Srebrenica by Ted/FDM

The ever insightful Ted Swedenburg does it well here:

"One of the many fine songs on Fun'Da'Mental's powerful 2006 release, All Is War: The Benefits of G-had, is "Srebrenica Massacre," featuring vocals in Bosnian (a variety of Serbo-Croation, according to some) by Alma Ferovic. Since April I've given several talks about Fun'Da'Mental, which have included analyses of several songs from All Is War, but I've not had much to say about "Srebrenica Massacre...."

Read more.
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No Borders Gatwick in Sept.

An Invitation To The Gatwick No Border Camp 2007

From 19th to 24th September 07 we will gather at Gatwick Airport for
the first No Border Camp in the UK. This camp will be a chance to work together to try and stop the building of a new detention centre, and togather ideas for how to build up the fight against the system of migration controls.

Gatwick Aiport - The Border Point
Gatwick is a border in the middle of Britain. People arrive hereeveryday. People are forcibly deported from here everyday. It is a place where people are imprisoned for unlimited lengths of time withouttrial, where people are forced to hide underground and be invisible,where people are treated as criminals for the 'crime' of crossing the border.In Britain, the government has recently announced its intention tobuild a new detention centre, near Tinsley House, another detentioncentre at Gatwick airport. This will be another in a long line of barbarous prisons across the world, imprisoning people who migrate.Unless we stop it from being built.Not far from Gatwick there are other border fortifications: theimmigration reporting centre at Croydon, the airline companies who charter deportation flights and the ID Interview centre in Crawley. Anda few miles away are the border posts at Dover and Folkstone, wherefear of detection by the border police forces people to risk theirlives hiding under lorries, or in suffocating containers.
While the physical borders get fortified, governments also tighten upthe internal controls: from international databases to videosurveillance, biometric ID cards to electronic tagging. Just recently,the UK government has announced the introduction of the Sirene System.
This will grant Britain access to the SIS (Schengen InformationSystem), a EU wide police database for refugees and migrants, plannedto be extended to keep protesters from moving around.
A Tactics Laboratory
How does daily life, from the need to work for survival to the welfaresystem, reinforce these borders? How can we fight against the commonacceptance of borders, the idea of an inside and outside? How can we claim freedom of movement as a basic right? How do we assert ourability to decide whether to go or stay, according to our needs anddesires, not the needs of the state or the economy? How can we escapecontrol, and start building a movement powerful enough to challenge the
divisions between people?We need to share knowledge with those who have broken these borders,the hackers who escape control, those who survive without work andmoney, those who fight the detention system , those who question identities, those who have learnt to organise themselves withouthierarchy or divisions.Camp(aign)ing Against BordersThis camp is continuing the tradition of the No Border camps across the world since the late 1990s, and like the camps taking place this yearin the Ukraine in August and on the US/Mexican border in November. Itwill be a space to share information, skills, knowledge andexperiences. A place to plan actions together against the system of borders which divides us.We are aware that the struggles for "no borders" reach far beyond "openborders". Without borders the idea of states will become obsolete,without states the national economies will be history. In a world without borders, nobody will ask for papers anymore.The camp will also be a laboratory of political and practicalself-organisation. The camp will consist only of people's contributionsto this. We are aware of the borders which divide ourselves from each other, be it sex, class, race, nationality, or whatever. The bordercamps are experiments in how to overcome these artificial andseparating identities.
No Borders
No Borders is a network of groups struggling for the freedom of movement for all and an end to all migration controls. We call for aradical movement against the system of control, dividing us intocitizens and non-citizens.We demand the end of the border regime for everyone, including ourselves, to enable us to live another way, without fear, racism andnationalism.
We move, we meet. We talk, we fight. Come camp with us.

< http://noborders.org.uk/>

And an idea for something to bring to the Camp... Let's bring a Uni. See here.
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Fear & Loathing In Teheran - by Sarah Gillespie

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Fear & Loathing In Teheran - by Sarah Gillespie

‘The blood drained from her face and Faye whispered, 'there's going to be a rape involved in this' Operator Maintainer Arthur Batchelor Daily Mirror 9th April 2007

Faye Turney, the ‘she-man’ Seaman captured in Shatt al-Arab last month, claims her captivity in Teheran was marred by fear of rape, torture and a lifetime of incarceration. Despite having been released unharmed, a bizarre scene is emerging from the dark recesses of Turney’s imagination in which the saintly mother of little Molly (3) was subjected to floundering indefinitely in a dingy jail wearing nothing but pair of knickers and a floral headscarf. According to Faye’s ‘worst fears’ her ‘evil captors’ spied on her through her cell door slat, cracked jokes about her imminent martyrdom and most bizarrely of all, felt compelled to fit her out with her very own hand-crafted, bespoke coffin. Here is our first hint that we are dealing with the humiliation fantasies of a serious narcissist; while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard indeed have affiliations with the Moral Police responsible for public executions, I doubt very much that they throw a made-to-measure coffin service into the deal.

Nothing here adds up. But it doesn’t have to because the press have finally dispensed with the pursuit of truth altogether. Faye Turney’s fears are being treated by the media as if they were facts. Do a Google search on ‘Faye Turney rape’ and over 80,000 results appear. Remarkable really, given the woman has not been raped at all and is even claiming that she was not. Such is the ravenous appetite in Britain for titillating tales of defenceless damsels and wicked Arabs, the Sun-reading British electorate doesn’t care anymore if the narrative is absolute fantasy or not, so long as the victim is a westerner and the aggressor is a Muslim.

Thus, it doesn’t matter that Turney & Co were well-fed, clothed, even supplied with Marlborough Lights and Presidential ‘goodie bags’. It doesn’t matter that none of the 15 were exposed to torture, sexual abuse or humiliation. It doesn’t matter either that the worst trauma they endured was having their I Pods confiscated and forced to wear outfits that looked a bit ‘last year’. Arthur Batchelor, one of the Seaman, who we can assume has received at least some Military training for coping with stress during captivity, said: ‘Those suits were an insult. Not only did mine not fit, but it was cheap and tacky and the Hugo Boss shirt was a fake.’ What? So this is the ‘mental torment’ he insists on peddling for cash? The message is clear, the Seamen were treated well. Another message is also clear; the news-consuming public refuses to internalise this. Fay's abuse was in her disturbed mind and what is even more disturbing is the fact that our minds are deviant enough to consume her sickening fantasies. Without delving too deeply into the collective perversion of an entire nation, it is crucial to note that the British, who built their pseudo-egalitarian, post-industrial, mega-economy on the backs of two centuries of colonized labour, just love to feel like they are the victim. Check out the streets of Soho if you need proof.

What is more alarming, is that British media are quick to mobilise this penchant for humiliation in order to spoon feed us fictional narratives that reinforce the binary underpinning Anglo-American-Israeli foreign policy: Muslim=terrorist/Westerner=liberator. Since Turney traded in her phantasmic trauma for a substantial wad of Rupert Murdoch’s cash we are inundated with stories about her not being raped. Without the popular fear of Islam bestowing a veneer of feasibility into this narrative, Turney’s confessional would be exposed for the absurd non-event that it is. Try to imagine an equivalent news flash without the anti-Muslim agenda: ‘Man Thought He Was Being Followed Home by Rabid Gunmen, But Then He Realized It Was His Mum & He Was Just Being Paranoid.’ Or ‘Footsie Share Index Plummets to Record Lows Thought City Worker When He Accidentally Leant on His Apple Mac Keyboard Earlier Today.'

The rape, the torture, the execution didn’t happen but still it is reported over and over again simply on the proviso that it was temporarily imagined to be true in the mind of one woman. Truth is elusive, murky territory, impossible to fix or locate, impervious to the tyranny of technological mapping devices that offer objective comprehendible absolutes. Truth is relative, deceptive, it is in process, it never arrives at its destination and yet, we all insist on chasing it into oblivion. What has happened in the case of Faye Turney is that we seem to have given up the quest altogether, we have willingly surrendered to the absolutist reassurance of fear, at the expense of truth. Not only are we cut adrift from facts, we are not even pretending to look for them anymore, we are heading for a terrain were facts no longer matter.

On 9th April 2007 Blair, a man who, among his many sins, incarcerates Muslims for months on end without charge, dubbed Iran a ‘cruel and callous’ nation. So complicit are we in the demonisation of an entire civilization, we knowingly consume this fantasy of cruelty rather than consider the real possibility of humanity. We are invited to believe that Turney, the giant Viking of the Gulf Sea, is the ultimate victim, while Ahmadinejad, who hopes, albeit naively, one day to defend his country from foreign invaders, is the ultimate evil. The tragedy is we are no longer concerned as to whether this is true or not.
# posted by thecutter @ 17:12

Guevara Convention Sound Out

Dave Watts from Fun^Da^Mental had a great idea a few months ago that is now seriously taking shape. It links up with stuff I am into re Che, but takes it to another level, as they say. Dave has a blogspot site now at Earconditioning - which you will agree is another in a long line of great FDM semantic reworkings (remember the phrase 'Global Sweatbox'?). Dave writes:

"...The past week also brought communication with John Hutnyk. He´s [not - jh] a professor at Goldsmith´s University, and participated in one of the talks at the Clandestino Festival in Gothenborg where Aki (yes, the notorious terrorist-apologist Aki Nawaz) and I dropped a Fun´da´Mental DJ set a few years ago. John has twice invited me to talk with his students about the politics and presentation of Fun-da-mental videos. Coming back to last week, John and I were discussing this idea of a compilation that has been sitting in my brain for the last couple years. This year is the 40th anniversary of the death of Ernesto ´Che´ Guevara, and I wanted to compile an album of contemporary artists who have felt touched by revolutionary spirit, thought, actions, etc. The idea is not for all the music to focus on ´Che´ himself, but for expression of whatever the contributing artists feel regarding being subject to living on their knees for the sake of ´The Man´or ´System´. John has came up with a phrase which I immediately responded, “That should be the title!” So, we are going with “The Guevara Convention”.

Emails have been sent out to collegues, friends, associates etc. and so far the response has been good…we have Dj/Rupture, Filestine, Coldcut, Fermin Murguza, Fun-da-mental, Las Ratas, DJ Klandestino, Dr. Das, Shaheen (former Prophets of da City producer and vocalist) and IR, saying ´yeah´ musically. Cecilia Parsberg http://this.is/parsberg/ put me in touch with a woman from Uruguay who was 14 years old when Che was killed. She became active in the Marxist Tupac Amaru group in Uruguay. She has said she´ll provide some words for the text, really looking forward to reading what she has to say.

fyi: The following link is for the animation that Cecilia and co-conspiritors put together about the Israeli occupation and for which they asked me to provide a soundtrack.http://this.is/TheWall/

Javi Jiminez, a teacher and music writer here in Tenerife has also come on board, so we are moving. All we need now, are a few more artists and a label, distributor. The potential for this is huge. Oh, I must say, inspiration for this album also came about through an album that Fun-da-Mental soundman Bernard Maiquez lent me several years ago, El Che Vive!, (Last Call Records) which was released to coincide with the 30th anniversary of ´Che´´s death. I ended my first DJ stint in Tenerife (an AntiWar night at the original Cafeoteca de Arte in Puerto de la Cruz/2003) with the classic ´Hasta Siempre´ by Carlos Puebla y sus Tradicionales, from the aforementioned album, and the place erupted….everybody sang along! My girlfiend´s mum knows the song, kids know the song….so a chord was struck! If you got something for this project, please bring it. More as it happens...."

So I would say without doubt this is the best form the Guevara Convention could take. As discussed here, there is a lot at stake in these days to the terror-spectacle. Hope it comes together - look out for it in September.

War Mongering Minds - Hearts & Wallets.

Ben moved his site yet again, so catch up on his latest here.

He has posted on war and research most recently. University warmongering is rife wherever anyone cares to look. I've commented before on such University-Military Complex links - here - in an incident that might entertain as much as it appals. Buckets of money for terror research. Glory glory. Bastards. The program was pulled after criticisms, but I did hear the other day that its resurfaced in more benign looking forms - details when someone digs out the documents. Meanwhile...

There were a couple of good books on Camelot and other war-research by anthros recently. Check out David Price's War and Anthro page here. His 'weaponizing Anthropology' is a pretty sweet title, but sometimes he advocates an 'undamaged' scholarship, and frankly I wonder if that old trick could ever have worked.

Ben Writes:

Given the ever-developing forms of subsumption of universities into capital, militarization cannot really be discussed separate from processes of commodification and commercialization in institutions of education and research. Nor can such militarization be understood divorced from the newer forms of integration of military, policing and intelligence activities, as part of ambitious projects of expansion and reorientation of systems of surveillance and control manifest in the War on Terror and the ‘revolution in military affairs’. The goal centres on massive and high tech expansion of intelligence and surveillance integrated with equally high-tech reorganization of communications, intended to make possible new practices of warfare and social control - reconstituting if not collapsing any distinction between them. Such, at least, is the more-or-less declared intent to which enormous energies and capital are being devoted.

The relation of Australian universities to this set of interrelated projects is not widely understood, and it is this which I intend to document. Theory of the offensive.

Kufiya-spotting

This great post and meme by Ted Swedenburg deserves your attention. I used to play this game but never thought to collect - this is trinketization as well after all. One of my favourites was the news reporter on Japanese television when I worked in Nagoya, who presented all his Baghdad reports during 2003 wearing a Kufiya. Some people have mistaken Jade Goody's pirate scarf on Big Brother as one as well, but I think we can let that pass - great as Jade is, her support for Pirates will do. Aki Nawaz of course is a prominent UK wearer, among millions in the UK, but though my own is now a bit tatty as its one of my oldest items of clothing, it does come out often. I got it from Palestine Solidarity in Melbourne in 1986 - we ran ads for their campaign group in the journal I edited, Criticism, Heresy and Interpretation. Anyway, this is Ted's latest addition, gently mocking 'Urban Outfitters', but it’s worth pursuing the other posts as this one is number 12 in his series.

"Kufiyaspotting #12: Urban Outfitters Markets Kufiya as "Anti-War Woven Scarf"

Urban Outfitters' "early spring" catalogue is now online, and the featured item in Men's Accessories is the (Palestinian) kufiya, marketed as an "anti-war woven scarf" (thanks, Hisham).

If you click on the photo of the male model, you will find the kufiya (only $20), in the classic mode, checkered black-and-white, but also available in red, turqoise (my fave), and brown.

It's remarkable that "anti-war" is now so mainstream that Urban Outfitters feels comfortable using it as a marketing tool. By contrast, back in the late '80s, the Banana Republic catalogue carried an item called the "Israeli Paratroopers Bag." It's also remarkable that despite even though the Palestinians, since the onset of the al-Aqsa Intifada, have been indelibly re-associated with terrorism and suicide bombings, the Palestinian kufiya remains so deeply rooted in hipster clothing style and the outfits of oppositional movements that it remains hip/commercial/"resistive" symbol. Something on the order of Che Guevara t-shirts, full of contradictions, capable of making money, yet still giving off the whiff of danger. Probably it's the hint of danger and the exoticism that, combined, (still) makes the kufiya marketable.

I'd hate, of course, to see wearing the "anti-war scarf" as accessory substitute for actual activism against the war/occupation. (And my friend Joel Gordon reminds me: the kufiya "originally" symbolizes resistance, and in fact, armed resistance (the Palestinian revolt of 1936-39, the fedayeen of the sixties and seventies), not "anti-war."

No doubt this is also related to the "hipness" of things Islamic today; an article by Jill Hamburg Caplan will soon appear in New York magazine, and I'll comment on it when it comes out.

I wrote an article on the kufiya as style back in 1992, in an article in Michigan Quarterly Revies, and I discuss its uses, in Palestine and the US, in my book, Memories of Revolt. I've also been attempting to document various "sitings" of the kufiya in this blog".



Great stuff as ever Ted - hence reposted in full (of awe).

'Combating Terrorism by Countering Radicalisation'

Comrades,

For information purposes (or should that be dis-informations proposals) ... Regarding meetings in British Universities to discuss new gov.terror research programs. Our very own Camelot, yet again.

Meanwhile, today even the Generals are talking mutinous talk it seems, perhaps....

J

> Dear all,
>
>
> This is the information relating to the third item on the agenda that
> I have just circulated. Some of you know about this already, but now
> that the scheme is coming to fruition and projects are to be funded, I
> think that it is essential that we discuss and reflect on the implications
> of these developments. The matter has been raised with me most recently by
> Martha Mundy, David Seddon and Glen Bowman, and
> Martha and David have already taken up the issues with the UK Middle
> Eastern Studies Association. I have copied in a circular letter that
> Martha has drafted on the problems that the scheme and its mode of
> implementation pose. David attended one of the by invitation meetings to
> which Martha refers yesterday. It was sparsely attended and pertinent
> questions from david and other participants did not produce satisfactory
> responses or assurances from the Programme Director or ESRC officials. If
> you read Martha's letter and then examine the attached ESRC call for
> proposals and supporting country/region documents, then I think the scale
> of the problems this poses (from conception to execution) will become all
> too painfully apparent.
>
> I would like to promote as wide awareness and discussion as possible
> of this and other manifestations of the "war against terror's" increasing
> influence on academic life (such as the presence of security personnel at
> academic events), so you might want to distribute this to other members of
> staff and maybe discuss it formally before the 28th. I will be happy to
> write to ESRC and AHRC expressing our collective views, perhaps on the
> lines that Martha has already laid out, but assuming that the scheme goes
> ahead as planned that is not likely to be the end of the matter and we
> really do need to consider the deeper and longer term implications
>
> All the best
>
> John
>
>
> Martha's letter:
>
>
> Dear Colleague,
>
> You will find below and in attachment information received by email
> concerning an FCO-AHRC-ESRC research programme entitled 'Combating
> Terrorism by Countering Radicalisation'. For three major reasons this
> initiative promises to be very damaging to the reputation of British
> academic research: because of the design of the programme itself, because
> of the risk to researchers working overseas it entails, and because of the
> lack of transparency in the sponsorship and selection process. I am
> therefore asking you, after reading the appended material, either to write
> yourself to the funding councils or to indicate back to me that you share
> the concerns outlined below and would like to pursue a collective
> response.
>
> Let me briefly summarize the three sets of problems raised by the
> initiative.
>
> 1) The programme entails a series of extremely specific
> intelligence-driven questions that start from the premise of a link between
> Islam, radicalisation (nowhere defined!) and terrorism. It is
> the role of academic research to provide good basic knowledge of the
> various regions; this requires relatively free funding for research, on
> which, of course, intelligence reports will in turn draw. But this
> programme puts the cart before the horse, even on its own terms, and will
> result in poor scientific knowledge about the regions, countries and
> phenomena that the programme identifies as central. Scholars need to
> enjoy a degree of intellectual independence and self-guidance that this
> programme does not allow.
>
> 2) In many of the countries and regions specified in the programme, a
> researcher who attempted on the ground - not from an office-chair in the
> United Kingdom - to conduct research into the questions posed by the
> programme could be placed in physical danger either from local religious or
> nationalist actors or from the relevant state governments themselves. In a
> context where the international reputation of the United Kingdom
> (following recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon) is poor,
> funding British researchers to pursue an overtly security-research agenda
> abroad is likely to endanger perhaps not just their reputation but also
> their physical well-being. As Doctoral Programme Director in the
> Anthropology Department of the LSE I regularly countersign the
> ethics and risk-assessment statements of our doctoral researchers. Should
> they propose research of the kind required by this programme in a country
> such as Nigeria or Sudan (two of the selected countries), it would be
> contrary to my professional ethics to ignore the possible risk the
> doctoral candidate would face. Presumably the programme was written by
> security studies experts who have little or no experience of field
> research in the areas Dear of South-East, Central and South Asia, The Arab
> World, and relevant African countries concerned by the
> initiative. In relation to both the current world-class status of British
> research and the personal security of researchers in the field, this
> initiative is problematic as potentially threatening both.
>
> 3) Inquiries to the ESRC by Professor David Seddon reveal that this
> programme has not been openly advertised but was designed by an invited
> group of academics meeting July 10th ; on October 12th/13th meetings are
> to be held in London and Edinburgh to which certain academics are invited
> (I myself happen to be on the list presumably because I was
> major panel member for the Arabic Language funding initiative of the two
> councils last year). Closing date for proposals will be November 8th and
> decision will be forthcoming in January, a 'Commissioning Panel of
> academic and user experts to be convened' [see attached Call for
> Proposals.doc]. The programme is not to be openly advertised; rather,
> selected applicants are to be invited to proceed with final applications
> for the funding. Apparently the funding derives largely from the Foreign
> Office and the AHRC. Given this fact, it would be appropriate
> that Foreign Office (as the US State Department has done in offering
> research grants) take over the direct administration of the programme.
> Such a programme should be neither funded by, nor administered through,
> the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social
> Research Council, as it violates the principles of open advertisement
> and transparent competition which guarantee the excellence and independence
> of British council-funded research. If the Foreign Office believes that
> programme is in its interest, then it should administer the grants itself,
> and academics choosing to participate can do so under that body. But the
> rest of British university research overseas and the good practices of the
> funding councils must be safeguarded against direct association with
> intelligence-gathering exercises.
>
>
> Martha Mundy
> Reader in Anthropology
> London School of Economics>
_______________________________________________
[note: I have not yet seen the 'attached call for proposals.doc, funnily enough -J]
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Disappeared In America

Worth a look, the day after Sept 11 is this project by Visible Collective.

The Gap in New York is also a bit of a rabbit hole:

Disappeared In America:

"DISAPPEARED is a project by Visible Collective/Naeem Mohaiemen that uses films, installations, & lectures to trace migration impulses, hyphenated identities and post-9/11 security panic. The majority of migrants detained in recent security hysteria were from the invisible underclass of cities like New York-- the shadow citizens who drive our taxis, deliver our food, clean our restaurant tables, and sell fruit, coffee, and newspapers. The only time we "see" them is when we glance at the hack license in the taxi partition, or the ID card around the neck of a vendor. When detained and deported, they cease to exist in the American consciousness. This desire to create a sinister outsider with dubious "loyalty" has a long pedigree, witness the World War I incarceration of German-Americans; the 1919 detention of 10,000 immigrants in the Anarchist bomb scare; the 1941 internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans; the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs; the HUAC "red scare" under Senator McCarthy; the harrassment of Deacons For Defense; the COINTELPRO infiltration of Black Panthers; and the continuing rise of the Minutemen militia.

CURRENT INTERVENTIONS Until Dec 1: Above Ground @ Tenement Museum, New York. September: State Of Emergency New York.

Various excerpts from our ongoing projects were presented as installations or lectures in New York (2006 Whitney Biennial; Queens Museum of Art; "Rule of Law" @ Broadway Gallery; Rubin Museum; Location One; Brecht Forum; "Knock @ The Door" South Street Seaport; Cooper Union Art & Censorship panel; "Detained" @ Asian American Arts Center), London (Performance Studies International), Liverpool (FACT Museum), San Francisco (Yerba Buena), Dhaka (Bengal Gallery; Public library), Delhi (Sarai Center/RAQS Media Collective), Houston ("How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?" @ Project Row House), Frankfurt (Staedelschule: "Politics of Image"), Stuttgart, Beirut (Home Works III), Karlskrona Military Museum, Berlin (KunstWerke: lecture by Natasa Petresin as part of e-flux video rental project), Chicago (Artwallah), Amherst (U Mass Amherst), Stockholm (Finnish Embassy), Manchester (Futuresonic), Belgrade, Helsinki (Kiasma Museum; Finlandia Hall) and e-Flux video library (various cities). While our work started in the American context, we have expanded to look at Europe & the Middle East, in recognition that anti-migrant xenophobia, coupled with Islamophobia, is not a new or uniquely American phenomenon. "
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Fun^Da^Mental's 'All Is War'

hawgblawg: "Positive review of Fun^Da^Mental's 'All Is War'
At last, a critic able to actually engage with Fun^Da^Mental's forthcoming release (due out at the end of the month) All Is War--a review by Chris Campion, writing in The Observer. Some choice bits:

Strip away the outrage, then, and what's left is an album pieced together with great consideration. To provoke not just a reaction but thought and debate...Musically, too, it's audacious and, at times, exhilarating...it is underpinned by a militant faith: a faith in humanity to lance the boil afflicting society and reveal the poison swelling up within. Fear, intolerance, ignorance and self-interest are the hallmarks of Blair's Britain underneath its thin veneer of civility and morality.
posted by Ted Swedenburg @ 8:57 PM "

Aki here and FDM here.
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recomposition of a communist politics

Institute for Conjunctural Research


"The narcissism of renegades?The spectres of recuperation, repetition and imitation have always haunted the various ideologies of resistance, at least those not all too happy to celebrate the joys of ambivalence and the hybrid, those for which resistance is not just the name of a minimal inflection – a torsion, a distance, perhaps even a perversion – in the densely articulated space of hierarchies, partitions and dominations. In order to make a contribution to specifying what resistance may mean today, whether the term is even applicable or operative, what its minimal lineaments may be, I would like to turn to a relatively minor, if, as I hope to argue, symptomatic, episode in the vicissitudes of this concept: the intellectual trajectory that led some figures emerging from the current of French Maoism, first, to formulate an ideology of pure revolt, or absolute resistance, countering the complicities of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary politics vis-à-vis the perennial mechanisms of power and oppression; second, to revise the latter theory of ‘angelic’ or non-dialectical revolt into a tragic theory of morality, separating the resistance exemplified by moral protest and the defence of human rights from any notion of revolt, now considered ‘barbaric’ – thus adopting, despite all protestations to the contrary, the key thesis of the nouvelle philosophie, as instigated and ‘produced’ by Bernard-Henri Lévy, to wit, that there is a bloody thread running straight from Das Kapital to the Gulags, and that it is philosophy’s collusion with mastery and the state that lies behind the ‘totalitarian’ disasters of the 20th century. The aforementioned trajectory is encapsulated in two works arising from the collaboration of Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, philosophers schooled at the École Normale at the time of the May events, and militants in the Gauche Prolétarienne, the most visible of the post-68 Maoist organisations, famously supported by Foucault and Sartre against the censorship of its newspaper, La cause du peuple. The GP disbanded in 1974 after its increasingly patent inefficacy on the shop-floor and its last-minute retreat from the option of armed struggle. It would be easy, and perhaps even useful, to reduce the two works in question, L’Ange and Le Monde, to mere effects of an exquisitely Parisian sequence, which led a few children of the elites, ‘the little princes of the University’, as Lacan sardonically noted, into a spectacular but ineffectual, and misinformed, embrace of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, through a period of inevitable disappointment, into an equally overblown and narcissistic exploitation of their personal failures for media effect, and, finally, to the collaboration with the increasingly hegemonic ideology of human rights and humanitarian interventions, still with us today ....".

hawgblawg: "Bring 'Em Home Now!" Concert for Peace on March 20 in NYC

hawgblawg: "Bring 'Em Home Now!" Concert for Peace on March 20 in NYC: "'Bring 'Em Home Now!' Concert for Peace on March 20 in NYC

This is an amazing lineup: Michael Stipe, Rufus Wainwright, Bright Eyes, Fischerspooner, Peaches, Devendra Banhart, & Steve Earle, with special guests 'Peace Mom' Cindy Sheehan & Chuck D.

At the Hammerstein Ballroom to commemorate the Third Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq"...(see http://swedenburg.blogspot.com/ for more)

So, this is a link to an event in far off USA, but posted from even more far out Arkansas, a place I have visitited just the once - for Carrie and Matt's wedding in downtown El Dorado. Also hung out at the fab cowboy shop in Magnolia and visited with the Clantons. Hayh y'all.

Ted, if I had known you were not that far away I would have visited you too for sure - and the locals coulda made even more fun of MY accent. (go figure).

People should check out the Swedenburg archive - worth the time.
.

Leon Khun

Check out the political cartoons of Leon Khun. He also has a book on detourning statues (not that this should give anyone ideas).

http://www.leonkuhn.org.uk/pclarge/Big_Ben.htm

Thanks aki.
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