comfort torture

Yesterday, Tuesday April 10, I saw an article by Mr. Joseph Kahn at the New York Times on China's mistreatment of one of its intellectuals. If you read the Times, you've read the same article about a hundred times before. They love writing articles about evil foreign regimes while luxuriating in the pink bubble bath background assumption that "we" aren't anything like that. And thus Kahn was more than willing, when referring to China's treatment of its reformist intellectuals, to use a word that has become, recently, "contested": torture. Earlier this year, in January, I contacted another Times reporter, Mr. Scott Shane, who was unwilling to use the 'T' word in an unqualified way concerning our treatment of detainees at Guantanomo. The contrast between these two uses of the word 'torture' is what prompted me to contact both authors.

Continue reading “comfort torture”

'Harrar': A nice cluster of towns in Ethiopia, now owned by a Starbucks nearer you

Following on from Mark's previous post, it seems the new dictatorship of mega-corporations is finally putting the nation-state, explicitly, in its proper place:

Now, Starbucks has begun to pursue trademark rights for its Ethiopian coffees – Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, and Harrar – despite those names describing geographic regions of Ethiopia that have been producing coffee for hundreds of years.  The Ethiopian government has objected to this...

Continue reading “'Harrar': A nice cluster of towns in Ethiopia, now owned by a Starbucks nearer you”

The line between the abroad and at home ...

President Bush seized this unprecedented power on the very same day that he signed the equally odious Military Commissions Act of 2006. In a sense, the two laws complement one another. One allows for torture and detention abroad, while the other seeks to enforce acquiescence at home, preparing to order the military onto the streets of America. [+]

Where is the border?

Spooked

In Australia recently, a number of universities have advised phd students researching terrorism that, under current laws, the information they gather "might" be passed on to security agencies.  A student in the Terrorism Research Project at Monash University was questioned by Federal Police after borrowing books from the library on terrorism.  At least one prominent sociologist has, after receiving a grant, abandoned research into the motivations of suicide bombers.  A paper by the Australian Homeland Security Research Centre urges universities to do more to counter "extremism" on campuses and insists that researchers should "be willing to share the findings of their work with government before publishing". Responding to questions regarding the conduct of research under the so-called 'Anti-Terror' laws, the Attorney-General insisted that prospective researchers should first discuss their research with him, personally, but urged the research to continue.  In other words, the issue here is not censorship (or not quite), so much as ensuring that academics become either de facto or unwitting spooks.  Somewhat sharpens the meaning of 'informant' as used in Qualitative Research Methods 101, does it not?

War portraiture

Terror Town | The Duct Tape Guys | Sovereign Authority

.. face down, face up to, facing off, losing face, prima facie, saving face ...

Disappeared

This is part one of a trilogy of short films called Disappeared in America - the other two can be watched here.

Continue reading “Disappeared”

The Führerprinzip

Let not propositions and "ideas" be the rules of your Being.  The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law.  Learn to know ever more deeply: from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility.  Heil Hitler!

Martin Heidegger, 1933

Continue reading “The Führerprinzip ”

Total Normality

To the right is the front page of Argentine daily newspaper Clarín, from March 25th 1976, thirty years ago, the day after the coup d'état that ushered in the so-called "Process of National Reconstruction." A "Process" in which some 30,000 would be killed.

Continue reading “Total Normality”

Por Ahora

When we started LS, we spent quite awhile batting around possible names. One suggestion was por ahora. Here's the back story.

Guerrero started supporting Chávez in 1992, on that fateful day when the then-unknown 37-year-old colonel launched a failed coup of his own. When defeat appeared imminent, Chávez surrendered. To avoid a bloodbath he went on television and asked his compatriots who were still holding two cities to put down their weapons.

During that short live broadcast Chávez did two things that electrified the Venezuelan imagination. First, he took personal responsibility for the botched coup. This seemed to many viewers like a significant break from the standard political tradition of lying and blaming others for failure. Then, in explaining the defeat, Chávez said, "For now, the objectives that we have set for ourselves have not been achieved."

During the next two years, while Chávez was in prison studying, that key phrase--"for now," or por ahora in Spanish--became a rallying cry, a slogan of defiance painted on walls, a talisman of hope in an otherwise
squalid and corrupt political landscape.

Today, we find on Planned Obsolescence the following:

To the Pomona College community:

On Tuesday, March 7, Miguel Tinker Salas, Arango Professor of Latin American History and Chicano Studies, was visited in his Pearsons Hall office by two men from the Los Angeles County Sheriff/FBI Joint Task Force on Terrorism. To avoid rumors, I wanted the Pomona College community to be aware of the facts.

The agents asked Professor Tinker Salas a number of personal questions as well as questions about the Venezuelan government and the Venezuelan community in the U.S. During the meeting, they told him that he was not a subject of investigation. The tone and content of the questioning, however, troubled him deeply. He was also troubled by the fact that the agents reportedly questioned some of the students outside his office while waiting to see him.

Miguel, as all of you know, is a superb Wig Award winning teacher and a fine scholar on Latin American history, politics, and culture who is sometimes asked by the news media to comment on topics related to his research, including Venezuelan politics. The College supports him and his scholarly work without reservation.

I am extremely concerned about the chilling effect this kind of intrusive government interest could have on free scholarly and political discourse. I am also concerned about the negative message it sends to students who are considering the pursuit of important areas of international study, in which they may now feel exposed to unwarranted official scrutiny.

The College is currently consulting with legal advisors about the most effective way to register a strong official protest about this intrusion into our scholarly and educational activities, and we will take appropriate action as soon as their advice is received. We are also asking for their help in assuring that all members of the College community are fully informed about their rights and their options in such situations.

David Oxtoby

And Kathleen Fitzgerald asks the right questions:

-- If Venezuela is in fact the subject of official anti-terrorist scrutiny, how much of that scrutiny really has to do with terrorism? How much has to do with the threat of socialism? How much has to do with oil?

"Por ahora" has suddenly taken on a whole new - and wholly dark - new meaning. For if we have been waiting for the other shoe to drop - "they're interested only in terror, in the middle east - they're not interested in me and what I say or think or write...For now, things will be OK..." - it is becoming increasingly clear that por ahora has already become just plain ahora...

Contains Mild Peril

Happy Birthday Bernadine Dohrn, former member of The Weather Underground. I wonder if saying this counts as glorifying terrorism?

Things Changed

It’s a point that’s been made quite well on Lenin’s Tomb a while back, but I thought I’d rehearse and add to it here. Why is the government so zealously pursuing new legislation relating to security? When in fact it isn’t necessary. This from today’s Guardian: [Blair] was speaking as police arrested 10 foreign suspects with a view to deporting them, not under Labour’s new laws, but under the national security terms of the 1971 Immigration Act. Asked why the law had not been used earlier, he replied: “Because things changed after 7/7.”

In other words, a law existed already which allowed the government’s aim to be achieved. Yet this didn’t stop it drawing up new legislation. Would the Law Lords have ruled imprisonment without trial unlawful had they made their ruling after 7/7, Blair asked yesterday, trying to drive home the idea that “the rules of the game are changing.” Be prepared to hear this phrase a lot over the next few months as the government tries to capitalize on a fragile cross-party consensus for new anti-terror laws. Be prepared too for a framing of the argument about civil liberties and human rights that will present security and freedom as a trade-off.

Continue reading “Things Changed”

Coffee anyone?

Imagine that a foreign government is orchestrating a ruthless terrorist war against you. It funds and instructs the terrorists, who deliberately murder civilians, rape women, smash babies against trees and innumerable other atrocities - all this takes place within the borders of your country, and continues until the task of the foreign government is complete: to have a government in place of which it approves. Then the terrorists want to sell you coffee. Do you buy it?

Touched by Bloodless Abstraction

The argument about indifference here needs elaborating. The ‘indifference’ – and in one case the advertising of one’s indifference – amounts to saying ‘what does not touch my immediate experience is a matter of little concern to me, or concerns me only as it touches my immediate experience, community, interests.’ Another, slightly more philosophical way of putting it is that I am touched by what happens to those who share the same predicates as me – white, middle-class, American or whatever. Conversely, I am incapable of being touched by - or really grasping - a level of humanity that precedes such predicates. My moral compass is governed by the accident of nearness. Thus, such people are spontaneous Rorty-ite liberals, a position here deftly summarised and defeated by Teagleton:

Continue reading “Touched by Bloodless Abstraction”

Holidays in the Sun

Ever wanted a job with real perks? Like free foreign holidays, luxury rooms at top hotels in glamorous Mediterranean locations, free flights and a mobile phone thrown in? Then join the CIA.

Iraq in the Name of Freedom

Some video of Iraq, for "mature audiences only," which rules out most of our current leaders, I figure (courtesy of Splinters). 

Update:  For the no-bullshit words of someone who's been there, and who is still there now, you may go here.  Goddamn this fucking war, and the greedy, head-in-the-sand OCD crooks who brought it. 

Continue reading “Iraq in the Name of Freedom”