hydrarchist writes....from australia......this is a translation someone did for the State of Emergency conference of a recent article to multitudes, previously unavailable in english as far as i know.also might be worth putting up on autonomedia...

The State of Emergency as the Empire's Mode of Governance.

by Jean-Claude Paye

translated by Patrice Riemens

Originally published in Multitudes 16, March 2004.

The atrocities of September 11, 2001 caused an unprecedented acceleration
in the transformation of the corpus of criminal and criminal procedure
laws in Western countries. In the months following the outrage, and
sometimes within days, governments have enacted measures curtailing public
and private liberties. In our opinion, a real break is taking place,
because it is the very existence of the rule of law as we know it which is
at stake.

hydrarchist writes ... this is just the introduction from a reader produced for a conference of the same title by some friends in Australia. The link to the rest of the texts can be found at the end.

The State of Emergency - A Reader

She is married to a man she loathes but who has her almost completely in his power ... [So] Sue Ellen’s ... alcoholism functions as a metaphor for her enduring state of crisis ... Such a state of crisis is not at all exceptional or uncommon in the context of the soap opera genre. On the contrary, crisis can be said to be endemic to it.- Ien Ang on Sue Ellen from Dallas.

In 1940, Walter Benjamin - a Marxist Jew in exile in France - wrote that “[t]he tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception, but the rule.” Just as crisis is the normal state for a soap opera about oil fortunes (i.e., Dallas), crisis is the normal state for the soap opera about oil fortunes in which we live (i.e., the world).

"Ashcroft, Snoops and Gag Orders:

The Secrets of
Surveillance"

Elaine Cassell, Counterpunch

Everyone knows by now (or should) that the Patriot Act
allows the FBI to conduct surveillance on Internet and
email usage. Using so-called National Security Letters
(NSLs), the FBI directs Internet Service Providers
(ISPs) to provide passwords and identifying information
that will allow the government to target people who are
plotting terrorism or who are otherwise potentially
dangerous to national security. I am sure that many of
you reading this (and I, likely) have the government in
our computers.

simulacrum writes:

The "New" Europe

The European Union as from May 1 has ten new member-countries. It extended its membership after years of debate and indecisiveness and became the world's single biggest market with a population of 450 million. Not only that the extended EU increased its economic potential, and eventually its worldwide influence and economic power, but it created a part of the world which will presumably be a respective, almost equal, competitor to the US on the global political landscape in quest for global dominance.

As it is, there are some significant downsides to this spectacular "Europeanization of Europe". Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, as some of the new members are societies with a dreadful recent past of unsuccessful communism. Their economies were systematically ruined by the overwhelming influence of Stalinist Soviet Union and the population of those countries as a whole lack, if we can call it like that, a basic training course in democracy. Of course, some countries, like for example Slovenia, had more ideological and geographical contacts with Western Europe, and therefore have developed a stronger sense of what "capitalism" and "democracy" as abstract concepts mean. Thus, this Slovenian experience reflected itself to certain extent in the current socio-political situation in the country which is, along with Cyprus, the richest newcomer in EU with a GDP per head of 69% of EU average.