"Filipino Lessons for America's Strategy in Iraq"

William Niskanen, Financial Times

[The writer, an economist and former defence analyst, is chairman of the
Cato Institute, a prominent right-libertarian think-tank.]

America's first experience of a relatively "easy" war followed by an
extended period of guerrilla combat was not in Iraq; it was a century ago
in the Philippines. Max Boot, the neoconservative commentator, described
the defeat of the Filipino insurrection as "one of the most successful
counterinsurgencies waged by a western army in modern times;" a model of
how US forces could prevail in Iraq." The parallels to date however, are
ominous.

Anonymous Comrade writes

"The Two-Fold Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg"
Peter Hudis, News & Letters

[The following is a talk delivered at a panel on Rosa Luxemburg sponsored by Monthly Review Press at the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York City in March 2004, on the occasion of the recently published The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson.]

Far from being any distant memory, the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg continues to impact the major ideological and social struggles of our time. One reflection of this was the debate which broke out a year ago, in April 2003, over the Cuban government’s decision to impose jail sentences (ranging from six to 28 years) on 75 dissidents and to summarily execute three Black Cubans who tried to commandeer a boat to Florida.

In response to these actions, Eduardo Galeano, the longtime anti-imperialist activist and theorist who has long supported the Cuban Revolution, wrote:

"The Cuban government is now committing acts that, as Uruguayan writer Carlos Quijano would say, 'sin against hope.' Rosa Luxemburg, who gave her life for the socialist revolution, disagreed with Lenin over the project of a new society. Her words of warning proved prophetic, and 85 years after she was assassinated in Germany she is still right: 'Freedom for only the supporters of the government, however many there may be, is not real freedom. Real freedom is freedom for those who think differently.'"

Galeano also quoted Luxemburg’s statement from the same work, The Russian Revolution, that "Without general elections, without freedom of the press and unlimited freedom of assembly, without a contest of free opinions, life stagnates and withers in all public institutions, and the bureaucracy becomes the only active element."(1)

Galeano’s comments helped ignite a firestorm of controversy inside and outside of Cuba.

Yoshie writes:

"Winning the Culture War, Losing the Class Struggle"

Yoshie Furuhashi

The Culture War is over, and conservatives have lost. No less an authority on the conservative camp in the Culture War than Paul M. Weyrich declared in 1999: "I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn't going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important." If we have won the Culture War, though, why are we in such bad shape?

"Historian With a History"

Jon Wiener, LA Times

The nominee for U.S. archivist has a penchant for dubious methods.

Go ahead, try. Name the archivist of the United States.

It's a pretty fair bet you failed. The archivist, former Kansas Gov. John Carlin, oversees the nation's most important documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. The position has traditionally been one of the lower-profile jobs in the federal hierarchy, but, as its website notes, the National Archives is not simply "a dusty hoard of ancient history. It is a public trust on which our democracy depends. It enables people to inspect for themselves the record of what government has done."

"The Midnight Fathers"

Ken McLeod

It's late. Your wife, or husband perhaps, is out or away somewhere or gone to bed before you. The kids are in bed, or out, or away. For now, you're alone. There may be a small glass of whisky on the table. Tobacco, or some stronger leaf, smoulders in the ashtray. Some voice that speaks to your darker or quieter moments plays low on the sound system. The television is off. Definitely off. The newspaper is crumpled, the novel has no savour. You prowl the bookshelves, hunker down, run your finger over the dust of forgotten corners. Your glance alights on a lean volume or skinny pamphlet; your fingertip tugs it out. Blow the dust, sneeze, flick over pages that once seemed cogent.

"Capital's Noosphere"

Jurrian Bendien, Marxmail

Various authors, presumably working from Bank of
International Settlements data, suggest the value of the global stock of
financial assets since 1980 has increased more than twice as fast as GDP, in
rich countries. The average daily trading volume in the currency markets is
now supposed to be between $1.1 and $1.5 trillion or so, suggesting in
approximate figures an annual turnover of $280-$390 trillion or so per year.

"The New Surveillance"

Sonia K. Katyal

Abstract
A few years ago, it was fanciful to imagine a world where intellectual
property owners — such as record companies, software owners, and
publishers — were capable of invading the most sacred areas of the home
in order to track, deter, and control uses of their products. Yet,
today, strategies of copyright enforcement have rapidly multiplied, each
strategy more invasive than the last. This new surveillance exposes the
paradoxical nature of the Internet: It offers both the consumer and
creator a seemingly endless capacity for human expression — a virtual
marketplace of ideas — alongside an insurmountable array of capacities
for panoptic surveillance. As a result, the Internet both enables and
silences speech, often simultaneously.

Frank Wallis writes:

"Freedom, God, and George W. Bush"

Frank Wallis

I keep hearing a familiar refrain from George W. Bush: freedom is from God, not from man.

"Liberty is both the plan of Heaven for humanity, and the best hope for progress here on Earth. The progress of liberty is a powerful trend. Yet, we also know that liberty, if not defended, can be lost. The success of freedom is not determined by some dialectic of history. By definition, the success of freedom rests upon the choices and the courage of free peoples, and upon their willingness to sacrifice. In the trenches of World War I, through a two-front war in the 1940s, the difficult battles of Korea and Vietnam, and in missions of rescue and liberation on nearly every continent, Americans have amply displayed our willingness to sacrifice for liberty." (Speech at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, 6 Nov. 2003)

One can only witness in wonderment what Bush means by "our willingness to sacrifice for liberty". GIs were sacrificed, but who made the decision to send them to war? Rich people who partied at night while poor men were being blown to bits on the battlefield.

Ernest EverHard writes

MAYDAZE!


A thesis on the Celebration of Alienation


(originally written in the 1970s)

This is supposed to be a celebration, but there is a stale scent about it - the scent of failure held up as success, of moldy platitudes held up as useful, critical ideas - the scent of an old, dying world, not the fresh air of a new one. Once again people come together because, deep down, all of them are fed up with their present existence; all of them want a life of unstifled tenderness, free creativity, limitless adventure. And once again, the Left, like the constipated rhinoceros it is, has managed after immense grunting and straining to produce the same dry, evil-smelling little pellets of slogans:


                            Jobs or Income Now!

                                  No Wage Cuts

                    No Cuts in Social Services

                        Fight Police Repression

Never mind that a movement which could enforce the granting of even one of the first three demands would be easily strong enough to overthrow capitalism... let's just keep on pestering Mommy and Daddy.

hydrarchist writes:

"A Global Sense of Place"

David Garcia

A Report from the Eterea 2
Meeting of Italian Tactical Television Makers. From March 25-28th, 2004 the second major gathering of the Telestreets took place
in Sennegallia.
Here are some notes from a short visit to the world of Telestreets.

Background

Telestreet, the latest wave in the rich history of Italian media activism,
has been fairly widely reported on this list and elswhere but some of the
basics are worth revisiting briefly.

Telestreets are semie-legal micro-broadcasters, literally street TV makers
using small transmitters to send programes that mostly reach no more than a
few blocks. Telestreets range from making their own local items to capturing
the programming (such as big football matches) from the commercial satellite
operators and re-broadcasting them for free on Telestreet networks.