If there is any confusion about the results of the election in Armenia, this could be a clue? -rg

"RETURN TO STALINISM"

28 March, 2008

A number of NGOs have made a statement headlined "Armenia 2008:
Return to Stalinism" which runs:

"Democratic reforms in Armenia resulted in sowing state terror. In the
wake of the lifting of state of emergency the Armenian authorities
unleashed a new wave of violence and intimidations. Having adopted
Soviet KGB methods, the Armenian police and National Security Services
subject unprotected people to organised repressions.

Without any grounding or explanation, citizens are detained in broad
daylight and forcibly taken to police stations, thus any occasional
person passing by may fall a victim to suchlike violence. Only
afterwards in the police station is their identity revealed, their
participation in the March 1 rally clarified. People are subjected
to psychological pressure and intimidation.

The scale of such violence increases day by day. The Armenian
authorities arbitrarily violate constitutional rights and fundamental
freedoms of the people.

We, the undersigned, urge to immediately cease terror against the
people of Armenia

1."Youth for Democracy" NGO

2.Transparency International Anti-corruption Center NGO

3."Asparez" Journalists' Club

4. "Krtutyan Asparez" NGO

5 Helsinki Citizens' Assembly Armenian Committee NGO

6 Helsinki Citizens' Assembly Vanadzor Office

7. "Huys" NGO

8. "We Plus" NGO

9. "Victims of State Needs" NGO

10. "Sksela" Youth Movement

Europe's new Iron Curtain
Economic wall separates haves from have-nots
By Tom Hundley
Tribune correspondent
3:56 AM CDT, March 29, 2008

TERESPOL, Poland - A few stray dogs and a bedraggled band of women
with gold-capped teeth compete for the thin shaft of afternoon
sunlight that warms a corner of the decrepit railway station waiting
room.

The women, from the former Soviet republic of Belarus, are
smugglers. There is no secret about that. They are busy putting on
layer after layer of new clothing, suiting up for their daily battle
with the border police.

These days there is a lot of talk about a borderless Europe, but in
this corner of the continent, on the eastern crust of Poland along the
banks ofthe River Bug, there is no mistaking the omnipresence of the
border. In many ways, this border has become Europe's new Iron
Curtain. The divide is no longer ideological; the wall is between rich
and poor, between Europe's haves and have-nots.

The modern concept of national borders as clear, demarcated lines is a
European invention that has been exported around the globe, providing
a ready source of conflict and bloodshed. Even in today's relatively
peaceful and settled Europe, borders remain flash points. Think of
Kosovo, where Europe's newest hostile border has been drawn.

Europe's borders have changed radically in the past generation. More
than 8,000 miles of new national borders have been created on the
continent since 1989, mostly in Europe's eastern half. But the whole
notion of borders also has undergone a profound physical and
psychological transformation.

The primary impetus for this transformation was the collapse of
communism and the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin
Wall. But almost as important has been the ascendance of the European
Union and its commitmentto the free movement of people across the
borders of its 27 member states.

According to Yale historian Timothy Snyder, the price of creating this
remarkable zone of free movement has been the creation of a hard
external border that seals off the EU from its poorer neighbors. "This
wasn't the intent of Schengen, but it has been one of the major side
effects," he said.

Schengen refers to a series of agreements implemented in 1995 that did
away with internal border controls across much of Western Europe. The
so-called Schengen Zone was expanded in December to include Poland,
Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Slovenia and Malta.

Along the EU's eastern frontier, some people have started to refer to
the external border as the Schengen Wall -or, less felicitously, the
New Iron Curtain.

EU officials cringe at the Iron Curtain reference. They like to talk
about "smart" borders secured by thermal cameras, satellite monitors,
biometric data banks and other high-tech whistles and bells.

A Cold War feel
But here in Terespol, the border between Poland and Belarus still has
a Cold War chill to it. The border on the Polish side may be smart,
but on the Belarus side it consists of old-fashioned electrified
fences, watchtowers and unsmiling guards.

This was and still is Josef Stalin's border. At the start of World War
II, the Soviet dictator grabbed a large chunk of eastern Poland,
annexed it to Belarus and never gave it back. After the war, 2.35
million Poles living in this territory were resettled in northern and
western Poland; about a million Poles remained.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the communities along this
border began to reknit. Cross-border trade started to flourish,
nourishing the economy on both sides. Poland, with its eager embrace
of Western Europe, was always going to be the richer of the two, but
it was Belarus' extreme bad luck to fall into the political grasp of
Alexander Lukashenko, a thuggish boss of the Soviet old school.

Under Lukashenko, Europe's last dictator, the economy is stuck in
reverse.

"It's not hard to find a job at home, but it will only pay $100 a
month. Even in Belarus, that's not enough to live on," said Ludmilla,
one of the women in the Terespol railway station.

So she and the other women eke out a living as traders, filling
suitcases and plastic trash bags with cheap clothing and other
merchandise bought in Polish wholesale markets and smuggling it back
into Belarus for resale.

But their modest enterprise has been thwarted by Viktor Lukashenko,
the president's son and heir apparent who also happens to be governor
of the Breskaja district on Poland's border. The younger Lukashenko
decreed that only three items of new clothing could be imported per
trip.

'For us, it's the end'
"Our president, whom we cannot get rid of, and his son, who will
replace him for another 60 years, want everyone in Belarus to be
poor," complained Ludmilla, who declined to give her last name out of
fear of government harassment.

To get around the restriction, the women in the railway station
squeeze into as many layers of clothing as they can-perhaps tucking a
small item or two between the layers-before getting on the train and
taking their chances. Some of the women make two or three round trips
each day.

Soon they will be facing a much more daunting obstacle.

When Poland joined the Schengen Zone in December, it agreed to impose
much stricter border controls on its Belarusian neighbors. For the
time being, Ludmilla and the others are entering Poland on
multiple-entry visas obtained before December. When those visas
expire, they will have to apply for Schengen visas.

A little bit of the apocalypse - rene

Those Who Control Oil and Water Will Control The World

Published on Sunday, March 30, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
by John Gray

History may not repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain observed, it can
sometimes rhyme. The crises and conflicts of the past recur,
recognisably similar even when altered by new conditions. At present, a
race for the world's resources is underway that resembles the Great
Game that was played in the decades leading up to the First World War.
Now, as then, the most coveted prize is oil and the risk is that as the
contest heats up it will not always be peaceful. But this is no simple
rerun of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, there are
powerful new players and it is not only oil that is at stake.

It was Rudyard Kipling who brought the idea of the Great Game into the
public mind in Kim, his cloak-and-dagger novel of espionage and
imperial geopolitics in the time of the Raj. Then, the main players
were Britain and Russia and the object of the game was control of
central Asia's oil. Now, Britain hardly matters and India and China,
which were subjugated countries during the last round of the game, have
emerged as key players. The struggle is no longer focused mainly on
central Asian oil. It stretches from the Persian Gulf to Africa, Latin
America, even the polar caps, and it is also a struggle for water and
depleting supplies of vital minerals. Above all, global warming is
increasing the scarcity of natural resources. The Great Game that is
afoot today is more intractable and more dangerous than the last.

The biggest new player in the game is China and it is there that the
emerging pattern is clearest. China's rulers have staked everything on
economic growth. Without improving living standards, there would be
large-scale unrest, which could pose a threat to their power. Moreover,
China is in the middle of the largest and fastest move from the
countryside to the city in history, a process that cannot be stopped.

There is no alternative to continuing growth, but it comes with deadly
side-effects. Overused in industry and agriculture, and under threat
from the retreat of the Himalayan glaciers, water is becoming a
non-renewable resource. Two-thirds of China's cities face shortages,
while deserts are eating up arable land. Breakneck industrialisation is
worsening this environmental breakdown, as many more power plants are
being built and run on high-polluting coal that accelerates global
warming. There is a vicious circle at work here and not only in China.
Because ongoing growth requires massive inputs of energy and minerals,
Chinese companies are scouring the world for supplies. The result is
unstoppable rising demand for resources that are unalterably finite.

Although oil reserves may not have peaked in any literal sense, the
days when conventional oil was cheap have gone forever. Countries are
reacting by trying to secure the remaining reserves, not least those
that are being opened up by climate change. Canada is building bases to
counter Russian claims on the melting Arctic icecap, parts of which are
also claimed by Norway, Denmark and the US. Britain is staking out
claims on areas around the South Pole.

The article unfortunately fails to mention that even the official site to dump the toxic waste, Ramat Hovav, is located in the Naqab/Negev, and more importantly near Bedouin villages, who inhabitants have been plagued with health problems. -rg

WEST BANK FACES TOXIC WASTE CRISIS
by Mel Frykberg in Ramallah

Al Jazeera
March 27, 2008

The West Bank has become a dumping site for hazardous waste - which
is making residents sick, say Israeli and Palestinian environmental
groups.

Several weeks ago, villagers from Jima'in in the Nablus district
complained that Israeli trucks were again dumping waste on Palestinian
land.

Ayman Abu Thaher, the deputy director-general of the Palestinian
Authority's Environmental Awareness Directorate said such dumping
has been going on for years.

"The Israelis are using the West Bank as a cheap and easy alternative
for dumping their waste at the expense of the health of Palestinians,"
he said.

According to Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), a joint Israeli,
Palestinian and Jordanian environmental group, improper dumping of
contaminants and waste has over time become a threat to the region's
drinking water.

Toxic percolation

In 2006, FoEME published a report, "A Seeping Time Bomb, Pollution
of the Mountain Aquifer by Solid Waste," which found that the
unsustainable disposal of solid waste has resulted in the percolation
of toxic substances including chloride, arsenic and heavy metals such
as cadmium, mercury and lead into the groundwater.Since the 2006
report was released, the German government has built a new solid
waste disposal project near Ramallah and the World Bank and the EU
have also completed another solid waste landfill facility near Jenin.

But Mira Epstein, a spokeswoman for FoEME, said that despite the
improvements, the threat to drinking water and the environment
persist today.

Over three million people reside in the recharge area of the aquifer,
which falls under both the West Bank and parts of Israel. The
population includes 2.3 million Palestinians, 235,000 Israeli settlers
and 500,000 Israelis living within Israel's internationally recognized
borders.

Some things still make me laugh. -rg

'Your turn is next,' Gadhafi warns Arab leaders after US toppling of
Saddam
The Associated Press
March 29, 2008

DAMASCUS, Syria: Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi poured contempt on
fellow Arab leaders at a summit Saturday and warned that they might be
overthrown like former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

Gadhafi's rambling, off-the-cuff speech to the opening of the Arab
summit both bewildered and brought reluctant smiles to the faces of the
other leaders.

The maverick Libyan's litany of insults at Arabs and his undiplomatic
railing at the disarray of Arab regimes have become almost a tradition
at the annual gathering.

Dressed in lush purple and pink robes with a traditional Libyan cloak
and cap, Gadhafi blasted Arab countries for doing nothing while the
United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and overthrew Saddam.

"How can we accept that a foreign power comes to topple an Arab leader
while we stand watching?" he said. He said Saddam had once been an ally
of Washington, "but they sold him out."

In recent years, Gadhafi has dramatically repaired ties with the United
States ' once his top enemy ' by giving up his country's weapons of
mass destruction programs and paying compensation for the 1988 Pan Am
bombing. Libya is hoping for a landmark visit by U.S. Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, though one is still not set, and has stepped up
economic ties to the West.

Still, that hasn't stopped Gadhafi from denouncing U.S. domination of
the world and criticizing other Arab countries for their closeness to
Washington.

Where Are The Iraqis in The Iraq War?

Published on Saturday, March 29, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
by Ramzy Baroud

Five years after the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, mainstream
media is once more making the topic an object of intense scrutiny. The
costs and implications of the war are endlessly covered from all
possible angles, with one notable exception ' the cost to the Iraqi
people themselves.

Through all the special coverage and exclusive reports, very little is
said about Iraqi casualties, who are either completely overlooked or
hastily mentioned and whose numbers can only be guesstimated. Also
conveniently ignored are the millions injured, internally and
externally displaced, the victims of rape and kidnappings who will
carry physical and psychological scars for the rest of their lives.

We find ourselves stuck in a hopeless paradigm, where it feels
necessary to empathise with the sensibilities of the aggressor so as
not to sound `unpatriotic', while remaining blind to the untold anguish
of the victims. Some actually feel the need to go so far as to blame
the Iraqis for their own misfortune. Both Democratic presidential
candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have expressed their wish
for Iraqis to take responsibility for the situation in their country,
with the former saying, `we cannot win their civil war. There is no
military solution.'
It would have been helpful if Clinton had reached her astute conclusion
before she voted for the Senate's 2002 resolution authorising President
Bush to attack Iraq. For the sake of argument, let's overlook both
Clinton's and Obama's repeated assertions that all options, including
military ones, are on the table regarding how to `deal' with Iran's
alleged ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. But to go so far as
blaming the ongoing war on the Iraqis' lack of accountability is a new
low for these `antiwar' candidates.

Is it still a secret, five years on, that the war on Iraq was fought
for strategic reasons, to maintain a floundering superpower's control
over much of the world's energy supplies and to sustain the regional
supremacy of Israel, the US's most costly ally anywhere?

Of course, there are those who prefer to imagine a world in which a
well-intentioned superpower would fight with all of its might to enable
another smaller, distant nation to enjoy the fruits of liberty,
democracy and freedom. But it is nothing short of ridiculous to pretend
that Iraqis are capable of controlling the parameters of the ranging
conflict, that a puppet government whose election and operation is
entirely under the command of the US military is capable of taking
charge and assuming responsibilities.
Equally absurd is the insinuation that the civil war in Iraq is an
exclusively Iraqi doing, and that the US military has not deliberately
planted the seeds of divisions, hoping to reinterpret its role in Iraq
from that of the occupier to that of the arbitrator, m

Yesha Council: Build Settlements without Gov't Permits

http://www.almanar.com.lb/NewsSite/NewsDetails.aspx?id=39237&language=en
31/03/2008

The Israeli Yesha Council of Settlements said Monday it would
continue to build in West Bank settlements, even without the necessary
government authorizations.

"Whoever thinks that through an administrative step you can smother the
settlement enterprise and prevent it from flourishing is mistaken,"
said a Yesha council statement. "Either the government will approve
construction in the settlements, or the natural development of the
settlements will continue to grow, even without government permits."

The statement came in response to a Peace Now report released Monday
that noted expansion in 101 West Bank settlements, including at least
500 structures each containing dozens of apartments.

The report, which summarizes the first quarter of 2008, also found
that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently approved a plan to
construct at least 969 housing units in settlements - 750 in the Agan
Ayalon neighborhood of Givat Ze'ev and 48 in Ariel.

I was recently told that Fisk had retired. Maybe this is a different idea of retirement. Two articles which do not necessarily tell us something we did not know, but attempt, as he has consistently done in his writing, to put the day to day ruminations in a historical perspective. It is a strange kind of journalism, impassioned, mad, committed-committable, giving you a different relation to the idea of objectivity in journalism. We could call it journalism with memory. Or historic(al) journalism. We could call it a kind of strange foil of contemporary journalism. So much of journalism today is either a distraction, a presentation of the tree excluded from its existence in a forest (could also be categorized as myopic or filed under over-information), lies (misinformation), unwitting propaganda (uncritical), sensational (entertainment) .... Moreover, one could say that the press has always tried to make the everyday, somehow more meaningful, more grounded in history, the everyday as historical. Yet, it has, one would argue, often failed (in the name of contemporariness), to report history as everyday. If history enters, it is always as scandal. That is, journalism has never lived up to its, allbeit problematic, attempt to stage an encounter between the everyday and history. One could say that some of Fisk's writings are temporary flares which light such a path. -rg

1. The Only Lesson We Ever Learn Is That We Never Learn
2. It's not a straight road to dictatorship

------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------
1. The Only Lesson We Ever Learn Is That We Never Learn

by Robert Fisk
Published on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 by The Independent/UK

Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a “hell-disaster”.

But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry - but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.

Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people - the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world - not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam’s links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn’t plan for the aftermath of war?

Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning - of which more later - but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.

As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I’d brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy’s War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror - I recommend the Battle of Borodino - along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: “With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.

From Democracy Now:

“Everybody in the World Except US Citizens Should Be Allowed to Vote and Elect the American Government”–Leading Intellectual Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek, the renowned philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist, joins us in our firehouse studio for a wide-ranging discussion. Žižek has been called “the Elvis of cultural theory” and is widely considered to be one of Europe’s leading intellectuals. He has written more than fifty books and speaks to sold-out audiences around the world. [includes rush transcript]

Slavoj Žižek, Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist. He is author of more than fifty books, including the forthcoming In Defense of Lost Causes.

AMY GOODMAN: Our next guest has been called “the Elvis of cultural theory,” widely considered to be one of Europe’s leading intellectuals. Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, cultural theorist. Born in Slovenia, he has written more than fifty books, speaks to sold-out audiences around the world. In 1990, he campaigned unsuccessfully to be president of Slovenia, the first Yugoslav republic to hold a free election.
He’s in New York right now to give a lecture tonight called “Resist, Attack, Undermine: Where Are We Forty Years After ’68?” The event opens this year’s Left Forum. Slavoj Zizek joins us here in the firehouse studio.
We welcome you to Democracy Now!

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Thank you very much. I am honored to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: When I asked you specifically how to pronounce your name, you said you’re nervous about people who pronounce it correctly.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yes, because I—no, but this is more a private trauma, like I don’t like to see myself. Whenever I see myself, like there on the screen, I’m tempted to adopt the position of an observer and ask myself, if I were to have a daughter, I would never allow that guy to take me to a movie theater. So—

AMY GOODMAN: But you also said you would be concerned if it was pronounced exactly, that perhaps that person came from the police.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yeah. Effectively, yeah, because only they really know. You know, this is at least my East European myth, that police are the ones who know.

AMY GOODMAN: This is a radio and a television and an internet show, broadcasting all at the same time. We showed, during Charlie Haden’s music break, coverage of Prague in ’68. This had an enormous influence on you. For an audience who would not even know what those two connections are—Prague ’68—explain what happened. And where were you?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: It’s like, by chance, I was very young at that point. I was in Prague. But OK, so that we don’t lose time—there is something really tragic about Prague ’68, namely—let’s be very frank, and it’s something very hard to swallow for a leftist. What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I’m a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets—it’s a very sad lesson—by their intervention, saved the myth. Imagine no Soviet intervention. In that ideological constellation, it would have been either, sooner or later, just joining the West or, nonetheless, at a certain point, the government is still in power, would have to put the brakes. It’s always the same story. It’s the same in—now you see my conservative, skeptical leftist side.
It’s the same in China, Tiananmen. I will tell you something horrible. Imagine the Communists in power giving way to the demonstrators. I claim—it’s very sad things to say, but if Tiananmen demonstrations were to succeed, like the Communist Party allowing for true democratic reforms and so on, it would have been probably a chaos in China. No, I’m not saying now that we should opt for dictatorship or some kind of a strong arm as the only solution; just let’s not dwell in safe illusions.
I think all too often today’s left falls into this play, which is why they like to lose. And I think this is the original sin of the left, from the very beginning. I—and I still consider myself, I’m sorry to tell you, a Marxist and a Communist, but I couldn’t help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure. They have this incredible—like, why did Paris Commune go wrong? Trotskyites. Why did the October Revolution go wrong? And so on. You know, this deep satisfaction—OK, we screwed it up, but we can give the best theory why it had to happen. I mean, this is what my title, the title of tonight’s talk, implicitly refers to, this comfortable position of resistance. Don’t mess with power. This is today’s slogan of the left. Don’t play with power. Power corrupts you. Resist, resist, withdraw and resist from a safe moralistic position. I found this very sad.

AMY GOODMAN: The second part of the topic, “Resist, Attack, Undermine: Where Are We Forty Years After ’68?” Talk about what you see as the pivotal moments in ‘68 and where we are in relation to them now.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: It’s a very nice question. Why? Because precisely a propos ’68, I think, we can see how—I will use consciously—an outward ideological struggle is still going on. Struggle for what? ’68, it’s the same as right here, one or two weeks ago, a wonderful commentary on Martin Luther King, how every child knows here “I Have a Dream.” Almost nobody knows what was that dream. It wasn’t just racial equality. Martin Luther King moved way to the left later. That’s obliterated.
It’s the same with ’68. If you ask people today, what will you get? Ooh, that wonderful explosion of creativity, anti-bureaucratic, sexual liberation, and so on. That’s, for me, precisely the least interesting part of ’68. That’s the ’68 which was perfectly integrated into today’s ideology, self-expression and so on. So if you want to draw the line, one line from ’68, it is what, for me, as an old-fashioned guy who likes erotics but with love, is the nightmare. Today’s legacy of that ’68 is alive. And, you know, they have in California, and now it’s spreading to Europe, a terrible thing called masturbation. People gather, you masturbate publicly, you’re not allowed to touch the other, and, of course, each one has to pay some money, which goes to politically correct causes and so on. And the idea, it’s like self-expression: you are alone, but in a crowd. This kind of—this is what I don’t like.
But there is another ’68, where people—about which people don’t want to talk. The crucial moment, I remember, it went—something incredibly happened: students, thousands of them, demonstrating, establishing a link with workers. People tend to forget that France was in a general strike, that this wasn’t just a student demonstration. Everybody would have swallowed that. So that legacy of ’68 is worth saving. So it’s not simple nostalgia. If we indulge a simple nostalgia for ’68, it means sexual revolution and all that, so I will tell to those guys, “Go to masturbation. Leave me alone.” No? What—’68 was a dream, and it failed, a dream of the possibility of these student protests reaching a wider audience.

China’s Genocide Games
by Eric Reeves
In preparing to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, China has engaged in a massive campaign to dissemble its role in the Darfur genocide in western Sudan, now entering its sixth year. Such a task was unexpected by Beijing. The regime knew it would encounter strenuous protests over the continuing destruction of Tibet, although the recent violent crackdown in Lhasa suggests Beijing hadn’t anticipated how deeply Tibetan anger runs. China’s leaders also knew they would draw fierce protests over their callous support of the brutal Burmese junta. Condemnation of Beijing’s own gross domestic human rights abuses was equally predictable. But the effectiveness of Darfur advocacy in highlighting China’s role in Sudan took Beijing by surprise. Steven Spielberg’s resignation as an artistic director for the Games - a decision of conscience stressing China’s role in Darfur - sharply intensified China’s dismay.

Thus Beijing has pulled out all the stops to counter advocacy success in emphasizing China’s longstanding diplomatic protection and economic support for the Islamist regime in Khartoum. Though Khartoum’s genocidal counterinsurgency campaign against Darfur’s African tribes has been authoritatively documented for years, Beijing seeks to obscure this grim reality through distortion, half-truths, and outright mendacity. In turn, nothing encourages Khartoum more than China’s refusal to speak honestly about violent human destruction in Darfur, where growing insecurity has brought the world’s largest humanitarian operation to the brink of collapse.

Why does China airbrush away Darfur’s genocidal realities? Why has Beijing been Khartoum’s largest weapons supplier over the past decade? Why has China repeatedly wielded a veto threat at the UN Security Council as the world body vainly struggles to bring pressure to bear on Khartoum? The answer lies in China’s thirst for Sudanese crude oil.

As China attempts to quell and destroy the uprisings in Tibet and the Armenian state attempts to prohibit and manage the growing disenchantment with so-called democracy, I do not know why I am posting this of all things, but I am. -rg

A Partial World Viewed
Film Fables
by Jacques Rancière
The Future of the Image
by Jacques Rancière
feature review by Tony McKibbin

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Tony McKibbin is an independent writer and teacher who writes for The List in Edinburgh and various film and literary journals worldwide.

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Jacques Rancière’s books, Film Fables and The Future of the Image, are really trying to do what his work in politics often does. If his collection of essays, On The Shores of Politics (1), proposes that we shouldn’t take the end of history seriously, and that politics isn’t necessarily about end goals but ongoing struggle, then in his recent books on the cinema (Film Fables) and on the image more generally (The Future of the Image), Rancière is again wary of declarative eschatology, of making statements that suggest the end of anything. As he says on the first page of The Future of the Image, he wants to examine “how a certain idea of fate and a certain idea of the image are tied up in the apocalyptic discourses of today’s cultural climate” (p. 1). But, he adds, “does not the term ‘image’ contain several functions whose problematic alignment precisely constitutes the labour of art?” (p. 1). Central to Rancière’s project is an aesthetic optimism: a sense that there are stories still to be told, and images constantly awaiting creation.

In The Future of the Image, Rancière wants to save the image in its singularity from the image in general. So, for example, he addresses the singularity of Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966) not as pure cinema opposed to impure television, but he tries to find the purity of the image as an image, rather than some ontological given of the medium. Hence, whether we see Bresson’s film on television or in the cinema, the image is essentially the same, just as if we were to see a show like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on a big screen it will not especially change the nature of the image; it will just expand its banality, just as a TV screen shrinks Bresson’s gracefulness: “…the intrinsic nature of Bresson’s images remains unchanged, whether we see the reels projected in a cinema, or through a cassette or disc on our television screen, or a video projection” (p. 3). To make it clear that Bresson’s approach isn’t ‘purely’ cinematic, Rancière draws comparisons with Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:

The camera’s fixing on the hand that pours the water and the hand that holds the candle is no more peculiar to cinema than the fixing of Doctor Bovary’s gaze on Mademoiselle Emma’s nails, or of Madame Bovary’s gaze on those of the notary’s clerk, is peculiar to literature. (p. 5)

Thus, it is really about perceptual options. Just as Rancière wants to save the image from end goal assumptions, so he also wants to rescue it from presumptuous ontological givens. He wants to rescue the image from the tautology of cinema being cinematic. We can see here how the two reservations dovetail to generate Rancière’s argument. If we accept that an image is not simply a product of its medium, but an issue first and foremost of perception, then the argument that proposes the end of the image, or the proliferation of empty images, swallowed up by the dubi

I had been translating this text and then realized that it had been done so already. I find the text interesting, particularly in light of discussions we organized around the idea of friendship nearly 9 years ago. Both Nancy and Derrida were philosophers whose work we had considered then, as well as Blanchot. It is nice for us to consider in light of our various friendships. -rg

Friendship

Contretemps 5, December 2004 By Giorgio Agamben

I. Friendship, our topic in this seminar, is so closely linked to the very
definition of philosophy that one can say that without it, philosophy would
not in fact be possible. The intimacy of friendship and philosophy is so
deep that philosophy includes the philos, the friend, in its very name and,
as is often the case with all excessive proximities, one risks not being
able to get to the bottom of it. In the classical world, this
promiscuity—and, almost, consubstantiality—of the friend and the philosopher
was taken for granted, and it was certainly not without a somewhat
archaizing intent that a contemporary philosopher —when posing the extreme
question, ʻwhat is philosophy?ʼ—was able to write that it was a question to
be dealt with entre amis. Today the relation between friendship and
philosophy has actually fallen into discredit, and it is with a sort of
embarrassment and uneasy conscience that professional philosophers try to
come to terms with such an uncomfortable and, so to speak, clandestine
partner of their thought. Many years ago, my friend Jean-Luc Nancy and I
decided to exchange letters on the subject of friendship. We were convinced
that this was the best way of approaching and almost ʻstagingʼ a problem
which seemed otherwise to elude analytical treatment. I wrote the first
letter and waited, not without trepidation, for the reply. This is not the
place to try to understand the reasons—or, perhaps, misunderstandings—that
caused the arrival of Jean-Lucʼs letter to signify the end of the project.
But it is certain that our friendship—which, according to our plans, should
have given us privileged access to the problem—was instead an obstacle for
us and was consequently, in a way, at least temporarily obscured. Out of an
analogous and probably conscious uneasiness, Jacques Derrida chose as the
Leitmotiv of his book on friendship a sibylline motto, traditionally
attributed to Aristotle, that negates friendship in the very gesture with
which it seems to invoke it: o philoi, oudeis philos, “o friends, there are
no friends.” One of the concerns of the book is, in fact, a critique of what
the author defines as the phallocentric conception of friendship that
dominates our philosophical and political tradition. While Derrida was still
working on the seminar which gave birth to the book, we had discussed
together a curious philological problem that concerned precisely the motto
or witticism in question. One finds it cited by, amongst others, Montaigne
and Nietzsche, who would have derived it from Diogenes Laertius. But if we
open a modern edition of the Lives of the Philosophers, we do not find, in
the chapter dedicated to the biography of Aristotle (V, 21), the phrase in
question, but rather one almost identical in appearance, the meaning of
which is nonetheless different and far less enigmatic: oi (o

Alot more has happened since this email was written
including the city of Troy getting involved and
shutting down an independent space
http://www.mediasanctuary.org/ that re-opened the
show.

If anyone does send a letter to either the president
of RPI or to the Mayor regarding either incident, we
are asking for the letters to be CC'ed or forwarded to

freetroyletters@gmail.com

we are attempting to collect them on this blog
http://freetroyletters.wordpress.com

we also have some video doc's up here and may be
putting more up soon:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TroyisFree

best, Dara

Thanks to Dara and all the tireless at RPI for keeping the neocon dogs
more or less at bay in upstate New York!

Not to forget the essential: the dog and the man are pretty much
neck-and-neck right now at Wafaa's other great project for his RPI
residency, namely http://dogoriraqi.com. And since he was so set on
doing the waterboarding (or rather, on having it done to him), it sure
would be a shame if the dog finally won!

Just to encourage y'all, below is the letter I sent in to the contest
organizers. Write to President Jackson in protest of the show closing
(president@rpi.edu), cc it to freetroyletters@gmail.com, then go cast
your vote for the waterboarding like a good American citizen (or for
that matter, a jolly good citizen of the world) at
http://dogoriraqi.com.

****

Ozone Rules Weakened at Bush's Behest
EPA Scrambles To Justify Action
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 14, 2008; A01

The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.

EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA's scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.

"It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA's expert scientific judgment," said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The president's order prompted a scramble by administration officials to rewrite the regulations to avoid a conflict with past EPA statements on the harm caused by ozone.

Solicitor General Paul D. Clement warned administration officials late Tuesday night that the rules contradicted the EPA's past submissions to the Supreme Court, according to sources familiar with the conversation. As a consequence, administration lawyers hustled to craft new legal justifications for the weakened standard.

The dispute involved one of two distinct parts of the EPA's ozone restrictions: the "public welfare" standard, which is designed to protect against long-term harm from high ozone levels. The other part is known as the "public health" standard, which sets a legal limit on how high ozone levels can be at any one time. The two standards were set at the same level Wednesday, but until Bush asked for a change, the EPA had planned to set the "public welfare" standard at a lower level.

This article posted on Nettime originally from the Wall Street Journal of all places -rg

NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data
Terror Fight Blurs Line Over Domain; Tracking Email
By SIOBHAN GORMAN
March 10, 2008

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental
Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data
about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents
called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. The National Security
Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building
essentially the same system.

The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence
gathering has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals
that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about
people's communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the
domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001
terrorist attacks.

Congress now is hotly debating domestic spying powers under the main
law governing U.S. surveillance aimed at foreign threats. An expansion
of those powers expired last month and awaits renewal, which could be
voted on in the House of Representatives this week. The biggest point
of contention over the law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act, is whether telecommunications and other companies should be made
immune from liability for assisting government surveillance.

Largely missing from the public discussion is the role of the highly
secretive NSA in analyzing that data, collected through little-known
arrangements that can blur the lines between domestic and foreign
intelligence gathering. Supporters say the NSA is serving as a key
bulwark against foreign terrorists and that it would be reckless
to constrain the agency's mission. The NSA says it is scrupulously
following all applicable laws and that it keeps Congress fully
informed of its activities.

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency
now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet
searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel
and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called "transactional"
data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated
software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious
patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism
programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA's own Terrorist
Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails
between the U.S. and overseas without a judge's approval when a link
to al Qaeda is suspected.

The NSA's enterprise involves a cluster of powerful
intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties
complaints when they came to light. They include a Federal Bureau of
Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known
as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S.
arrangement with the world's main international banking clearinghouse
to track money movements.

The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called
"black programs" whose existence is undisclosed, the current and
former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began
years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater
reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say,
is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual
financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.

---------------------------------------------------

Hello everyone -

Here is some more "strange culture." Happening in a university near you.
Solidarity appreciated.

all the best, Brian

***********

Wafaa Bilal: Speech in a Democracy

Wafaa Bilal is currently an artist-in-residence at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute in the city of Troy, New York. Shortly after his arrival on March
5, his exhibition in the gallery of the Arts department was closed to the
public by order of the university’s president. Today there is no certainty
that the exhibition will be reopened. What I want to show is that every
aspect of Wafaa Bilal’s visit to RPI points back to one fundamental issue:
the value of free speech in a democracy.

Bilal was born in Iraq in 1966. He resisted the authoritarian government of
Saddam Hussein, suffered persecution and then escaped the country,
emigrating to the US in the early 1990s to realize a lifelong dream. He
completed an MFA at the Chicago Art Institute in 2003 – and then, due to
circumstances far beyond his own choosing, he became one of the most
controversial artists in America.

He works with photography, video and computer games, using the Internet to
reach beyond the gallery to a wider public. At the heart of his recent
pieces is a single principle: he performs the existence of an Iraqi
civilian. He shows us, tells us and tries to make us feel what life might
be like right now, for those he left behind in his home country. By staging
himself in interactive situations, he asks each of us to chose what we have
to say to the Iraqi people.

Let’s remember that Iraqis are not necessarily our enemies. US armed forces
originally came to liberate them from a dictator. This apparently simple
premise has given rise to a terribly complex dilemma. An occupying power,
claiming to restore democracy to a foreign nation, is faced with deadly
attacks on its forces and with the parallel development of civil wars
linked inextricably to its presence. A civilian population, which had no
voice and no chance to intervene in any of the events leading up to this
violence, is faced with explosives, assassinations, cross-fire, penury,
immeasurable suffering and death. By the most cautious and thoroughly
documented account available, the liberation of Iraq has been accompanied
by 81,632 civilian deaths by violence since March 20, 2003 (cf.
www.iraqbodycount.org). Each of those who have died, including Bilal's own
brother, is a unique human being, just like each of the 3,974 Americans who
have died in he war. The question that arises today is whether the citizens
of the United States – who, through our elected representatives, did
collectively decide to engage in violence – can still speak in public about
the consequences of that decision.

THE $3 TRILLION WAR IN IRAQ
by Joseph Stiglitz

The Toronto Star
March 12, 2008

Only two winners have emerged from the conflict: oil companies and
defence contractors.

With March 20 marking the fifth anniversary of the United States-led
invasion of Iraq, it's time to take stock of what has happened.

In our new book The Three Trillion Dollar War, Harvard's Linda Bilmes
and I conservatively estimate the economic cost of the war to the
U.S. to be $3 trillion, and the costs to the rest of the world to
be another $3 trillion - far higher than the Bush administration's
estimates before the war.

The Bush team not only misled the world about the war's possible costs,
but has also sought to obscure the costs as the war has gone on.

This is not surprising. After all, the Bush administration lied about
everything else, from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction
to his supposed link with Al Qaeda. Indeed, only after the U.S.-led
invasion did Iraq become a breeding ground for terrorists.

The Bush administration said the war would cost $50 billion. The
U.S. now spends that amount in Iraq every three months.

To put that number in context: For one-sixth of the cost of the war,
the U.S. could put its social security system on a sound footing
for more than a half-century, without cutting benefits or raising
contributions.

Moreover, the Bush administration cut taxes for the rich as it went
to war, despite running a budget deficit. As a result, it has had to
use deficit spending - much of it financed from abroad - to pay for
the war.

The time for worldwide boycott is now
Omar Barghouti, The Electronic Intifada, 2 March 2008

On Friday, 29 February 2008, Israel's deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "holocaust," telling Israeli Army Radio: "The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, [the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves."

This date will go down in history as the beginning of a new phase in the colonial conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, whereby a senior Israeli leader, a "leftist" for that matter, has publicly revealed the genocidal plans Israel is considering to implement against Palestinians under its military occupation, if they do not cease to resist its dictates. It will also mark the first time since World War II that any state has relentlessly -- and on live TV -- terrorized a civilian population with acts of slow, or low-intensity, genocide, with one of its senior government officials overtly inciting to a full-blown "holocaust," while the world stood by, watching in utter apathy, or in glee, as in the case of leading western leaders.

For an Israeli leader who is Jewish, in particular, to threaten anyone with holocaust is a sad irony of history. Are victims of unspeakable crimes invariably doomed to turn into appalling criminals? Can anything be possibly done to break this vicious cycle, before the state that claims to represent the main victims of the Nazi holocaust commits a fresh holocaust itself?

Before addressing those questions, however, isn't it exaggerated and pointedly counterproductive, one may ask, to compare Israel's crimes against the Palestinians, no matter how brutal and inhumane they have been, to Nazi genocide? Besides, isn't each crime unique and worthy of attention in its own right as a violation of human rights, of international law, of universal moral principles? The answer is yes: each crime is unique, and nothing Israel has done to date comes even close, in quantity, to Nazi crimes. But when victims-turned-perpetrators openly admit their intentions to carry out a unique form of offense that they are most familiar with, and they actually commit repeated acts that are qualitatively reminiscent of that crime in their unbridled racism and the ghastly level of disregard for the value and dignity of the human life of the "other" that is inherent in them, then their threats ought to be taken seriously. Everyone is called upon to react, to act in any way to stop this crime-in-progress from reaching its logical conclusion.

Read this in several articles, this is not the clearest, but still one for the record -rg

Israel's warning: rocket fire from Gaza will result in a Palestinian 'holocaust'

REUTERS/MOHAMMED SALEM
Palestinians evacuate a wounded man, above, after an Israeli missile destroyed the Workers Union headquarters yesterday.
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Saturday, 1 March 2008

An Israeli government minister warned yesterday that increasing rocket fire from Gaza would bring Palestinians a Shoah – the Hebrew word normally used to denote the Nazi Holocaust inflicted on Jews during the Second World War.

The declaration by the Deputy Defence Minister, Matan Vilnai, came amid fresh calls from some Israeli politicians for a ground invasion of Gaza provoked by the launch of eight Soviet-designed Grad rockets into the southern city of Ashkelon during the lethal violence of the past three days.

Mr Vilnai declared: "As the rocket fire grows, and the range increases – and they haven't yet said the last word on this – they are bringing upon themselves a greater Shoah because we will use all our strength in every way we deem appropriate, whether in air strikes or on the ground."

The former Labour minister and general in the IDF military told Army Radio: "We're getting close to using our full strength."