YearZeroMagazine UK writes:

The Shadow Show

If you wanted to control the media,if you wanted to make sure debate was held at a minimum, what would you do? You could try the old Soviet trick of burning books, smashing down doors and taking people away. But most times people see that. They can hear the screams, smell the smoke, see the fire. Now sure you can still get away with this in both the pro and anti-coalition countiries. In antagonist and alllied states like Algeria, Iran or Indonesia they prefer the firey version of suppression. Of course it would never do for a country like ours, or the US. But not because our governments and elites desire free speech, because our governments and elites prefer a show of free speech. The two ideas are very different.

For a start play heavily with words. Call the US and the UK `democracies` when every ancient Athenian worth their salt would be turning in their graves at such an idea. Once you call `our` countries democracies then of course, by inference, other countries are not. Of course this totally dispenses with the word `oligarchy`. An oligarchy is a state, elected, voted or not, where a smallish group of people control most of the power. This is the UK, even more so in the USA.

jim writes: "Writing some twenty years ago on the theme of “simulation of opposition” in too-late capitalism, and the “law of equivalence” in the “advanced democratic” political systems, radical French theorist Jean Baudrillard picked Manhattan’s World Trade Towers to illustrate his point.

An excerpt from Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Phil Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983):

“Why are there two towers at New York’s World Trade Center? All of Manhattan’s great buildings were always happy enough to confront each other in a competitive verticality, the result of which is an architectural panorama in the image of the capitalist system: as pyramidal jungle, all of the buildings attacking each other. The system profiled itself in a celebrated image that you had of New York when you arrived there by boat. This image has completely changed in the last few years. The effigy of the capitalist system has passed from the pyramid to the perforated card. Buildings are no longer suspicious one of the other, like columns in a statistical graph. This new architecture incarnates a system that is no longer competitive, but compatible, and where competition has disappeared for the benefit of the correlations. (New York is the world’s only city therefore that retraces all along it’s history, and with a prodigious fidelity and in all its scope, the actual form of the capitalistic system—it changes instantly in function of the latter. No European city does so.) This architectural graphism is that of the monopoly; the two W.T.C. towers, perfect parallelepideds a quarter-mile high on a square base, perfectly balanced and blind communicating vessels. The fact that there are two of them signifies the end of all competition, the end of all original reference. Paradoxically, if there were only one, the monopoly would not be incarnated because we have seen how it stabilizes on a dual form. For the sign to be pure, it has to duplicate itself: it is the duplication of the sign that destroys its meaning. This is what Andy Warhol demonstrates also: the multiple replicas of Marilyn’s face are there to show at the same time the death of the original and the end of representation. The two towers of the W.T.C.are the visible sign of the closure of the system in a vertigo of duplication while the other skyscrapers are each of the them the original moment of a system constantly transcending itself in a perpetual crisis and self-challenge.

Anonymous Comrade offers: "(actually Fidel Castro says--with some "editing" by the Anonymous Comrade) After 26 days of relentless bombing, those who have been following
events from day to day can see that what has happened up until now is
exactly as we predicted.

The war began inexorably. We knew that it was extremely unlikely,
practically impossible, that it would not happen. Nevertheless, this
has not led us, either before or after, to become discouraged or
renounce our stance.

"If I told you I thought the world was controlled by a handful of capitalists and corporate bosses, you would say I was a left-winger,” an anarchist black blocker told pravda.ru at a recent demonstration against the Afghanistan War. “But if I told you who I though the capitalists and corporate bosses were, you’d say I was far right,” the bandana-clad youth added with a wink.



The masked gutter punk was not alone. His perspective -- a broad blend of left-wing socialism and far-right nationalist and libertarian views – has been slowly infiltrating both extremes of the political spectrum, particularly in the anti-globalist movement, and has been leading to a new synthesis of doctrine – “beyond left and right” – that is coalescing around a number of tendencies – national anarchism, social nationalism, national bolshevism – that some are calling the fastest growing ideological movement on the fringe.


Though significantly divergent in their beliefs, these ideologies are at the core of what is being called the “Third Position” – a collection of radical anti-capitalist, anti-globalist and anti-imperialist views that that are outspoken in their rejection of the corporate state, of social democracy, of Marxism, and of Zionism.



But just as these ideologies are gaining more adherents, they are also becoming the target of more disinformation, as the extreme Old Left-ists of the anti-globalist movement call conferences to attack these ideas, and as the self-righteous defenders of neo-liberalism try to force these doctrines’ square peg into their round hole of “hate” and “fascism”. Decadence is fighting back, but as the proponents of these ideas steadily resist being labeled as “far right” by the defenders of the neo-liberal corporate-socialist status quo, the globalist power structure has found itself in a boxing match with a body of water.



Bill White's full story is at http://english.pravda.ru/usa/2001/11/03/20022.html"