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Anonymous Comrade writes Note: This article has not appeared in Yellow Times which is still not operating.
"Was Einstein Right?"
John Chuckman
"My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain - especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state." Albert Einstein
Einstein is one of my favorite twentieth-century characters. He was remarkable, and I don't mean only for his profound contributions to our understanding of the physical world. He was someone who drove authoritarians like J. Edgar Hoover mad. He was one of those rare souls, like George Orwell, who despite mistakes and flaws, consciously worked to direct his actions, and redirect them after missteps, by principles of decency, humanity, and rational thought. He never subscribed to menacing slogans like "My country, right or wrong" or "You're either with us or against us." Quite the opposite, he knew any country was capable of being wrong at times and did not deserve blind allegiance when it was.
Anonymous Comrade writes:
This text from The Commoner is written by the editor of Autonomedia's new book Revolutionary Writing.
"Against War and the Preconditions of War"
Werner Bonefeld, The Commoner
On Sundays, holidays, there's naught I take delight in,
Like gossiping of war, and war's array,
The foreign people are a-fighting.
One at the window sits, with glass and friends,
And sees all sorts of ships go down the river gliding;
And blesses then, as home he wends
At night, our times of peace abiding. (Goethe, Faust I).
I
Goethe's depiction of the saturated bourgeois to whom war is a Sunday entertainment and for whom the times are bliss, has an eerie contemporary ring: war as televised entertainment. Even Hollywood can not compete for this is the real snuff movie. Since 1945, wars have been fought mostly in those areas of the world where the integration of populations into the world market society of capital is precarious, that is, where capitalist forms of social reproduction are deemed underdeveloped. Between 1945 and the early 1990, Latin America has had 396.000 war death, Africa 5.3 million, the Middle and Far East, 1.8 million, Asia 4.6 Million and Europe 238.000 (Gantzel and Schwinghammer, 1995, p. 150). This development has continued unabated. How many wars have been fought since the end of the Cold War? How many will be fought, not in years ahead, but in the next few months? Afghanistan has again been transformed into rubble. Iraq is to follow soon, and where next?
Anonymous Comrade writes
"Absurd War in Iraq"
John Chuckman
The title could be the name of a television quiz show, although I doubt the subject matter would attract a large audience, especially in that key market of the United States.
Anonymous Comrade writes:
"Is Uncle Sam about to get caught...?"
"Between Iraq and a Hard Place:
An Anti-State Communist Perspective on the War"
Angyal Istvan
As I write this, in early March 2003, the rulers of the United States are about to attack Iraq. If the prevalent guesses are correct, the American empire will rapidly defeat and destroy Saddam Hussein's regime, seize Iraqi oil fields, and occupy major urban centers. This will probably be accomplished with an initially low number of US military casualties, and a very high number of deaths among Iraqi civilians and military personnel. The United States will attempt to cobble together a client regime analogous to that of Karzai's in Afghanistan, and it will be at this point, the high-point of an apparently overwhelming and inexpensive US military victory, that a real, enduring defeat for the United States may begin.
hydrarchist writes
"Let's think about something else just for a little and not war, the propaganda, the pulverization of ethics, the despair..... Think of the new, the hopeful.... think about Free and Open Source Software and whether washing machines can be produced on a similar model, and whether it even matters."
The Two Economies
Graham Seaman
Or: Why the washing machine question is the wrong question
Introduction
Within capitalism, material goods are typically made:
o by people working for a wage
o for others who own the means of production
o in order to create profit
o by selling the product
The co-ordination between producers is indirect, through the market,
using money as a signalling mechanism.
Production of free software and other free goods can be contrasted
point by point with this list; non-material goods can be produced by
people:
o working because they chose to
o using their own means of production
o in order to create something useful or pleasurable
o which anyone can use
The co-ordination between producers is direct, mediated only by
technology.
Anonymous Comrade writes:
"Bring On the Spanners"
Arundhati Roy
Wednesday April 2, 2003
The Guardian
Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates...
How many children, in how many classrooms, over how many centuries, have hang-glided through the past, transported on the wings of these words? And now the bombs are falling, incinerating and humiliating that ancient civilisation
On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers scrawl colourful messages in childish handwriting: For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse. A building goes down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who loves a boy. A child who only ever wanted to play with his older brother's marbles.
dr.woooo writes:
"Intervention in the Vacuum"
By Chris Baden
Ever since the events of 1989-91, there has existed a historical vacuum. This vacuum has been filled by (depending on your world view) distinct descriptions such as End of History, Empire, Globalization. I am not so concerned over the correct definition of the current power structure, but I am concerned with how these power relations have shaped the current crisis in Iraq and what follows from there.
dr.woooo writes:
"The Same Old Empire (Oops, I mean Imperialism)...
by sasha k
Before September 11 2001, calling the US an Empire put one in the realm of the paranoid, the left or the academic, but now all that has changed. Everyone is using the word, both pro and con. It has been used so much that President Bush himself has had to respond:
"We have no territorial ambitions, we don't seek an empire," Bush remarked on Veterans Day, continuing, "Our nation is committed to freedom for ourselves and for others."
jim writes:
"Bush's Dream, America's Nightmare"
Jamal Mecklai
Having lived in -- and loved -- America for fifteen years, I have often found myself a lonely apologist as people everywhere made fun of America's shallow culture and shockingly thin knowledge levels, and were angered by its arrogant (and often violent) posturing in world affairs. Of course, since America was the worlds biggest market, since it had the best universities and made the best movies, most of the criticism was easy to deflect, since everybody -- or almost everybody -- also had a vested interest in the American dream.
The Bush government's immoral and illegal assault on Iraq this week has tormented me, more even that the attack on the World Trade Centers, since it has compelled me to confront the fact that a country I love(d) could pillage and rape in this manner.
The Bush Administration's Fear of War...and What Forces Them to Wage It
[Translated from the German, November 2002]
In Italy, France, but above all in the United States and England, many hundreds of thousands of people go in the streets in order to protest against the United States' forthcoming war against Iraq. They do this on different grounds and with varying ideas of why the Bush-Cheney-Rice clique wants this war no matter what.
In order to be against war, we don't need to know anything about their respective backgrounds. Wars are always massacres in the interests of the rulers. Whether Bush or Saddam Hussein, whether Schröder or Bin Laden, whether Sharon or Arafat--war and terrorist attacks serve them in the securing of their power and maintenance of the conditions on which their power rests. War is the sharpest form and demonstration of the force on which the capitalist order, the daily prison of labor and the power of money are based (see Wildcat: Global War for the World Order).
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