. I imagine hiding you like Anne Frank. I imagine Hollywood movie magic in which a young lookalike would swap places with you and let you flee to safety — if there is any safety in this world of extreme rendition and extrajudicial execution by the government that you and I were born under and that you, until recently, served. I fear you may pay, if not with your death, with your life — with a life that can have no conventional outcome anytime soon, if ever. “Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped,” you told us, and they are trying to stop you instead.
I am moved by your choice of our future over yours, the world over yourself. You know what few do nowadays: that the self is not the same as self-interest. You are someone who is smart enough, idealistic enough, bold enough to know that living with yourself in a system of utter corruption would destroy that self as an ideal, as something worth being. Doing what you’ve done, on the other hand, would give you a self you could live with, even if it gave you nowhere to live or no life. Which is to say, you have become a hero.
Pity the country that requires a hero, Bertolt Brecht once remarked, but pity the heroes too. They are the other homeless, the people who don’t fit in. They are the ones who see the hardest work and do it, and pay the price we charge those who do what we can’t or won’t. If the old stories were about heroes who saved us from others, modern heroes — Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, Rachel Carson, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi — endeavored to save us from ourselves, from our own governments and systems of power.
The rest of us so often sacrifice that self and those ideals to fit in, to be part of a cannibal system, a system that eats souls and defiles truths and serves only power. Or we negotiate quietly to maintain an uneasy distance from it and then go about our own business. Though in my world quite a few of us strike our small blows against empire, you, young man, you were situated where you could run a dagger through the dragon’s eye, and that dragon is writhing in agony now; in that agony it has lost its magic: an arrangement whereby it remains invisible while making the rest of us ever more naked to its glaring eye.
Private Eyes and Public Rights
Privacy is a kind of power as well as a right, one that public librarians fought to protect against the Bush administration and the PATRIOT Act and that online companies violate in every way that’s profitable and expedient. Our lack of privacy, their monstrous privacy — even their invasion of our privacy must, by law, remain classified — is what you made visible. The agony of a monster with nowhere to stand — you are accused of spying on the spies, of invading the privacy of their invasion of privacy — is a truly curious thing. And it is changing the world. Europe and South America are in an uproar, and attempts to contain you and your damage are putting out fire with gasoline.
You yourself said it so well on July 12th:
“A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone’s communications at any time. That is the power to change people’s fates. It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the U.S. Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice — that it must be seen to be done.”
They say you, like Bradley Manning, gave secrets to their enemies. It’s clear who those enemies are: you, me, us. It was clear on September 12, 2001, that the Bush administration feared the American people more than al-Qaeda. Not much has changed on that front since, and this almost infinitely broad information harvest criminalizes all of us. This metadata — the patterns and connections of communications rather than their content — is particularly useful, as my friend Chris Carlsson pointed out, at mapping the clusters of communications behind popular movements, uprisings, political organizing: in other words, those moments when civil society rises to shape history, to make a better future in the open world of the streets and squares.
The goal of gathering all this metadata, Chris speculates, “is to be able to identify where the ‘hubs’ are, who the people are who sit at key points in networks, helping pass news and messages along, but especially, who the people are who spread ideas and information from one network of people to the next, who help connect small networks into larger ones, and thus facilitate the unpredictable and rapid spread of dissent when it appears.”
Metadata can map the circulatory system of civil society, toward what ends you can certainly imagine. When governments fear their people you can be sure they are not serving their people. This has always been the minefield of patriotism: loyalty to our government often means hostility to our country and vice-versa. Edward Snowden, loyalist to country, you have made this clear as day.
Those who demonize you show, as David Bromwich pointed out in a fine essay in the London Review of Books, their submission to the power you exposed. Who stood where, he writes,
“was an infallible marker of the anti-authoritarian instinct against the authoritarian. What was distressing and impossible to predict was the evidence of the way the last few years have worn deep channels of authoritarian acceptance in the mind of the liberal establishment. Every public figure who is psychologically identified with the ways of power in America has condemned Snowden as a traitor, or deplored his actions as merely those of a criminal, someone about whom the judgment ‘he must be prosecuted’ obviates any further judgment and any need for thought.”
You said, “I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.” Who you are is fascinating, but what you’ve exposed is what matters. It is upending the world. It is damaging Washington’s relations with many Latin American and some European countries, with Russia and China as well as with its own people — those, at least, who bother to read or listen to the news and care about what they find there. “Edward Snowden Single-Handedly Forces Tech Companies To Come Forward With Government Data Request Stats,” said a headline in Forbes. Your act is rearranging our world. How much no one yet knows.
What You Love
What’s striking about your words on video, Edward Snowden, the ones I hear as your young, pale, thoughtful face speaks with clarity and incisiveness in response to Glenn Greenwald’s questions, is that you’re not talking much about what you hate, though it’s clear that you hate the secret network you were part of. You hate it because it poisons what you love. You told us, “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions… [but] I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.” You love our world, our country — not its government, clearly, but its old ideals and living idealists, its possibilities, its dreamers, and its dreams (not the stale, stuffed American dream of individual affluence, but the other dreams of a better world for all of us, a world of principle).
You told us where we now live and that you refuse to live there anymore:
“I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build, and it’s not something I’m willing to live under. America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.”
Which is to say you acted from love, from all the things the new surveillance state imperils: privacy, democracy, accountability, decency, honor. The rest of us, what would we do for love?
What is terrifying to the politicians at the top is that you may be our truest patriot at the moment. Which makes all of them, with their marble buildings and illustrious titles, their security details and all the pomp, the flags, the saluting soldiers, so many traitors. The government is the enemy of the people; the state is the enemy of the country. I love that country, too. I fear that state and this new information age as they spread and twine like a poison vine around everything and everyone. You held up a mirror and fools hate the mirror for it; they shoot the messenger, but the message has been delivered.
“This country is worth dying for,” you said in explanation of your great risks. You were trained as a soldier, but a soldier’s courage with a thinker’s independence of mind is a dangerous thing; a hero is a dangerous thing. That’s why the U.S. military has made the Guardian, the British newspaper that has done the key reporting on your leaks, off limits to our soldiers overseas. Whoever made that cynical censorship decision understands that those soldiers may be defending a set of interests at odds with this country and its Constitution, and they need to be kept in the dark about that. The dark from which you emerged.
When the United States forced the airplane of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s democratically elected head of state, to land in Austria, after compliant France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy denied him the right to travel through their airspace, all South America took it as an insult and a violation of Bolivia’s sovereignty and international law. The allied president of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, tracked the incident in a series of tweets that demonstrated an openness, a principledness, and a strong friendship between Morales, Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa, and her. It was a little window onto a really foreign continent: one in which countries are sometimes headed by genuinely popular leaders who are genuinely transparent and governed by rule of law. It’s a reminder that things in our own blighted, corrupted, corporate-dominated country could be different.
Building a Bridge to the Nineteenth Century
How did we get here? In 1996, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore pushed the dreadful slogan “building a bridge to the twenty-first century.” It was a celebration of Silicon Valley-style technological innovation and corporate globalization, among other things. At the time, I put “building a bridge to the nineteenth century” on my letterhead. It turned out that we were doing both at once: erecting a massive electronic infrastructure that outpaces our ability to democratically manage it and shifting our economy backward to recreate the chasms of class divide that marked the nineteenth century. The two goals intertwined like serpents making love.
The new technologies made a surveillance state that much more powerful and far-reaching; the new technologies replaced many jobs with few; the new technologies created new billionaires without principles; the new technologies made us all into commodities to be sold to advertisers; the new technologies turned our every move into something that could be tracked; the new technologies kept us distracted and busy. Meanwhile, almost everyone got poorer.
What the neoliberals amassing mountains of wealth for the already super-wealthy forgot, what the tax-cutters and child-starvers never learned in school, is that desperate people do not necessary simply lie down and obey. Often enough, they rebel. There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose. The twentieth century’s welfare states, their pumped-up, plumped-up middle classes, their relative egalitarianism and graduated tax plans pacified the once-insurrectionary classes by meeting, at least in part, their needs and demands. The comfortable don’t revolt much. Out of sheer greed, however, the wealthiest and most powerful decided to make so many of the rest of us at least increasingly uncomfortable and often far worse.
Edward Snowden, you rebelled because you were outraged; so many others are rebelling because their lives are impossible now. These days when we revolt, the new technologies become our friends as well as our enemies. If you imagine those technologies as the fire Prometheus stole from the gods, then it works both ways, for us and for them, to create and to destroy.
Those new technologies are key to the latest rounds of global organizing, from theWorld Trade Organization actions of 1999, put together by email and epochal in their impact, to the Arab Spring, which used email, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and other means, to Occupy Wall Street. The technologies are double-edged: populist networks for creating global resistance are vulnerable to surveillance; classified reams of data are breachable by information saved to thumb drives or burned onto CDs by whistleblowers and hackers. They can spy in private; we can organize in public, and maybe the two actions are true opposites.
Meanwhile there is massive upheaval in Egypt and in Brazil, and in recent years there have been popular rebellions in many parts of the Arab world, Turkey, Iceland, Greece, Spain, Britain, Chile, and the U.S. itself with Occupy. The globe is on fire with popular outrage, with fury over economic injustice and, among other things, climate change spurred by the profits a few are piling up to the detriment of the rest of us, generations to come, other species, and the planet itself. It seems that, surveillance or not, people are not about to go quietly into the nineteenth century or accept the devil’s bargains of the twenty-first either.
Prometheus and Being Burned
I think of a man even younger than you, Edward Snowden, who unlike you acted without knowing what he did: 26-year-old Mohammed Bouazizi, whose December 2010 self-immolation to protest his humiliation and hopelessness triggered what became the still-blooming, still-burning Arab Spring. Sometimes one person changes the world. This should make most of us hopeful and some of them fearful, because what I am also saying is that we now live in a world of us and them, a binary world. It’s not the old world of capitalism versus communism, but of the big versus the little, of oligarchy versus democracy, of hierarchies versus swarms, of corporations versus public interest and civil society.
It seems nearly worldwide now, which is why revolts all over the planet have so much in common these days, why Occupy activists last month held up signs in New York’s Liberty Plaza in solidarity with the uprising in Taksim Square in Turkey; why Arab Spring activists phoned in pizza orders to the uprising in Wisconsin in early 2011; why Occupy spread around the world, and Greek insurrectionaries learned from the successes of Argentina in the face of austerity and economic collapse. We know our fate is common and that we live it out together and change it together, only together.
There were rumblings that you had defected, or would defect, to China or Russia, but you had already defected when we became aware of your existence: you had defected from them to us, using the power you had gained deep within the bowels of their infernal machines to empower us. What will we do with what you’ve taught us? That’s up to us, but for anyone who thinks what you did was not threatening to those in power, just look at how furious, how upset, how naked our emperors now are.
And you, Prometheus, you stole their fire, and you know it. You said, “Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, [Senator Dianne] Feinstein, and [Congressman Peter] King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.”
Someday you may be regarded as a Mandela of sorts for the information age, or perhaps a John Brown, someone who refused to fit in, to bow down, to make a system work that shouldn’t work, that should explode. And perhaps we’re watching it explode.
The match is sacrificed to start the fire. So maybe, Edward Snowden, you’re a sacrifice. In the process, you’ve lit a bonfire out of their secrecy and spying, a call to action.
I fear for you, but your gift gives us hope and your courage, an example. Our loyalty should be to our ideals, because they are a threat to the secret system you’ve exposed, because we have to choose between the two. Right now you embody that threat, just as you embody those ideals. For which I am grateful, for which everyone who is not embedded in that system should be grateful.
Prometheus Among The Cannibals
Billions of us, from prime ministers to hackers, are watching a live espionage movie in which you are the protagonist and perhaps the sacrifice. Your way forward is clear to no one, least of all, I’m sure, you.
I fear for you; I think of you with a heavy heart. I imagine hiding you like Anne Frank. I imagine Hollywood movie magic in which a young lookalike would swap places with you and let you flee to safety — if there is any safety in this world of extreme rendition and extrajudicial execution by the government that you and I were born under and that you, until recently, served. I fear you may pay, if not with your death, with your life — with a life that can have no conventional outcome anytime soon, if ever. “Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped,” you told us, and they are trying to stop you instead.
I am moved by your choice of our future over yours, the world over yourself. You know what few do nowadays: that the self is not the same as self-interest. You are someone who is smart enough, idealistic enough, bold enough to know that living with yourself in a system of utter corruption would destroy that self as an ideal, as something worth being. Doing what you’ve done, on the other hand, would give you a self you could live with, even if it gave you nowhere to live or no life. Which is to say, you have become a hero.
Pity the country that requires a hero, Bertolt Brecht once remarked, but pity the heroes too. They are the other homeless, the people who don’t fit in. They are the ones who see the hardest work and do it, and pay the price we charge those who do what we can’t or won’t. If the old stories were about heroes who saved us from others, modern heroes — Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, Rachel Carson, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi — endeavored to save us from ourselves, from our own governments and systems of power.
The rest of us so often sacrifice that self and those ideals to fit in, to be part of a cannibal system, a system that eats souls and defiles truths and serves only power. Or we negotiate quietly to maintain an uneasy distance from it and then go about our own business. Though in my world quite a few of us strike our small blows against empire, you, young man, you were situated where you could run a dagger through the dragon’s eye, and that dragon is writhing in agony now; in that agony it has lost its magic: an arrangement whereby it remains invisible while making the rest of us ever more naked to its glaring eye.
Private Eyes and Public Rights
Privacy is a kind of power as well as a right, one that public librarians fought to protect against the Bush administration and the PATRIOT Act and that online companies violate in every way that’s profitable and expedient. Our lack of privacy, their monstrous privacy — even their invasion of our privacy must, by law, remain classified — is what you made visible. The agony of a monster with nowhere to stand — you are accused of spying on the spies, of invading the privacy of their invasion of privacy — is a truly curious thing. And it is changing the world. Europe and South America are in an uproar, and attempts to contain you and your damage are putting out fire with gasoline.
You yourself said it so well on July 12th:
“A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone’s communications at any time. That is the power to change people’s fates. It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the U.S. Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice — that it must be seen to be done.”
They say you, like Bradley Manning, gave secrets to their enemies. It’s clear who those enemies are: you, me, us. It was clear on September 12, 2001, that the Bush administration feared the American people more than al-Qaeda. Not much has changed on that front since, and this almost infinitely broad information harvest criminalizes all of us. This metadata — the patterns and connections of communications rather than their content — is particularly useful, as my friend Chris Carlsson pointed out, at mapping the clusters of communications behind popular movements, uprisings, political organizing: in other words, those moments when civil society rises to shape history, to make a better future in the open world of the streets and squares.
The goal of gathering all this metadata, Chris speculates, “is to be able to identify where the ‘hubs’ are, who the people are who sit at key points in networks, helping pass news and messages along, but especially, who the people are who spread ideas and information from one network of people to the next, who help connect small networks into larger ones, and thus facilitate the unpredictable and rapid spread of dissent when it appears.”
Metadata can map the circulatory system of civil society, toward what ends you can certainly imagine. When governments fear their people you can be sure they are not serving their people. This has always been the minefield of patriotism: loyalty to our government often means hostility to our country and vice-versa. Edward Snowden, loyalist to country, you have made this clear as day.
Those who demonize you show, as David Bromwich pointed out in a fine essay in the London Review of Books, their submission to the power you exposed. Who stood where, he writes,
“was an infallible marker of the anti-authoritarian instinct against the authoritarian. What was distressing and impossible to predict was the evidence of the way the last few years have worn deep channels of authoritarian acceptance in the mind of the liberal establishment. Every public figure who is psychologically identified with the ways of power in America has condemned Snowden as a traitor, or deplored his actions as merely those of a criminal, someone about whom the judgment ‘he must be prosecuted’ obviates any further judgment and any need for thought.”
You said, “I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.” Who you are is fascinating, but what you’ve exposed is what matters. It is upending the world. It is damaging Washington’s relations with many Latin American and some European countries, with Russia and China as well as with its own people — those, at least, who bother to read or listen to the news and care about what they find there. “Edward Snowden Single-Handedly Forces Tech Companies To Come Forward With Government Data Request Stats,” said a headline in Forbes. Your act is rearranging our world. How much no one yet knows.
What You Love
What’s striking about your words on video, Edward Snowden, the ones I hear as your young, pale, thoughtful face speaks with clarity and incisiveness in response to Glenn Greenwald’s questions, is that you’re not talking much about what you hate, though it’s clear that you hate the secret network you were part of. You hate it because it poisons what you love. You told us, “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions… [but] I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.” You love our world, our country — not its government, clearly, but its old ideals and living idealists, its possibilities, its dreamers, and its dreams (not the stale, stuffed American dream of individual affluence, but the other dreams of a better world for all of us, a world of principle).
You told us where we now live and that you refuse to live there anymore:
“I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build, and it’s not something I’m willing to live under. America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.”
Which is to say you acted from love, from all the things the new surveillance state imperils: privacy, democracy, accountability, decency, honor. The rest of us, what would we do for love?
What is terrifying to the politicians at the top is that you may be our truest patriot at the moment. Which makes all of them, with their marble buildings and illustrious titles, their security details and all the pomp, the flags, the saluting soldiers, so many traitors. The government is the enemy of the people; the state is the enemy of the country. I love that country, too. I fear that state and this new information age as they spread and twine like a poison vine around everything and everyone. You held up a mirror and fools hate the mirror for it; they shoot the messenger, but the message has been delivered.
“This country is worth dying for,” you said in explanation of your great risks. You were trained as a soldier, but a soldier’s courage with a thinker’s independence of mind is a dangerous thing; a hero is a dangerous thing. That’s why the U.S. military has made the Guardian, the British newspaper that has done the key reporting on your leaks, off limits to our soldiers overseas. Whoever made that cynical censorship decision understands that those soldiers may be defending a set of interests at odds with this country and its Constitution, and they need to be kept in the dark about that. The dark from which you emerged.
When the United States forced the airplane of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s democratically elected head of state, to land in Austria, after compliant France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy denied him the right to travel through their airspace, all South America took it as an insult and a violation of Bolivia’s sovereignty and international law. The allied president of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, tracked the incident in a series of tweets that demonstrated an openness, a principledness, and a strong friendship between Morales, Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa, and her. It was a little window onto a really foreign continent: one in which countries are sometimes headed by genuinely popular leaders who are genuinely transparent and governed by rule of law. It’s a reminder that things in our own blighted, corrupted, corporate-dominated country could be different.
Building a Bridge to the Nineteenth Century
How did we get here? In 1996, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore pushed the dreadful slogan “building a bridge to the twenty-first century.” It was a celebration of Silicon Valley-style technological innovation and corporate globalization, among other things. At the time, I put “building a bridge to the nineteenth century” on my letterhead. It turned out that we were doing both at once: erecting a massive electronic infrastructure that outpaces our ability to democratically manage it and shifting our economy backward to recreate the chasms of class divide that marked the nineteenth century. The two goals intertwined like serpents making love.
The new technologies made a surveillance state that much more powerful and far-reaching; the new technologies replaced many jobs with few; the new technologies created new billionaires without principles; the new technologies made us all into commodities to be sold to advertisers; the new technologies turned our every move into something that could be tracked; the new technologies kept us distracted and busy. Meanwhile, almost everyone got poorer.
What the neoliberals amassing mountains of wealth for the already super-wealthy forgot, what the tax-cutters and child-starvers never learned in school, is that desperate people do not necessary simply lie down and obey. Often enough, they rebel. There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose. The twentieth century’s welfare states, their pumped-up, plumped-up middle classes, their relative egalitarianism and graduated tax plans pacified the once-insurrectionary classes by meeting, at least in part, their needs and demands. The comfortable don’t revolt much. Out of sheer greed, however, the wealthiest and most powerful decided to make so many of the rest of us at least increasingly uncomfortable and often far worse.
Edward Snowden, you rebelled because you were outraged; so many others are rebelling because their lives are impossible now. These days when we revolt, the new technologies become our friends as well as our enemies. If you imagine those technologies as the fire Prometheus stole from the gods, then it works both ways, for us and for them, to create and to destroy.
Those new technologies are key to the latest rounds of global organizing, from theWorld Trade Organization actions of 1999, put together by email and epochal in their impact, to the Arab Spring, which used email, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and other means, to Occupy Wall Street. The technologies are double-edged: populist networks for creating global resistance are vulnerable to surveillance; classified reams of data are breachable by information saved to thumb drives or burned onto CDs by whistleblowers and hackers. They can spy in private; we can organize in public, and maybe the two actions are true opposites.
Meanwhile there is massive upheaval in Egypt and in Brazil, and in recent years there have been popular rebellions in many parts of the Arab world, Turkey, Iceland, Greece, Spain, Britain, Chile, and the U.S. itself with Occupy. The globe is on fire with popular outrage, with fury over economic injustice and, among other things, climate change spurred by the profits a few are piling up to the detriment of the rest of us, generations to come, other species, and the planet itself. It seems that, surveillance or not, people are not about to go quietly into the nineteenth century or accept the devil’s bargains of the twenty-first either.
Prometheus and Being Burned
I think of a man even younger than you, Edward Snowden, who unlike you acted without knowing what he did: 26-year-old Mohammed Bouazizi, whose December 2010 self-immolation to protest his humiliation and hopelessness triggered what became the still-blooming, still-burning Arab Spring. Sometimes one person changes the world. This should make most of us hopeful and some of them fearful, because what I am also saying is that we now live in a world of us and them, a binary world. It’s not the old world of capitalism versus communism, but of the big versus the little, of oligarchy versus democracy, of hierarchies versus swarms, of corporations versus public interest and civil society.
It seems nearly worldwide now, which is why revolts all over the planet have so much in common these days, why Occupy activists last month held up signs in New York’s Liberty Plaza in solidarity with the uprising in Taksim Square in Turkey; why Arab Spring activists phoned in pizza orders to the uprising in Wisconsin in early 2011; why Occupy spread around the world, and Greek insurrectionaries learned from the successes of Argentina in the face of austerity and economic collapse. We know our fate is common and that we live it out together and change it together, only together.
There were rumblings that you had defected, or would defect, to China or Russia, but you had already defected when we became aware of your existence: you had defected from them to us, using the power you had gained deep within the bowels of their infernal machines to empower us. What will we do with what you’ve taught us? That’s up to us, but for anyone who thinks what you did was not threatening to those in power, just look at how furious, how upset, how naked our emperors now are.
And you, Prometheus, you stole their fire, and you know it. You said, “Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, [Senator Dianne] Feinstein, and [Congressman Peter] King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.”
Someday you may be regarded as a Mandela of sorts for the information age, or perhaps a John Brown, someone who refused to fit in, to bow down, to make a system work that shouldn’t work, that should explode. And perhaps we’re watching it explode.
The match is sacrificed to start the fire. So maybe, Edward Snowden, you’re a sacrifice. In the process, you’ve lit a bonfire out of their secrecy and spying, a call to action.
I fear for you, but your gift gives us hope and your courage, an example. Our loyalty should be to our ideals, because they are a threat to the secret system you’ve exposed, because we have to choose between the two. Right now you embody that threat, just as you embody those ideals. For which I am grateful, for which everyone who is not embedded in that system should be grateful.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
SC118-6
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/ship-of-fools-a-new-hermeneutic/
Ship Of Fools: A New Hermeneutic
There was in Greek mythology a very ancient divinity, traced back as far as Egypt, called Hermes, “messenger of the gods.” He was to interpret or translate the messages of gods into human words. He is also credited with the origin of alphabetic writing, cunning, deceit, and fraud. And there you have it… (the curriculum)!
Of course, messages from the gods were predominantly prescriptions on how to live (rituals, sacrifices) or proscriptions (codes of conduct, etc). After all, that was the principal role of the the World Religions as they emerged out of the early civilizations of the Ancient Near East. But the mouths of the gods were not the only place where such pronouncements originated, at least not for long. The earliest kings of the lands, considered divine incarnations themselves, also assumed the divine right to establish and maintain social order in the emerging city-states. Laws of the land were established, much like Hermes articulated the divine law, through the written word. It was more than likely that it was through the king that Hermes ‘spoke.’
So the interpretation of religious scripture, along with the proper application (interpretation) of legal codes (texts) became an ongoing concern for theologians and jurists (lawyers and justices) alike. Thus their concern gave way to the discipline of hermeneutics – theological and legal interpretations of divine or human law, respectively. And, of course, this is how the initial cunning, deceit and fraud of Hermes just kept on giving, and still gives today, more than ever.
And so, from Feuerbach, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Bultmann, H.G. Gadamer through Heidegger, we see the unfolding development of the problem of meaning – of the interpretation of religious, moral, social, and legal codes. In other words, we were forewarned that such proscriptions, prescriptions, rights and responsibilities of the citizenry were, and always will be, OPEN TO INTERPRETATION by the experts or those filling the seats of power. Thus do we find ourselves amidst and amok in our current dilemma. The very definitions that inform the laws of the land, and in this case, the definition of the words ‘terrorist,’ ‘spy’, ‘traitor’ are now haunting reminders of this hermeneutic appeal. Some of the edges are being blurred, stretched really beyond recognition (while my guitar gently weeps) — the hermeneutical advantage being driven by the law-makers and other self-anointed experts.
We can of course begin with the issue of ‘espionage’ and Obama’s remarkably free-style application of the ‘legal’ definition to include government or corporate whistle-blowers who choose to disclose issues that are morally or legally questionable, subject to informed debate and consent of the governed in light of the original conditions of the social contract. But, we already know that contracts (social or otherwise) are made to protect one party – the party that drew up the contract – and made to be broken in order to insure such protection is enforced or executed. So, I am afraid the Bradley Manning syndrome may continue unabated for the rest of our nation’s life. But, if you look at our militaristic response to the Occupy Wall Street movement a couple of years back, you will see the same, self-styled hermeneutic of events as they unfolded. There was no respect for freedom of assembly, association, or speech; the people on the streets were treated like ‘terrorists’ engaged in acts of terror. Now, the powers-that-be did not of course speak that way, but it is obvious from their collusion and their militaristic behavior that the cards are being reshuffled in a different direction and to their advantage. They have already gone so far as to inappropriately label whistleblowers as spies and traitors, and they have determined that terrorism is a rampant enough problem in our world, such that the wholesale collection of electronic telephonic, networking, and postal data is a reasonable measure consistent with their obligations to protect the nation, and that it should not to be confused with illegal wiretapping, monitoring, or censorship. It is truly revealing but not surprising that they would label Mr Snowden a spy, when all he did was to disclose the illegal spying of the US administration and their security agencies on American citizens.
Now we have the local Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation director warning a group of county residents that unfounded complaints about water quality could be considered “terrorism.”
You need to make sure that when you make water quality complaints you have a basis, because federally, if there’s no water quality issues, that can be considered under Homeland Security an act of terrorism.
So there you have it folks, another hermeneutic reassessment of the law of the land. But, as farcical as this appears on the face of it; hold your laughter folks and hold on to your hats. It’s only just begun. The band is heating up in the back room and the fat lady is beginning to sing. We will never, ever have a mass demonstration again in the Land of Washington, Franklin, Lincoln and Jefferson. We can never put the number of bodies in the streets as they did this week in Brazil. The powers that be would see this, interpret it, and proclaim it to be an act of TERROR!!
Mark my words, folks. Any congregation of people with the appearance of raising complaints, discussing relevant political issues, or, god-forbid, challenging the official narrative, automatically has the “signature” of a terrorist plot or engagement. Listen clearly, Chris Hedges. They will not allow you much more rope in this game of chicken. They have already laid the ground-work, and executed the strategy nearly flawlessly in Pakistan and other parts of the developing world. It is only a matter of time before they apply the same heuristic, and the same principles of interpretation (hermeneutic) here in the HomeLand!
We are all potential terrorists under the new hermeneutic, articulated so clearly just this week by the avenger-in-chief, (Hermes) Obama, messenger of the One God… MONEY! Collecting call and online data is legal and protective of the oligarchy’s rights under the terms of the contract. The release of classified information that identifies illegal actions of empire are acts of treason or acts of terror, pure and simple. Assembly or association or speech that is inconsistent with the embodiment of the official narrative is terrorism. This is where we are headed folks.
Put a half of million disgruntled citizens on the streets of this country (like they are doing in Brazil) and we will have a new federal prison open for business… the business of incarcerating citizen-terrorists… or we will just ship them off shore to a black-site somewhere for extraordinary rendition; or, perhaps disperse them with a few hundred armed drones. In any event, we, the government, will rid ourselves of some of those seven billion people that are crowding out the deserving few, the chosen, the owners, as George Carlin liked to say.
No folks, it won’t be long before questioning the authorities either online about public policy, or on the streets of a city near you en masse, will be interpreted as an act of espionage, treason, or terror — aiding and abetting the enemy. But, you know, Stalin had a much more efficient way of handling such challenges to his control and to his regime; he just sent folks off to gulags in Siberia, starved them to death in the winter, and then blamed it all on mother nature. I wonder upon what our authorities will blame the silencing of the voices of dissent here in the Home (of the brave)… Land (of the free). I’m certain it’s only a matter of them finding… or rather, articulating, the right hermeneutic!
Ship Of Fools: A New Hermeneutic
There was in Greek mythology a very ancient divinity, traced back as far as Egypt, called Hermes, “messenger of the gods.” He was to interpret or translate the messages of gods into human words. He is also credited with the origin of alphabetic writing, cunning, deceit, and fraud. And there you have it… (the curriculum)!
Of course, messages from the gods were predominantly prescriptions on how to live (rituals, sacrifices) or proscriptions (codes of conduct, etc). After all, that was the principal role of the the World Religions as they emerged out of the early civilizations of the Ancient Near East. But the mouths of the gods were not the only place where such pronouncements originated, at least not for long. The earliest kings of the lands, considered divine incarnations themselves, also assumed the divine right to establish and maintain social order in the emerging city-states. Laws of the land were established, much like Hermes articulated the divine law, through the written word. It was more than likely that it was through the king that Hermes ‘spoke.’
So the interpretation of religious scripture, along with the proper application (interpretation) of legal codes (texts) became an ongoing concern for theologians and jurists (lawyers and justices) alike. Thus their concern gave way to the discipline of hermeneutics – theological and legal interpretations of divine or human law, respectively. And, of course, this is how the initial cunning, deceit and fraud of Hermes just kept on giving, and still gives today, more than ever.
And so, from Feuerbach, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Bultmann, H.G. Gadamer through Heidegger, we see the unfolding development of the problem of meaning – of the interpretation of religious, moral, social, and legal codes. In other words, we were forewarned that such proscriptions, prescriptions, rights and responsibilities of the citizenry were, and always will be, OPEN TO INTERPRETATION by the experts or those filling the seats of power. Thus do we find ourselves amidst and amok in our current dilemma. The very definitions that inform the laws of the land, and in this case, the definition of the words ‘terrorist,’ ‘spy’, ‘traitor’ are now haunting reminders of this hermeneutic appeal. Some of the edges are being blurred, stretched really beyond recognition (while my guitar gently weeps) — the hermeneutical advantage being driven by the law-makers and other self-anointed experts.
We can of course begin with the issue of ‘espionage’ and Obama’s remarkably free-style application of the ‘legal’ definition to include government or corporate whistle-blowers who choose to disclose issues that are morally or legally questionable, subject to informed debate and consent of the governed in light of the original conditions of the social contract. But, we already know that contracts (social or otherwise) are made to protect one party – the party that drew up the contract – and made to be broken in order to insure such protection is enforced or executed. So, I am afraid the Bradley Manning syndrome may continue unabated for the rest of our nation’s life. But, if you look at our militaristic response to the Occupy Wall Street movement a couple of years back, you will see the same, self-styled hermeneutic of events as they unfolded. There was no respect for freedom of assembly, association, or speech; the people on the streets were treated like ‘terrorists’ engaged in acts of terror. Now, the powers-that-be did not of course speak that way, but it is obvious from their collusion and their militaristic behavior that the cards are being reshuffled in a different direction and to their advantage. They have already gone so far as to inappropriately label whistleblowers as spies and traitors, and they have determined that terrorism is a rampant enough problem in our world, such that the wholesale collection of electronic telephonic, networking, and postal data is a reasonable measure consistent with their obligations to protect the nation, and that it should not to be confused with illegal wiretapping, monitoring, or censorship. It is truly revealing but not surprising that they would label Mr Snowden a spy, when all he did was to disclose the illegal spying of the US administration and their security agencies on American citizens.
Now we have the local Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation director warning a group of county residents that unfounded complaints about water quality could be considered “terrorism.”
You need to make sure that when you make water quality complaints you have a basis, because federally, if there’s no water quality issues, that can be considered under Homeland Security an act of terrorism.
So there you have it folks, another hermeneutic reassessment of the law of the land. But, as farcical as this appears on the face of it; hold your laughter folks and hold on to your hats. It’s only just begun. The band is heating up in the back room and the fat lady is beginning to sing. We will never, ever have a mass demonstration again in the Land of Washington, Franklin, Lincoln and Jefferson. We can never put the number of bodies in the streets as they did this week in Brazil. The powers that be would see this, interpret it, and proclaim it to be an act of TERROR!!
Mark my words, folks. Any congregation of people with the appearance of raising complaints, discussing relevant political issues, or, god-forbid, challenging the official narrative, automatically has the “signature” of a terrorist plot or engagement. Listen clearly, Chris Hedges. They will not allow you much more rope in this game of chicken. They have already laid the ground-work, and executed the strategy nearly flawlessly in Pakistan and other parts of the developing world. It is only a matter of time before they apply the same heuristic, and the same principles of interpretation (hermeneutic) here in the HomeLand!
We are all potential terrorists under the new hermeneutic, articulated so clearly just this week by the avenger-in-chief, (Hermes) Obama, messenger of the One God… MONEY! Collecting call and online data is legal and protective of the oligarchy’s rights under the terms of the contract. The release of classified information that identifies illegal actions of empire are acts of treason or acts of terror, pure and simple. Assembly or association or speech that is inconsistent with the embodiment of the official narrative is terrorism. This is where we are headed folks.
Put a half of million disgruntled citizens on the streets of this country (like they are doing in Brazil) and we will have a new federal prison open for business… the business of incarcerating citizen-terrorists… or we will just ship them off shore to a black-site somewhere for extraordinary rendition; or, perhaps disperse them with a few hundred armed drones. In any event, we, the government, will rid ourselves of some of those seven billion people that are crowding out the deserving few, the chosen, the owners, as George Carlin liked to say.
No folks, it won’t be long before questioning the authorities either online about public policy, or on the streets of a city near you en masse, will be interpreted as an act of espionage, treason, or terror — aiding and abetting the enemy. But, you know, Stalin had a much more efficient way of handling such challenges to his control and to his regime; he just sent folks off to gulags in Siberia, starved them to death in the winter, and then blamed it all on mother nature. I wonder upon what our authorities will blame the silencing of the voices of dissent here in the Home (of the brave)… Land (of the free). I’m certain it’s only a matter of them finding… or rather, articulating, the right hermeneutic!
SC118-5
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/the-executioner/
The Executioner!
He is the man behind the rough looking body guards lounging lazily in the Foster Grants… like the fearsome North African leaders of old; he determines who lives and who dies… He is the hegemon… the angel of death… the grim reaper… he is Barack Obama. This once and ‘wanna-be-eternal’ king singlehandedly destroys whatever is in its path, like a two mile wide tornado in Oklahoma, the worst wildfire in Colorado history, or a once-in-five-hundred-year flood in Germany; and he seems comfortable propagandizing or lying without compunction or guilt, worse even than Bill Clinton. (“I did not have sex with that woman.”) Obama does much better with his dissembling: “before any [drone] strike is taken there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured“). GW Bush… should take lessons from this man-god… and a wrathful one he is!
He appears to be responsible for more gratuitous killing across the planet than any of his evil predecessors, and certainly more already than the 9/11 hijackers. All in the name of freedom and democracy… and for the glory of god. What sacreligious crap. He kills indiscriminately with one hand as he takes away any of the presumed rights this State was founded upon with the other. He is taking care of the enemy! (definition – ‘anyone who would presume to take food or petrol from the hand or mouth of deserving American Oligarchs, their friends and co-conspirators’) So he is locking up the ‘in-mates’ as he whittles away at the ‘out-mates.’ Talk about having your cake and eating it!
His Special Ops paramilitary units carryout secret missions of assassination, while his drone-army-camps — comprised of pubescent boys with pimply faces sitting in their dirty underwear eating Cheetos and drinking Chocolate Yoohoo in some dingy Washington DC basement – kill babies, children, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, any one gathering for a meeting, a pic-nic, a game of pick-up basketball… or more than likely in Pakistan, a “jirga,” or assembly of tribal elders. Those are “signature strikes” ladies and gentlemen, taking out anyone who appears involved in any event that his ‘best and brightest’ computer-game geeks determine has the ‘signature’ of a terrorist gathering. WOW!! Sure seems simple enough; especially for the simple-minded Americans who buy this shit! But, sadly, the only thing ‘signature’ about these lucky strikes is the American John Hancock resting upon the lifeless forehead of every woman, child and harmless man.
Forty tribal elders dead!! killed by a ‘signature strike’ during a ‘pow-wow’ discussion of mining and logging issues in their local villages. WOW!! How the fuck do we do that? And get away with it! But, hey, anybody who can smile in the face of Guantanamo Bay, or Abu Ghraib, and the black sites literally littered across the globe in our name, while compiling private electronic communications data on all Americans — someone like this can certainly handle the indiscriminate killing of innocents in the name of his god, whatever its name happens to be.
But, don’t you know it… the killing non-Western indigenous types appears to be high priority on the agenda in preparation for the final leg of the race. The empire must find ways to reduce planetary population overshoot so that the imperialists have more stuff to consume until it all ends… perhaps extending their party a few more years. Remember, “he who dies with the most toys wins!” This is the ugly face of empire folks, as it makes the short strokes to “the end of time as we have known it.” Like most ‘actors’ on the civic stage throughout roughly 5,000 years of recorded history, our politicians have nothing more to offer us but increased control, oversight, manipulation and the threat of death. Nothing has really changed throughout the entire time… only the tools to manage the masses.
Do not let historians or histories of the founding of this ‘republic’ fool you. It was all a bunch of wealthy merchants, land owners, lawyers and charlatans with political clout that created a set of laws and documents to steal whatever they could from the indigenous populations here, and enrich themselves while importing slaves from Europe and Africa to tend their fields and work their machines. Furthermore, those documents and laws are always subject to hermeneutic revision, repeatedly revised and reinterpreted in order to satisfy the requirements of the managers and owners today. That is the nature of the beast we face. And they can rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite as long as they like… it is built in to the system… And so while the tribal elders in Pakistan sit down to discuss the meaning of things in their communities… our leaders redefine the meaning of the law, so as to allow them to murder those tribal elders by drone, and to do so without reprisal. We are the executioner!
The Executioner!
He is the man behind the rough looking body guards lounging lazily in the Foster Grants… like the fearsome North African leaders of old; he determines who lives and who dies… He is the hegemon… the angel of death… the grim reaper… he is Barack Obama. This once and ‘wanna-be-eternal’ king singlehandedly destroys whatever is in its path, like a two mile wide tornado in Oklahoma, the worst wildfire in Colorado history, or a once-in-five-hundred-year flood in Germany; and he seems comfortable propagandizing or lying without compunction or guilt, worse even than Bill Clinton. (“I did not have sex with that woman.”) Obama does much better with his dissembling: “before any [drone] strike is taken there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured“). GW Bush… should take lessons from this man-god… and a wrathful one he is!
He appears to be responsible for more gratuitous killing across the planet than any of his evil predecessors, and certainly more already than the 9/11 hijackers. All in the name of freedom and democracy… and for the glory of god. What sacreligious crap. He kills indiscriminately with one hand as he takes away any of the presumed rights this State was founded upon with the other. He is taking care of the enemy! (definition – ‘anyone who would presume to take food or petrol from the hand or mouth of deserving American Oligarchs, their friends and co-conspirators’) So he is locking up the ‘in-mates’ as he whittles away at the ‘out-mates.’ Talk about having your cake and eating it!
His Special Ops paramilitary units carryout secret missions of assassination, while his drone-army-camps — comprised of pubescent boys with pimply faces sitting in their dirty underwear eating Cheetos and drinking Chocolate Yoohoo in some dingy Washington DC basement – kill babies, children, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, any one gathering for a meeting, a pic-nic, a game of pick-up basketball… or more than likely in Pakistan, a “jirga,” or assembly of tribal elders. Those are “signature strikes” ladies and gentlemen, taking out anyone who appears involved in any event that his ‘best and brightest’ computer-game geeks determine has the ‘signature’ of a terrorist gathering. WOW!! Sure seems simple enough; especially for the simple-minded Americans who buy this shit! But, sadly, the only thing ‘signature’ about these lucky strikes is the American John Hancock resting upon the lifeless forehead of every woman, child and harmless man.
Forty tribal elders dead!! killed by a ‘signature strike’ during a ‘pow-wow’ discussion of mining and logging issues in their local villages. WOW!! How the fuck do we do that? And get away with it! But, hey, anybody who can smile in the face of Guantanamo Bay, or Abu Ghraib, and the black sites literally littered across the globe in our name, while compiling private electronic communications data on all Americans — someone like this can certainly handle the indiscriminate killing of innocents in the name of his god, whatever its name happens to be.
But, don’t you know it… the killing non-Western indigenous types appears to be high priority on the agenda in preparation for the final leg of the race. The empire must find ways to reduce planetary population overshoot so that the imperialists have more stuff to consume until it all ends… perhaps extending their party a few more years. Remember, “he who dies with the most toys wins!” This is the ugly face of empire folks, as it makes the short strokes to “the end of time as we have known it.” Like most ‘actors’ on the civic stage throughout roughly 5,000 years of recorded history, our politicians have nothing more to offer us but increased control, oversight, manipulation and the threat of death. Nothing has really changed throughout the entire time… only the tools to manage the masses.
Do not let historians or histories of the founding of this ‘republic’ fool you. It was all a bunch of wealthy merchants, land owners, lawyers and charlatans with political clout that created a set of laws and documents to steal whatever they could from the indigenous populations here, and enrich themselves while importing slaves from Europe and Africa to tend their fields and work their machines. Furthermore, those documents and laws are always subject to hermeneutic revision, repeatedly revised and reinterpreted in order to satisfy the requirements of the managers and owners today. That is the nature of the beast we face. And they can rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite as long as they like… it is built in to the system… And so while the tribal elders in Pakistan sit down to discuss the meaning of things in their communities… our leaders redefine the meaning of the law, so as to allow them to murder those tribal elders by drone, and to do so without reprisal. We are the executioner!
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