pablo cheekily posing in front of white house w son

Nicene Christianity is the religion of Christmas and Easter, the celebration of a Jesus who is either too young or too much in agony to shock us with his revolutionary rhetoric. The adult Christ who calls his followers to renounce wealth, power and violence is passed over in favour of the gurgling baby and the screaming victim. As such, Nicene Christianity is easily conscripted into a religion of convenience, with believers worshipping a gagged and glorified saviour who has nothing to say about how we use our money or whether or not we go to war.

some background...

"In other words, Chomsky's famous ability to obfuscate and the obscurity of most of his publications can only partially explain why his neo-Nazi involvements have escaped wide-spread criticism" Partners in Hate - Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers - Werner Cohn (1985) some bedtime reading

interestingly, kamm's pathological obsession has driven him to writing scores of one star reviews on amazon.co.uk, literally scores! here

also while pottering about online today, I stumbled across finkelsteins homepage which I’d not visited in a while and found it both interesting and amusing looking through some of the correspondences and letters posted on 'the holocaust industry' - although a book I’ve not read - only articles and extracts - I imagine it's just mr. kamm’s cup of tea - I can see the foam seething now...

After looking through kamm’s webpage, tedious chomsky tirade after tedious chomsky tirade, it appears that a protracted bitter and unhealthy history of loathing has been fermenting for quite some time now in mr. kamm’s mind. I’m reluctant to punish myself in going back to the text in trying to find kamms’ exact reference (oh the irony…) to nc supporters arguments of the form ‘I can’t believe, therefore it did not happen’ – but the hypocrisy is side splitting; rather like shintaro lecturing on holocaust denial… planks…eyes?

Rather than locking horns in intellectual vanity with mr. kamm’s ‘scholarly research’ (that without doubt illustrates that nc harbours vicious plots against the jews along with harold covington, lemmy from motorhead, and countless other rigorous intellectuals) it’s perhaps more telling to look at kamms focus on an incredibly narrow spectrum of nc’s work (i.e. the Faurisson connection & how that somehow equates to unquestionably to holocaust denial) in order to more broadly discredit him.

While there is content to his observation that there exists a slight messianic cult around the man, it is certainly something he does little (or less than the next man) to foster (while the author of many books and a prominent speaker at lectures etc. unlike many of his peers in a profession that is saturated in vanity, his focus on ideas rather than individuals is laudable). The ‘following’ can more easily be explained by a quite obvious connection with his content and the countless numbers of disenfranchised individuals who have been shunned, abused or ignored by a largely unrepresentative media. Discussing whether these individuals are hopelessly deluded, insane or pathological seems besides any point at all; it tells us little except the contents of kamm’s mind…

dear alan!

not sure whether youve noted the controversy your posting of this odd "oliver kamm" blogg has caused on the comment box. mike is mike, "oliver kamm" is oliver kamm, journalist behind the aptly named "oliver kamm" blogg


relevant bit of your post:

"jona brought to my attention oliver kamm's criticisms of chomsky. these appear to be the most substantive and methodical claims i've seen."



"Comments" activity to date:


"Chomsky's intervention was a defence of the content of Faurisson's beliefs and not merely of Faurisson's right to express those beliefs"

yet:

"Chomsky did this not by endorsing Faurisson's obviously false claim that the Holocaust never happened"

and:

"Chomsky in fact defended the character of Faurisson's beliefs and not just Faurisson's right to express those beliefs (which was in any event never at issue)"

yet:

"...defending Faurisson against the charges of antisemitism and pro-Nazism"

full of vague and contradicting notions ("character of belief"? was ist das?). the relationship between "content" and "freedom of expression" is what this whole thing hinges on. i'm a so-called "chomsky admirer" myself, and i havent dared to make up my mind about this issue; a problematic which does, after all, extend far beyond nc, faurisson, holocaust denial, or yes, even kamm. so i was actually hoping to find something of substance, instead of the usual self-indulgent constructivism.

sadly though, kamm appears anything else than methodical, objective nor philosophically conscientious about the argumentative nucleus. in fact, he doesn't engage the problematic at all. this probably because he made up his mind prior to touching the matter. policing other people's footnotes instead of engaging with any content ("it is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adpot a central doctrine of their murderers" - nc).

it's a tough debate. anyone who has the answers at the snap of a kamm ought to be treated with caution.

mike | 12.21.04 - 3:14 pm | #


My thanks for the link, and my complacent self-satisfaction regarding your commentor's unwitting confirmation that he is a follower of Chomsky, for he deals with my inconvenient body of evidence by quoting me with deliberate selectivity in order to deceive. Anyone taking the trouble to read my posts as opposed to the words your commentor has wrenched out of context will be unimpressed with that particular staple of Chomskian technique. By my reference to Chomsky's defending the character of Faurisson's beliefs, I make it perfectly clear what that position consisted in: Chomsky defended the political legitimacy of those beliefs regardless of their factual veracity (or rather, lack of it). He did so, moreover, while knowing for a fact that Faurisson was a pro-Nazi apologist. Chomsky, in short, whitewashed the political beliefs of a man he knew to be pro-Nazi and antisemitic.

That is not simply an allegation against Chomsky, nor is it a 'tough debate'; it is a fact, which your incompetent commentor unsurprisingly doesn't even attempt to refute but merely tries to obfuscate by becoming mired in woolly abstractions dimly comprehended.

Oliver Kamm | Email | Homepage | 12.22.04 - 1:21 pm | #


oliver kamm is quite right in saying that i don't refute him, since i hadn't really found anything to refute. and since I don't operate on ideological levels, where information might be "convenient" or not, i'm afraid i can't say anything on that either.

i do think it is a tough debate, albeit one that evidently doesn't find its way into the distilled episteme of today's cultural managers. in what relationship does the liberty to express a belief stand to the content or "political character" of that belief? are there elements of instrumental rationality at play? are we only allowing freedom of expression for views we like, whilst ideologically undermining others?

i think it's in those questions where the answers to the chomsky-faurisson affair are to be found, and not in this politicized farce about whether or not chomsky knowingly helped to propagate neo-nazi views. this was evidently not his intention, since he seems to promote freedom of expression regardless of its content (a normative guideline one would have to refute prior to ascribing any relevance to chomsky's defence of a holocaust denier).

i wonder why one cannot actually engage chomsky's position and challenge him by reflecting on the normative questions that underlie freedom of expression. isn't this where any true engagement with chomsky would happen? merely trying to prove that chomsky was knowingly defending a holocaust denier seems to miss the point. the search for content goes on.

what is kamm actually trying to show? that chomsky's persona is no good?

mike | 12.22.04 - 6:09 pm | #



this in defense of an able historian

cannot counter facts in NC's history of angloamerican imperialism including israel
-> so obv hes gotta be a nazi/looney or whatever
-> jewish self-proclaimed anarchist- nazi?

yeah likely

about as likely as the tales of WMD monsieur kamm has been floating elsewhere bad journalism?

"Why does it sell and re-sell a WMD argument for war with Saddam, as speculative and superfluous as a coursebook in Dianetics, both before and after the war?"

sloppy quotations hey.. where are those goddamn wmd oliver?

geneva convention says crime of faring aggressive war carries cumulative sum of sinning- ambition is critical as the welsh say..

"Saddam will likely never threaten anyone again... and we have attained one of our primary goals: no WMD in Iraq. (Did Saddam help us in that goal, by not having any WMD to begin with? [??] That's still highly debatable... but if he did, all the better.) Further, the war has resulted in Libya destroying its WMD as well."

hihihi fevered delusions of adequacy? war crimes.. women and children.. ts ts ts

i'm sure theres plenty more of the same

Authors go to war, but should have stayed at home; quite

It is remarkable that in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown. O. Wilde The soul of man under Socialism

"In an honest Service, there is thin Commons, low Wages, and hard Labour; in this, Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and Power; and who would not ballance Creditor on this Side, when all the Hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sower Look or two at choaking. No, a merry Life and a short one shall be my Motto" - Pirate Captain Bartholomew Roberts.

jona brought to my attention oliver kamm's criticisms of chomsky. these appear to be the most substantive and methodical claims i've seen. there are some examples of what appears to be dishonest reporting of quotations and the misleading drawing of inferences.

kamm's site also features this heart warming link

abroad;

the spread of "freedom" and "democracy" continues unabated

whilst at home;

"We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"

and the reaction of the 'educated' classes to these triumphs of modernisation? applause - although the article notes unreflectively that "Some selections have been notoriously unpopular, such as Adolf Hitler in 1938, Joseph Stalin in 1939 and 1942, and Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979." and there is an alternative perspective perhaps worthy of consideration, and conspicuous by its absence from the arena of public debate.



"The conception of presidential sovereignty crafted by the radical statist reactionaries of the Bush administration is so extreme that it has drawn unprecedented criticism in the most sober and respected establishment circles. These ideas were transmitted to the President by the newly appointed Attorney-General, Alberto Gonzales – who is depicted as a moderate in the press. They are discussed by the respected constitutional law professor Sanford Levinson in the current issue of the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Levinson writes that the conception is based on the principle that "There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos." The quote, Levinson comments, is from Carl Schmitt, the leading German philosopher of law during the Nazi period, who Levinson describes as “the true éminence grise of the Bush administration.” The administration, advised by Gonzales, has articulated “a view of presidential authority that is all too close to the power that Schmitt was willing to accord his own Führer,” Levinson writes.

One rarely hears such words from the heart of the establishment."

[....]

"The principle of universality is the most elementary of moral truisms. It is the foundation of “Just War theory” and in fact of every system of morality deserving of anything but contempt. Rejection of such moral truisms is so deeply rooted in the intellectual culture as to be invisible. To illustrate again how deeply entrenched it is, let’s return to the principle of “anticipatory self-defense,” adopted as legitimate by both political organizations in the US, and across virtually the entire spectrum of articulate opinion, apart from the usual margins. The principle has some immediate corollaries. If the US is granted the right of “anticipatory self-defense” against terror, then, certainly, Cuba, Nicaragua, and a host of others have long been entitled to carry out terrorist acts within the US because there is no doubt of its involvement in very serious terrorist attacks against them, extensively documented in impeccable sources, and in the case of Nicaragua, even condemned by the World Court and the Security Council (in two resolutions that the US vetoed, with Britain loyally abstaining). The conclusion that Cuba and Nicaragua, among many others, have long had the right to carry out terrorist atrocities in the US is of course utterly outrageous, and advocated by no one. And thanks to our self-determined immunity from moral truisms, there is no fear that anyone will draw the outrageous conclusions."

so its good riddance to neo-fascist david blunkett



although, sadly, his lasting contribution to the creation of europe's fasting growing police state is under attack from an unlikely, and hitherto silent, group, the law lords;

"A scathing law lords judgment condemning the indefinite detention of foreign terror suspects as a threat to the life of the nation left anti-terrorist laws in tatters yesterday.

The ruling by an 8-1 majority held that the indefinite detention without trial at Belmarsh, and Woodhill high security prisons was unlawful under the European convention on human rights (ECHR).

Constitutional lawyers called it one of the most important decisions from Britain's highest court in 50 years.

But 24 hours after David Blunkett, the law's sponsor, was forced to resign as home secretary, Downing St and the new home secretary, Charles Clarke decided to tough it out. They would study the judgment - but made it plain they are more likely to renew the controversial laws than modify them."

[....]

"Lord Scott described the regime under which suspects can be detained indefinitely on the say-so of the home secretary with no right to know the grounds for detention as "the stuff of nightmares, associated with France before and during the revolution, with Soviet Russia in the Stalinist era, and now associated, as a result of section 23 of the 2001 Act, with the United Kingdom"

note that none of this will, or is likely to, result in the release of these guys who have been locked up without lawful basis for three years...

keep repeating we are free

also a disappointment to the rightist guerillas is this ruling that human rights (specifically ECHR) apply to people under british jurisdiction, regardless of whether its lambeth or the a suburb of basra whih happens to have been illegally invaded by british troops...

you have to be 'properly educated' to make sense of all this

More brilliant cartoons from mahjoob, a palestinian cartoonist

still not loving police

"War is a Racket"

zmag article on that perkins book, confessions of an economic hit-man, with interesting historical counterpart

"Adolescent sexual health is the experience of the ongoing process of physical, psychological, and socio-cultural well being related to sexuality. Sexual health is evidenced in the free and responsible expressions of sexual capabilities that foster harmonious personal and social wellness,enriching individual and social life. It incorporates freedom from fear, shame, guilt, false beliefs and other psychological factors inhibiting sexual response and impairing sexual relationships.”

"the struggle with things", hesse quote reads: "we make gods, and struggle with them, and they bless us" (demian)

And here I disagree with some of my friends; I think spelling out in extensive detail the form or future society goes beyond our understanding. There surely will have to be plenty of experimentation - we don't know enough human beings and societies, their needs and limitations. There is just too much we don't know, so lots of alternatives should be tried.

NC on anarchism dec 6

US applies lessons learned in florida (and elsewhere);

"...the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes."

[....]

"...the Ukrainian poll, like its predecessors, also featured thousands of local election monitors trained and paid by western groups.

Freedom House and the Democratic party's NDI helped fund and organise the "largest civil regional election monitoring effort" in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organised exit polls. On Sunday night those polls gave Mr Yushchenko an 11-point lead and set the agenda for much of what has followed.

The exit polls are seen as critical because they seize the initiative in the propaganda battle with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving wide media coverage and putting the onus on the authorities to respond."

zmag on issue

Iraq Adopts Terror Alert System

the sick joke that is yankdom
were there to be an allknowing god
(s)he'd weep


The Bush administration is funding sexual health projects that teach children that HIV can be contracted through sweat and tears, touching genitals can result in pregnancy, and that a 43-day-old foetus is a thinking person.

A congressional analysis of more than a dozen federally funded "abstinence-only programmes" unveiled a litany of "false, misleading and distorted information" in teaching materials after reviewing curriculums designed to prevent teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.

[...]

Other "facts" include that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, half the gay male teenagers in the US have tested positive for HIV, and condoms fail to prevent transmission of HIV in 31% of incidences of heterosexual intercourse. US government figures contradict all of these assertions.

AC Green's Game Plan - a programme named after a basketball player who said he would not have sex before marriage - teaches: "The popular claim that condoms help prevent the spread of STDs, is not supported by the data."

Mr Waxman told the Washington Post: "I don't think we ought to lie to our children about science. Something is seriously wrong when federal tax dollars are being used to mislead kids about basic health facts."

Chatteris News flash!

Church carols cancelled after row - from the BBC

Council officials have cancelled a Christmas carol service after being refused the best seats in the church. Councillors and senior officers had expected to be seated according to their status at the annual event.

The Rev James Thomson has denied them reserved seats because he believes everyone is equal in the sight of God.

Fenland District Council has cancelled the event at St Peters and St Pauls Church in Chatteris, Cambs, which was to be held on 12 December.

NOTORIOUS C.H.O.



is the new Hicks a Korean American, Cho, female, gay icon?

"Bush is not Hitler... He would be if he applied himself, but he's just lazy." - Margaret Cho

"She’s a mix of the rawness of Richard Pryor, she’s as shocking as Lenny Bruce, she’s as expressive as Lily Tomlin and as sweet as Carol Burnett ... she’s a one-of-a-kind performer."

"So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen."
Mark 20:16

"A vicar's refusal to reserve seats for civic dignitaries at a carol service has caused a huge row in a rural community, it emerged today."

[....]

"Vicar James Thomson refused to reserve seats at the front and told Mrs Potts: "All are equal before God."

"It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adpot a central doctrine of their murderers"

- Noam Chomsky

Record of a shooting

Watchtower
'It's a little girl. She's running defensively eastward'

Operations room
'Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?'

Watchtower
'A girl of about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death'

Captain R (after killing the girl)
'Anything moving in the zone, even a three-year-old, needs to be killed

Justice takes another slow and ponderous step towards putting Mark Thatcher in an African jail hell hole

Mark Thatcher to face coup questions, Mark Oliver and agencies,Wednesday November 24, 2004

Sir Mark Thatcher must face questioning by investigators from Equatorial Guinea over charges he helped finance a foiled coup plot there, a South African court ruled today.

How a Republican election supervisor manipulated the 2004 central Ohio
vote,
in black and white
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
November 23, 2004

The Republican head of the Board of Elections in Franklin County, Ohio,
manipulated the supply of voting machines on November 2, denying
thousands of likely Democrats the right to cast their votes in a fair
and
timely manner.

As indicated in the sworn testimony below, offered here for the first
time, the
election was engineered to make voting as difficult as possible for
inner city
residents, and to drive away those who could not afford to stay away
from
work or families, or whose health made it imprudent or impossible to
endure
the long, cold, wet lines.

INDIA FIGHTS BACK (From SchNEWS)
“Nothing in its [the corporation’s] legal makeup limits what it can do to others in pursuit of its selfish ends, and it is compelled to cause harm when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs.” - Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation.

Joel Bakan’s recent book and film ‘The Corporation’ have shown the inability of corporations to consider people or the environment in their actions. The film explores how the legal structure of corporations makes them responsible only to their shareholders.

At SchNEWS we’ve always had a healthy skepticism of corporations. This week we’ve got reports on some of the biggest, meanest corporate killers and the resistance to them in India, where the locals aren’t taking corporate rule lying down…

Bayer
“Bayer’s decision to give up the GM ghost in India isn’t surprising because the writing has been on the wall for years. Like almost everyone else, Indian people aren’t prepared to accept GM foods and Bayer realised it had to stop flogging a dead horse.” Doreen Stabinsky – Greenpeace

Genetic pirates Bayer Crop Science announced that they are stopping trials of GM vegetables in India. The company has taken the radical and innovative decision to concentrate on conventional plant breeding. Bayer claimed that the decision was “due to changes in our global research strategy”.

SchNEWS reckons that it might have had something to do with protests at the end of September, when Greenpeace activists chained themselves to the Mumbai headquarters of Bayer to demonstrate against the crop trials. The activists spent 11 hours in chains, only releasing themselves after arranging a meeting with truth-resistant Bayer management wonks and an assurance that their questions would be answered.

This is Bayer’s third climbdown over GM crops in a year. In March they announced it would not be commercialising GM maize in the UK because its future was “economically non-viable.” Three months later the company stopped all trials of GM oilseed rape in Australia, effectively ending any chance of the crop’s widespread cultivation.

Bayer’s withdrawal from GM research is part of a global trend of companies deciding that GM food wasn’t such a good idea after all. Everybody hates it and the firms are made to look like twats when a bunch of hippies halt crop trials, and force them to admit that the science is bollocks. Earlier this year, Monsanto abandoned GM wheat research and trials of GM oilseed rape in Australia.

* Greenpeace Press Office: 020 7865 8255, Divya Raghunandan
* Greenpeace India: draghuna@dialb.greenpeace.org
* Coalitiona against Bayer Dangers

Dow ‘N’ Out

The people of Bhopal know all about corporations’ lack of respect for anything other than the pursuit of profit; in particular Dow Chemicals who now own the infamous Union Carbide...

The 3rd December will be the 20th anniversary of the disaster at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal where four thousand people died after an explosion and toxic gas leak at the pesticide factory. Thousands more have been seriously ill or died since then.

Union Carbide was supposed to be responsible for cleaning up the site, but 20 years on toxic waste is still stored unsafely, poisoning the nearby town’s water supply.

A recent BBC investigation uncovered levels of contamination 500 times higher than World Health Organisation recommended limits. Local people who have to drink the water every day are exposed to the chemicals and many suffer from liver and kidney damage.

Union Carbide says that when it handed the site back in 1998 it “found no evidence of groundwater contamination” .

Perhaps they just didn’t notice the thousands of tons of toxic waste on the abandoned site, the pools of mercury lying on the ground, skips full of poisonous material and bags of highly toxic chemical waste. Rainwater washes these chemicals into puddles and streams and eventually into the ground water.

The more than 570,000 victims of the disaster have only recently started to receive compensation. From the 15th November, £188 million is being distributed to victims.
“We never want to see another Bhopal,” the survivors have said from the beginning.

The 3rd of December is a Global Day of Action when trade unions, community organizations and others will hold protests, events and actions in cities in India, including Bhopal, and around the world. Visit the campaign website to learn 20 things you can do to help make Dow face responsibility for Bhopal

You Must Be Choking... Coca Cola

“Drinking Coke is like drinking farmer’s blood in India” - Nandlal Master, of Lok Samiti and the National Alliance of People’s Movements

In India a pattern has emerged as a result of Coca-Cola’s operations. Communities living around bottling facilities experience severe water shortages and the little remaining groundwater, along with the soil, is polluted by Coca-Cola’s practice of dumping its wastewater into the nearby fields.

One of the worst examples was the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Plachimada, South India (SchNEWS 360). The plant was eventually shut down after an epic 600 day protest by more than 1000 families.

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are also angrily denying allegations that their products manufactured in India contain toxins far above the permitted levels in the developed world.

India’s Centre for Science and Environment announced research in August which showed that Pepsi’s soft drink products had 36 times the level of pesticide residues permitted under EU regulations and Coca-Cola’s had 30 times the level. The pesticides residues can cause cancer and immune system breakdown. The same products in the US don’t have these added ‘extras’.

Unsurprisingly, Indian people are getting pissed off with Coca Cola. And they’re organizing...

Between the 15-24th November there’s a 250km march between two Coke factories, to bring attention to the many problems created by Coca-Cola in India. The march will end on 24th November with a rally in Mehdiganj.

The demonstrators want the government to withdraw Coca-Cola’s license to operate because of the damage to communities caused by water shortages and pollution, and the determined Indians have got the big corporations on the run...

“Coca-Cola will pay for its crimes in India and internationally,” said Amit Srivastava of the India Resource Center, a group that helps coordinate the campaign internationally. “We will take this battle to where it hurts Coca-Cola the most - the US and the EU, its largest markets.” They have also joined forces with the Colombian trade union, Sinaltrainal, who are fighting Coca-Cola over its complicity in the murder, torture and intimidation of trade union organizers in Colombia (SchNEWS 447).

* India Resource Centre
* Amit Srivastava - amit@IndiaResource.org
* KillerCoke

"in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven" [Mt 22:30]

Highly-charged, jam-packed hearings held here in Columbus have cast serious doubt on the true outcome of the presidential election.

On Saturday, November 13, and Monday, November 15, the Ohio Election Protection Coalition’s public hearings in Columbus solicited extensive sworn first-person testimony from 32 of Ohio voters, precinct judges, poll workers, legal observers, party challengers. An additional 66 people provided written affidavits of election irregularities. The unavoidable conclusion is that this year's election in Ohio was deeply flawed, that thousands of Ohioans were denied their right to vote, and that the ultimate vote count is very much in doubt.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions

John Perkins describes himself as a former economic hit man - a highly paid professional who cheated countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars.
20 years ago Perkins began writing a book with the working title, "Conscience of an Economic Hit Men."

Perkins writes, "The book was to be dedicated to the presidents of two countries, men who had been his clients whom I respected and thought of as kindred spirits - Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We Economic Hit Men failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in.

John Perkins goes on to write: "I was persuaded to stop writing that book. I started it four more times during the next twenty years. On each occasion, my decision to begin again was influenced by current world events: the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1980, the first Gulf War, Somalia, and the rise of Osama bin Laden. However, threats or bribes always convinced me to stop."

But now Perkins has finally published his story. The book is titled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. interview from Democracy Now

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build
up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard
work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or
scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many
skies have fallen".

Check this wacky site out... it's hilarious, the introduction says...

We're Americans and we're pissed off!

"This pro-American page is dedicated to guiltlessly and righteously defending America!
(If you can't take it in here then go to your yoga class and burn some incense)
This page also serves to counterbalance traitors, cowards, and confused puppets of misinformation..."

it also includes news items:

"9-1-03 - Arab and Muslim women hijack a Russian school, torture and kill as many as 350 grade school children. This is further confirmation that Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia should be nuked ASAP. These people are lower animals."

Quizzes, which are just amazing:

"If you were President:
How should America respond to a Chechenia type attack on American school children?
*Do nothing, blame ourselves
*Dust for evidence, bomb select Middle East targets with smart bombs.
*Go ballistic on select cities that clearly give moral support to terrorists (Tehran, Demascus, etc)
*Anonymously wage bio terror on select cities that clearly give moral support to terrorists *Comply to terrorist's demands, withdraw troops, etc."

Scathing attcks on celebrities who are anti war... and some great graphics



"Shame, shame, shame on the anti-American Dixie Sluts ... Deport them to France."

It also provides advice to the government on how to deal with terrorism:

"10-04-02 - (below) Group of "naturalized Americans" wearing Alah beards, Arab bed sheets, and funny looking Islamic beanie hats get arrested in Oregon. Dick Chenney has said that future terrorist attacks are inevitable and there's nothing we can do to stop it. Bull shit! Round up ALL of the Muslim towel-heads that the INS let in going back over the last 5 years and send them back to Mecca. Then stop letting these psychopathic killer bees into our country!"

it goes on and on and on, confirming every stereotype you ever had about the USA.

John Swift (1729):

A MODEST PROPOSAL

FOR PREVENTING THE CHILDREN OF POOR PEOPLE IN IRELAND FROM BEING A BURDEN TO THEIR PARENTS OR COUNTRY, AND FOR MAKING THEM BENEFICIAL TO THE PUBLIC

As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject, and maturely weighed the several schemes of other projectors, I have always found them grossly mistaken in the computation. It is true, a child just dropped from its dam may be supported by her milk for a solar year, with little other nourishment; at most not above the value of 2s., which the mother may certainly get, or the value in scraps, by her lawful occupation of begging; and it is exactly at one year old that I propose to provide for them in such a manner as instead of being a charge upon their parents or the parish, or wanting food and raiment for the rest of their lives, they shall on the contrary contribute to the feeding, and partly to the clothing, of many thousands.

[...]

a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

fantastic!

Well, they tell me of a pie up in the sky
Waiting for me when I die
But between the day you're born and when you die
You know, they never seem to hear even your cry

Sure as the sun will shine
I'm gonna get myself what's mine
The harder they come
the harder they'll fall,
One and all
harder they come
harder they'll fall,
One and all

And the oppressors are trying to track me down
They're trying to drive me underground
And they think that they have got the battle won
I say, forgive them Lord, they know not what they've done

chorus

And I keep on fighting for the things I want
Though I know that when you're dead you can't
But I'd rather be a free man in my grave
Than living as a puppet or a slave

chorus

"Among those primitive peoples who lead satisfactory, unimpaired sexual lives, there is no sexual crime, no sexual perversion, no sexual brutality between man and woman; rape is unthinkable because it is unnecessary in their society. Their sexual activity flows in normal, well-ordered channels which would fill any cleric with indignation and fear, because the pale, ascetic youth and the gossiping, child-beating woman do not exist in these primitive societies. They love the human body and take pleasure in their sexuality. They do not understand why young men and women should not enjoy their sexuality. But when their lives are invaded by the ascetic, hypocritical morass and by the Church, which bring them 'culture' along with exploitation, alcohol, and syphilis, they begin to suffer the same wretchedness as ourselves. They begin to lead 'moral' lives, i.e. to suppress their sexuality, and from then on they decline more and more into a state of sexual distress, which is the result of sexual suppression. At the same time, they become sexually dangerous; murders of spouses, sexual diseases, and crimes of all sorts start to appear." Reich, Children of the Future

Home Office sought to wipe out 'beastly' commune!

Home Office officials tried to shut down a prototype "free: love" hippy commune in the 1920s, according to official papers released yesterday. Files from the 1920's released to the Public Record Office showed that officials regarded the Whiteways Colony in Gloucestershire as a security risk. The commune had been created in the Cotswold Hills near Stroud around the turn of the century, attracting an assortment of socialists, pacifists, "free thinkers and refugees." "Manners had they none and their customs are beastly," wrote an official in 1925.Police paid a husband and wife £400 to infiltrate the commune in the hope of finding evidence of their unspeakable activities.The couple emerged claiming that "promiscuous fornication " was indeed a feature of life in the colony, but they were unable to produce proof. The Home Office could not even work up popular agitation against the commune, as local residents viewed members as cranks rather than as objects of fear.

Morning Star March 12 1999

in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it



Bertrand Russell:

I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. [...] The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

in praise of idleness (1932)

Joy of life... depends upon a certain spontaneity in regard to sex. Where sex is repressed, only work remains, and a gospel of work for work's sake never produced any work worth doing. [...] The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with affection for another. Everybody knows that this is untrue.

similarly,

i have always been fascinated with the bikini atoll (marshall islands), which could have been a beautiful palm-treed island with real people growing up sexually. instead the necrophiliac protestant yank whore came around, resettled the locals to a faraway locus which- unfortunately- was still close enough to the nuclear explosions to be nastily contaminated during the ensuing tests.

I went to meet the people from this island the other day ...





“Tony Blair wanted to restore peace, freedom and democracy for the Iraqi people, he wanted to get rid of that brute Saddam Hussein. He spent millions on that, but he says he can’t pay for us who are British citizens to go home” Allen Vincatassin – representative of the Diego Garcians.

The Diego Garcians were exiled from their island in the 1970’s after deals between Britain, Mauritius and the US, Mauritius got it’s independence from Britain in 1965, but let Britian keep the Chagos Islands, of which Diego Garcia is one. In return Britain paid Mauritius £3 million. Then the thrifty British government agreed to lease the island to the US for military use in return for an £11.5 million discount on nuclear submarines.

The people of Diego Garcia were tricked and forced off their island to make way for an air base. All the animals on the Island were gassed, contract workers were brought in and two of the longest runways in the world were constructed, recently many of the bombers that have been flattening Iraq and Afganistan took off from Diego Garcia.

The Diego Garcians were sent to Mauritus, where they have lived in slums for the last 30 years. They lived in extreme poverty, starved, died or committed suicide. The British government maintained the pretence that the island had no permanent residents, and the Diego Garcians were visiting workers from Mauritius.

In 2000 the high Court ruled that their expulsion from the Islands was illegal. Neo Labour, invented a ‘feasibility study’ to decide whether the islands could be resettled, it decided that it would be ‘too expensive’ to repatriate the Diego Garcians, it would be harmful to the local ecology (the B52s apparently aren’t), and anyway the islands are in danger from global warming.

While the Diego Garcians have been continually prevented from returning to their island, others have been welcomed. The US military for one, along with thousands of Filipino and Mauritian workers who have been brought in to build and maintain the base, which is ironic, as the actual Diego Garcians are now in the Jobcentre in Crawley. Multinationals such as Cable and Wireless also have a presence on the island serving the bases. Recently there’s been a plan to allow tourists to visit the island, which raises the sick idea of anyone being able to visit the island, apart from the people whose homeland it is, oh yeah anyone who can afford the £4,500 cost of the cruise to get there!

Now they are arriving in Britain, from the slums of Port Louis in Mauritius, in search of a better life. The Diego Garcians were ‘graced’ with full British citizenship, a token gesture for being forced to renounce their rights for access to their island. The first group, including Allen Vincatassin arrived in 2002, they were told by the Overseas Territories Minister, at that time, Baroness Amos, that they would be given no help by central government. Luckily the local council were more sympathetic and gave them temporary accommodation until they found work.

Since then, 200 Diego Garcians have landed in Gatwick and are living in Crawley. Many of them, and the most recent arrivals face destitution, denied access to any benefits from the government who exiled them from their homes, despite the fact that they hold British citizenship. They have been denied benefits because they fail the DSS Habitual Residency Test (HRT) they cannot prove they have been resident in Britain for more than a month, the Diego Garcians are currently challenging this legislation and asking the government to allow them benefits from the moment they arrive.

There are disputes between West Sussex County Council (WSCC), who are currently footing the bill for temporary hotel accommodation, and central government. The government says that they won’t pay and that WSCC have no responsibility either. WSCC have been looking after the Diego Garcians so far, but are worried about the costs of looking after the one thousand more Diego Garcians who might come. It was a central government decision to displace the Diego Garcians in the first place, so financial responsibility should rest with them. By passing all responsibility onto the local councils the government might turn local people against the Diego Garcians, as they might resent having to pay for their benefits, although when SchNEWS went to meet them, the Diego Garcians reported that locals had been friendly and sympathetic.

SchNEWs accountants worked out that to put all the Diego Garcians in the world on full benefits for a year would cost roughly 1 million pounds, that’s about the cost of 2 Tomahawk cruise missiles. Bearing in mind that most of the Diego Garcians currently in Crawley are working and don’t need benefits, and most of them wouldn’t need benefits for a year, the cost would never be as high as 2 cruise missiles, scrap one, and the Diego Garcians would probably be fine.

lots more information and photos from GlobalSecurity.org

also on znet

Despite Republican Victory, Bush Supporter Has Tiny, Tiny Penis

growing up sexually, a collection of references to sexual livin in "primitive societies" (real people): "150 countries and over 550 ethnographic communities are covered"

The International Encyclopedia of Sexuality, "most ambitious and comprehensive cross-cultural sex survey ever undertaken, in any language or part of the world, this three-volume encyclopedia summarizes the sexual attitudes and behavior patterns of thirty-two countries"

Watch the nazis
Run your town



"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre." (1977)

And all that other crap they hand me
In the papers and t.v.
And all that mass stupidity
That seems to grow more everyday

"It pays to make the U.S. school system a crock of shit because the dumber the people are that come out, the easier it is to draft them, make them into docile consumers, or, you know, mongo employees. There are plenty of yuppies out there with absolutely nothing upstairs. Graduate airheads with Ph.Ds and everything but they don't know anything. And what do they listen to? Certainly not MY records."

"A lot of things wrong with society today are directly attributable to the fact that the people who make the laws are sexually maladjusted."

zappa

Dear Limey assholes

Last week G2 launched Operation Clark County to help readers have a say in the American election by writing to undecided voters in the crucial state of Ohio. In the first three days, more than 11,000 people requested addresses.

the response has been mixed, here are some of the funny ones...

"Have you not noticed that Americans don't give two shits what Europeans think of us? Each email someone gets from some arrogant Brit telling us why to NOT vote for George Bush is going to backfire, you stupid, yellow-toothed pansies ... I don't give a rat's ass if our election is going to have an effect on your worthless little life. I really don't. If you want to have a meaningful election in your crappy little island full of shitty food and yellow teeth, then maybe you should try not to sell your sovereignty out to Brussels and Berlin, dipshit. Oh, yeah - and brush your goddamned teeth, you filthy animals."
Wading River, NY

"KEEP YOUR FUCKIN' LIMEY HANDS OFF OUR ELECTION. HEY, SHITHEADS, REMEMBER THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR? REMEMBER THE WAR OF 1812? WE DIDN'T WANT YOU, OR YOUR POLITICS HERE, THAT'S WHY WE KICKED YOUR ASSES OUT. FOR THE 47% OF YOU WHO DON'T WANT PRESIDENT BUSH, I SAY THIS ... TOUGH SHIT!"
PROUD AMERICAN VOTING FOR BUSH

"Please be advised that I have forwarded this to the CIA and FBI."
United States

"Who in the hell do you think you are??? Well, I'll tell you, you're a bunch of meddling socialist pricks! Stay the hell out of our country and politics. And another thing, John Kerry is a worthless lying sack of crap so it doesn't surprise me that a socialist rag like yours would back him. I hope your cynical ploy blows up in your cowardly faces, you bunch of mealy-mouthed morons!"
United States

*the corporation: the pathological pursuit of profit and power - features chommers

*apparently the swiss were responsible for the indymedia server theft, "The best guess insiders offer, because of the sequence of events, is that the seizure was provoked by a posting that originated on IndyMedia's Swiss site, and that the seizure request therefore originated with Swiss police."

Kate Evans cartoons

"i'm not going to be your monkey!"

have you heard about this?

BREAKING NEWS: US Authorities Seize IMC Servers in UK

UPDATE 14th Oct: Hard drives returned
The two servers recently seized by US Authorities were returned yesterday morning to Rackspace (the hosting service where the servers were first taken from). Indymedia is now weighing additional legal options after this illegal seizure of its servers. Many of the original questions still remain.

UPDATE 13th Oct: Indymedia UK Call for Solidarity
Indymedia Press Release: 11/12th Oct
Reporters Without Borders Solidarity Statement: "Home Secretary David Blunkett challenged over Indymedia website closures"
Association for Progressive Communications Statement: "APC condemns "arbitrary" seizure of IndyMedia web servers by US and European law enforcers."

UPDATE 9th Oct: Statewatch Statement on Server Seizures and MLAT
"Why did the Home Office agree? What grounds did the USA give for the seizure of the servers? Were these grounds of a "political" nature? Has the Home Office requested that the servers be returned? What does this action say about freedom of expression and freedom of the press?"

UPDATE 8th Oct: Latest Indymedia Statement
"Indymedia condemns the fact that even 24 hours after two entire servers were taken down, Indymedia is still not getting any information of the reasons for the order. By taking down 2 servers more than 20 Indymedia sites were affected in different countries globally as well as several unrelated projects. Indymedia considers this extremely invasive operation a a serious threat to the Freedom of Speech worldwide. Indymedia insists that the servers are returned"

International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Statement (8th Oct)
"We have witnessed an intolerable and intrusive international police operation against a network specialising in independent journalism," said Aidan White IFJ General Secretary. "The way this has been done smacks more of intimidation of legitimate journalistic inquiry than crime-busting."

znet reports...

schnews also covers this story this week

I will be up in London at the ESF, schnews conference and schnews party this weekend... jesse?

amusing quarrel, in the words of pd "virtue dictatorship vs. gattaca".

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/print.asp?editorial_id=10101

"According to a recent article in The Observer (10 October 1999) the fashionable dinner tables of German society are buzzing with controversy over `the death of critical theory and the future of metaphysics'. The article refers to a debate provoked by a conference address given at Elmau in Bavaria last July by Peter Sloterdijk. His paper, `Regeln fur den Menschenpark : Ein Antwortschreiben zum Brief über den Humanismus' (Rules for the Human Theme-Park: A Reply to the Letter on Humanism), was addressed to an international conference on `Philosophy after Heidegger'. Copies of the address began circulating among academics shortly after the conference. Subsequently, two heavily critical articles were published in the national press. Sloterdijk's bad-tempered response to these articles (Die Zeit, 9 September 1999) has generated an animated quarrel, whose participants have included Manfred Frank, Ernst Tugendhat, Ronald Dworkin and Slavoj Zizek, among others."

http://www.zeit.de/archiv/1999/37/199937.sloterdijk_.xml

"Sehr geehrter Herr Habermas,

Gerüchte reisen bekanntlich schnell. Irgendjemand hat einmal gesagt, sie reisen so schnell wie der böse Wille. Inzwischen ist auch mir, als letztem Glied in der geflüsterten Kette, mit einer Verzögerung von nur wenigen Wochen, sogar an meinem Ferienort im Süden zu Ohren gekommen, was Sie über mich und meinen Elmauer Vortrag zum Humanismusbrief von Martin Heidegger verbreitet haben sollen, mit Worten, die eher aus dem polemischen Reservoir Ihres politischen Wortschatzes stammen, wobei der Ausdruck "jungkonservativ" eine große Rolle spielt.

Mit Rücksicht darauf, dass es zwischen uns einmal hellere Tage gegeben hat, sogar die unausgeführte Vorskizze zu einer Freundschaft, und weil ich meine Erinnerungen an die Hochachtung, die ich für Sie als Verfasser einiger für mich und meine Generation lehrreicher Bücher empfand, nicht im Affekt verwerfen will, schreibe ich Ihnen hiermit, um die Voraussetzungen für eine Rückkehr zu dialogischen, nicht diffamierenden Verständigungsformen von meiner Seite her zu erfüllen. Ich tue den ersten Schritt, obwohl es Ihnen der Situation nach oblegen hätte, ihn zu machen. Ich honoriere den Bonus des Älteren, den Sie in Bezug auf mich genießen. Ich betrachte bis auf weiteres Ihre Auslassungen als bloße Irrtümer, die Sie revidieren können, und Ihre Urteile als Ausdrücke eines Zustands, von dem eine Rückkehr in gemäßigte Formen noch möglich ist.

Bitte beachten Sie die Formulierung "bis auf weiteres". Sie drückt aus, dass ich der Obergrenze meiner Toleranz nahe bin. Sie haben, Herr Habermas, mit zahlreichen Leuten über mich geredet, niemals mit mir. In unserem argumentierenden Gewerbe ist das bedenklich; bei einem Theoretiker des demokratischen Dialogs ist es unverständlich. Mit Ihren Reden haben Sie, um nach dem zu urteilen, was ich im indirekten Rücklauf höre, für Aufregung gesorgt. Über Wochen hin, scheint es, haben Sie im Groben gepoltert und im Feinen agitiert. Sie haben zwischen Hamburg und Jerusalem umhertelefoniert, um andere zu Ihrem Irrtum zu bekehren. Sie haben Kollegen, die meine Elmauer Rede bedenkenswert fanden, sogar massiv unter Druck gesetzt. Mehr noch, Sie haben Raubkopien des Textes angefertigt (der Ihnen privatim überlassen worden war) und diese, unter Verletzung aller guten kollegialen, akademischen und publizistischen Sitten, an Journalisten, die Ihre Schüler waren und sind, geschickt, begleitet mit einer expliziten Anleitung zum Falschlesen und mit einer Aufforderung zum Handeln. Sie haben Teilnehmer der Elmauer Tagung mit latent erpresserischen Vorwürfen überschüttet, dass sie in situ nicht so exzentrisch wie Sie auf meine Rede reagiert hatten. Sie haben bei einem Mitarbeiter der ZEIT sowie bei einem Autor des Spiegels Alarmartikel in Auftrag gegeben, bei denen Ihr Name nicht fallen sollte. Zuerst blies Ihr Schüler Assheuer ins Horn, dann hat auch der Mohr seine Schuldigkeit getan.

...

Das Wesen Kritischer Theorie wird in der Dämmerung offenkundig. Darf ich notieren, was ich jetzt sehe? In ihrer älteren Version (Adorno) war die Frankfurter Schule ein gnostischer George-Kreis von links; sie lancierte die wunderbar hochmütige Initiative, eine ganze Generation in verfeinernder Absicht zu verführen. Sie löste eine tiefe Wirkung aus, die wir unter der Formel vom Eingedenken der Natur im Subjekt zusammenfassen können. In ihrer jüngeren Version (Habermas) war sie ein in Latenz gehaltener Jakobinismus - eine sozialliberale Version der Tugenddiktatur (in Verbindung mit journalistischem und akademischem Karrierismus). Beide Systeme, wenn sie mächtig werden, stellen für normale Demokratien Gefährdungsfaktoren dar - das ältere in nur geringem Maß, weil es aus inneren Gründen nie populär werden kann, das jüngere jedoch umso mehr, weil es überaus häufige und populäre Affekte - das Ressentiment und die Lust am Bessersein - organisiert.

...

Dass Sie, dieser große Kommunikator, dieser vom eigenen Nicht-Faschismus durchdrungene Diskursethiker aus Deutschland (Ihr nachweislich brüchiges Axiom lautet ja: Faschisten sind immer die anderen), die Medien so zum Einsatz bringen, wie dieser Vorfall es bezeugt, gibt mir Gelegenheit zu bemerken, wie im Konflikt Ihre liberale Maske zerfällt. Ihre diskursethischen Vorwände rücken zunehmend zur Seite und lassen robustere Motive erkennen. Ich brauche nur in dieser Woche die ZEIT zu lesen und den Spiegel, um zu wissen, woran ich mit Ihnen und Ihren ethischen Projekten bin. Sie haben aufgehört, den zwanglosen Zwang des besseren Arguments zu bemühen. Jetzt sind Sie endlich bei dem nicht mehr ganz so zwanglosen Zwang der schnelleren Denunziation (und der schlechteren Lektüre) angekommen. (Ihr verstorbener Kollege Luhmann würde bemerken: also doch Umstellung von Moraldiskurs auf Agitation.)

Ach, lieber Habermas, würde ich am liebsten sagen, es ist vorbei. Die Zeit der Söhne mit dem zu guten und dem zu schlechten Gewissen geht vorüber. Was ist daran so traurig? Es gilt, ein neues Kapitel aufzuschlagen. Was ich philosophisch als Theoretiker des humanen Traums dazu beitragen wollte, zeigen meine beiden letzten Bücher.

Die Kritische Theorie ist an diesem 2. September gestorben. Sie war seit längerem bettlägerig, die mürrische alte Dame, jetzt ist sie ganz dahingegangen. Wir werden uns versammeln am Grab einer Epoche, um Bilanz zu ziehen, aber auch, um des Endes einer Hypokrisie zu gedenken. Denken heißt Danken, hatte Heidegger gesagt. Ich meine eher, Denken heißt Aufatmen.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen Ihr P. Sl."

the complete lenny bruce

sexual minimum a basic human right?

"People with disabilities are cared for as children - you're infantilised - and people don't want to see children as sexual beings... by denying a sex life, we deny disabled people their full human rights."

sorry to go on about this...

HOW DIRECT ACTION CAN SAVE THE WORLD - SCHNEWS TENTH BIRTHDAY CONFERENCE
SATURDAY 16TH OCTOBER 2004, 2PM – 7PM

CAMDEN CENTRE, EUSTON ROAD, LONDON (Kings Cross tube)

SPEAKERS * DISCUSSION * FILMS * FOOD * BAR * ALL WELCOME * FREE!

Direct action works. Active, popular opposition to oppressive rulers has been the motive force of change throughout history and it still is. If you think nicer politicians are gonna save the world and your job is to cheer them on – well, you’ll be a long time waiting for change.

SchNEWS, the weekly direct action newsletter, has been providing information for action to anti-capitalists since 1994. We’ve put this conference together as an opportunity to discuss, plot and organise resistance to the suicidal onward march of capitalism. From the occupation of Iraq to criminalising dissent, from the growth of sweatshop economies to creeping privatisation of basic services, capitalism is attacking more and more people. And more and more people are resisting.

This conference is a chance to hear about that resistance first hand and find out how you can get involved in it.

2pm WORK Our lives, their profits – how we fight exploitation

Anne Jones, mother of Simon Jones and campaigner for workplace safety
Edgar Paez, international secretary of Columbian trade union SINALTRAINAL

3pm WEATHER Climate change - capitalism's legacy to the world

Rising Tide, grassroots network taking action on the root causes of climate change

4pm WAR The warmongers and how to oppose them

*this meeting is chaired by none other than yours truly*

Mark Curtis, director of the World Development Movement and author of Web of Deceit
Ewa Jasiewicz, human rights activist and journalist imprisoned by Israeli government
Jo Wilding, activist, writer and witness to the seige of Falluja

5-7pm WINNING How direct action can save the world

Schnews,
Speaker on opposing the G8 visit to Scotland in 2005
Anne, Edgar, Mark, Ewa, Jo and everyone else!

This event receives no financial support from the government of London. As if.

At a speech given in 1961 at the California Medical School in San Francisco, Huxley said: "There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it."

my cartoon for this week's schnews which also includes lot's of information about the 'alternative' ESF next weekend in London:

The European Social Forum is coming to London next week. “A giant gathering for everyone opposed to war, racism and corporate power, everyone who wants to see global justice, workers’ rights and a sustainable society.” Which sounds pretty good, but behind the scenes the ESF has been hijacked by authoritarian organizations such as the Socialist Worker’s Party. Racist, war crazy corporate whores Neo Labour have even got in on the act through Ken Livingstone and the GLA, who have been involved in organizing and funding the events. And it’s not just grassroots environmental and direct actions groups that are complaining about all this. Recently a coalition of the UK trade justice and environmental NGOs wrote in a letter: “Many British NGOs are keen to get involved in the ESF but have found it difficult to do so because of the lack of transparency and openness in the UK process”.

So, instead of standing idly by while the ESF claims to be the new representative body of “sensitive, political active citizens”, we want to demonstrate “another possible world” - a world which is already here today. The world of Autonomy, Self-Organisation, Solidarity and Sustainability. There’s a whole load of free/donation events happening 13th-17th, for a full programme www.altspaces.net

BEYOND ESF is a free direct action conference and celebration of self-organised cultures of resistance. The 4 main themes are Autonomy & Struggle, No Borders & Migration, Casualisation, and Social Control & Repression. There will be food, cinema and live music each evening. Beyond ESF: at Middlesex University, Tottenham Campus, White Hart Lane, N17. www.wombles.org.uk/auto On the Friday there will be A Day of Dissent Against the G8, featuring workshops, discussions and a benefit party from 11am. Details

TACTICAL MEDIA PRODUCTION 4 days of events will tackle issues around communication rights: from Community and Alternative Media to Surveillance and the Security State to Intellectual Property. An Indymedia centre will be running all week to report on the ESF, autonomous spaces events, as well as covering protests and actions. There will also be a bar with cheap food, social events film screenings, media training and public access internet computers. All this at The Camden Centre, Bidborough St ( Kings Cross), WC1 more and more

RAMPART squatted art and social space will have film shows, music and workshops, food, internet access, audio & video editing and prop & banner making. It is also home to the Mobile Carnival Forum and the Lab of Insurrectionary Imagination RampART is at 117 Rampart Street, Whitechapel E1.


SOLIDARITY VILLAGE Space for co-operative practical projects for a sustainable economy. Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, Holborn and LSE Clement House, Aldwych.

WOMEN’S OPEN DAY There’s no money for subsistence farming, caring, volunteering, fighting for justice – but plenty for war. Women speak out together. 10am-10pm, 14th, Kings Cross Methodist Church, 57a Birkenhead St,WC1.

RADICAL THEORY FORUM hosts a series of discussions on the theme of “How can theory inform action?”, followed by a party with films, art, spoken word and music. 11am-late, 14th, 491 Gallery, 491 Grove Green RoadLeytonstone E11. 491 Gallery

FAIRFORD COACH APPEAL HEARING Demonstrate against detentions without arrest –In March 2003 three coach loads on their way to protest at Fairford Airbase were turned back to London. Appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice, The Strand W1. 9-10am, 14th/15th Fairford Coach Action

CRITICAL MASS Bicycle Protest. 15th, Meet noon at the National Theatre (under Waterloo Bridge) for an afternoon ride, or 6pm for an evening jaunt. London Rising Tide

URBAN FORUM Neo-liberal policies mean the public realm is forever decreasing. This forum will debate reclaiming the rights for citizens. 15th/16th The Bartlett, UCL, Wates House, 22 Gordon St, WC1. see here

LIFE DESPITE CAPITALISM - discussions of alternatives to capitalism for today, rather that waiting for the ‘revolution’. 16th-17th, Old Theatre and Clement House at the LSE, Aldwych.

* There’s a radio and Indymedia have a breakfast show during the ESF on Resonance FM 104.4; 8am-9am, 15th-17th.

* 20,000 copies of the Autonomous Spaces free newspaper are available now from autonomous info-points around London. It has full details about all the events happening at the autonomous spaces with a map of venues. Get copies from LARC, Fieldgate Street or RampART, and the Camden Centre (during the ESF)

SchNEWS have our very own conference. “How Direct Action Can Save the World”.
Active, popular opposition to oppressive rulers has been the force of change throughout history. Find out first hand, how to get involved, organize, plot and discuss resistance to the onward march of capitalism.

2-3pm: WORK: Our lives, their profits – how we fight exploitation.
3-4pm: WEATHER: Climate change – capitalism’s legacy to the world.
4-5pm: WAR: The warmongers and how to oppose them.
5-6pm: WINNING: How direct action can save the world.

Saturday 16th At The Camden Centre, Bidborough Street, (nr. Kings Cross) WC1. more details

GLOBAL VOTE 2004

Even if you are not a US citizen, the November 2 presidential election will have a huge impact on your life. The very idea of democracy requires that you should have a say in choosing who determines your destiny. This site therefore allows non-Americans to vote in the 2004 US presidential election.

GLOBALVOTE2004.ORG is totally neutral. You may vote for any candidate. Your vote will be kept secret. And you may only vote once.We will count the votes 48 hours before the election and submit the result to the US media. Just letting US citizens know how the world has voted could influence what looks like a tight race.

click here to vote

Fascism & Pornography

"The current attack on the consumers of child pornography is typical of fascist administration. Already we have seen deaths, lives and careers ruined. We've seen people named and tried by the media. It's there - turn on your computer, go to google and zap! there you have it. But don't look. Good heavens, no! That's evil! That's depraved! What's next? Will we prosecute people for looking at billboards?

And all this is from people who say it's okay to conduct "pre-emptive strikes" aginst other people's countries - as long as they're not powerful enough to hit back harder than we can deliver our violence. All this from people who allow Australian citizens to be held illegally in death camps and concentration camps, who allow them to be tortured, who allow them to be subject to fascist show trials. All this from people who lock up innocent people indefinitely in concentration camps in Australia. All this from people who keep the native inhabitants of the country in similar conditions, all out of sight and out of mind. Well fuck them!

Who are the real criminals, the people who look at pictures or the people who administer these kinds of things?

If Balthus's art makes us feel uncomfortable then perhaps we should have a look at repression in our society and how it relates to our discomfort. But hey! Perhaps you shouldb e careful, Gary, about what kinds of pictures you publish on this site. There might be some retrospective legislation and one day they'll come around and take your computers away and name you in the paper. One day they might lock you up. Anything is possible with the kind of administration we have."

freundschaft



schiele 1912

SchNEWS 10th Birthday Events

SchNEWS, the Brighton-based direct action newsletter, will be celebrating its tenth birthday on SATURDAY 16th OCTOBER 2004 in LONDON with

a launch of SCHNEWS AT TEN - THE BOOK. Ten years of get-of-your-arse direct action all in ones book
a MASSIVE PARTY in south London
a DIRECT ACTION CONFERENCE AND BOOK LAUNCH

Also ... Russian SchNEWS is now online!, SchNEWS Korea? could you translate this one SJ?

Labour Party Love in coming to Brighton next week - see schnews on friday or this months private eye for details.

Labour ‘Fringe’

The Labour Party conference in Brighton includes several exciting fringe meetings. It will be difficult to tell if it’s Labour who are flirting with the corporations by letting them come to their annual love in, or the flashy wide boys from big business paying for all the drinks and trying their latest chat up lines on Neo Labour MPs.

The greenwashed, the bad and the ugly from the corporate world are queuing up to pay the estimated £1500 cost of organising a fringe meeting. Other less wealthy organisations such as the League Against Cruel Sports struggle to pay the costs.

Leading neo-liberal think tank, the Social Market Foundation and the Blairite Institute for Public Policy Research are organizing a programme of fringe talks. Most of them are sponsored by a commercial organization that has a direct interest in the subject being discussed. In return a representative of the sponsor sits on the discussion panel.

For example, a talk on Tuesday 28th September, titled "Gambling, regeneration, and social responsibility: can everyone be a winner?" is sponsored by Sun International, a corporation that operates a number of casino resorts in Southern Africa. Peter Byrne, its executive director, has a seat on the discussion panel. The panel includes no representatives from anti-gambling organizations, or organizations involved in treating gambling dependency.

The 'fringe' tag is somewhat misleading, as 14 out of the 18 talks feature a serving Minister of State. The SMF programme of talks appears to be very much at the centre of the Blairite conference agenda, rather than at the fringe.

Other highlights include Health minister John Hutton addressing the question “Can the private sector deliver public good for the NHS?”. While you’re thinking about the answer to that one, remember that the meeting is paid for by Capio, a Swedish Health firm who received a £210 million contract from the NHS recently and the Capio President will also speak at the meeting. So the answer is ‘yes’ before it has even been discussed.

All the meetings are sponsored by well meaning corporations with no hidden agendas whatsoever. A meeting on Transport featuring transport secretary Alaistair Darling is sponsored by train company the Go Ahead Group. The housing minister Keith Hill will be speaking at a meeting about housing the “have nots” which is sponsored by the British Property Federation – representing the kindly developers who always have the best wishes of the homeless and “have-nots” at heart.

The two events that feature Home Secretary David Blunkett are notable because both are sponsored by recipients of contracts issued by Blunkett’s Home Office. Siemens Business Services, which is sponsoring an interesting meeting called “Who do we think we are? Identity diversity and citizenship”, is a specialist in identity card technologies and could benefit hugely from the future introduction of a national identity card scheme, which is Blunkett’s personal wet dream at the moment.

The plan is clear, those dirty little neo labour sluts will wallow in corporate sponsored champagne and canape seductions, untill the greedhead perverts have their wicked way with them.

The only meeting where there was no clear agenda was one sponsored by The British Nuclear Group titled “Think While you Drink” – we hopeThe British Nuclear Group does not have a drink problem and that Neo Labour MP think a bit and are able to see through the obvious corporate agenda at their little party.

SchNEWS interviews Chomsky

• dan plesch: the case for impeaching tony

• anthony price's impeachment report

• impeachblair.org

lukacs' "antinomies of bourgeois thought", the essential bacon in history and class consciousness. from here we may argue that kantian grammar lifted modern institutions above history, thus reifying the protestant ethic and spirit of stealing of the rising bourgeoisie. a good tool vs. third tony/liberal illusions language.

habermas (kant2k) certainly appropriates kantian illusions in his supranational dreaming/militant humanism. even though we may assume that it's philosophically sounder than say kagan's twisting of hobbes, i can't see how ignoring 1804-2004 should be less elusive. after all the two seem diametrically opposed within the same rotten discourse.

re: last days of disco

looking at influence of industrial capital on wwI project (cf kühnl), i've concluded along similar lines. industrialist round table at the time indicated that eastern europe was to be had etc. [1914!]- elite supported hitler! aristocrats effectively provided military power which was a seperate branch under the odd constitution of the weimar republic. hitler was no true achiever and certainly not one "against all odds"..

a.h. was the first true tony in that the ruling classes imposed a more covert type of agency, the popular leader, which was to integrate egalitarian discourse of the 1930s with the neo-feudal ambitions of the ruling bunch within the new job of the schizophrenic managerial type. this cocksucker is enthroned as an effective buffer between hard-working protestants w liberal illusions on the one hand and the anonymous force of the capital rentier on the other.

hitler was selected from a bunch of radical demagogues at the time in much the same way any banana republic wants a cia-selected puppet-'elect'. mystifying hitler as being 'strongest brand evil ever' is like saying tony is special in any way.. hating your supposedly benevolent administrator is nothing but grateful servitude to the system. hate him all you like, kill him even. there are plenty more mediocre lawyers around.

I could not imagine how a film of Hitler's last days could possibly be better done.



wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for fact that kershaw is probably the best biographer of AH i've read... fuck...

although;

"Does it help us to understand Hitler any better? My own feeling is that, brilliant though the portrayal is, it does not. It is hard to see how it could - or, indeed, what great enlightenment it would bring if we did know him better (whatever that means). Would we then have a clearer grasp of his hold over the German people, or why so many intelligent individuals in positions of authority were prepared to put his wishes into practice? At any rate, no amount of intuitive acting is likely to make him any more intelligible to audiences which cannot possibly enter his warped mentality. His life has been scrutinised as scarcely no one else's, but an inner core is still unfathomable. Hitler will always remain in some senses an enigma."

is encouraging since the apparent uniqueness/central enigma/fuhrerkontakt magick/whatever of AH distracts and clouds the issue of the collective will manifested - and the parallels between the same ignorance of collective responsibility then and now - sound as if they remain elusive.

i don't think AH's mentality was more fundamentally warped than GWB or kissinger or macnamara and the many others who've waged aggressive wars without regard for civilian life. that doesn't mean he wasn't a less moral and more cupable individual than the others - but distinguishing in kind between a man who kills 1,000-10,000 people and between a man who kills 1,000,000,000-10,000,000 seems to me to be missing the point. the institutions and mechanisms that made possible these crimes are virtually continuous and lessons have been drawn from one generation of tyrants to the next - as to the fine tuning of urban combat, "counter"-terror (a phrase coined by the nazis), reliable rather than purely sadistic torture techniques (many of which are legal and admissible under UK and US law) and how to sell wars to their pliant, suppressed and enslaved populations.

whether the mechanism is used to murder 30,000 iraqi civilians or 6,000,000 plus jews, communists, gays and other regime enemies

(potential "enemy combatants" if you like, in the sense that they are categorised so as to be in some sense sub-human, note AH on jews and cheney on "terrorists". in both circumstances the non-believers are to be killed, since they are apparently impossible to negotiate with since they are sub-rational and hence sub-human 'fanatics' - pot kettle anyone? - on the one hand and criminal parasites on the other, always sub-human, always a threat)

to point to one crime and call it worse is trivially true - but both crimes are of a such a horrific magnitude that one cannot emotionally fathom their relative scale.

is the correct response to simply deem one crime beyond comprehension and thus one that cannot be sensibly discussed (cf. finkelstein) or to look at the construction of these crimes and the complicity of many thousands of apparently blameless folk going about their lives making barbed wire, guarding doors, couriering orders about BUT NEVER QUESTIONING OR THINKING FOR THEMSELVES.

the parallels between the type of society where industrial war slaughter takes place and not between the relative scale of various industrial war massacres is going to tell us something useful about how and why these events do and are able to occur. mitigating responsibility for the events that occured from the collective to some exhaulted and now denounced tyrant is part and parcel of the process where responsibility for oneself in the world, and one's actions, is subjugated to such snake oil salesmen in the first instance.

Genieße mäßig Füll und Segen;
Vernunft sei überall zugegen,
Wo Leben sich des Lebens freut.
Dann ist Vergangenheit beständig,
Das Künftige voraus lebendige
Der Augenblick ist Ewigkeit.

Und war es endlich dir gelungen,
Und bist du vom Gefühl durchdrungen:
Was fruchtbar ist, allein ist wahr­
Du prüfst das allgemeine Walten,
Es wird nach seiner Weise schalten,
Geselle dich zur kleinsten Schar.

Und wie von alters her, im stillen,
Ein Liebewerk nach eignem Willen
Der Philosoph, der Dichter schuf,
So wirst du schönste Gunst erzielen:
Denn edlen Seelen vorzufühlen
Ist wünschenswertester Beruf.

goethe, kein wesen kann zu nix verfallen

More Thatcher action, fingers crossed everyone.

Thatcher bids to avoid court quiz Associated Press, Monday September 13, 2004

Lawyers for Sir Mark Thatcher are taking steps to prevent him from answering questions under oath about his alleged involvement in a failed coup plot in Equatorial Guinea, one of his senior legal representatives said today.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior member of Sir Mark's defence team said an application had been forwarded to the Cape high court to set aside the subpoena requiring him to appear in court later this month.

Sir Mark, son of the former prime minister Lady Thatcher, was served with a subpoena last week after a request from the attorney general's office in Equatorial Guinea to question him about his alleged financing of a foiled coup attempt in the oil-rich west African country.

The lawyer said the matter would be brought before the court on Tuesday September 21 - one day before Sir Mark is required to appear in the Wynberg magistrates court to face questioning.

"We believe the subpoena is an infringement on Mr Thatcher's right to a fair trial in South Africa," he said.

max ernst & dorothea tanning, arizona 1948

Vanitas! Vanitatum vanitas!

Ich hab mein Sach auf Nichts gestellt
Juchhe!
Drum ist's so wohl mir in der Welt.
Juchhe!
Und wer will mein Kamerade sein,
Der stoße mit an, der stimme mit ein
Bei dieser Neige Wein.

Ich stellt mein Sach auf Geld und Gut.
Juchhe!
Darüber verlor ich Freud und Mut.
O weh!
Die Münze rollte hier und dort,
Und hascht ich sie an einem Ort,
Am andern war sie fort.

Auf Weiber stellt ich nun mein Sach.
Juchhe!
Daher mir kam viel Ungemach.
O weh!
Die Falsche sucht' sich ein ander Teil,
Die Treue macht' mir Langeweil:
Die Beste war nicht feil.

Ich stellt mein Sach auf Reis' und Fahrt.
Juchhe!
Und ließ meine Vaterlandesart.
O weh!
Und mir behagt' es nirgends recht,
Die Kost war fremd, das Bett war schlecht,
Niemand verstand mich recht.

Ich stellt mein Sach auf Ruhm und Ehr.
Juchhe!
Und sieh! gleich hatt ein andrer mehr.
O weh!
Wie ich mich hatt hervorgetan,
Da sahen die Leute scheel mich an,
Hatte keinem recht getan.

Ich setzt mein Sach auf Kampf und Krieg.
Juchhe!
Und uns gelang so mancher Sieg.
Juchhe!
Wir zogen in Feindes Land hinein,
Dem Freunde sollt's nicht viel besser sein,
Und ich verlor ein Bein.

Nun hab ich mein Sach auf Nichts gestellt.
Juchhe!
Und mein gehört die ganze Welt.
Juchhe!
Zu Ende geht nun Sang und Schmaus.
Nur trinkt mir alle Neigen aus;
Die letzte muß heraus!

goethe 1806. ein trinklied.

During the Spring semester of 1827, both Feuerbach and Stirner had attended Hegel's lectures on Religion, and in the Fall they again enrolled for his lectures on the History of Philosophy. In time, they drew the same conclusion: Hegel was a theologian. Feuerbach's judgment of 1843, that "speculative philosophy is the true, consistent and rational theology," supports the observation of Richard Kroner that "Hegel's philosophy is in itself a speculative religion—Christianity spelt by dialectic."

But whereas Feuerbach thought himself advancing by discovering Hegel's Geist to be God rationalized, and God to be Man alienated, Stirner drew another conclusion. Rather than advancing, Feuerbach had merely stumbled, and now looked up devoutly to another theophany, Man. To Stirner it really made very little difference whether the holy be called Geist, God, Man, or State, for the posture of all believers was the same [spineless].

Scandalous Picasso?

"Das Kind war realistisch in den Dingen dieser Welt befangen, bis ihm nach und nach hinter eben diesen Dingen zu kommen gelang. Der Jüngling war idealistisch, von dem Gedanken begeistert, bis er sich zum Manne hinaufgearbeitet, dem egoistischen, der mit den Dingen und Gedanken nach Herzenslust gebart und sein persönliches Interesse über Alles setzt. Endlich der Greis? Wenn ich einer werde, so ist noch Zeit genug, davon zu sprechen."

They're in revolt against an autocracy that denies them individual freedom in the name of fossilised abstractions: Obedience, Team Spirit, Tradition, Duty. "When do we live?" Mick Travis asks. "That's what I want to know." They first start to live by celebrating erotic freedom (Mick's affair with a local waitress, Wallace's romance with a junior boy), and finally erupt in furious, orgasmic liberation on Founders Day.

guardian reading:

This final transition from fantasy to reality suggests that the revolution is doomed to failure, but a failure that's also a warning.