"How Fascism Starts"

Molly Ivins, Creators Syndicate

AUSTIN, Texas — It's pretty easy to get to the point where
you don't want to hear any more about Abu Ghraib prison and
what went on there. But there are some really good reasons
why Americans should take a look at why this happened.

I suspect the division here is not between liberals and
conservatives (except for a few inane comments made by some
trying to be flippant), but between those who are following
the story closely and those who are not. I particularly
recommend both Sy Hersh's follow-up piece in the current
issue of The New Yorker and the investigative piece in the
current issue of Newsweek. What seems to me more important
than the "Oh ugh" factor is just how easy it is for standards
of law and behavior of slip into bestiality.

"When Bonesmen Fight"

Tom Hayden,
Yale Politic

I hope some journalist has the guts to ask John Kerry
(Skull and Bones, 1965) and George Bush (Skull and
Bones, 1967) whether they have any qualms about
belonging to a secret, oath-bound network since their
college days. Did they discuss Skull and Bones in code
when President Bush called Senator Kerry to
congratulate him on his primary victories? Will they
agree not to leave the room if the reporter blurts out
"322", coded references to Demosthene's birthday and
Skull and Bones' founding.

Am I scratching the blackboard yet, dear reader? Or are
you smugly dismissing these questions as paranoid and
unsophisticated?

Rafah's Human Face
Starhawk

Just over a year ago, I held Nehad's six-year old, curly haired charmer of a daughter on my lap and scooped eggs from a plate shared by her five other children as bullets thudded into the walls of her home in the border zone of Rafah. With shy pride, Nehad told me the eggs were from her own chickens, the oranges from the few trees that remained undamaged in her garden. The kids watched cartoons on TV , inured to the rat-a-tat-tat of constant fire until the bullets grew so loud that even they dived to the floor.

"Afflicted Powers:
The State, the Spectacle and September 11"
Retort

He too fought under television for our place in the sun.
Robert Lowell on Lieutenant Calley, 1971.

We begin from the moment in February 2003 when the tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica hung in the anteroom to the un Security Council Chamber was curtained over, at American insistence—not ‘an appropriate backdrop’, it was explained, for official statements to the world media on the forthcoming invasion of Iraq. [1] The episode became an emblem. Many a placard on Piccadilly or Market Street rang sardonic changes on Bush and the snorting bull. An emblem, yes—but, with the benefit of hindsight, emblematic of what? Of the state’s relentless will to control the minutiae of appearance, as part of—essential to—its drive to war? Well, certainly. But in this case, did it get its way? Did not the boorishness of the effort at censorship prove counterproductive, eliciting the very haunting—by an imagery still capable of putting a face on the brutal abstraction of ‘shock and awe’—that the velcro covering was meant to put a stop to? And did not the whole incident speak above all to the state’s anxiety as it tried to micro-manage the means of symbolic production—as if it feared that every last detail of the derealized decor it had built for its citizens had the potential, at a time of crisis, to turn utterly against it?

Read the rest at

New Left Review