viernes, 27 de noviembre de 2015
miércoles, 25 de noviembre de 2015
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.
-- 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
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
martes, 24 de noviembre de 2015
domingo, 22 de noviembre de 2015
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.
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
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
Ernest Hemingway
viernes, 20 de noviembre de 2015
sábado, 14 de noviembre de 2015
¿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
viernes, 13 de noviembre de 2015
Police Torture and the Real Militarization of Society
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.
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
miércoles, 11 de noviembre de 2015
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.
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.
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
martes, 10 de noviembre de 2015
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.
(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.
Anónimo.
domingo, 8 de noviembre de 2015
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
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.
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
miércoles, 4 de noviembre de 2015
Israel’s Endless Cycles of Violence
Israel’s near-half-century-old occupation of Palestinian territory has fueled such animosity that Israelis fear that ending it could unleash even worse violence, a self-perpetuating conundrum that – if left unresolved – will doom Israelis and Palestinians to chronic bouts of death and destruction, as Alon Ben-Meir describes.
By Alon Ben-Meir
The Netanyahu government has conveniently and consistently separated the occupation of the West Bank from the repeated eruption of violence, insisting that the Palestinians’ unrest is a result of incitement by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, when in fact he has been attempting to reduce the tension.
Not once has any Israeli official suggested that nearly 50 years of occupation might have brought the Palestinians to a boiling point. Any incident could have ignited a new violent flare-up, and the conflict over the Temple Mount/Haram el-Sharif provided the spark that led to the current fire, regardless of whose side was at fault.
By Alon Ben-Meir
The Netanyahu government has conveniently and consistently separated the occupation of the West Bank from the repeated eruption of violence, insisting that the Palestinians’ unrest is a result of incitement by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, when in fact he has been attempting to reduce the tension.
Not once has any Israeli official suggested that nearly 50 years of occupation might have brought the Palestinians to a boiling point. Any incident could have ignited a new violent flare-up, and the conflict over the Temple Mount/Haram el-Sharif provided the spark that led to the current fire, regardless of whose side was at fault.
The most troubling issue is that successive Israeli governments remained blind and refused to connect much of the Palestinian violence to the occupation; what is worst is that the Israeli public has largely bought into the fallacy of this argument.
They are persuaded by the pervasive and misleading official narrative that even if Israel were to evacuate the West Bank, the Palestinians will not end their violent resistance to Israel’s very existence. They insist that the Palestinians are determined to take over all of Mandatory Palestine rather than establishing a Palestinian state limited to the West Bank and Gaza, to live side-by-side with Israel in peace.
Ironically, whereas this charge against the Palestinians is deeply ingrained among right-wing Israelis, they cheer the fact that many members of the Israeli government categorically reject the establishment of a Palestinian state on any part of the Jews’ “biblical homeland.”
To make the case against the withdrawal from the West Bank, Israeli officials point to Israel’s evacuation of Gaza in 2005, its subsequent takeover by Hamas, and the violence emanating from it. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-conservative cohorts argue that Israel must learn from this experience and thus should not withdraw from the West Bank, which is far closer than Gaza to Israel’s urban centers.
They further argue that should Israel evacuate the West Bank, Hamas will certainly take over and turn it into another staging ground from which to launch rocket attacks, cut Israel in half, and inflict incalculable losses in lives and property. Ironically, this suggests that Palestinian radicalism can be contained under occupation when in fact the occupation itself is the prime cause behind the intensified Palestinian extremism.
Brigadier General Guy Goldstein, Deputy Director of Government Activities in the Territories no less, stated this week: “It’s a rebellion of … terror that comes from pain and frustration.”
But then leave it to the hypocrites in Netanyahu’s government to justify continuing the occupation, presumably to stem the rise of violent extremism. Indeed, if Israel were to precipitately and unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank, as it did from Gaza, a similar result could theoretically reoccur.
As such, the withdrawal from Gaza offers a different kind of lesson from which Israel must learn. Unlike the conditions that existed in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority has begun in earnest to build the foundations of a state with schools, clinics, a network of roads, and private and government institutions.
They were even praised by Israel’s top security officials for their full cooperation with Israel on all security matters, even in times of increased tension between the two sides, as is currently the case. What is most worrisome, however, is that neither Netanyahu nor any of his coalition partners know where Israel will be if the occupation continues for another five to ten years, how many more Palestinian uprisings will occur, and what will be the death toll and destruction both sides sustain?
I believe that the Israelis who have been traumatized by the violent events of the past few weeks should ask themselves a simple question: If a handful of Palestinians have managed to cause such havoc with the entire Israeli security apparatus in place and thousands of Israeli troops stationed throughout the West Bank, by what logic can any honest person say that the occupation bolsters Israel’s national security?
If anything, the occupation has been and will continue to be the very evil that Israel needs to rid itself from, and they must do so for their own sake rather than the Palestinians’, as the occupation poses the greatest threat to Israel’s future well-being.
To remove this perpetual threat, Israelis must examine this disastrous state of affairs and demand the withdrawal from the West Bank under terms and conditions consistent with Israel’s requirements to ensure the safety of its citizens. The Gaza experience in a way was positive and instructive in that it has shown the mistakes that the late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made and how to avoid similar mistakes in any future disengagement from territories in the West Bank.
The Palestinians, with the support of the Arab states and the international community, will never give up their aspiration to establish a state of their own. Israel should sooner than later accept this fact, particularly because of its unchallenged military prowess and that it is in a perfect position to withdraw from the West Bank, with some land swaps, without risking any aspect of its legitimate national security concerns.
The Israeli withdrawal should be based on a number of agreed-upon phases to be implemented over a period of ten years or more, and entail well-defined reciprocal measures by both sides to be executed on a schedule with monitoring mechanisms to ensure full compliance. In fact, a withdrawal based on preconceived security plans and collaborative economic developments will prompt the Palestinians to develop vested interests and give them the incentive to preserve it and in return, it would dramatically enhance rather than undermine Israel’s security.
More importantly, the Palestinians know only too well that should they threaten Israel by violating such an agreement, Israel is and will remain in a position to reoccupy the land almost at will, except this time Israel will have a solid moral and tangible ground to stand on that potentially engenders the support of the international community.
Is this a risk worth taking by any Israeli government? I believe the answer is clear. The occupation is not sustainable; it is costly both in blood and treasure, Israel’s national security will remain at risk, and the country will become ever more internationally isolated while risking its very identity as a Jewish state.
I am not naïve enough to suggest that the current Netanyahu government will ever be willing to end the occupation. It is now up to the Israelis to seek new leaders who will, because it is they who will pay the ultimate price that the evil of occupation will exact.
They are persuaded by the pervasive and misleading official narrative that even if Israel were to evacuate the West Bank, the Palestinians will not end their violent resistance to Israel’s very existence. They insist that the Palestinians are determined to take over all of Mandatory Palestine rather than establishing a Palestinian state limited to the West Bank and Gaza, to live side-by-side with Israel in peace.
Ironically, whereas this charge against the Palestinians is deeply ingrained among right-wing Israelis, they cheer the fact that many members of the Israeli government categorically reject the establishment of a Palestinian state on any part of the Jews’ “biblical homeland.”
To make the case against the withdrawal from the West Bank, Israeli officials point to Israel’s evacuation of Gaza in 2005, its subsequent takeover by Hamas, and the violence emanating from it. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-conservative cohorts argue that Israel must learn from this experience and thus should not withdraw from the West Bank, which is far closer than Gaza to Israel’s urban centers.
They further argue that should Israel evacuate the West Bank, Hamas will certainly take over and turn it into another staging ground from which to launch rocket attacks, cut Israel in half, and inflict incalculable losses in lives and property. Ironically, this suggests that Palestinian radicalism can be contained under occupation when in fact the occupation itself is the prime cause behind the intensified Palestinian extremism.
Brigadier General Guy Goldstein, Deputy Director of Government Activities in the Territories no less, stated this week: “It’s a rebellion of … terror that comes from pain and frustration.”
But then leave it to the hypocrites in Netanyahu’s government to justify continuing the occupation, presumably to stem the rise of violent extremism. Indeed, if Israel were to precipitately and unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank, as it did from Gaza, a similar result could theoretically reoccur.
As such, the withdrawal from Gaza offers a different kind of lesson from which Israel must learn. Unlike the conditions that existed in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority has begun in earnest to build the foundations of a state with schools, clinics, a network of roads, and private and government institutions.
They were even praised by Israel’s top security officials for their full cooperation with Israel on all security matters, even in times of increased tension between the two sides, as is currently the case. What is most worrisome, however, is that neither Netanyahu nor any of his coalition partners know where Israel will be if the occupation continues for another five to ten years, how many more Palestinian uprisings will occur, and what will be the death toll and destruction both sides sustain?
I believe that the Israelis who have been traumatized by the violent events of the past few weeks should ask themselves a simple question: If a handful of Palestinians have managed to cause such havoc with the entire Israeli security apparatus in place and thousands of Israeli troops stationed throughout the West Bank, by what logic can any honest person say that the occupation bolsters Israel’s national security?
If anything, the occupation has been and will continue to be the very evil that Israel needs to rid itself from, and they must do so for their own sake rather than the Palestinians’, as the occupation poses the greatest threat to Israel’s future well-being.
To remove this perpetual threat, Israelis must examine this disastrous state of affairs and demand the withdrawal from the West Bank under terms and conditions consistent with Israel’s requirements to ensure the safety of its citizens. The Gaza experience in a way was positive and instructive in that it has shown the mistakes that the late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made and how to avoid similar mistakes in any future disengagement from territories in the West Bank.
The Palestinians, with the support of the Arab states and the international community, will never give up their aspiration to establish a state of their own. Israel should sooner than later accept this fact, particularly because of its unchallenged military prowess and that it is in a perfect position to withdraw from the West Bank, with some land swaps, without risking any aspect of its legitimate national security concerns.
The Israeli withdrawal should be based on a number of agreed-upon phases to be implemented over a period of ten years or more, and entail well-defined reciprocal measures by both sides to be executed on a schedule with monitoring mechanisms to ensure full compliance. In fact, a withdrawal based on preconceived security plans and collaborative economic developments will prompt the Palestinians to develop vested interests and give them the incentive to preserve it and in return, it would dramatically enhance rather than undermine Israel’s security.
More importantly, the Palestinians know only too well that should they threaten Israel by violating such an agreement, Israel is and will remain in a position to reoccupy the land almost at will, except this time Israel will have a solid moral and tangible ground to stand on that potentially engenders the support of the international community.
Is this a risk worth taking by any Israeli government? I believe the answer is clear. The occupation is not sustainable; it is costly both in blood and treasure, Israel’s national security will remain at risk, and the country will become ever more internationally isolated while risking its very identity as a Jewish state.
I am not naïve enough to suggest that the current Netanyahu government will ever be willing to end the occupation. It is now up to the Israelis to seek new leaders who will, because it is they who will pay the ultimate price that the evil of occupation will exact.
Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. alon@alonben-meir.com. Web: www.alonben-meir.com
S.:https://consortiumnews.com/2015/10/30/israels-endless-cycles-of-violence/
domingo, 1 de noviembre de 2015
Estremece la madrugada
F.: Rafael Suárez
Tout le monde parle des couchers de soleil
Tous les voyageurs sont d'accord pour parler des couchers de soleil dans ces parages
Il y a plein de bouquions où l'on ne décrit que les couchers de soleil
Les couchers de soleil des tropiques
Oui c'est vrai c'est splendide
Mais je préfère de beaucoup les levers de soleil
L'aube
Je n'en rate pas une
Je suis toujours sur le pont
A poils
Et je suis toujours seul à les admirer
Mais je ne vais pas les décrire les aubes
Je vais les garder pour moi seul
Tous les voyageurs sont d'accord pour parler des couchers de soleil dans ces parages
Il y a plein de bouquions où l'on ne décrit que les couchers de soleil
Les couchers de soleil des tropiques
Oui c'est vrai c'est splendide
Mais je préfère de beaucoup les levers de soleil
L'aube
Je n'en rate pas une
Je suis toujours sur le pont
A poils
Et je suis toujours seul à les admirer
Mais je ne vais pas les décrire les aubes
Je vais les garder pour moi seul
Blaise Cendrars
Couchers de soleil
Why 5+5+5 doesn’t always make 15: Maths exam question divides the internet
A Year 3 pupil was marked down for the solution written out for 5x3
by Mark Molloy
Working out the answer to 5x3 may seem simple enough but the solution one student gave has sparked an online debate.
The maths question, which asks pupils to work out 5x3 using the repeated addition strategy, was posted on Reddit.
Full article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/11960777/Why-555-doesnt-always-make-15-Maths-exam-question-divides-the-internet.html
Full article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/11960777/Why-555-doesnt-always-make-15-Maths-exam-question-divides-the-internet.html
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