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Whatever else one wants to say, the US is a country that, for more than a decade, has loudly and continuously declared itself to be a “nation at war”. It’s not “at war” in any one county, but in many countries around the globe. In the last four years alone, it has used drones to end people’s lives in six predominantly Muslim country (probably more). Under its Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader, it has repeatedly wiped out entire families (including just this week), slaughtered dozens of children at a time, targeted and killed people rescuing and grieving its victims, and either deliberately or recklessly dropped bombs on teenagers (including its own citizens), then justified it with the most foul and morally deranged rationale. It embraces and props up the world’s most repressive tyrants. It isolates itself from the world and embraces blatant double standards in order to enable the worst behavior of its client states. It continues to maintain a global network of prisons where people are kept indefinitely in cages with no charges. It exempts itself and its leaders from the international institutions of justice while demanding that the leaders of other, less powerful states be punished there. And it is currently in the process of suffocating a nation of 75 million people with an increasingly sadistic sanctions regime, while proudly boasting about it and threatening more. It spent years imprisoning even Muslim journalists with no charges. And then there’s that little fact about how, less than a decade ago, it created a worldwide torture regime and then launched an aggressive war that destroyed a nation of 26 million people, one that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings. Those are all just facts. And while there is no shortage of Americans willing to step up and dutifully justify some or all of those acts, it’s so astonishing to watch people express surprise and bewilderment and anger when they discover that this behavior causes people in the world to intensely dislike the United States. If you want your country to rule the world as an aggressive and militaristic empire, then accept the inevitable consequence of that: that there will be huge numbers of people in the world who resent and even hate your country for that behavior. Don’t cheer while your country constantly kills, invades, occupies, and dominates the internal affairs of countless other nations - and then expect to be liked. Immorality aside, producing this reaction is one reason not to do such things.

The PSY scandal: singing about killing people vs. constantly doing it, Glenn Greenwald

This is in relation to artist PSY sharing anti-U.S. sentiments and participating in several protests against the industrial military complex. This is an absolutely amazing article.

(via eastafrodite)

charioty

(via brandef)

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Jack Whitten at Zeno X

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Hassan Rahim • NO FUCKING EXCEPTIONS/NO FUTURE/BURN IT DOWN

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Nothing is after all just nothing. It cannot be a place that resembles an idea of nothingness. A place involves area, or extension. It is defined by coordinates and boundaries. It is not nothing. It is room. Nothing has no room, nor can anything be located within nothing. Nothing cannot have an inside or an outside. It cannot destroy, swallow, or terminate. As nothing, it can have no energy or effect. As nothing, it cannot be a thing, a realm, a state, or anything. It is absolutely nothing to fear. It is nothing to hope for.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, translated by Robert Thurman (via empiresof)

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“I came back to Paris in spring 1968, after a long trip to South East Asia and Japan, where big riots were taking place. I photographed most of the Paris demonstrations : the ‘Sorbonne crisis’ as well as the moment it was abandoned, with students shouting ‘Too late, civil police, the Sorbonne is no temple’. I also photographed the occupation of the Odéon theatre, the striking Renault factories, the burial of Gilles Tautin, the big pro-De Gaulle demonstration on the Champs-Elysees and the barricades in the Latin Quarter on Rue Gay-Lussac.

May ‘68, we immediately understood that it was something important, probably the most important protest that took place in the decade, certainly since WWII. People were tired of Gaullism and wanted a change. They wanted to remodel society, to change the relations between executives and workers and all of that. It was sort of the Middle Ages at that time! France was a very conservative nation, quite insular, and thanks to May ‘68, you saw people - young, old - chatting together without social barriers, without hang-ups. And that was something never seen before. 

At the Sorbonne, there were memorable evenings in the large amphitheatre, where intellectuals, philosophers, artists and union members - as well as people from the right wing, left wing - came to express themselves. Well, there were also leaders, of course; professional speakers who were experts in rhetoric and monopolized the dialogue, but Cohn-Bendit or Jean-Paul Sartre weren’t the only ones to speak. At the enormous Richelieu amphitheatre, debates would last until late at night… until 2, 3 in the morning. Then people couldn’t go back home - there was no commuting so they just slept there.

On May 6, there were major riots in protest against the arrest of Sorbonne students, after they were arrested. At the first large protest, the CRS riot police were throwing grenades inside the apartments of the bourgeois who were watching the scene from the fifth floor, commenting “Oh, so interesting!.. etc.”

When reporters of the CRS riot police were published, showing them hunting, lashing and beating up young women or people on the floor with shoes and their nightsticks; it was filmed, and above all, it was photographed - and published. And at that moment, it contributed to show the people’s repression and it stimulated the people’s uprising.

The sight of Rue Gay-Lussac on the morning of May 11 was something! It felt like being in Beirut after the civil war. The barricades, every 50 meters. It went on through the night. The next day, early in the morning, people came down in their houses robes and slippers to try and buy bread. They stood there, totally frightened, between cut trees and burned cars - it was unbelievable.

For weeks my clothes were saturated by the persistent smell of tear gas. The ORTF (French public TV and radio network) was on strike, so with Godard, Chris Marker and others, we shot some short movies called “cinétracts”, a kind of filmed version of our photos. These films were broadcast throughout France, deprived of TV and radio news due to strikes in the public service.

We shouldn’t forget that ‘68 was a year incredibly wild and rich in events perhaps more dramatic and consequential. Prague for instance… There was the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers. A lot happened at the same time everywhere, and finally May ‘68 was sort of like a student protest in one of the wealthiest nations in the world. There was no unemployment, no people laid off. There was incredible economic development, there was no dictatorship as in other countries - well, there was a youth that wanted to change, move and breathe.  

The emergency was to communicate, to talk to each other, to question everything. It was the rebellion of a whole generation against what the society had in principle prepared for it, a rebellion against everything that came from above.” — Bruno Barbey

Click on the link above to watch (and to listen) the photo-essay.

[Picture : One of the famous slogans of May ‘68 : “Beauty is in the street”]

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KEYS TO THE CITY:  A set of “master keys” to the infrastructure of New York City popped up on eBay last month, leaving many public commentators and city officials alike concerned for the safety of the metropolis … After the keys were sold to a buyer who was actually “an undercover Post reporter,” an investigation found that “most of the keys did, in fact, work.”

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Truth.

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From the ArtBase: Add-Art is a Firefox extension which replaces advertising images on web pages with art images from a curated database. This extension is an alternative to conventional add blockers which simply remove advertisements, leaving negative space in their place. Add-Art instead transforms your web browser into an art gallery, featuring contemporary artists and curators.

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I would like to talk about something that everybody knows, but that, so it seems, no one has the boldness to say. That is, that the time for indignation is over. Those who get indignant are already starting to bore us. Increasingly, they seem to us like the last guardians of a rotten system, a system without dignity, sustainability or credibility. We don’t have to get indignant anymore, we have to revolt.

Franco Berardi “Bifo” (via yourmomisapastiche)

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When what we are is intrinsically determined by capitalism, it’s not enough to try to better ourselves; we have to cease to be ourselves.

Self-Destruction (via ninjabikeslut)