3 Articles on Burma

1. Inside a city under siege: gunfire breaks the silence as troops
reclaim the streets
2. Burma: Hundreds may be dead, as junta tries to keep brutality unseen
3. Hope wanes among protesters in Myanmar

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Inside a city under siege: gunfire breaks the silence as troops
reclaim the streets

David Jiménez in Rangoon
Saturday September 29, 2007
The Guardian

The monasteries are surrounded, the monks held inside at gunpoint,
whole districts are sealed off, and the internet has been closed down.
Soldiers have taken over the streets, carrying guns at their waists
and always pointing forwards. Fresh army divisions have reached the
city gates from neighbouring provinces.

Rangoon is a city under siege.

The sound of sporadic gunfire broke the unusual silence which cloaked
the centre of the city. It was proof that the killings of the past two
days had not weakened the determination of the thousands of Burmese
protesters ready to risk their life in defiance of the regime.

Article continues
Many of them disobeyed the ban on gatherings of more than five people,
confronting the troops once again - unarmed and without violence.

Without a clear leader, and with the monks confined to their
monasteries, young civilians have taken up the baton, and form the
front line of the protests. Thein, an adolescent with long hair and
Buddhist scriptures tattooed on his body, showed his bare chest to a
file of soldiers in Anawrahta street near the centre.

He carried a sheet of paper with a copy of a blurred image of Aung
San, the hero of independence and father of the opposition leader Aung
San Suu Kyi. Was he afraid of death? "I have no work. My father has no
work. I have nothing to lose," he said.

Yesterday's demonstrations brought out fewer people than in previous
days. The junta had sealed off entire Rangoon neighbourhoods, stopping
the people from gathering. The protests were dispersed, and the main
march of 5,000 people opted to head for the city outskirts.

The five principal pagodas of Rangoon, which had been centres of the
protest, were taken at dawn by soldiers; it was impossible to enter or
leave them. But spontaneous and disorganised protests continued to
break out throughout the afternoon. What began with 10 people shouting
with their fists in the air became a demonstration with hundreds of
voices. In a few minutes, a thousand more had joined in. People who
out of fear did not join in the protests applauded from balconies and
doorways.

Seeing a foreign journalist, many offered food and drink. "Don't
leave. We need you," they shouted.

The killings of Wednesday and Thursday had the effect desired by the
soldiers: they have been a warning that the junta is ready to do
anything to stay in power.

Thomas Keenan: Translation, or: Can things get any worse?

Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues. - Shaikh Abdullah Azzam

To end this talk, I ask all who find in it truth, from all Muslims and in particular those who work in the mass media and in Internet and in Media publication, and relevance to consider its publication and distribution -- in all languages and as widely as possible -- a trust on his shoulders. - Ayman al-Zawahiri (September 2005)

Early in No Man's Land, Danis Tanovic's bitterly funny film about the war in Bosnia, one Bosnian soldier asks another -- as they sit, immobilized in the fog, on what turns out to be a battlefield -- whether he knows the difference between a pessimist and an optimist.

The soldier shrugs.

The answer: "a pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."

* * *

What sort of language is war, if it is one? Eyal Weizmann suggested in his Exergue that we need to understand war as a discourse, but more precisely as a threatened one, a selferasing one, a language endangered by its own capacity to destroy and hence to destroy itself. That condition, when language ceases, he called "total war." For him, the discursivity of less-than-total war is defined by its less-than-totality, its unfinished status, the gap that remains between the possibilities of destruction and what's actually done. The logic of this is counter-intuitive, but careful: as long as escalation is possible, as long as still more destruction remains to come, then so does the possibility of less, and hence there is an offer being made, a proposition, a move in a negotiation. So what would "total" conflict be? When does escalation become impossible? Is it when, as the French news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur describes the conflict in Lebanon on its cover (20-26 July 20006), it's become "La Guerre des Fous," when the war is crazy, crazed, delirious, out of control? What would that mean? Is this what happens when war is no longer a means but an end in itself, or when killing for the sake of killing -- rather than for a reason, and idea, a cause, a country -- takes over as the norm and not the exception? Or should the term total war be reserved for those events when a genocidal, eradicatory, annihilatory, cleansing logic governs the conduct of fighting, when the aim is simply to kill all of the others, to force them to surrender and submit unconditionally and absolutely, to make them disappear as subjects or speakers in a dialogue or an exchange? When the violence is not exercised in order to force others into a conversation, or to change the terms of a debate, but in order to end the debate, to remove the other party from the debate once and for all, when debate itself -- or politics, or language -- is itself the target of the violence .... is that the limit? Is that the moment when things actually can't get any worse?

Articulated Power Relations - Markus Miessen in conversation with Chantal Mouffe

In December 2006, London-based architect and writer Markus Miessen went to meet political theorist and Professor of Political Theory Chantal Mouffe. In a series of conversations at Westminster, he used his current investigation into ‘conflict- and non-consensus-based forms of participation as a form of alternative spatial practice’ as a starting point to question Mouffe about democratic life and her understanding of what she calls ‘conflictual consensus’.

Markus Miessen
Chantal, you have written extensively on the struggle of politics and the radical heart of democratic life. Could you please explain to us the main thesis of your latest book “On the Political”?

Chantal Mouffe
My objective in ‘On the Political’ consists of two aims: the first one is from the point of view of political theory. I am convinced that the two dominant models in democratic political theory–which are the aggregative model and on the other side the deliberative model, represented, for example, by the work of Jürgen Habermas–are not adequate to grasp what is the challenge that we are facing today. I wanted to contribute to the theoretical discussion in political theory by proposing a different model, one, which I call the agonistic model of democracy. My second aim corresponds to my central motivation, which is a political one. I have been trying to understand why in the kind of society we are living today–which I call a post-political society– there is an increasing disaffection with democratic institutions. I have for some time been concerned with the growing success of right wing populism parties but also, more recently, with the development of Al Quaida forms of terrorism. I feel that we do not have the theoretical tools to really understand what is happening. Of course I do not claim that political theory is powerful enough to explain everything. But I think that there is a crucial role that political theory can play in helping us to understand our current predicament. So far, it has not been helpful at all. In fact, one could even say that it has been contra-productive. We have been made to believe that the aim of democratic politics was to reach a consensus. Obviously, there are different ways in which this consensus is being envisaged. But the common idea is that the distinction between Left and Right is not pertinent any more. It is what we find in Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. They argue that we should think beyond Left and Right, and, according to Beck, that we need to re-invent politics in terms of ‘sub-politics’. This is of course typical of liberal thought, which, as Carl Schmitt indicated, has never been able to understand the specificity of the political. When liberals intend to speak about politics, they either think in terms of economics–and that would definitely be the aggregative model–or in terms of morality, and this represents the deliberative model. But what is specific to the political always eludes liberal thought. I consider this as a serious shortcoming because to be able to act in politics one needs to understand what is the dynamic of the political.

And would this constitute the book’s main thesis?

Yes, this is why, in the book, I insist that the dimension of the political is something that is linked to the dimension of conflict that exists in human societies, the ever-present possibility of antagonism: an antagonism that is ineradicable. This means that a consensus without exclusion–a form of consensus beyond hegemony, beyond sovereignty will always be unavailable.

Maurizio Lazzarato: The Misfortunes of the “Artistic Critique” and of Cultural Employment
Submitted by eyal weizman on Fri, 2007-05-11 11:20.
Translated by Mary O’Neill

In the work of sociologists and economists who are concerned with the transformations in capitalism and more specifically the changes in the artistic and cultural labour market, there is a tendency to use artistic activity and those conditions of professional practice as the model from which, they argue, neo-liberal economics draws its inspiration. This is an ambiguous discourse and it deserves to be examined more closely. Le nouvel esprit du Capitalisme [The New Spirit of Capitalism] has the merit of making the “artistic critique” one of the economic, political and social actors of the century just past, and of the post-1945 period in particular. But both the definition of what exactly the “artistic critique” is, and the role the authors assign to it in contemporary capitalism are puzzling in many respects.

The thesis that runs throughout “The New Spirit of Capitalism” is the following: the artistic critique (based on and demanding freedom, autonomy and authenticity) and the social critique (based on and demanding solidarity, security and equality) “are most often developed and embodied by different groups” and are “incompatible”.1

The torch of the artistic critique, which was handed over by the artists to the students in May 1968, was then apparently taken up by “trendy” individuals working in the media, finance, show-business, fashion, internet, etc. sectors, i.e. the “creatives” at the “top of the sociocultural hierarchy”. The social critique, on the other hand, developed and embodied by the workers of May ’68, was taken up by the ‘little people’, subordinates, those excluded by liberalism. Artistic critique and social critique are therefore “largely incompatible”.

The “artistic critique” provokes in the authors an unease, even a kind of contempt, which they have difficulty hiding. Seen from their point of view, this is entirely understandable since the “artistic critique [...] is not naturally egalitarian; indeed it always runs the risk of being reinterpreted in an aristocratic sense” and “untempered by considerations of equality and solidarity of the social critique, [it] can very quickly play into the hands of a particularly destructive form of liberalism, as we have seen in recent years”. Besides, the artistic critique is “not in itself necessary to effectively challenge capitalism, a fact demonstrated by the earlier successes of the workers’ movement without the support of the artistic critique. From this point of view, May ’68 was exceptional”. Reading it, one also feels that the book is pervaded by a certain resentment against May ’68 that for some years now has been prevalent among the French intellectual elites. Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who (it is argued)s as the key thinkers of ’68 inadvertently sowed seeds of liberalism in people’s minds, are bearing the brunt of that resentment here [in this text] as well as in the mind of the former Minister of Education.

So not only is the artistic critique not necessary, other than to “moderate the excess of equality in the social critique” that is in danger of “treating freedom with disdain”*, but what is more, it acts like a Trojan Horse for liberalism, to which it is related by the aristocratic taste for freedom, autonomy and authenticity, which the artists supposedly handed on to “the students” and which then went into circulation via “the trendy, left-wing bobos** ”. Here Boltanski and Chiapello give us a re-run of the opposition between freedom and equality, between autonomy and security. This opposition dates from another era and, it must be said, has resulted in the failure of socialism as well as communism.

“No culture without social rights”

The concept of “artistic critique” doesn’t hold up for theoretical as well as political reasons:

a) As far as this last aspect goes, B&C’s theses were roundly refuted four years after publication. The misfortunes of Boltanski and Chiappello’s “artistic critique” are many, but the greatest misfortune befell it with the emergence of the “Coordination des Intermittents et Précaires” *** and the resistance movement among the “artists” and the “technicians” in the performing arts sector of the cultural industry (l’industrie du spectacle); indeed this coordinating group constitutes the most successful expression of that resistance. The six words of one of this movement’s slogans “No culture without social rights” are more than enough grounds on which to base a criticism of B and C’s book and to highlight all the weaknesses in their analysis of contemporary capitalism. If the slogan “No culture without social rights” is translated into B and C’s terms, what is considered to be potentially aristocratic-liberal and incompatible with social justice will, as a result, become a battleground, perhaps the only one, where the neo-liberal logic can be thwarted: “no freedom, autonomy, authenticity (culture), without solidarity, equality, security (social rights)”.

Le nouvel esprit du Capitalisme was published in 1999, but it ceased to apply both theoretically and politically on the night of 25/26 June 2004, when the “Coordination des intermittents et précaires” was founded at the Théâtre Nationale de la Colline. When, developed and embodied as it was by “artists and technicians in the show-business industry”, by cultural workers, the “artistic critique” became organized and adopted a name, it brought together what the authors held to be incompatible: the artist and the temporary worker, the artist and the intermittent (or casual) worker, the artist and the unemployed person, the artist and the Rmiste**** living on minimum benefit payments.

The strongest and fiercest resistance (the conflict has been going on for three years) to the French employers’ liberal scheme of “social reconstruction” comes from cultural workers in the performing arts sector. It was the individual “Coordinations des intermittents et précaires”, and not just the cultural workers, who developed and put forward a model of indemnification for ‘workers in discontinuous employment’, based on solidarity, security and justice. It was again these representative groups who indicated the battlegrounds for a system of unemployment insurance that is based on both security and autonomy and is capable of functioning even in the mobile labour market.

Lebanon: short memory, system failure
By Vicken Cheterian

Lebanon has approached the opening of its two-month presidential election period, scheduled to begin on 25 September 2007, in a troubled mood. The atmosphere of foreboding is intensified by the assassination on 19 September of the member of parliament Antoine Ghanem (along with six other people). Ghanem was a critic of Syria, and many at his funeral [1] three days later were convinced that Syria was responsible for his death.

The incident is but the latest in a series of such killings that began with the murder of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri [2] on 14 February 2005. The atmosphere of tension, which includes a boycott by opposition members of the parliamentary session due to select the new president, contributed to the last-minute postponement [2] of the start of the election process until 24 October.
But whenever the vote is held and whichever of the eight leading candidates [3] is elected, the process alone will not resolve the deep fractures within the country. A recent return to Beirut convinces me that to understand the present crisis, it is necessary to take a longer-term perspective which traces its origins to the character and operation of Lebanon's political system since the end of the civil war of 1975-90.

Burma's question
By Aung Zaw
Created 2007-09-26 06:03

The rare and steadfast protests in Rangoon and other Burmese cities in August-September 2007, and the military regime's violent crackdown on the demonstrators and key activists, leave the fragile opposition movement still politically isolated and faced with the quandary of who will lead it and what direction it will take. Moreover, even as the convulsion in Burma has clearly drawn renewed gained worldwide attention to the country, there is little sign of concerted, effective international support that could encourage and empower Burma's voices for change.

The first significant protest in more than a decade was driven by a fivefold increase in the fuel price and increases in other commodities. But the peaceful gatherings from 19 August quickly took on a political dimension. Now, Burma's [1] dissidents and observers both at home and abroad [2] are wondering if and how this fresh expression of dissent can sustain its momentum.

Aung Zaw is the editor of the Irrawaddy [3] magazine based in Thailand.
The activists arrested and jailed in the crackdown that followed the initial protests include prominent former student leaders [4] such as Min Ko Naing and Ko Ko Gyi [5], who were leaders in the 1988 democracy uprising and who each spent about fifteen years in prison. In addition, four prominent women activists, including labour-rights advocates Su Su Nway [6] and HIV-Aids campaigner Phyu Phyu Thin, remain in hiding as authorities conduct house-to-house searches across the former capital Rangoon and Pegu, to its north. Su Su Nway has reportedly run out of the medication she needs for a heart complaint.
The protests are in scale and impact still far from the nationwide uprising of 1988 - to which the military junta responded with crushing violence that killed more than 3,000 citizens, and by refusing to acknowledge the overwhelming election victory of the National League for Democracy (NLD) that followed in 1990.

This, then, is not - yet - 1988. At the same time, four relevant factors surrounding the current protests suggest that they should not be underestimated.

A dynamic history

First, the involvement of those who took a prominent part in the epic events of nineteen years ago is an important signal of continuity in Burmese opposition [7] politics.
Second, the protests have been small and sporadic but also persistent and widespread [8]. They broke out in several areas beyond Rangoon - Pakokku, Bokalay, Lattputta, Sittwe as well as Pegu; and, most significantly, in Kyaukse, near Mandalay.

Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces

Chantal Mouffe

Can artistic practices still play a critical role in a society where the difference between art and advertizing have become blurred and where artists and cultural workers have become a necessary part of capitalist production? Scrutinizing the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello[1] have shown how the demands for autonomy of the new movements of the 1960's had been harnessed in the development of the post-Fordist networked economy and transformed in new forms of control. The aesthetic strategies of the counter-culture: the search for authenticity, the ideal of self-management, the anti-hierarchical exigency, are now used in order to promote the conditions required by the current mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period. Nowadays artistic and cultural production play a central role in the process of capital valorization and, through ‘neo-management’, artistic critique has become an important element of capitalist productivity.

This has led some people to claim that art had lost its critical power because any form of critique is automatically recuperated and neutralized by capitalism. Others, however, offer a different view and see the new situation as opening the way for different strategies of opposition. Such a view can be supported by insights from Andre Gorz for whom ‘When self-exploitation acquires a central role in the process of valorization, the production of subjectivity becomes a terrain of the central conflict... Social relations that elude the grasp of value, competitive individualism and market exchange make the latter appear by contrast in their political dimension, as extensions of the power of capital. A front of total resistance to this power is made possible. It necessarily overflows the terrain of production of knowledge towards new practices of living, consuming and collective appropriation of common spaces and everyday culture.’[2]

This definitely beats other things written about the recent attacks on Syria like the Washington Post's "Israel Attacks Syria and Everyone Wins" -rg

Israel’s Air Raid On Syria:
Another Threat To Iran

By Peter Symonds

18 September, 2007
WSWS.org

Further details have leaked out about Israel’s unprovoked air raid on Syria on September 6, underscoring its primary purpose as a menacing warning not only to Syria, but also Iran. Amid an escalating campaign orchestrated from the Bush administration over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programs, the operation was a graphic demonstration of Israel’s capacity to carry out its previous threats to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Briefing the Israeli parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee on Sunday, military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin boasted that Israel had recovered its “deterrent capability” following its disastrous war in southern Lebanon last year. Outlining the scope of Israel’s capacity, he declared: “The new situation affects the entire region, including Iran and Syria.” Yadlin then elaborated on the alleged threat posed by Iran and its nuclear programs, concluding that current UN sanctions “are not having much of an effect”.

Yadlin gave no details of the September 6 air raid and cautioned committee chairman Tsahi Hanegbi against discussing reports of the strike. Israeli authorities have slapped a total blackout on the operation, making it illegal for the media to discuss details provided by Israeli sources. As a result, the only reports in the Israeli press are based on accounts published in the international media.

Hanegbi absurdly excused the blanket censorship, declaring that it was needed to ease tensions. “The more we bite our tongue, the better it will go,” he told Israeli radio. The more obvious and ominous reason is that the Israeli government wants to keep everyone, particularly Iran and Syria, guessing as to its next move. A comment in Haaretz, entitled “Silence works for Israel”, noted with satisfaction that the lack of comment also allowed other governments, including in the Middle East, to say nothing and ignore Syria’s protests—in effect, backing the raid.

Two notes on the state of American Academia

1. A Student's Guide to Hosting Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week October 22-26,
2. Furor disrupts plans for UCI school of law (from LA Times)

From Archive of Moscow Bienniale:

Jacques Ranciere
Misadventures of Universality

Thank you to Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Joseph Backstein and to the Biennale foundation. I shall bring out my subject by focusing on some statements and spectacles from another art Biennale that I visited last week in Seville, in Spain. The curator of that biennale in Seville was also the curator of the last ‘Documenta’ in Kassel, Kozui Enwezor, gave to the gathering of the artists and works a far-ranging objective court: “to unmask those machineries that decimate and waste social economic and political interconnection looking for a return to a logics of totalisation .” So, the question which the Biennale should address was: “how could, how can art play an integral and not only peripheral role in relation to the global challenge that affects both the artistic production and reception, especially in light of the damaging effects of reactionary conservative and fundamentalist politics in all social structures of the world today.” So, such statements affirm a will to oppose postmodern scepticism and resume a certain form of “universalist” view of art and politics and of the connection and attempt to challenge the machineries of dissociation, to restore a sense of universality and intelligibility, of the interconnections that frame a global world.
But this clear commitment to an enlightened view of the global world seemed to be questioned from the very beginning by the title chosen for that Biennale, this title was: ‘The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society’. It transpired as though the global view on the global world, advocated as a purpose of the exhibition, could not be but a matter of ghosts. It transpired as though the old Brechtian will to make the “homely” strange in order to provoke a fresh gaze on the contradictions of our world was overshadowed by the darkness of the Freudian “unhomelyness”. This wavering between two meanings of “unhomeliness” was strongly emphasized by the first works proposed to the visitors. They were series of photographs and installations focusing on the war in Iraq and the antiwar protests in Western countries. Close to the photographs of the horrors of the civil war made by the freelance Iraqui reporter Ghaith Abdul-Ahad we could see photographs of anti-war protests in New York and Washington made by the German born New York based artist Josephine Meckseper. On one of those photographs we could see some protesters holding banners in the background. As for the foreground, it shows us an overfilled dustbin, the content of which falls to the ground. The title of the photograph is “Untitled”. A title, which in such a context means: no title is needed because the image is more telling than any discourse.
This image clearly points to the ambivalence of the “unhomely”. On the one hand it belongs to the tradition of collage. It is not collage in the technical sense of the word but it belongs to the aesthetics of collage that chooses to play on the shock of heterogeneousness if not contradictory elements. But aesthetics was often implemented in the past as a means of producing political consciousness. Among the artists who used it in that way there was another New York based artist Martha Rosler who made in the 70’s her well-known series “Bringing war home” by pasting together photographs of the atrocities in Vietnam and advertising images of American petty-bourgeois interiors. Josephine Meckseper’s photograph may thus look as an ironic answer to Rosler’s series, as she pours the overflow of American consumerism into the way of the protesters that want to bring the Afghanistan or Iraqi war home. What is at issue is not the intention of the artist. What is at issue is a twist that has occurred in the practice of collage, which is also a twist in the meaning given to “unhomeliness”. Rosler’s collage, thirty years ago, was predicated on the heterogeneity of the opposite: the image conflated two opposite worlds, one of them was the hidden truth of the other, but also it conflated them in order to show that they could not go together. The image of the little nude Vietnamese girl shouting ahead of the soldiers on the roads of her wasted country could not go with the image of the American cosy interior without exploding it. The universality of the struggle for emancipation was supposed to break through the universality of the market. Meckseper’s “collage”, on the contrary, is predicated on homogeneity: the world of consumption is no more alien to the world of the struggle. The anti-war protest brings war home, in its way, but it brings it in a space where it is at home in a space of struggle that is itself a territory of consumption. Forty years ago Jean-Luc Godard already made fun of the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola”. But when they marched against the war in Vietnam, the children of Marx and Coca-Cola were fighting with the children of Marx. The little Vietnamese girl did not shout only for grief but also for struggle and victory. Now the protesters can no more identify with the fighters of the other side, no more march for their victory. The Iraqi victims turn out to be only victims of the empire of Coca-Cola, and the protesters are only fighting against that empire, or as a risk of perceiving and making us perceive that this empire ultimately turns out to be the empire of their own consumption.

Truls Lie, Jacques Rancière

Our police order: What can be said, seen, and done
"Politics is when you create a kind of stage where you include your enemy," says Jacques Rancière in his book The Politics of Aesthetics.

Le Monde diplomatique (Oslo) editor Truls Lie talks to the French philosopher about aesthetics, his distinction between "being political" and the "police order", the media as arena of liberation, the Internet, his film interests, and, about those who today are excluded, those who cannot make their voices heard. Such as the Palestinians.

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière has written around twenty books since the mid-1970s. The common thread throughout these, including his most recent, The Politics of Aesthetics, has been the ways in which oppression is perpetuated.

Truls Lie: Can you give a general description of political engagement in the French political or intellectual scene today, after the deaths of Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, and others? Who are the people arguing in a political-philosophical way today in France?

Jacques Rancière: It is difficult to say. On the one hand, there is a kind of official political philosophy in France, which is very strong and at the same time very weak. There are philosophers like Alain Finkielkraut and Michel Gauchet, who discuss the problems of democracy, that democracy becomes a threat to itself, because it is being reduced to the power of the individual, of consumerism. It is, in fact, a kind of transformation of the Marxist critique of consumerism in an anti-democratic way, with the idea that all is lost because of mass individualism, of democracy, which means consumerism. It is hard to find political thinking in France today. There are of course philosophers like Alain Badiou, for instance, who try to embody a kind of fidelity to a certain type of politics of dissolution.

TL: You have written in the past about the worker and the intellectual in the nineteenth century. Do you think intellectuals in France, for example, are using their power to categorize and use the worker in their discussions? JR: I don't think so. Of course, I studied the workers' emancipation in the nineteenth century in order to rethink a certain tradition, namely the Marxist tradition. But now I am sorry to say that there is not much interest in those topics. It is taken for granted that all this is over, no more workers' movement, no more workers' emancipation. There is a trend in France to consider any kind of workers' protest as a sign of disease. Workers are seen as an outmoded part of the population who cannot grapple with modernity.

It is interesting to note that Rancière uses the term "police order" to describe the major part of what we normally understand as politics – the structured embodiment of a society where everything has its place. The police order is the government or process of governance that prescribes our reality or our sensibility – in relation to the underlying norms that define what is allowed or not allowed, available or unavailable in a given situation – in the realm of perception itself. Almost like a code of conduct. There is therefore an underlying division that dictates what can and cannot be said, shown, or done. This creates permanent sets of norms which in turn establish a community that decides who is included or excluded, whose words are significant or insignificant, who is entitled to govern others and who is not. But are there any concrete actors in the police order? Individual politicians, the IT world's Microsoft, or the neo-conservative American television company Fox News?

Saskia Sassen
Cities as frontier zones: Making informal politics

The large complex city, especially if global, is a new frontier zone. Actors from different worlds meet there, but there are no clear rules of engagmenet. Where the historic frontier was in the far stretches of colonial empires, today’s frontier zone is in our large cities. It is a strategic frontier zone for global corporate capital. Much of the work of forcing deregulation, privatization, and new fiscal and monetary policies on the host governments had to do with creating the formal instruments to construct their equivalent of the old military “fort” of the historic frontier: the regulatory environment they need in city after city worldwide to ensure a global space of operations.I

But it is also a strategic frontier zone for those who lack power, those who are disadvantaged, outsiders, discriminated minorities. The disadvantaged and excluded can gain presence in such cities, presence vis a vis power and presence vis a vis each other. This signals the possibility of a new type of politics, centered in new types of political actors. It is not simply a matter of having or not having power. There are new hybrid bases from which to act. One outcome we are seeing in city after city is the making of informal politics.II

This is the larger subject against which my talk today should be situated. I will focus on one specific aspect: how the new media contribute to this larger project.

PUBLIC MAKING AGAINST THE PRIVATIZING AND WEAPONIZING OF URBAN SPACE

The enormity of the urban experience, the overwhelming presence of massive architectures and dense infrastructures, as well as the irresistible utility logics that organize much of the investments in today’s cities, have produced displacement and estrangement among many individuals and whole communities. Such conditions unsettle older notions and experiences of the city generally and public space in particular. An aspect that makes this visible is the much talked about crisis in public space resulting from the growing commercialization, theme-parking, and privatizing of public space.III While the monumentalized public spaces of European cities remain vibrant sites for rituals and routines, for demonstrations and festivals, increasingly the overall sense is of a shift from civic to politicized urban space, with fragmentations along multiple differences.

For more on this, visit the ACLU site:
http://www.aclu.org/natsec/31540prs20070904.html

-rg

DOCUMENTS SHOW TROOPS DISREGARDING RULES
by Ryan Lenz

by the Associated Press
Published on Tuesday, September 4, 2007

New documents released Tuesday regarding crimes committed by
U.S. soldiers against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a
troubling pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the
rules that govern interrogations and deadly actions.

The documents, released by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead
of a lawsuit, total nearly 10,000 pages of courts-martial summaries,
transcripts and military investigative reports about 22 incidents. They
show repeated examples of soldiers believing they were within the
law when they killed local citizens.

The killings include the drowning of a man soldiers pushed from
a bridge into the Tigris River as punishment for breaking curfew,
and the suffocation during interrogation of a former Iraqi general
believed to be helping insurgents.

In the suffocation, soldiers covered the man's head with a sleeping
bag, then wrapped his neck with an electrical cord for a "stress
position" they insisted was an approved technique.

Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer was convicted of negligent
homicide in the death of Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush following a
January 2006 court-martial that received wide media attention due to
possible CIA involvement in the interrogation.

But even after his conviction, Welshofer insisted his actions were
appropriate and standard, documents show.

"The simple fact of the matter is interrogation is supposed to be
stressful or you will get no information," Welshofer wrote in a
letter to the court asking for clemency. "To put it another way,
an interrogation without stress is not an interrogation - it is
a conversation."

Welshofer said in the same letter that he was "within the appropriate
constraints that both the rules of law, and just as importantly -
duty, imposed on me."

A workable and just solution in Palestine is predicated on one principle, tested in South Africa: side with racism or be against, writes Azmi Bishara

The world looks different from the southern tip of Africa. There, in that country that liberated itself from a colonialist apartheid regime a decade ago, the people have embarked on a bold venture to build a nation. They have a sophisticated democratic constitution that officially recognises 11 languages within the framework of a multi- ethnic, multi-tribal, multi-religious civil polity founded on the concept of equal citizenship. This constitution embodies different aims and different priorities. It embodies a revolution that has transformed itself into a state, not only by means of the fight until victory but also by means of the arts of negotiation and compromise that made the transition possible.

Another big proponent of the boycott, this is an older interview but still quite interesting. -rg

A rare voice: An interview with author Ilan Pappe
Christopher Brown interviewed by
Ilan Pappe
December 13, 2006
Electronic Intifada

A tenuous ceasefire is holding in the Gaza Strip after almost five months of a heavy dose of "Operation Summer Rain" by the Israeli military.

The showers of missiles, aerial bombardment, military incursions into populated areas over the course of the five month 'rain' storm have left dead more than 457 people, a quarter of them children, and well over 1,000 injured.

Since the summer rains began, many in the Israeli peace camp have remained silent about the ongoing crisis in Gaza and the West Bank. However, one voice remains constant in Israeli circles and continues to speak out despite opposition to the contrary. Professor Ilan Pappe is a professor of history at Haifa University. He has written numerous articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has openly and continuously called for academic as well as cultural boycotts of Israel.

These pronouncements have made Professor Pappe a scion in the eyes of the Israeli government and public, but he continues to move forward in the hope of reconciliation and justice for Palestinians. His latest contribution is the new book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

EI contributor Christopher Brown recently spoke over the phone with Professor Pappe about the current situation in Israel/Palestine.

Christopher Brown: Ehud Olmert recently appointed Avigdor Lieberman as deputy prime minister -- a man who some consider a "fascist" in light of his views towards Arabs, and Palestinians in particular. Yet, the world press has barely said anything about his rants; for instance, that all Arabs should be expelled from the territories, and Arab Knesset members be executed for having any contact with the Hamas led government. Meanwhile, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, has his every word recorded for all to hear, regarding the Holocaust being a hoax, the destruction of Israel and the like. Your response?

Ilan Pappe: I think you've put your finger on two very important issues. The first one is the ideology that Avigdor Lieberman subscribes to that is an ethnic cleansing ideology. Someone who believes that the only way to solving the problems in Israel/Palestine is by expelling the Palestinians from Israel and any territory Israel covets.

I think the problem with Avigdor Lieberman is not his own views but the fact that he reflects what most Israeli Jews think, and definitely what most of his colleagues in the Olmert government think but don't dare to say, or don't think is desirable to say for tactical reasons. But I do think that we should be worried about Lieberman, not as an extreme fascist but rather as a person who represents the mood of Israel in 2006.

The second point is the double standard, the hypocrisy that you pointed to where you compared rightly the utterances of Ahmadinejad being repeated and how similar, and worse generalizations and attitudes by Israelis are not heard at all. And I think the reason has to do with the very peculiar standing that Israel has among the western world. [However] not in the eyes of civil society ... [To] most people that live today in the west, [Israel] is a country that violates human rights, civil rights, and both its ideology and polices are not acceptable. But the governments are still very supportive of the state because the world is lead by an American president and a group of people who have a certain point of view, almost a religious point of view, in which such ideas like that of Lieberman fit well.

Have not posted an article by Pilger in a while. Here he makes an argument for the boycott. -rg

Israel: an important marker has been passed
23 Aug 2007

From a limestone hill rising above Qalandia refugee camp you can see Jerusalem. I watched a lone figure standing there in the rain, his son holding the tail of his long tattered coat. He extended his hand and did not let go. “I am Ahmed Hamzeh, street entertainer,” he said in measured English. “Over there, I played many musical instruments; I sang in Arabic, English and Hebrew, and because I was rather poor, my very small son would chew gum while the monkey did its tricks. When we lost our country, we lost respect. One day a rich Kuwaiti stopped his car in front of us. He shouted at my son, “Show me how a Palestinian picks up his food rations!” So I made the monkey appear to scavenge on the ground, in the gutter. And my son scavenged with him. The Kuwaiti threw coins and my son crawled on his knees to pick them up. This was not right; I was an artist, not a beggar . . . I am not even a peasant now.”

“How do you feel about all that?” I asked him.

“Do you expect me to feel hatred? What is that to a Palestinian? I never hated the Jews and their Israel . . . yes, I suppose I hate them now, or maybe I pity them for their stupidity. They can’t win. Because we Palestinians are the Jews now and, like the Jews, we will never allow them or the Arabs or you to forget. The youth will guarantee us that, and the youth after them . . .”.

That was 40 years ago. On my last trip back to the West Bank, I recognised little of Qalandia, now announced by a vast Israeli checkpoint, a zigzag of sandbags, oil drums and breeze blocks, with conga lines of people, waiting, swatting flies with precious papers. Inside the camp, the tents had been replaced by sturdy hovels, although the queues at single taps were as long, I was assured, and the dust still ran to caramel in the rain. At the United Nations office I asked about Ahmed Hamzeh, the street entertainer. Records were consulted, heads shaken. Someone thought he had been “taken away . . . very ill”. No one knew about his son, whose trachoma was surely blindness now. Outside, another generation kicked a punctured football in the dust.

Will Pakistan Survive?

http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20070830&fname=dalrymple&sid=1&pn=3

Sixty years after its birth, India faces a number of serious problems, butPakistan's problems are on a different scale; indeed the country finds itself at a fundamental crossroads. We are back to the old question, and it is not just whither Pakistan...
William Dalrymple
Amid all the hoop-la surrounding the 60th anniversary of Indian Independence--inflatable Taj Mahals floating down the Thames, wall-to-wall Sanjeev Bhaskar on the telly, Shah Rukh Khan popping up at Madame Tussauds--almost nothing has been heard from Pakistan. Nothing, that is, if you discount the low rumble of suicide bombings, the noise of automatic weapons storming the Red Mosque, and the creak of slowly collapsing dictatorships.

In the world's media, never has the contrast between the two countries appeared so stark: one is widely perceived as the next great superpower, famous for its software genii, its Bollywood babes, its strongly growing economy and its legions of brilliant writers and super-rich steel magnates; the other written off as a failed state, a world centre of Islamic radicalism, the hiding place of Osama Bin Laden and the only US ally which Washington appears ready to bomb.

On the ground, of course, the reality is very different, and first time visitors to Pakistan are almost always surprised by the country's visible prosperity. There is far less poverty on show in Pakistan than in India, fewer beggars, and much less utter desperation. In many ways the infrastructure of Pakistan is much more advanced: there are better roads and airports, and much more reliable electricity. Pakistani middle class houses are often bigger and better appointed that their equivalents in India. 

Moreover the Pakistani economy is undergoing a very similar construction and consumer boom to that in India, with growth rates of 7%, and what is currently the fastest-rising stock market in Asia. You can see the effects everywhere: in new shopping centres and restaurant complexes, in the hoardings for the latest laptops and ipods, in the cranes and buildings sites, in the endless stores selling mobile phones: in 2003 the country had fewer than three million cellphone users; today apparently there are almost 50 million. Car ownership has been increasing at roughly 40% a year since 2001; Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has risen from $322m in 2002 to $3.5bn in 2006.

Mohsin Hamid, author of the bestseller The Reluctant Fundamentalist, wrote about this change after a recent visit: having lived abroad as a banker in New York and London, he returned home to find the country unrecognisable. He was particularly struck by "the incredible new world of media that had sprung up, a world of music videos, fashion programs, independent news networks, cross-dressing talk-show hosts, religious debates, and stock-market analysis:
"I knew, of course, that the government of Musharraf had opened the media to private operators. But I had not until then realized how profoundly things had changed. Not just television, but also private radio stations and newspapers have flourished in Pakistan over the past few years. The result is an unprecedented openness… Young people are speaking and dressing differently. Views both critical and supportive of the government are voiced with breathtaking frankness in an atmosphere remarkably lacking in censorship. Public space, the common area for culture and expression that had been so circumscribed in my childhood, has now been vastly expanded. The Vagina Monologues was recently performed on stage in Pakistan to standing ovations."