Today, words like “progress” and “development” have become interchangeable with economic “reforms”, deregulation and privatisation. “Freedom” has come to mean “choice”. It has less to do with the human spirit than it does with different brands of deodorant. “Market” no longer means a place where you go to buy provisions. The “market” is a de-territorialised space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling “futures”. “Justice” has come to mean “human rights” (and of those, as they say, “a few will do”).
This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalise their detractors, deprive them of a language in which to voice their critique and dismiss them as being “anti-progress”, “anti-development”, “anti-reform” and of course “anti-national” – negativists of the worst sort. Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, “Don’t you believe in progress?” To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs and whose homes are being bulldozed they say, “Do you have an alternative development model?” To those who believe that a government is duty-bound to provide people with basic education, health care and social security, they say, “You’re against the market.” And who except a cretin could be against a market? more»
We use "Empire" in the sense proposed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to designate a post-Cold War planetary capitalism with "no outside," [1] but we modulate their account to take greater consideration of the internal frictions wracking this order since the millennium. By Empire, we mean the global capitalist ascendancy of the early twenty-first century, a system administered and policed by a consortium of competitively collaborative states, among whom the US still clings, by virtue of its military might, to an increasingly fragile preeminence. This is a regime of biopower based on corporate exploitation of myriad types of labour, paid and unpaid, for the continuous enrichment of a planetary plutocracy. Empire is an order of extraordinary scope and depth. Yet it also is precarious, flush with power and wealth, yet close to chaos as it confronts a set of interlocking economic, ecological, energy, and epidemiological crises. Its governance is threatened by tensions between a declining US and a rising China which could either result in some super-capitalist accommodation, consolidating Empire, or split it into warring Eastern and Western blocs. Its massive inequalities catalyze resistances from below, some, reactionary and regressive, others, like the global justice and ecological movement, protagonists of a better alternative.
What makes virtual games' technocultural form exemplary of Empire is their identity with its key means of production, communication and destruction--the digital network. More than any previous media other than the book, virtual play is a direct offshoot of its society's crucial technology of power. Sprung from the military-industrial matrix that generated the computer and Internet, games are today a test ground for digital innovations and machinic subjectivities: online play worlds incubate artificial intelligences; consoles plug to grid computing systems; games are media of choice for experiments in neurobiological stimulation and brain driven telekinesis. And, once suspect as delinquent time waster, virtual play is increasingly understood by state and corporate managers as training populations for networked work, war and governability.
We examine the relation between games and Empire in terms of the virtual and the actual, conjugating this couplet with intentionally fuzzy logic in two distinct yet overlapping ways. The virtual is the digital, the on-screen world, as opposed to existence "IRL". But "virtual" also denotes potentiality; the manifold directions in which a given, actual, situation might develop. [2] The technological and ontological virtual are distinct and should never be conflated. [3] But they are related, through the practice of simulation. Computers create potential universes. They model, dynamically, what might be. Such simulation is vital to a power system engaged in the high-risk military, financial and corporate calculus required for globalized control. It is from such simulation that virtual games emerged, broke loose into ludic freedom--only to now be reintegrated into the assemblages of world capital, as a means of inducing the "flexible personality" [4] demanded by digital work, war and markets. Yet this ludic apprenticeship can generate capacities in excess of Empire's requirements. Just as the eighteenth-century novel was a textual apparatus generating the bourgeois character required by mercantile colonialism (but also capable of criticizing it), and twentieth-century cinema and television were integral to industrial consumerism (yet screened some of its darkest depictions), so, we suggest, virtual games are the exemplary media producing subjects for twenty-first century global hyper-capitalism but also, perhaps, of exodus from it. more»
Ari Folman's semiautobiographical "Waltz With Bashir" is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars. It also was considered a potential nominee in the documentary and animation categories. I suppose you could call it an animated documentary by way of oral history, but it's best not to get caught up with labels concerning this film.
What begins as an introspective odyssey examining the effects of war on the young Israeli soldiers turns into a provocative exposé on the Sabra and Shatila massacre, an event that sent shock waves through Israelis who were made inadvertent collaborators. But the final word is not their emotional trauma, but the stark reality of the event itself. more»
The Phalange party in Lebanon represents an extremist faction of Maronite Christians in Lebanon that was modeled under the fascist parties of Spain, Italy and Germany. They serve also as the militia arm of a movement that marries the self-determination of Maronite Christians to self-determination of the nation of Lebanon. In some ways the Phalangist party mirrors those of Hindu nationalist parties such as the RSS or VHP in India, both claiming a long history of suffering under occupation, both fascist, both wishing to unify God, Nation and Family under a militarist banner that preserves national purity.
Under the watchful eyes of Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Military a Phalange militia committed one of the worst atrocities in the recent history of the Middle East the Sabra and Shatila massacres of many hundreds of Palistinian refugees, in revenge for the killing of their leader Bashir Gemayel.
The long struggle that the Maronites had for self determination, over some fifteen hundred years, in which they have suffered greatly at the hands of history has forged in them a strong national identity. While deserving much praise for their perseverance of identity as a “people”, the historical persistence of a collective identity, the inheritance of memory whose pain become ones own, is always a co-dependent arising with the “other” who one can demonize for inflicting suffering, the "other" on whom one can seek revenge.
A history of the Phalange party and the Maronite Christian community follows.... more»
Once again, Pakistan is in crisis, with Waziristan the newest "most dangerous place" in the world. Islamabad can't control the escalating conflict, and the government is again run by an unpopular, incompetent and nepotistic civilian administration.
And again, Pakistan is going hat in hand to the IMF, Saudi Arabia and China to face off oil prices, food inflation, dwindling foreign exchange and declining terms of trade.
Tariq Ali has been warning of Pakistan's collapse for four decades. For those sins, his books have often been banned there, and "generals, corrupt politicians and bearded lunatics" dislike him in equal measure. In The Duel, Ali provides a gossip-filled, witty and polemical history, revealing, with perspicacity and verve, the flight into the abyss. ... more»
Pakistan and India have been at war since 1948. There have been occasional flare-ups, pitched battles between the two armies, but mostly the war has taken the form of a guerrilla battle between the Indian army and Pakistani surrogates in Kashmir. In 2004 the two countries began a cautious peace process, but rather than ending, the war has since migrated to Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas on the Afghan border. ‘Safe havens’ for a reinvigorated Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida, the tribal areas are seen by the West as the ‘greatest threat’ to its security, as well as being the main cause of Western frustration with Pakistan. The reason is simple: the Pakistan army’s counterinsurgency strategy is not principally directed at the Taliban or even al-Qaida: the main enemy is India. more»
Spectacular Acts of Terrorism create Events which are designed to shift the public discourse by rupturing processes of dialogue and understanding. A Big Bang such as planes that crash into buildings, or trains that explode, or discotheques that blow up, or a rain of bullets across a city -- brings about a quantum shift in every single aspect of individual perception and public policy -- immediately. This is the deliberate outcome of such Spectacles -- they are planned to disrupt incrementalist and rational development of thought processes at every level of a pluralist functioning state and society. This is why they happen unannounced, this is why they happen simultaneously at multiple locations, and this is why they target places of public prominence.
Who carries out such Spectacular Acts? We hear that the terrorists in Mumbai were young men in jeans with rucksacks who went for carnage with smiles on their faces. It is foolish to assume that the terrorists who go for such Spectacles are desperate people interested in alleviating genuine grievances. Of course, terrorists fight for a cause. But that cause isn't what they kill for; the specificity and legitimacy of their cause (Iraq, Kashmir, Gujarat, Chechya, Afghanistan, whatever they may think it to be) is condensed into the general and universal terms of violence and hatred by those who recruit them and radicalise them. By the time they spray bullets and hold hostages, asking for justice on their own terms, they have long betrayed themselves and become prisoners of manipulated representations. ....more»
In New York on the last day of an American tour, absorbing the demise of Yankee Stadium and maybe of Wall Street as we thought we knew it, Zizek’s talk is a blast-furnace but not a blur. The theme through all Zizek’s gags is that the financial meltdown marks a seriously dangerous moment — dangerous not least because, as in the interpretation of 9.11, the right wing is ready to impose a narrative. And the left wing is caught without a narrative or a theory. “Today is the time for theory,” he says. “Time to withdraw and think.”
Dangerous moments are coming. Dangerous moments are always also a chance to do something. But in such dangerous moments, you have to think, you have to try to understand. And today obviously all the predominant narratives — the old liberal-left welfare state narrative; the post-modern third-way left narrative; the neo-conservative narrative; and of course the old standard Marxist narrative — they don’t work. We don’t have a narrative. Where are we? Where are we going? What to do? You know, we have these stupid elementary questions: Is capitalism here to stay? Are there serious limits to capitalism? Can we imagine a popular mobilization outside democracy? How should we properly react to ecology? What does it mean, all the biogenetic stuff? How to deal with intellectual property today? Things are happening. We don’t have a proper approach. It’s not only that we don’t have the answers. We don’t even have the right question. more»
To invent something is to invent an accident. To invent the ship
is to invent the shipwreck; the space shuttle, the explosion. And to
invent the electronic superhighway or the Internet is to invent a
major risk which is not easily spotted because it does not produce
fatalities like a shipwreck or a mid-air explosion. The information
accident is, sadly, not very visible. It is immaterial like the waves
that carry information.
- Yet you call yourself an "adept of technologies".
I am an art critic of technologies, a fan worried about the
propagandistic and sudden nature of the new technologies. When
machines begin to be idolized, social catastrophe is never far
behind.more»
Well just when you thought the Bush War Machine was winding down, news comes out of the ramp up for covert military/intelligence operations in Iran. What makes the matter so much more disgusting is that the Democratic Leadership has signed off on the funding for their project. The following interview with Seymour Hersh - the Pulitzer Prize winning dissident journalist - details the story which he just broke in the New Yorker Magazine.... more»
Given the Supreme Court decision to grant rights of Habaes Corpus to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was 5 to 4 it is not real comforting to know that here in America we are just one vote away from a full dictatorship.
If one wants to explore the devolution of a justice system founded on Enlightenment Values, the history of the US Supreme Court since Ronald Reagan's presidency would be a text book example. The original interpretation philosophy of the most conservative justices correlates well with fundamentalist interpretations of religion. Fortunately however ,this time the stench
of totalitarianism was too much for the majority. Unfortunately, in this case both the executive branch and a democratic congress were also complicit in legislating high crimes against the justice system rc....
Congress, in turn, twice tried to eliminate habeas rights for detainees. The Supreme Court rejected the first attempt in 2006, ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the legislation did not apply to pending cases. So Congress tried again with the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), which made explicit that the elimination of habeas rights applied to all Guantánamo cases, past, present and future. The issue before the Supreme Court in Boumediene was whether the MCA violated the constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus, known as the "Suspension Clause..."more»
documented Iraqi civilian deaths (courtesy Iraq body count)
In one of the most cynical moments of recent political history General David Patraeus - the current Chief Operations Officer of the enterprise called: Occupation Iraq - in his recent testimony before the US Congress referred to the civil war in Iraq as ethno-sectarian competition.
For all of you who know your George Orwell, here is a fascinating look at the Patraeus testimony ... more»
Hedges takes on both the Christian Right and The New Atheists, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris et al. and finds some striking neo-conservative similarities between the two. He also has some interesting things to say about the progressive utopian
idealism the new atheists inherit from the Enlightenment tradition rc...
I write in the book that not believing in God is not dangerous. Not believing in sin is very dangerous. I think both the Christian right and the New Atheists in essence don't believe in their own sin, because they externalize evil. Evil is always something out there that can be eradicated. For the New Atheists, it's the irrational religious hordes. I mean, Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. Both Hitchens and Harris defend the use of torture. Of course, they're great supporters of preemptive war, and I don't think this is accidental that their political agendas coalesce completely with the Christian right...more»
...Few of his contemporaries think of George Walker Bush as a visionary American president, unless they are using the term to imply a touch of madness. Yet early in his second term Bush launched a bold initiative to try to establish closer American ties with India, the world’s biggest democracy, in what may eventually be judged by historians as a move of great strategic importance and imagination...
Bush... has managed to cast aside 40 years of hostility and suspicion between America and India – and even agreed to start collaborating over nuclear energy – in the hope of strengthening India and its economy. And all for a special reason: the rise of China. ...more»
Picasso captured an intense scene reflecting the deeply unjust suffering, agony and despair experienced by the people of Guernica. And in doing so he produced one of the most iconic, powerful and affecting pieces of anti-war artwork ever put to canvas. It is little surprise then that a reproduction of the painting, which hangs outside the entrance to the UN Security Council, was covered while Colin Powell was attempting to sell the Iraq War to the world.
The people of Iraq are suffering what amounts to the similar unjust brutality inflicted on the people of Guernica Iraq, except it's practically on a daily basis. A more accurate comparison would be to imagine having the London Tube and Bus bombings everyday. And have them happen so often that they become a predictable daily occurrence and part of life."
Guernica was the product of a fascist Spanish-German alliance between Franco and Hitler, and the corportist sponsors of the Luftwaffe. The following collage of images come to us trough the efforts of the Anglo-American alliance of Blair and Bush and through the courtesy of Boeing, Haliburton, Blackwater et al....
more»
On the five year anniversary week of the Iraq war what can one say? Hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees, a nation in civil war, and no real end in sight. A war that even former head of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan concedes was fought over oil. One can only turn to images and here is Picasso whose depiction of the slaughter at Guernica Spain as a result of German bombing, is considered one of his most important paintings. I will post a link to U tube video by the same title which unfortunately subjects Guernica to the eternal return of the same.
The Pentagon counted down Wednesday toward an unprecedented effort to shoot down a dying and potentially deadly U.S. spy satellite, using a souped-up missile fired from a ship in the Pacific.
The timing was tricky. For the best chance to succeed, the military awaited a combination of favorable factors: steady seas around the Navy cruiser that would fire the missile, optimum positioning of the satellite as it passed in polar orbit and the readiness of an array of space- and ground-based sensors to help cue the missile and track the results.
The operation was so extraordinary, with such intense international publicity and political ramifications, that Defense Secretary Robert Gates — not a military commander — was to make the final decision to pull the trigger.
The government organized hazardous materials teams, under the code name "Burnt Frost," to be flown to the site of any dangerous or otherwise sensitive debris that might land in the United States or elsewhere. ...more»
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