jim submits:

"Bothersome Reality"

Thomas Zummer

. . . all bothersome reality appears as if wiped away.
-- Alfred Polgar, 1912

It is 2003.

In 1912, Alfred Polgar had been speaking of the cinema, drawing a comparison
between its economies and those of the stage, where the possibility of
puncturing the illusion of theater is always in potentia directed to a
fragile and unstable image. Perhaps we have to return, again, to such
instances to remind ourselves of the genealogical chain of virtualities by
which media stabilizes its image -- that is to say, its world -- putting the
world into a picture, as Heidegger might have said, advancing a tactical
isomorphism, as a reflection, a conduit to the realities that are taking
place. In, for example, a war.

The problem is that there are TOO MANY reasons for the attack...

nolympics submits:

"http://www.southbaymobilization.org/web/otherthanw ar/HomelandOffense2002.pdf"

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head"

James F. Moore, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

As the United States government becomes more belligerent in using its power in the world, many people are longing for a "second superpower" that can keep the US in check.  Indeed, many people desire a superpower that speaks for the interests of planetary society, for long-term well-being, and that encourages broad participation in the democratic process.  Where can the world find such a second superpower?  No nation or group of nations seems able to play this role, although the European Union sometimes seeks to, working in concert with a variety of institutions in the field of international law, including the United Nations.  But even the common might of the European nations is barely a match for the current power of the United States.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Which War Are You Watching? The View from Spain"

Dwight Reynolds

The American media's portrayal of the routing of Saddam Hussein as a great
military victory and a step toward world peace is almost incomprehensible
outside of the U.S., for the rest of us have been watching a very
different war.

jim submits:

"May Day at Kut & Kienthal"

Peter Linebaugh

Inasmuch as the historian's craft depends on written records, then the answer to the question posed in the title of V. Gordon Childe's classic book about the Tigris and Euphrates, What Happened in History? is well answered in the title of another classic book on the same subject by Samuel Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, because that's where writing began. With the American "liberation" of Iraq and the subsequent destruction of the library of Baghdad and its museum of antiquities, we could say, therefore, that history while not quite coming to an end has become impossible to write.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"In Jesus' Name"

John Chuckman

My subject is Franklin Graham, one of President Bush's very-public religious confidants. Franklin's father, Billy, served President Nixon in a similar capacity. Billy's efforts were crowned with a kind of earthly immortality: he's on those White House tapes in the National Archives sharing anti-Semitic remarks with Nixon and never flinching or clearing his throat over the idea of using atomic bombs in Vietnam.

jim submits
"Reappropriations of Public Space"

Toni Negri

1. For a good twenty years things had followed a fairly regular pattern -- at least since the crisis of 1971-74, when, having digested the struggles of the 1960s and defeat in the Vietnam War, multinational capital relaunched its project of development in terms of liberal policies and post-industrial modernisation. These were the years in which neo-liberalism imposed itself: grey years, even if they were illuminated, as was the case in France, by a number of working-class offensives (that of 1986, for example) and by a succession of student explosions -- the first manifestations of the revolt of immaterial labour -- around which social protest attempted in vain to organise itself. December 1995 in France marked the first mass break with the political, economic and ideological regime of the liberal epoch.

jim submits:

"Between 'Historic Compromise' and Terrorism:

Reviewing the Experience of Italy in the 1970s"

Toni Negri, Le Monde Diplomatique, August-September, 1998

Translated by Ed Emery

[Toni Negri was one of the historic leadership of the Italian revolutionary group Potere Operaio (Workers' Power) and is currently serving a prison sentence in Rebibbia prison, Rome. Negri gave himself up on 1 July 1997 after 14 years' exile in Paris in a bid to close a chapter in his own personal "judicial history" and that of other far-left militants still in exile. Originally sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment for "armed insurrection against the state" and to four and a half years for "moral responsibility" for the clashes between revolutionary activists and police in Milan between 1973 and 1977, he theoretically still has over four years to serve. Waiting for a general remission (indulto) from the Italian parliament which has not as yet materialised, he was authorised to work on day-release at the end of July. In the following article, he recalls the political experience of the 1970s in Italy.]

To speak of what the 1970s represented in Italy's political history is to speak also of the present. In part, because the consequences of the repressive policies of those years are still very much with us. The Special Laws have not been repealed, at least 200 people are still in prison and about the same number are living their lives in exile(1). Also, because the disintegration of the post-war political system, shattered to pieces by the fall of the Berlin Wall, had reached intolerable limits. But above all, because the social (and psychological) traumas of that decade have still not been healed or distanced.

jim submits:

"French Intellectuals Mobilise for the Liberation of Toni Negri"

Catherine Bedarida, Le Monde, translated by Ed Emery, December 13, 1997

A thousand people have signed a petition in support of the philosopher Toni Negri, at the same time as Italian public opinion is becoming increasingly concerned about the fate of another former leading figure in the extreme Left, Adriano Sofri.

Peter Linebaugh: Magna Carta and the Commons, part two.

Click here for the first part of this article.

Edward Coke's "Fine Fetch"

Four centuries later the 17th century crisis of political legitimacy began. From the Tudor autocracy at the beginning of the century to the Whig oligarchy at the end, and passing through civil wars among the 'four kingdoms' and the bourgeois revolution in between -- the crisis was conducted in terms of Magna Carta. Edward Coke was the hero of Magna Carta's chapter 39 and its myth-maker. [26] Dismissed as Chief Justice of King's Bench, imprisoned in the Tower, he helped draw up the Petition of Right of 1628. Charles I heard he was working on a book on Magna Carta. As Coke lay dying, his chambers were ransacked and his manuscripts were confiscated. At the beginning of the English Revolution Parliament ordered their recovery and they were published posthumously in 1642.