Una hermosa coincidencia: La urgencia por llegar/Traspasando Espejos

La urgencia de llegar, Hijos de los días; Eduardo Galeano (2012)

 

Traspasando Espejos, Rafael Suárez (2007)

 



El viaje al mar

En los tiempos idos, los hijos del sol y las hijas de la luna vivían juntos en el reino africano de Dahomey. 

Y juntos vivieron, abrazándose, peleándose, hasta que los dioses los apartaron y los condenaron a la lejanía.

Desde entonces, los hijos del sol son peces en la mar y las hijas de la luna son estrellas en la noche.

Las estrellas de mar no caen del cielo: desde el cielo viajan. Y en las aguas buscan a sus amantes perdidos.

Eduardo Galeano
Los hijos de los Días
26 de Diciembre

http://www.outings-project.org/

Modernidad líquida

Rafael Suárez

Plus tolérer tout ce qui dure

Perturbation, l'incohérence, la surprise sont les conditions habituelles de notre vie. Ils sont même devenus des besoins réels pour beaucoup de gens dont le seul manger bonbons à la menthe (..) avec des changements brusques et sans cesse renouvelés stimuli (..)  plus tolérer tout ce qui dure. Nous ne savons plus comment faire pour que l'ennui mutuellement rapprocher fruits. Donc, toute la question se résume à cette question: l'esprit humain peut maîtriser ce que l'esprit humain a créé?.

 

Paul Valéry

Regards sur le monde actuel
et autres essais

¿Entonces conoce usted la meta?

«- ¿Hacia donde cabalga, señor?

- No lo sé -respondí-, sólo quiero partir, sólo partir, nada más que partir de aquí. Sólo así lograré llegar a mi meta.

- ¿Entonces conoce usted la meta? -preguntó él.

- Sí -contesté-. Ya te lo he dicho. Partir, ésa es mi meta.

- ¿No lleva provisiones? -preguntó.

- No me son necesarias -respondí-, el viaje es tan largo que moriré de hambre si no consigo alimentos por el camino. No hay provisión que pueda salvarme. Por suerte es un viaje realmente interminable.»

 

Franz Kafka.

La partida.

 

Luz Casal y Carlos Núñez: Negra Sombra

¡Entierra la carne y vive!

¿Es preciso contradecir la herida abierta?

Lanza un grito, en esta noche en vela.

Sin la luna de nadie, hace tiempo, que es fácil acero, derramar preguntas, aún con hilos de voz:

Obra, buen corazón; rumorea cárcel.

-          ¡Entierra la carne y vive!

-          Patalea. Despierta. Lucha.

Y si la memoria marchita, olvida la cena larga: no busques cortinas; Ni oasis. Ni emperos.

No confundas el destierro con tu soledad. Pero hay algo útil en ella. No hay errores. No hay venenos extraños.

 

¿Cómo se asombra un corazón ante un muro? Anula tu capacidad de indolencia, de preciso silencio, de arrojo eterno, de palabras, embriaga tus labios bajo el peso de escribir, bajo la lámpara de la noche.

Rafael Suárez

Perdóneme si le he ofendido

“Perdóneme si le he ofendido, soy extranjero en este país. Le respeto a usted y respeto a su hija. Yo soy de América, me oculto en Sicilia, me llamo Michael Corleone, y hay quien pagaría mucho dinero por esta información, pero su hija perdería un padre, en vez de ganar un marido”.

 

El Padrino

 

Quand par le dur hiver...

Quand par le dur hiver tristement ramenée
La neige aux longs flocons tombe, et blanchit le toit,
Laissez geindre du temps la face enchifrenée.
Par nos nombreux fagots, rendez-moi l'âtre étroit !

Par le rêveur oisif, la douce après-dinée !
Les pieds sur les chenets, il songe, il rêve, il croit
Au bonheur ! - il ne veut devant sa cheminée
Qu'un voltaire bien doux, pouvant railler le froid !

Il tisonne son feu du bout de sa pincette;
La flamme s'élargit, comme une étoile jette
L'étincelle que l'oeil dans l'ombre fixe et suit;

Il lui semble alors voir les astres du soir poindre;
L'illusion redouble; heureux ! il pense joindre
A la chaleur du jour le charme de la nuit !

Jules Verne

Ludwig Katz: Retrato de un hombre en rojo

Earth has lost a third of arable land in past 40 years, scientists say

Experts point to damage caused by erosion and pollution, raising major concerns about degraded soil amid surging global demand for food

 

The world has lost a third of its arable land due to erosion or pollution in the past 40 years, with potentially disastrous consequences as global demand for food soars, scientists have warned.

 

The world has lost a third of its arable land due to erosion or pollution in the past 40 years, with potentially disastrous consequences as global demand for food soars, scientists have warned.

New research has calculated that nearly 33% of the world’s adequate or high-quality food-producing land has been lost at a rate that far outstrips the pace of natural processes to replace diminished soil.

The University of Sheffield’s Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, which undertook the study by analysing various pieces of research published over the past decade, said the loss was “catastrophic” and the trend close to being irretrievable without major changes to agricultural practices.

 

More inf.: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-land-soil-food-security-shortage

Somaliland: A parched earth

Somaliland's harshest drought is decimating the herder way of life and displacing thousands.

Ashley Hamer

Hargeisa, Somaliland - Swaths of Somaliland, a fragile, internationally unrecognised nation-state in the Horn of Africa, have been racked by one of the harshest droughts in two decades which is destroying livelihoods and pushing families into destitution.

When a storm broke in mid-November, Aicha Jama huddled her last-remaining sheep and goats out of their bush pen and into her own tiny hut.

Jama's handful of wretched animals, already close to death from starvation, could not bear a violent gale. "Two goats died from cold just now," Musa, Jama's nephew, told Al Jazeera

In the drizzly aftermath, Jama carried the bony bodies of the survivors out of her hut and they crumpled, shivering with their hides soaked, the animals were too weak to hold their heads off the ground.

November's rain was some of the first to fall here for three years.

The coastal Awdal and Galbeed regions of northwestern Somaliland are suffering the driest conditions in recent memory.

Across three fractured territories that the international community still recognises as Somalia - Somaliland, Puntland and South Central - aid groups warn that a combination of protracted drought and sudden heavy rainfall brought on by El Nino weather patterns this year will probably push 855,000 people close to catastrophe in 2016.

In Somaliland's Awdal region, traditional rains - known locally as Gu and Deyr - which should occur regularly though the year and serve to replenish water reserves and rejuvenate grazing pasture, have failed for several consecutive years.

" Two years ago we owned 200 sheep and goats," said Jama. "But there has been no water, no food and the animals are dying continuously."

Her small extended family say that they cannot move from the remote dry zone because their last donkey died and the remaining sheep and goats are too weak to walk.

En route from the coast inland through desiccated terrain dozens of pastoralist families like Jama's displayed the meagre remains of once profitable herds - their lifeline - now reduced to three, five, 15 animals - or none at all.

Goat, sheep, donkey and even camel carcasses litter the bush around rural camps

Livestock production is the backbone of Somaliland's economy. Around 60 percent of the population practise some form of pastoralism or depend on animal products, primarily because the arid regional climate allows for few alternative livelihoods, says Abdullahi Rabile, a livestock specialist with the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Somaliland.

Eighty percent of Somaliland's export income is generated from sales of sheep, goats, cattle and camel.

In 2014, the combined territories of Somaliland, Puntland and South Central Somalia exported a record 5 million livestock, worth an estimated $360m.

Most of those beasts were raised in Somaliland - the most politically stable of the three territories - and the majority of sales went to Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Gulf states.

But few communities in the drought zone sold any animals or managed to plant crops at all this year. Instead they are accumulating debt.

'I lost them all'

In Lughaya, a windswept town on the Awdal seafront, Marian Hussain, 60, says she used to own 300 sheep and goats.

Before the drought she would sell up to 10 animals a year, with a goat or sheep making on average $50 to $80, and additional income earned through sales of milk and meat.

" But slowly I lost them all. Now I have five goats left. I depend on food and support from my relatives."

Lughaya town elder, Ege Ali, earns more as a livestock trader than the transient pastoralists who raise the animals in the bush. He says he is regularly lending food rations to rural nomads whose herds have been decimated.

The business of the town is livestock, but there were no animal sales this year, not even camels … the animals that remain are too poor condition to sell," Ali said.

Average household debt in Awdal increased from $68 in September 2014 to $400 in the same month this year, according to Rabile.

Rural communities across this parched region are familiar with drought; they have experienced it from time to time for generations. But they say the rains they rely on have become increasingly erratic and less generous, and they notice that the landscape is changing, growing more hostile.

"The current year is bad, but this follows a series of poor rainy seasons in many years," said Richard Trenchard, FAO representative for Somalia.

"Most farmers and livestock owners are able to withstand a poor season or two. However ... we often see that one particularly bad season, after a series of poor ones, can tip vast numbers of people into desperate food security situations. This is where we are now, at least potentially: thousands of people are staring into a hunger abyss following a series of poor rainy seasons."

A direct link between human-induced global climate change and increasing drought in the Horn of Africa is difficult to make, says Friederike Otto, a senior researcher at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute.

The region is geographically diverse with complex climate variations and there is a lack of long-term observational records which make it difficult to validate climate models.

Nevertheless, a report published by Oxfam in October suggests that soaring global temperatures in 2014 and 2015, coupled with the onset of a particularly powerful El Nino in the late months of 2015, may exacerbate the impact of disrupted rainfall patterns with dire consequences for populations across the Horn of Africa.

In Somaliland, Trenchard says the current drought is further intensified by poor land management and the limited capacity of the territorial government to regulate and manage land and water use sustainably.

Aggravating practices include unregulated over-grazing in concentrated areas and the relentless chopping-down of trees for charcoal production - another significant source of income for Somaliland - which causes deforestation leaving the soil weak and unable to retain water.

When the herd is gone the pastoralists can no longer support their families in the bush. People are forced to seek help and alternative sources of income in towns and cities.

Internally displaced

Somaliland proclaimed independence from Somalia in 1991 and maintains a fragile democracy. It is also the world's fourth poorest economy.

However, an estimated 84,000 people are internally displaced (IDP) within its borders and it shelters thousands of refugees from other countries - most notably at least 8,000 from Ethiopia and an influx of more than 9,000 from Yemen after the crisis there this year.

Many of Somaliland's IDPs have been uprooted by conflict in the region but the majority, according to the territory's Ministry of Resettlement, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction, have been forced to move by recurring drought and deteriorating landscapes that have rendered life impossible for herders.

On the outskirts of the capital Hargeisa, thousands of displaced families live in shanty towns and ragged camps. Some IDP settlements have been supported by humanitarian organisations, while others appear starkly neglected. 

 

The Naasa Hablod camp, for instance, sprawls over a hilltop above the city. Some IDP settlements are supported by humanitarian organisations. Naasa Hablod, however, is starkly neglected.

Osman Hugur Obsiye, chief of the camp, thinks about 1,000 families - perhaps as many as 5,000 individuals - squat on this rocky hill.

He says most families, including his own, are nomads displaced to the city over the past five years as drought and disease killed off their herds of sheep, goats, cattle and camel.

Obsiye claims Naasa Hablod receives almost no aid. Whereas humanitarian groups have built permanent structures in other settlements, here residents lash together their own homes from sticks, rags and rope.

There is no school, no mosque, no health facility and no police station. Water is brought up in trucks by merchants from the city and as a result residents claim they must buy it at an inflated price.

No funding

Maria Abdullahi owned more than 200 sheep and goats and lost them all to starvation in a single year.

"I have seven children … we came to the city because our chances are somehow better. In the countryside my husband could not find money for us," she said

Aid groups warn that the drought and rainfall brought by El Nino will most likely push thousands into a crisis state [AShley Hamer/Al Jazeera]  

 

"Here he collects rocks [as manual work] and I can sew cloth rugs to sell in town."

In camps such as Naasa Hablod, Somaliland's displaced populations are chronically neglected because the international community does not recognise the territory's independence and channels the majority of humanitarian aid into the more visible crisis of South Central Somalia, believes Ahmed Fagaase, a displacement specialist with the aid group Danish Refugee Council in Hargeisa.

Back in Awdal, Aicha Jama thinks that with a handful of decent downpours over the coming weeks her surviving animals could begin to recover after three months. But the family has no source of income in the interim.

Aid groups have distributed rations of flour, sugar, rice and cooking oil and are treating rising malnutrition in the region, but the support so far is insufficient to meet the needs of the people affected.

FAO wants to restock drought-hit communities with live sheep and goats, but as yet there is no funding for the proposal.

As of October, the international humanitarian response plan for the whole of Somalia was only 36 percent funded.

Meanwhile, for pastoralists existing in the drought zone the land grows drier. Even now with spotty rain falling in some areas it will be months before surviving herds are restored and crops can be grown.

Families who have lost all their animals and their livelihoods may have no choice but to move to a town where they must find alternative ways to earn a living. In a territory with a youth unemployment rate of 75 percent, they risk being cast to the margins.

"My animals are my life," says Shukri Bare, a pregnant mother-of-two in the small Awdal settlement of Kalowle.

"When they were almost finished we could no longer survive [in the bush] and we had to come for help here three months ago. We cannot go back. We do not know if we can recover from this."

 

S:http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/11/somaliland-parched-earth-151130112224968.html

Robando al mar

F.: Rafael Suárez

Vida Liquida

F.: Rafael Suárez

Guerilla Open Access Manifesto by Aaron Swartz

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for
themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries
in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of
private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the
sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought
valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure
their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But
even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future.
Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their
colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them?
Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to
children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.

"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they
make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal —
there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's
already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been
given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world
is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for
yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords
with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.



Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been
sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by
the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or
piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a
ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only
those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate
require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they
have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who
can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the
grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public
culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with
the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need
to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific
journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open
Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the
privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz

July 2008, Eremo, Italy

The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (CC available)

Imperativo moral

Este no es el azul del hechizo. Sigo buscando.

F.: Rafael Suárez

I am the autumnal sun

Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature
-- not his Father but his Mother stirs
within him, and he becomes immortal with her
immortality.
From time to time she claims
kindredship with us, and some globule
from her veins steals up into our own.


I am the autumnal sun,
With autumn gales my race is run;
When will the hazel put forth its flowers,
Or the grape ripen under my bowers?
When will the harvest or the hunter's moon
Turn my midnight into mid-noon?
I am all sere and yellow,
And to my core mellow.

The mast is dropping within my woods,
The winter is lurking within my moods,
And the rustling of the withered leaf
Is the constant music of my grief.

 

Henry David Thoreau

Il ne pleut pas, le temps est clair

Je rêve, et la pâle rosée
Dans les plaines perle sans bruit,
Sur le duvet des fleurs posée
Par la main fraîche de la nuit.

D'où viennent ces tremblantes gouttes ?
Il ne pleut pas, le temps est clair ;
C'est qu'avant de se former, toutes,
Elles étaient déjà dans l'air.

D'où viennent mes pleurs ? Toute flamme,
Ce soir, est douce au fond des cieux ;
C'est que je les avais dans l'âme
Avant de les sentir aux yeux.

On a dans l'âme une tendresse
Où tremblent toutes les douleurs,
Et c'est parfois une caresse
Qui trouble, et fait germer les pleurs

 

Sully Prudhomme

Rosées

Ingres

Y tú, ¿qué sabes hacer? ¿Yo? tocar en la calle..

Han corrompido su sacrificio. Lastima.

Le temps, le temps très vieux qui prépare sa vengeance

Il y a toujours une ville, des traces de poètes
Qui ont croisé leur destinée entre ses murs
L'eau coule un peu partout, la mémoire murmure
Des noms de ville, des noms de gens, trous dans la tête.

Et c'est toujours la même histoire qui recommence,
Horizons effondrés et salons de massages
Solitude assumée, respect du voisinage,
Il y a pourtant des gens qui existent et qui dansent.

Ce sont des gens d'une autre espèce, d'une autre race,
Nous dansons tout vivants une danse cruelle
Nous avons peu d'amis mais nous avons le ciel,
Et l'infinie sollicitude des espaces;

Le temps, le temps très vieux qui prépare sa vengeance,
L'incertain bruissement de la vie qui s'écoule
Les sifflements du vent, les gouttes d'eau qui roulent
Et la chambre jaunie où notre mort s'avance.

 

Michel Houellebecq
So long

Ayuda a quemar la grasa del alma.

Los que pueden, actúan. Los que no pueden y sufren por ello, escriben. El acto de escribir, constituye una de las acciones mas profundas del sentir del ser humano. Ayuda a quemar la grasa del alma.

Ernest Hemingway

Una de punk... Offspring

Y, sin embargo, el azul irradia hacia el Norte

Rafael Suárez

¿Qué hay más perdido que una puerta desnuda sin llave?

 

                                                                                                                    A  N.

 

Contemplando las noches prohibidas, sonámbulo tenebroso de un silencio abrumador, es justo defender, la chispa de contrariados instintos, botones fríos disfrazados de tal vez.

 

 

Ilimitados ciegos que olvidan, obedientes, las viejas diferencias, incisivas entonces, inocuas ahora, de un camino, el mío, arponeado entre heridas y abordajes.

 

 

Marionetas de juicios de cansadas camas, apóstoles, sin piedad, mientras predican caprichos fríos y pozos abiertos. Maestro correcta la intuición.
 

Difícil mirada inquieta que arrastra la soledad de una despedida. Agarra e inunda, poderosa razón sin fondo, la pupila empapada. Las lagrimas ya no acuden.
 

Llueven limosnas entre las noches. Ahora, mientras ventanas sin cariño, empuñan mi mirada fértil, huellas débiles como, polvo de oro, juega con el aire que nerviosamente, truena en mis pulmones.
 

Un sueño nocturno, me tuvo toda la noche en vela, en una noche de luna de nadie. Pintaban derroches de soledad de Otoño. Quizás era un viernes de invierno.
 

No había sangre en aquella flor que ya no dolía. El misteriosos futuro debe ser rojo y negro. Peón del pasado: Peor para el dolor salvaje.
 

Me volví a equivocar: jamás el exceso detuvo un suspiro.
 

Hay misterio en el amor descarnado, intenso y confuso.
 

Puedes hacer de cada noche una amante fugitiva, con distintos vestidos de lobo, pero sabes, que tiene un difunto por mirada. Lo has visto.
 

Puedes prohibir la piel y el alba. Puedes cerrar el libro blanco. Uno tras otro. Ciego e ilimitado, puedes abrumar más sábanas con excesos de desconocidas. Puedes buscar nuevas partituras.
 

Tras tus palabras, mientras encuentres silencio, permanecerás ciego.

 

 

La luna ya no es de marfil. Es de nadie. Ella habla en fondos oscuros. Escondidos. En un pintar de idas. En un sueño de brumas cansadas: duermo entre derrotas vacías, hijos pálidos de un camino de miradas y pergaminos odiosos.
 

 

 

Helados martillos sumergen ojos y corazones en amargas hendiduras que desagarran el tambor de la inocencia.
 

Y gira. A galope desnudo, la herradura circular de la vida, que sangra en tormentas innecesarias y en noches reflexivas.

 

 

Un cuerpo cede paso a otro. Y otro a otro. ¿Cómo puedo hacer?.
 

El mundo huele a exilio. Sus ramajes complacen el hambre que ya no tengo. Es un viejo cuchillo profano, de misterios absorbentes, mundos enterrados en abiertos rastro de piel, hermanos confiados de almas que compartieron noches y sábanas.

  

Estoy cansado. No me encontraras en esa mesa. No voy a comer.

 

 

Más islas tienen aroma. Languidece mi dicha.
 

Hay puertas de roble, llenas de ilusiones, hoy ya no son tristes y negras las sombras de entradas que deslumbraron cantos opuestos.

 

No deseo más patíbulos que curven mis ojos.

 

 

Sigo silencioso, distinguible en mi espejo. Leyendo. Recordando. Envejeciendo solo.

 

 

Comprendía inocente que el coraje recita alma y arroya explicaciones. ¡Aún me reconozco!.

 

 

Quizás, hereje, mi mirada guiña un ojo a la tristeza que desprecia el juego de la noche.

 

 

Hay un abierto sosiego en la soledad. No será fuente de sangre.
 

He buscado y perdido. He frecuentado los jamases, allá donde la Utopía me llevó, enterré laberintos, condenado a largos paseos, en un camino de suspiros derramados, de ventanas robustas, secretas.

 

 

Tengo razón y me equivoco. Elegante retrato de un alma sin llave.

 

 

¿Qué hay más perdido que una puerta, desnuda, sin llave?

 

 

Rafael Suárez

Police Torture and the Real Militarization of Society

by Steve Martinot 

 

The Structure of Obedience

Consider the following scenario. A police officer tells a person to stay in one place, or to sit down, or to lie down on the ground face down. The person starts to walk away, and gets arrested. Though that may be a brief journalistic description, it has enormous political ramifications.

Lets take a specific example, seen nationally in an officer’s own lapel camera video. First, the journalistic version: a pregnant woman who had just brought her daughter to school, and who happens to be black, is approached by a cop. He asks to see her ID. She objects, takes a single step away, and he grabs her and arrests her. Now, the real version: a cop approaches a black woman, after having been advised of a quarrel between her and a white woman, and ignoring the white woman. This black woman had just brought her daughter to school, and happens to be pregnant. He demands to see her ID. She says (correctly) she doesn’t think she has to show it to him, and questions his having approached her in the first place. She says she will call a friend to affirm her rights. Ten seconds into her call, she takes a step away from him, and he reaches out and grabs her sleeve. She says “don’t touch me,” and pulls away. He then grabs her, throws her down on the ground with his knee in her back, ignoring the fact that she is pregnant, and handcuffs her behind her back. He arrests her. One step away was all it took.

The journalistic version focuses on the woman, who is approached for some reason. In the realistic version, the cop acts toward a black person rather than a white person, though this black person is just standing there. The fact that she is black is noticed as important, and the fact that she is pregnant is ignored as unimportant. She is an object and not a female human being. She has no right to object to him. The cop has created a situation for her to which he, the cop, then responds by throwing her to the ground and handcuffing her.

Even if a person is sitting in his/her car, the same scenario can unfold. The officer can tell the person to get out of the car so that he can throw the person to the ground and handcuff him/her. (This is what happened to Sandra Bland in Texas, who ended up dead while in custody.) The act of throwing a person to the ground, has become a routine response to the act of questioning an officer’s approach. To say, hypothetically, “you have no reason to approach me,” is to risk being thrown to the ground and handcuffed. This paradigm has occurred so often, all across the country, that it can not be considered anything but a routine trained response.

The next level of escalation above this routine seems to be to shoot the person when they actually move away. Hundreds of people, mostly black and brown, have been shot in the back by police for moving away from an arbitrary approach by police (e.g. Yuvette Henderson, January, 2015, Emeryville).

There is a rhetorical expression that the police use to justify throwing a person to the ground and handcuffing them. “The subject became uncooperative.” When a person walks away from the cop and gets shot, the rhetorical expression is: “I felt threatened.” But there is a momentous assumption that the cop makes in either case. That is that he can play the role of a commanding officer, as if in a military institution, and the civilian on the street must respond with the obedience of a platoon member. Only in the military is the requirement for “cooperation” that absolute.

In the language of civil society, to throw a person to the ground is assault. To kneel on soneone’s back is torture. To handcuff a person in order to prohibit their autonomy and self-respect is a violation democratic ethics as well as of Constitutional due process. To shoot someone in the back is murder. Yet these criminal actions are now routine responses to a failure to obey. To question or disagree with a police officer amounts to disobedience, and can be punished in the moment.

A cop in McKinney, TX, actually explained this paradigm (again on candid video). He had broken up a teenage pool party, and in a berserk fashion chased down all the black partiers he could catch. He threw a young woman to the ground twice to handcuff her, and pulled his gun on others. Then, suddenly returning to rational demeanor, he lectured two teenage black men whom he had told to sit on the ground, as if he was their housemother. “I personally told you to get on the ground, and stay there. What did you do when I walked away? You did just what everybody else did, which was illegal [indicating the others had fled]. You did it, and you got caught.” And he arrested them. He is not only assuming the position of a commanding officer over these others who are his “subordinates,” but he consciously regards his own words as law.

Civil society is not a military organization. We have not been enlisted or inducted into one, and to so consider us is wholly inimical to any democratic ethics. Yet in Nebraska, there is a law that allows each citizen only five second to obey a police command and not be subject to arrest. In other words, legislatures and courts have ratified this regimentation of civilians, rendering us platoon members on pain of prison. The jail house may say “free society” on the door, but it is still a jail house.

The Militarization of the Police

The issue of police militarization has become a general concern throughout the country. Police departments receive military weaponry and surveillence technology from the federal government, as if preparing for war. But this weaponry is like the rhetorical expressions the police use to explain their behavior. It is an exhibition designed to buttress (as well as to normalize) the legitimacy of the demand for absolute obedience. The weaponry is not for defense against criminals. It is to create a military atmosphere to facilitate general acceptance of that demand. The regimentation of the people is the real content of police militarization. Yuvette Henderson was shot and killed by the Emeryville police using military assault rifles. She was shot in the back as she walked away from them. (The existence of assault rifles in civilian hands is a different question, and entails government complicity in allowing them unlicensed.)

Police motivations are most clearly expressed, however, in their requests for tasers. Tasers are not weapons of defense or war. They are instruments of torture. Police label them “less-lethal” substitutes for guns. But tasers would not be used against real weapons, which is the alleged role of guns. Tasers are actually substitutes for billyclubs or pepper spray, that are weaker forms of torture, with lesser reach. They are thus “more lethal” forms of exacting obedience. (When they label tasers “less-lethal” substitutes for guns, the police are admitting that the primary role of guns is also obedience and not defense.) The use of tasers has resulted in over 900 deaths in the last few years. What the taser better facilitates than other technologies is the expression of sadism by the cop using them – the many cases of people already handcuffed who were then tased repeatedly (often resulting in death). It more properly belongs to the category of instruments of restraint – such as hog-tying, body-wraps, spit masks, etc. – which also appeal to the sadistic mind.

Some people think that the police simply need to be better trained in the use of the taser. That is, they see the taser as a legitimate control instrument, and its sadistic use as a mistake. But the “misuse” of the taser is already implied in the militarist demand for absolute obedience.

The precedent for using torture to exact obedience lies deep in US history. In the slave system, for instance, a person was compelled to obey any order given by a white person under penalty of torture (painful punishment) or death (depending on the degree of resistance). The entire system depended on torturing the kidnapped Africans into absolute obedience at the onset of their enslavement. Torture was the technology of control. Any self-defense by the laborer was punishable by bodily damage or death. And just as the enslaved person had no legitimate defense against any white person’s aggressive whim (whether physical, sexual, or moral), so today a civilian (and especially a person of color) has no defense against whatever command a cop desires to give. That withholding of the right to refuse extends to various sexual demands on women by police officers, under the same paradigm of obedience.

The Machinery of Un-Civil-War

In these situations, where the cop initiates an approach for no extant or obvious legal reason (including arbitrary traffic stops), the cop is acting purely on the basis of suspicion or desire (to harass). His impunity in doing so not only gives suspicion the power of law, it gives desire the power of command (a power nexus between regimentation and autocracy).

The legal mechanism underpinning this power is the victimless crime law. Victimless crime laws dispense with the need for a complainant. They give a cop the ability can act autonomously in deciding who to notice and what to use as “probable cause.” In other words, probable cause becomes arbitrary, a question of unilateral volution. The officer who stops someone on the street or in traffic needs only to say he was carrying on an “investigation.”

But now, because disobedience is illegal, “investigation” becomes a euphemism for a process of criminalization. Having stopped an individual, the cop has only to find a command to which the person will object as too humiliating, and charge disobedience.

From a civilian perspective, the ability of the police to criminalize civilians at will is a criminal enterprise in itself. Worse than entrapment, it is a complete abandonment of every principle of justice. The cop himself becomes the situation in which a violation of law can be charged, and the person arrested. The entire procedure has nothing to do with law enforcement. It is more akin to racketeering.

Police public relations asks, “how are we to do our job if a person can simply walk away?” But the referent of this question has already distorted the category of “job,” shifting it from law enforcement to control. Suspicion, whose most prevalent form is racial profiling, is the opposite of law enforcement. In law enforcement, when a crime is committed, the police look for a suspect. In profiling, the police commit an act of suspicion, and look for a crime with which to charge the suspect. And the term “job” becomes a euphemism for impunity.

Within a democratic ethos, “investigation” would imply a different assumption. To ask a question implies that one will respect the answer, whatever it may be. The response could be silence, or walking away, and that would have to be respected. Not to do so is not to ask a question but to make a demand, and thus to withhold all respect. To demand certain answers is not to “investigate” but to carry on an inquisition, in which human personhood becomes irrelevant. The “investigation” and its questions become an instrument of control and regimentation, a withholding of respect as its basic assumption. However, once control and obedience become primary, all legitimate purpose (such as investigation) becomes mere pretense.

The Insecurity of Security

This suggests that there is an institutional insecurity that seeks to cover itself through social control, for which individual interactions with the police are the means. Indeed, with their command position over people, the cops act out this insecurity by criminalizing individuals in advance. No legal principle need be involved. There is only the militarist principle. When the pregnant woman steps away from the cop, she is breaking no law. To force her to ground and handcuff her is far from anything intended by the princple of due process in the Constitution. The Constitution provided for law enforcement, but not for police impunity. When police shoot a fleeing subject and claim they are acting in self-defense (i.e. threatened), it is not their person but the command and control principle that is threatened. To defend that control through assault or murderous action against a disobedient person implies that the cop’s own identity is wholly immersed in its paradigm. There is nothing psychological about this. Self-worth or insecurity is not the issue. There is only the military ethic of power, imposed on civil society through an assumption of impunity. It is the ethos of democracy, of human self-respect, that is the threat.

We have already suggested that slavery and its nexus of torture and obedience is a precedent for this mode of police behavior. The prison system is another, of course. Prison totally institutionalizes obedience. But the use of the paradigm of regimentation in civil society is responsible for that the US prison system having become the largest in the world. With 5% of the world’s population, its 2.5 million prisoners constitute 25% of the world’s total. Insofar as 70% of all prisoners are there for victimless crimes, this prison population testifies to the police having generalized their project of creating situations in which to criminalize people. Insofar as 75% of US prisoners are people of color, the primary form of criminalization is racial profiling.

And that points to the real institutional insecurity of the US, the weakness and fragility of white supremacy – which had been shown by the civil rights movements themselves. When social institutions require control and obedience, it is not only to protect cultural hegemony, but rather an admission that the foundation of that hegemony must not be questioned, because it is illegitimate, an institutional violation of social ethics and constitutionality.

The primary violation is then the structural inversion whereby the prison becomes the source of legality (legalism), manifest in society as police regimentation of the populace.

Conclusion

What rights can we still say we have, if we find ourselves trapped in a military structure? A person has the right to remain silent if arrested, but one does not have the right to remain silent if approached by the police on the street with the demand that one respond. That would constitute being “uncooperative.” Neither does one have the right to protect one’s property from the police. Private houses can be invaded on “suspicion,” and property confiscated as asset forfeiture. And the police who do this are insulated, hermetic, accountable only to themselves under the Patrolman’s Bill of Rights. They are immune from oversight.

This insularity, comparable to the military, informs what “doing their job” really means. Its concatenation of regimentation and impunity, of militarism and social supremacy, testifies to its white supremacy in content, and its insecurity in form. In short, the parentage of white supremacy in slavery has never been abjured. It remains in the Constitution, in the 13th amendment, which outlaws slavery everywhere except in prisons. To the extent the prison now becomes the source of social order and law in civil society beyond its prison walls, it embodies the technology of that supremacy, extended through police regimentation of society.

If the Constitution no longer protects people against this confluence of torture and regimentation, then the Constitution has become a dead letter.

 

S.:http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/11/police-torture-and-the-real-militarization-of-society/

Una moto, una cámara y el mundo por delante

El fotógrafo Walter Astrada atraviesa la India tras pasar por Turquía, Georgia, Armenia, Rusia, Kazajistán, Uzbekistán, Tayikistán, Kirguistán, Mongolia y Corea del Sur a lomos de Atenea. En eso consiste su proyecto, 'The Journey': viajar y disparar a la vida

 

NUEVA DELHI.- El mundo está lleno de gente que no se ve capaz de renunciar a lo que tiene para hacer lo que quiere. El fotoperiodista Walter Astrada (Buenos Aires, 1974) no es de esas personas. Sabe que la vida son decisiones. La última que ha tomado es de las grandes: subirse a una moto y conducir alrededor del planeta sin mirar el reloj.

 

 

 

 

 

(...)

F.:http://www.publico.es/culturas/moto-camara-y-mundo-delante.html

 

 

Jawlensky

Sin palabras: Hermoso hasta el dolor

 
Leighton

Pisanello:San Jorge y la princesa (Detalle)

Caravaggio: Baco (detalle)

Así veía Munch los celos en 1866

Rothko

Gentileschi

Sin palabras: La amapola de Huysum

Spain’s News Media Are Squeezed by Government and Debt

Newspapers almost everywhere have struggled to adjust to digital technology and declining advertising revenues.

But in Spain, the rapid restructuring of a shrinking industry — more than 11,000 journalists have lost their jobs here in seven years — has also prompted mounting concerns over whether Spain’s most established papers have lost their editorial independence amid the financial squeeze.

The industry here has faced a perfect storm that has included huge debts and the assertiveness of a conservative government under Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and his Popular Party that has aggressively countered public criticism.

Mr. Rajoy’s government has been assailed by opponents for its passage this year of what has become known as “the gag law,” which imposes steep penalties for unauthorized political protests or the publishing of amateur video footage of police officers. On Thursday, a group of international media watchdogs published a joint report expressing concerns over media freedom in Spain and calling for repeal of the law and a loosening of the government’s control over the national broadcaster.

But it is the less obvious pressures on the news media business that have also sown increasing worry about free expression in Spain and in particular whether Spain’s establishment newspapers — once the most influential in the country — have been brought to heel.

Many in the industry say the formidable combination of government and financial pressures has blunted their ability to cover any range of conflicts of interest among big business and politicians at a time of multiplying financial and political scandals that emerged after the onset of Spain’s debt crisis.

“The newspapers are in the hands of creditors, and also in those of a government that has helped convince the creditors that the papers should be kept alive rather than just asphyxiated because of their debts,” said Miguel Ángel Aguilar, a veteran Spanish journalist who founded his own publication, Ahora, in September.

“This is a situation of dependency that has done terrible damage to the credibility of the media in this country,” he said.

While many journalists like him are competing with the Spanish news media’s old guard by setting up independent and mostly online publications whose coverage has often been more aggressive, even they acknowledge that their effect has so far been limited.

“If we break news, it’s still not the same as if it’s all over the newsstands,” said Ignacio Escolar, the editor of eldiario.es, an online publication that was created in 2012 and has 13,000 subscribers.

Much of the debt held by leading publishers is tied to investments made by media groups during Spain’s boom years.

It has meant that Spanish newspapers “have really lost editorial independence when it comes to talking about the big companies, especially the banks,” said Juan Pedro Velázquez-Gaztelu, who left one of Spain’s leading newspapers, El País, two years ago and is now the Madrid bureau chief of Alternativas Económicas.

“I don’t think there has been a worse time for freedom of expression in Spain since the death of Franco,” he said.

Over the past two years, the editors of three major Spanish newspapers have been ousted. Their removal came amid steep financial losses, but also followed the publication of articles that had ruffled feathers in Spain’s political establishment.

The best-known of these editors, Pedro J. Ramírez, has said that his dismissal from the newspaper El Mundo was triggered by his decision to publish embarrassing text messages sent by Prime Minister Rajoy to his former party treasurer, Luis Bárcenas, shortly after Mr. Bárcenas went to prison.

Mr. Ramírez’s decision was part of the newspaper’s coverage of an investigation into whether millions amassed in offshore accounts by Mr. Bárcenas were tied to a slush fund operated by Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party that was used to enrich politicians.

El Mundo, for its part, says Mr. Ramírez’s departure was mutually agreed and was linked to its financial losses under his leadership rather than any political pressure or his coverage of the Bárcenas scandal.

In October, Mr. Ramírez created a news website, El Español, financed by his multimillion-dollar severance package from El Mundo, as well as a crowdfunding campaign.

Mr. Ramírez argued in an interview that mainstream newspapers “are no longer doing their job as watchdogs.” Newspapers, he said, were under corporate and political pressure, but also suffered from greater editorial restrictions imposed by their own management.

 

“Newspapers are no longer led by their editors, but by chief executives who are worried about accounts and trying to maintain good relationships with those in power,” said Mr. Ramírez, who has been joined by a dozen former colleagues from El Mundo.

 

One, María Peral, said she wanted a new challenge after witnessing a clear decline in editorial freedom during “a crisis that forced us to keep out content that could be harmful for our advertisers or for the banks that own the debt.”

 

Casimiro García-Abadillo, who briefly succeeded Mr. Ramírez at the helm of El Mundo, said he, too, had “limited room to maneuver” as editor of El Mundo, one of Spain’s leading conservative papers, where he remains a columnist.

 

“There are a lot of cases where critical news about big institutions is either not published or only in a friendly manner,” Mr. García-Abadillo said.

 

Pablo Casado, a conservative lawmaker who is a spokesman for Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party, said he was unaware of any complaint from journalists about political interference.

“I don’t see a problem with the press in Spain,” he said.

 

Still, the government has taken steps to increase its control over RTVE, Spain’s public television and radio broadcaster. In 2012, Mr. Rajoy’s government introduced a law that allows the government to appoint RTVE’s boss without the consent of other political parties.

 

While the management denies editorial interference, Alejandro Caballero Mateos, a journalist who is president of RTVE’s newsroom committee, listed a dozen examples this year of news items that, he said, RTVE purposefully played down or ignored.

Those included RTVE’s coverage of a report by Amnesty International, without citing its criticism of Spain, including its gag law. RTVE, the committee found, ignored news about a possible conflict of interest between Cristóbal Montoro, Mr. Rajoy’s budget minister, and contracts signed by a company he founded.
 

In July, the committee also found, RTVE played down a judge’s report about one of Spain’s largest corruption investigations, involving a group of conservative politicians accused of negotiating kickbacks on 250 million euros, about $272 million, in public contracts.

 

In an emailed response, RTVE denied any censorship. While Amnesty International’s criticism of Spain was not reported on its main afternoon

 

news report, RTVE said it was mentioned in other programs and on its website.

The past business dealings of Mr. Montoro, the budget minister, were not under court investigation, which justified not reporting on them, the station said.

 

Newsroom conflicts have also heated up at El País, which established itself as Spain’s leading newspaper in the late 1970s when it chronicled Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy.

The newspaper’s editor, Antonio Caño, recently quashed an attempt by members of its newsroom committee to organize a vote of confidence over his leadership.

 

In recent months, the newsroom committee raised concerns over articles that were altered or removed from the El País website after their publication, including two articles relating to Qatar, according to the minutes of the committee’s internal meetings, which were seen by The New York Times.

 

Prisa, the parent company of El País, has been negotiating an investment from a Qatari company.

Another two articles concerned Telefónica, a company that is a shareholder of Prisa and that bought its television assets last year, helping Prisa cut its debt to 1.9 billion euros, or about $2.1 billion.

Last week, Mr. Caño, El País’s editor, said during a presentation that Prisa’s debt “in no way” affected his paper’s editorial content. Juan Luis Cebrián, the executive chairman of Prisa and co-founder of El País, also stressed newsroom independence. “What gets published is what the editor of El País wants to publish,” he said.

 

Still, Mr. Caño acknowledged that Spanish journalists worked in a country where “the political powers are frankly very far removed from Britain in terms of accepting the fundamental role fulfilled by the media.”

 

At El País, two journalists recently left the paper after a dispute about the alteration of an article about Telefónica’s ties to the government.

 

“Working at El País used to be the dream of any Spanish journalist,” said Mr. Aguilar, who is also a regular columnist for El País. “But now there are people so exasperated that they’re leaving, sometimes even with the feeling that the situation has reached levels of censorship.”

 

S.:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/world/europe/as-spains-media-industry-changes-rapidly-some-worry-about-objectivity.html?_r=0

 

des nuits trop longues et de l’autre, éternelle.

Derrière la fenêtre dont on a blanchi le cadre
(contre les mouches, contre les fantômes),
une tête chenue de vieil homme se penche
sur une lettre, ou les nouvelles du pays.
Le lierre sombre croît contre le mur.
Gardez-le, lierre et chaux, du vent de l’aube,
des nuits trop longues et de l’autre, éternelle.

Philippe Jaccottet
Derrière la fenêtre...

Maestro

Maestro es el nombre más hermoso que un hombre puede llamar a otro, después de padre.

Anónimo.

El tiempo no existe.

 

 

F.: Rafael Suárez

If it's no problem.....

If it's no problem, why mention it?

Everything spoken means that

it's opposite, & everything else.

I'm alive, I'm dying.

 

Jim Morrison

Poems

Erté

Se encuentra en el Museo de Arte Metropolitano de Nueva York.

Samuelson

(Visto en Flickr)

Sin palabras

Modigalini

The Empire of Chaos: An Interview With Noam Chomsky

By C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout | Interview

 

US foreign policy in the 21st century has little to offer other than massive military power. Indeed, gone are the days when military might was used in order to "recreate the world in America's image." In the post-Cold War era, US military interventions take place in the absence of an overall strategic vision and with ideological justifications lacking force and conviction even among the United States' traditional allies. Little wonder then that military interventions, always illegal and unjustifiable, end up accomplishing nothing more than the creation of black holes, while giving rise in turn to new and ever increasing violent terrorist organizations bent on spreading their own vision of social and political order.

In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Noam Chomsky reflects on the dynamics of US foreign policy in the 21st century and the implications of the policy of raining down destruction for world order. Chomsky also assesses the role of Russia's involvement in Syria, the rise of the Islamic State and the apparent attraction it holds for many young Muslims from Europe, and offers a grim view about the future of US foreign policy.

CJ Polychroniou: US military interventions in the 21st century (e.g., Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria) have proven totally disastrous, yet the terms of the intervention debate have yet to be redrawn among Washington's warmakers. What's the explanation for this?
Noam Chomsky: In part the old cliché: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The comparative advantage of the US is in military force. When one form of intervention fails, doctrine and practice can be revised with new technologies, devices, etc. There is a good review of the process from World War II to the present in a recent book by Andrew Cockburn, Kill Chain. There are possible alternatives, such as supporting democratization (in reality, not rhetoric). But these have likely consequences that the US would not favor. That is why when the US supports "democracy"; it is "top-down" forms of democracy in which traditional elites linked to the US remain in power, to quote the leading scholar of "democracy promotion," Thomas Carothers, a former Reagan official who is a strong advocate of the process but who recognizes the reality, unhappily.

 Some have argued that Obama's wars are quite different in both style and essence from those of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Is there any validity behind these claims?

Bush relied on shock-and-awe military violence, which proved disastrous for the victims and led to serious defeats for the US. Obama is relying on different tactics, primarily the drone global assassination campaign, which breaks new records in international terrorism, and Special Forces operations, by now over much of the globe. Nick Turse, the leading researcher on the topic, recently reported that US elite forces are "deployed to a record-shattering 147 Countries in 2015."

Destabilization and what I call the "creation of black holes" is the principal aim of the Empire of Chaos in the Middle East and elsewhere, but it is also clear that the US is sailing in a turbulent sea with no sense of direction and is, in fact, quite clueless in terms of what needs to be done once the task of destruction has been completed. How much of this is due to the decline of the US as a global hegemon?

The chaos and destabilization are real, but I don't think that's the aim. Rather, it is a consequence of hitting fragile systems that one does not understand with the sledgehammer that is the main tool, as in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere. As for the continuing decline of US hegemonic power (actually, from 1945, with some ups and downs), there are consequences in the current world scene. Take, for example, the fate of Edward Snowden. Four Latin American countries are reported to have offered him asylum, no longer fearing the lash of Washington. Not a single European power is willing to face US anger. That is a consequence of very significant decline of US power in the Western hemisphere.

However, I doubt that the chaos in the Middle East traces substantially to this factor. One consequence of the US invasion of Iraq was to incite sectarian conflicts that are destroying Iraq and are now tearing the region to shreds. The Europe-initiated bombing of Libya created a disaster there, which has spread far beyond with weapons flow and stimulation of jihadi crimes. And there are many other effects of foreign violence. There are also many internal factors. I think that Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn is correct in his observation that the Wahhabization of Sunni Islam is one of the most dangerous developments of the modern era. By now many of the most horrible problems look virtually insoluble, like the Syrian catastrophe, where the only slim hopes lie in some kind of negotiated settlement towards which the powers involved seem to be slowly inching.

Russia is also raining down destruction in Syria. To what end, and does Russia pose a threat to US interests in the region?

Russian strategy evidently is to sustain the Assad regime, and it is indeed "raining down destruction," primarily attacking the jihadi-led forces supported by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and to an extent the US. A recent article in the Washington Post suggested that the high tech weapons provided by the CIA to these forces (including TOW anti-tank missiles) had shifted the military balance against Assad and were a factor in drawing the Russians in. On "US interest," we have to be careful. The interests of US power and of the people of the United States are often quite different, as is commonly the case elsewhere as well. The official US interest is to eliminate Assad, and naturally Russian support for Assad poses a threat to that. And the confrontation not only is harmful, if not catastrophic, for Syria, but also carries a threat of accidental escalation that could be catastrophic far beyond.

 Is ISIS a US-created monster?

A recent interview with the prominent Middle East analyst Graham Fuller is headlined, "Former CIA officer says US policies helped create IS." What Fuller says, correctly I think, is that, "I think the United States is one of the key creators of this organization. The United States did not plan the formation of ISIS, but its destructive interventions in the Middle East and the war in Iraq were the basic causes of the birth of ISIS. You will remember that that the starting point of this organization was to protest the US invasion of Iraq. In those days it was supported by many non-Islamist Sunnis as well because of their opposition to the Iraq's occupation. I think even today ISIS [now the Islamic State] is supported by many Sunnis who feel isolated by the Shiite government in Baghdad." Establishment of Shiite dominance was one direct consequence of the US invasion, a victory for Iran and one element of the remarkable US defeat in Iraq. So in answer to your question, US aggression was a factor in the rise of ISIS, but there is no merit to conspiracy theories circulating in the region that hold that the US planned the rise of this extraordinary monstrosity.

How do you explain the fascination that a completely barbaric and savage organization like the Islamic State holds for many young Muslim people living in Europe?

There has been a good deal of careful study of the phenomenon, by Scott Atran among others. The appeal seems to be primarily among young people who live under conditions of repression and humiliation, with little hope and little opportunity, and who seek some goal in life that offers dignity and self-realization; in this case, establishing a utopian Islamic state rising in opposition to centuries of subjugation and destruction by Western imperial power. In addition, there appears to be a good deal of peer pressure - members of the same soccer club, and so on. The sharply sectarian nature of the regional conflicts no doubt is also a factor - not just "defending Islam" but defending it from Shiite apostates. It's a very ugly and dangerous scene.

 The Obama administration has shown little interest in re-evaluating the US relationship with authoritarian and fundamentalist regimes in places like Egypt and South Arabia. Is democracy promotion a completely sham element of US foreign policy?

There doubtless are people like Thomas Carothers, mentioned above, who really are dedicated to democracy promotion, and are within the government; he was involved in "democracy promotion" in the Reagan State Department. But the record shows quite clearly that it is scarcely an element in policy, and quite often democracy is considered a threat - for good reasons, when we look at popular opinion. To mention only one obvious example, polls of international opinion by the leading US polling agency (WIN/Gallup) show that the US is regarded as the greatest threat to world peace by a huge margin, Pakistan far behind in second place (presumably inflated by the Indian vote). Polls taken in Egypt on the eve of the Arab spring revealed considerable support for Iranian nuclear weapons to counterbalance Israeli and US power. Public opinion often favors social reform of the kind that would harm US-based multinationals. And much else. These are hardly policies that the US government would like to see instituted, but authentic democracy would give a significant voice to public opinion. For similar reasons, democracy is feared at home.

Do you anticipate any major changes in US foreign policy in the near future either under a Democratic or Republican administration?

Not under a Democratic administration, but the situation with a Republican administration is much less clear. The party has drifted far off the spectrum of parliamentary politics. If the pronouncements of the current crop of candidates can be taken seriously, the world could be facing deep trouble. Take, for example, the nuclear deal with Iran. Not only are they unanimously opposed to it but they are competing on how quickly to bomb Iran. It's a very strange moment in American political history, and in a state with awesome powers of destruction, that should cause not a little concern.

 

S.:http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33519-the-empire-of-chaos-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky