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Although it is cliché to say, her beauty and serenity evoke an aging Virgin Mary, especially in this setting. She sits on her donkey expression unchanged as she bounces along among the olive trees through the rocky valley pass eyes glancing outward, watchful and placid.
Her donkey has an open sore on its behind and she has a grotesquely bulbous and purple arm irritated to elephantine proportions by the holes made to clean her blood three times a week.
It is this arm that she offers to the soldier as proof of her right to pass. The man she travels with, also a dialysis patient, on a healthier donkey with less corroded looking track marks, speaks English,“Please”, he says looking up at the two boys lounging on the hill, guns cocked,
“Dialysis, we are dialysis.”
Nidal has no common language with these people. She offers the arm and a slight faraway smile.
"Hollywood Isn't Holding Its Lines Against the Pentagon"
Jonathan Turley, LA Times
With the reality of entrenched opposition in Iraq resulting in increasing U.S. fatalities there, the opposition at home to the occupation is hardening by the day. The military appears to have come up with a solution: Change reality.
In what has been described as a "Pentagon infomercial," the Defense Department has hired a former producer of the TV show "Cops" to film postwar Iraq from its perspective. Though producer Bertram van Munster has denied that he is shooting a propaganda piece, it is clear that the Pentagon is gearing up to frame its own account — and history — of the Iraq war.
"Lessons in How to Lie About Iraq"
Brian Eno, August 17, 2003 by the Observer/UK
When I first visited Russia, in 1986, I made friends with a
musician whose father had been Brezhnev's personal doctor.
One day we were talking about life during 'the period of
stagnation' -- the Brezhnev era. 'It must have been strange
being so completely immersed in propaganda,' I said.
'Ah, but there is the difference. We knew it was
propaganda,' replied Sacha.
Anonymous Comrade submits
Tandem Surfing the Third Wave: Part 3, interview with
subRosa
Ryan Griffis
This interview was conducted between subRosa and Ryan
Griffis via email correspondence during the first half
of 2003.
subRosa is an artists collective that produces
performative and new media projects that critique the
relationships between digital technologies,
biotechnologies and women's bodies/lives/work. subRosa
was initiated in the fall of 1998 as a project at the
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, from which it has evolved
into its current form, a collective of five women
dispersed throughout the US. A new book, Domain
Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices, edited by Faith
Wilding, Michelle Wright and Maria Fernandez, was
recently released by the group and published by
Autonomedia Books. subRosa can be found on the Web at
Cyberfeminism.
1.
RG: Could you briefly discuss cyberfeminism and how it
relates to other historical versions of feminism and
critical theory?
Rob Eshelman
I didn’t sleep very well; all night I heard the sound of tanks maneuvering through the streets of Jenin. Or were they the sounds of bulldozers? Why would a bulldozer be running at three in the morning? Getting up from the flat roof of an office building where I was trying to sleep I’d look over the edge of the building.
Then came the sound of distinct gunfire. The rapid crackle of fully automatic M-16 fire, the tell tale sign of the Israeli Defense Forces. They’ve got unlimited ammunition whereas Al Aksa and other Palestinian resistance groups don’t so they opt for semi-automatic bursts or single shots. I didn’t sleep much and the next day I was to travel to Salfit.
August 19,2003
THE THINGS THAT KEEP US HERE
by Caoimhe Butterly in Baghdad
Anwar Adel Khardom points to her heavily pregnant,shrapnel-sprayed stomach as she fluctuates between composure and frantic, inconsolable grief. 'What sort of life will this child be born into?' Her thirteen year old daughter Hadil, frail arms bruised and scarred with shrapnel, head bandaged with white gauze, remains wide-eyed and observant, fanning her mother with a woven fan as the heat of an oppressive, airless day reaches it's midday climax.The room is crowded with relatives and friends who drink the bitter coffee and cry and keen in memory of Anwar's husband, Adel, her 18-year old son Haider, 17-year old daughter Ola, and 8-year old daughter Mervat-all shot dead by U.S.soldiers seven days before. 'How could they, why did they do it-they must of known we were a family-how could they kill my babies?', Anwar asks continually as she holds a picture of her beautiful, smiling children immortalised on the black banners hung on the outside walls of her family home,each of their names withshaheed (martyr) scripted next to it, proclaiming the family's tragedy to the hushed street outside.
The car that carried Anwar's family into a line of fire that pumped more than twenty bullets through the windshield and chassis into the warm living flesh,vital organs and skulls of her husband and children remains outside.The seats and headrests were ripped apart by bullets and remain covered in faded,darkened bloodstains.Hadil's blood-stained handprints on the outside of the car are the same colour,left there as she groped her way out of the car that held dead Ola and Haider and dying Adel and Mervat, trying to follow her mother as Anwar ran towards the house they had just come from,screaming for help. No help came,at 9:30 p.m. on August 7 in Hyatt al Tunis,a residential neighborhood in Baghdad.U.S. soldiers continued to shoot so erratically at anyone attempting to help the wounded,that they proceeded to injure at least five other civilians and two of their own soldiers, as other troops stationed in a military base stationed at the end of the street joined in. Ground troops from the First Brigade,First Armoured Division proceeded to fire round after round into the darkened street ,shattering the quiet of a summer night and destroying the remnants of tolerance held by that,and many other communities,towards an occupational presence whose benign veneer grows thinner by the day. When the up to twenty minutes of constant shooting stopped,three civilians were dead and more wounded.Saef A.,a 21-year old university student, who drove in a car with two friends down the same road into the path of U.S. occupational forces(who were in the process of raiding and searching a local store,and ,having been subjected to the standard continual diet of mis-information and racism,suitably terrified enough to view all Iraqis as potential or actual enemies)was shot repeatedly and then-as his two friends,both wounded,leapt out of the car,witnesses report seeing a soldier approaching the car, point a gun with a grenade-launcher attached at the still-living Saef, and shoot, causing the car, and Saef's body to be engulfed in flames.
Anonymous Comrade submits:
"Bert Brecht, Minstrel of the GPU"
Ruth Fischer
Introduction By Bob Gould
The 75th anniversary of the first performance of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera occurred recently. Over the past few years there have been several major critical biographies of Brecht, and studies of his relationship with his female artistic collaborators. There is no question that Brecht was one of the two or three most influential playwrights of the 20th century, and his artistic influence has been generally progressive. Nevertheless, his work includes a hard Stalinist aspect, which, for instance in the 1970s, made a kind of romantic Stalinism acceptable to some intellectuals and students. The play Ruth Fischer discusses below is better known in English as The Measures Taken, and is still in print in the comprehensive Methuen library of Brecht plays. Fischer's book, Stalin and German Communism, is of great historical interest, particularly to people who may have followed the discussion of the notion of Zinovievism.
"No, It's Not Anti-Semitic
Judith Butler
Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-semitic in their effect if not their intent. -- Lawrence Summers, 17 September 2002
When the president of Harvard University declared that to criticise Israel at this time and to call on universities to divest from Israel are 'actions that are anti-semitic in their effect, if not their intent', he introduced a distinction between effective and intentional anti-semitism that is controversial at best. The counter-charge has been that in making his statement, Summers has struck a blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not in intent. Although he insisted that he meant nothing censorious by his remarks, and that he is in favour of Israeli policy being 'debated freely and civilly', his words have had a chilling effect on political discourse. Among those actions which he called 'effectively anti-semitic' were European boycotts of Israel, anti-globalisation rallies at which criticisms of Israel were voiced, and fund-raising efforts for organisations of 'questionable political provenance'. Of local concern to him, however, was a divestment petition drafted by MIT and Harvard faculty members who oppose Israel's current occupation and its treatment of Palestinians. Summers asked why Israel was being 'singled out . . . among all nations' for a divestment campaign, suggesting that the singling out was evidence of anti-semitic intentions. And though he claimed that aspects of Israel's 'foreign and defence' policy 'can be and should be vigorously challenged', it was unclear how such challenges could or would take place without being construed as anti-Israel, and why these policy issues, which include occupation, ought not to be vigorously challenged through a divestment campaign. It would seem that calling for divestment is something other than a legitimately 'vigorous challenge', but we are not given any criteria by which to adjudicate between vigorous challenges that should be articulated, and those which carry the 'effective' force of anti-semitism.
jim submits ""Ravachol"
Octave Mirbeau
Translated and introduced by Robert Helms
Francois-Claudius Koeningstein (Oct. 14, 1859 -- July 11, 1892), known to posterity as Ravachol, was born to Dutch and French parents at Saint-Chamond, near St. Etienne in Eastern France. He was angered by two actions taken by the French government on May 1, 1891. One was at Fourmies, where the newly designed Lebels machine gun was used against a peaceful May Day rally at which women and children were carrying flowers and palms. Casualties there numbered 14 dead and 40 wounded. The other incident was at Clichy, where police attacked a six-man anarchist labor rally. The workers defended themselves with pistol-shots and were subsequently given long terms at hard labor.
Anonymous Kumquat submits:
"The Discourse of History"
Roland Barthes
Translated by Stephen Bann. Comparative Criticism, 3 (1981): 7-20. Pagination, superscripts, and accents are not preserved. Please see source for the final three notes.
The formal description of sets of words beyond the level of the sentence (what we call for convenience discourse) is not a modern development: from Gorgias to the nineteenth century, it was the special concern of traditional rhetoric. Recent developments in the science of language have nonetheless endowed it with a new timeliness and new methods of analysis: a linguistic description of discourse can perhaps already be envisaged at this stage; because of its bearings on literary analysis (whose importance in education is well known) it is one of the first assignments for semiology to undertake.
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