"The Triumph of Anarchism"

Shelley Walia, The Hindu

Noam Chomsky deserves the recent vote that ranks him as the
most important intellectual today; a thinker who is an
effective counterweight and an independent critic of the
state. A comment.

"Each individual, according to Chomsky, has the
responsibility and the creative acumen to take control of
his/her society."

An essay supporting the anarchist philosophy at the age of
10; hours spent at the bookshops on Manhattan's 4th Avenue
engaged in anti-authoritarian polemics; and then a life time
spent in analysing what ails international relations in the
context of the widespread infringement of human rights and
the numerous wrongs which fester our society. Indeed,
Chomsky deserves the recent vote that ranks him above
Umberto Eco or Howard Zinn as the most important
intellectual today, an intellectual who is an effective
counterweight and an independent critic of the State. As he
writes in a famous essay "Objectivity and Liberal
Scholarship": ". . . access to power, shared ideology,
professionalisation may or may not be deplorable in
themselves, but there can be no doubt that they interact so
as to pose a serious threat to the integrity of scholarship
in fields that are struggling for intellectual content and
are thus particularly susceptible to the workings of a kind
of Gresham's law. What is more, the subversion of
scholarship poses a threat to society at large."

Workplace Position Paper

North East Federation of Anarcho-Communists (NEFAC)

As anarchist-communists, we want a radical reorganization of
the workplace. We want workplaces that are run by directly democratic
federated workers' and community-based councils. We want the highest
decision-making body to be general assemblies of workers held on the shop
floor and in the communities where they live. We want to abolish the wage
system, end the alienation and division of labor, and usher in a new
society of libertarian communism.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Torture and White Phosphorus"

John Chuckman

"The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice, which were designed for different needs. We have to adapt." — Condoleezza Rice

I've previously charged Condoleezza Rice with having an appalling ignorance of history. I don't mean the kind of knowledge — dates of battles, names and terms of treaties, etc. — that earns a good grade on an exam. We know Condoleezza got good grades in school. No, I mean a deeper understanding of the economic, social, and moral forces of history and of the irrepressible role of truth despite the countless attempts to silence it.

Guerilla warfare, terrorism, and fanatical causes are not new to the 21st century, they are as old as human society, and governments have had many ways of dealing with them. This goes so far as governments changing around those regarded as terrorists and heroes, according to the needs of the time, much the way victors in a war define who were the good guys and bad guys.

One thing history surely does tell us is that nothing is more dangerous than Condeleezza's tendency to speak in sweeping, virtually meaningless generalizations about the people she regards as foes. Every war of aggression, every wave of state terror, every deadly fanatical cause has used just such terms. People are described with de-humanized slogans, making them easy to hate and abuse. We should all go on a personal terror alert when powerful figures talk this way.

Advice From Dr. Laura

Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a radio personality who dispenses advice to
people who call in to her radio show. Recently, she said that, as an
observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to
Leviticus 18:22 and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The
following is an open letter to Dr. Laura penned by a east coast
resident, which was posted on the Internet.

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I
have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that
knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend
the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that
Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do
need
some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other specific
laws and how to follow them:

"Art, Truth and Politics"

Harold Pinter

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal,
nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily
either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the
exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as
a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search
for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The
search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the
dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems
to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so.
But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to
be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each
other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other,
tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the
truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is
lost.

The Ibogaine Alternative

Paul DeRienzo

Imagine a drug that could eliminate a scourge that impacts the lives of more than three million Americans and more than a million western Europeans — drug addiction — with one pill.

Ibogaine was isolated from the root-bark of a plant known as Tabernanthe iboga that grows in a forested area of West Africa in Cameroon and Gabon. In Africa the plant is central to a religion known as Bwiti, one of the most resilient indigenous belief system in Africa. An initiate into the religion must eat the iboga root to induce intense visions and to "meet their ancestors."

Bernie Roddy writes:

"Notes on Creative Property"
Bernie Roddy

According to a popular theory of property, you ought to receive the results of your labor, and those results are new property, your profits. For people who create things that can be sold such as movies, scripts, programs, or music, it makes sense to insist that any beneficiary of its sale be someone who invests labor toward the item’s creation, or perhaps toward its distribution. But someone who invests capital does not invest labor. Stockholders in a company do not have a claim to profits generated by new creations. An entrepreneur often does contribute labor, as does an artist. Both might persuade someone to provide capital, but any commitment to return some profit is not backed up by this conception of property. At best, it is based on a contractual relationship.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Canada's Prince of Darkness:
Michael Ignatieff,
Or Thomas Friedman in Striped Trousers, Silk Stockings and Garters"

John Chuckman

If Michael Ignatieff is anything, it's connected, and I do not mean just to the relatively small establishment of Canada, I mean connected to the shadowy godfathers of world empire. Ignatieff has a rich career in America where truly loyal service, whether by natural or adopted sons, is always handsomely rewarded.

Another Canadian, David Frum, made it all the way to the White House with his custom-tailored scribbling. So too such a genuinely dangerous American as Pat Buchanan. How does a man like Thomas Friedman pick up prizes writing advertising copy for the Pentagon? As I said, loyalty is handsomely rewarded.

David Frum and Pat Buchanan both fell from grace, but there is little danger of Ignatieff's doing so. He almost perceptibly pants and gasps when he applies words to the imperial splendor of which he stands in awe.

In the wake of the U.S. media’s typical barrage of lies and obfuscations regarding the November wave of riots in France, we thought your readers would be interested in this illuminating declaration which we just received from the Paris Group of the Surrealist Movement. For the Chicago Surrealist Group, Franklin Rosemont

"Warning Lights"

A Surrealist Statement on the Recent Riots in France

Paris Group of the Surrealist Movement

For three weeks, in the ghettos of the poor suburbs, euphemistically named “sensitive neighborhoods,” on the outskirts of the outskirts, thousands of cars were burned, public utilities devastated, troops of police deliberately attacked.

There is nothing new about what sparked these incidents: the absurd death of two adolescents seized by panic, in the course of “normal police behavior.” Comparable police blunders also occurred in the past, and nearly always lootings and burnings were the inevitable response. But such incidents were localized.

Nor is there is anything new in the methods employed or the visible targets: For many years now, notably in Alsace, cars are burned on New Year's Eve or at the time of more obscure commemorations. And for a long time schools have been vandalized by schoolboys expelled from school; buses or police cars stoned; passengers methodically robbed in public transport.

What is new today is the immediate extension of this violence, its rapid spread to the provinces, well beyond the borders of a spontaneous and unpremeditated movement.

Solve et Coagula writes:

"Gnosticism"
Interview with Tobias Churton by Richard Smoley, New Dawn

Tobias Churton is one of today’s most lively and spirited investigators of that underground stream of the Western tradition known as Gnosticism. He first became interested in the Gnostics while reading for a degree in theology at the University of Oxford in the 1970s.

Soon after leaving, he became interested in exploring these ideas for television. “I’d got it into my head that there had never been any religious television – only programmes about religion,” he later recalled. “I had written a paper on the subject which recommended a new kind of television for this most neglected area, something on the lines of television, a kind of programme which would enter into the very nature of the religious experience and not simply observe it.”

Churton got his opportunity in the mid-1980s, when he produced a series on the Gnostics for British television. To accompany his series, he wrote his first book, The Gnostics, a history of this elusive esoteric movement from early Christianity to modern manifestations in such figures as Giordano Bruno and William Blake, and even in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.