Hope is on the Way

The Disturbing Words of John Edwards

I heard several lines from John Edwards' convention speech on the radio before I clicked it off. Anymore and I would have vomited.

As it was, I experienced a horrible flashback to being a twelve-year old at the Midwest Baptists' Camp Sycamore, sitting in the sweltering cinderblock meeting hall, shirt stuck to the back of a card-table chair, while a strutting little preacher sprayed beads of sweat and globs of spit into the twilight yelling about hell.

An Anarchist in the Hudson Valley
in conversation: Peter Lamborn Wilson
with Jennifer Bleyer
From the excellent

Brooklyn Rail

It’s been nearly ten years since Peter Lamborn Wilson—née Hakim Bey—looked at the pitiably state-bound, rule-bound world around him and asked: "Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom?" In a slim, rattling volume called Temporary Autonomous Zone, Wilson intoned that, in fact, freedom is already here. Autonomy exists in time, he said, rather than space. It’s in times of wildness, revelry, abandon and revolution that for even just one brief jail-breaking moment, as sweet as honey to the tongue, one is freed of all political and social control.

Wilson rightly became celebrated as a kind of urban prophet. It was an identity to add the others he bears seamlessly and without contradiction: anarchist, poet, public intellectual, psychedelic explorer, artist, social critic, Sufi mystic. Six years ago he moved upstate from the East Village to New Paltz, New York. The setting is different, but the ideas have only deepened—notably his critique of global capital and "technological determination." In his green wood-frame house, trees rustling overhead and birds chirping outside, we drank tea and talked.

Orion Anderson writes:
"Richard Koenigsberg’s paper on the logic of war and genocide is available for the first time as an on-line publication."

"Dying For One's Country:
The Logic of War and Genocide"

Richard Konigsberg

As the Final Solution began, Hitler professed to be undisturbed by the extermination of men, women, and children. He explained: “If I don’t mind sending the pick of the German people into the hell of war without regret for the shedding of valuable German blood, then I have naturally the right to destroy millions of men of inferior races who increase like vermin.” If he was permitted as national leader to send his own soldiers to die in war, why should he have compunction about sending the mortal enemies of the German people — Jews — to their deaths?

If we understand war as a sacrificial ritual that requires shedding the blood of one’s own people, then the Holocaust is no longer “incomprehensible.” Genocide represents an extension of the logic of war, enlarging the pool of sacrificial victims. If German soldiers were required to “die for the country,” why should Jews be exempt?"

The whole article is

here"

"Anarchism, Marxism and the Bonapartist State"

Saul Newman, Anarchist Studies, [Volume 12, #1, 2004]

This paper explores the question of state power and sovereignty in radical political theory through an examination of the classical anarchist critique of Marxism. It draws on the Bonapartist moment in Marx's thinking, seeing this as laying the groundwork for the development of a theory of the state as autonomous from class, suggesting that the implications of this argument are only fully realised in anarchism. Anarchism was able to develop a wholly autonomous and specific theory of state power and political authority — one that was irreducible to the Marxist class and economic analysis. I will argue that this had crucial consequences for contemporary radical political theory as it allowed the political dimension to emerge as a separate field of antagonism, demanding its own specific forms of analysis. I then explore the implications of this theoretical terrain through Agamben's analysis of biopower and state sovereignty, and Laclau and Mouffe's 'post-Marxist' understanding of
hegemonic political identification, suggesting that there are important links here with anarchism that could be developed.

NOT BORED! writes:

Operation Censor:

A New Translation of a Situationist Text

In August 1975, ex-Situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti, with the help of Guy Debord, another ex-Situationist, executed an exemplary prank: they created an author (a powerful industrialist called "Censor") and wrote for him an anonymous pamphlet on Italian politics, and printed up copies and sent them to 520 of the most powerful people in the country. The very cynical pamphlet was very well received -- no one suspected a fake. Finally, in December 1975, two months after the pamphlet was reprinted, Sanguinetti revealed himself, and a major scandal ensued.

Here, for the first time in English, is Sanguinetti's December 1975 statement. It contains links to the other important texts involved in "Operation Censor."

"On the Necessity of Refusal"

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

[What follows is the transcript of a speech by Nurit Peled-Elhanan of the Israeli Palestinian Bereaved Families Forum, and Laureate of the 2001 EU Parliament Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and Human Rights. This speech was given at Arab Media Watch's conference on June 6 entitled "opposing, challenging and resisting 37 years of occupation".]

I would like to dedicate my words in this part of the day called "giving voice to the voiceless" to a man whose voice was silenced brutally. Prof. Izzat Ghazzawi, my co-laureate of the Sakharov award, a Palestinian writer and militant for peace and dialogue, was a man who spent three years in a solitary prison cell for nothing more than raising his voice in favour of dignified human existence, and who sent word from this cell to Israeli writers and poets to join him in his refusal to lose faith in man. A man who watched his 15-year-old son being shot by Israeli soldiers at the courtyard of his school while rushing to help a wounded friend, a man who has never spoken a harsh word, and who commented on the continuous humiliation and torture he and his family have been enduring for years, with a short email message, saying: "I think they are trying to intimidate my voice." Prof. Gazawi's heart gave in to humiliation and harassment a year ago, and I have promised him upon his dea
th that
his voice would never be intimidated.

Louis Lingg writes:

"Alternative Press Review has published an examination of the mass hypnosis techniques used by George Bush and the rhetorical and emotional confusion used to overcome critical thinking:

"Bush–Hitler: Hypnotizing the Masses"

"Whatever Happened To Compassion?"

Zygmunt Baumann

In the USA ten years ago the income of company directors was 42 times
higher than that of the blue-collar workers; it is
now 419 times higher. Ninety-five per cent of the surplus of 1,100 billion
dollars generated between 1979 and 1999 has
been appropriated and consumed by 5 per cent of Americans.

What happens inside every single society occurs as well in the global
sphere — though on a much magnified scale. While the
worldwide consumption of goods and services was in 1997 twice as large as in
1975 and has multiplied since 1950 by a
factor of six — 1 billion people, according to a recent UN report, 'cannot
satisfy even their elementary needs'.

.... this is from the most recent issue of Republicart, which focuses on the theme of precarity, something which you'll be hearing a lot more about....

Spectacle Inside the State and Out:

Social Rights and the Appropriation of Public Spaces
The Battles of the French Intermittents

The strength of a political movement is found not only in its ability to reach a concrete objective. These kinds of successes depend mostly on the economy of power relations. The strength of a movement reveals itself more in its potential for raising new questions and providing new answers. And this much is certain: the battles of the precariously employed French cultural workers have raised new questions demanding new answers.[1]

"Finding Journalists' Political Donations"

David Folkenflik, Baltimore Sun

Michael Petrelis has been angry at The New York Times for a long,
long time. Since the 1980s, Petrelis, a Green Party volunteer and
longtime AIDS activist now based in San Francisco, has felt that The
Times is insufficiently attentive to what he believes are the
government's shortcomings in fighting the disease. Since March,
however, Petrelis has become an online gadfly, seeking to force The
Times to reveal what he says are its political entanglements and
sympathies toward the Democratic Party. And he is beginning to get
noticed.