#there's a difference between a military or police dictatorship which is what the US might degenerate into under trump

[orc-apologist]

it's funny how when you'll give actual explanations as to why people are racist or transphobic or something similar, like how that happens and why it's happening now out of all times, that go beyond "white people/cishet people evil" so many people will instantly attack you for "apologia"

I think it kinda comes from this idea that identity politics has pushed that people of the unmarked categories like male white and cishet can't possibly struggle with things in life. but economic crises, which we have been in for 16 years now, affect everyone that's not part of the ruling class. prolonged economic instability alienates people from the status quo, from established parties, rhetoric and such. they begin to look elsewhere for solutions. the powers that be know to counteract this with reactionary politics. using scapegoating they'll promise the return to an (often imaginary) better yesterday, the very definition of reactionary politics.

these ideas sound plausible and actionable. things used to be better after all. those scapegoats used to not be there (as visibly) after all.

the way of solving this isn't to go "waaahh people are evil and fascism is back, woe is me" but to a) point out that these reactionary politics are not going to solve the problem because they are not the cause b) point out the actual cause of the problem (capitalism) c) offer actual alternatives (organizing, strikes, expropriating the bourgeoisie, and eventually total labor democracy)

[animebw]

Binge-Watching: Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Episodes 32-35

In which we get another fantastic space battle, Julian tries to be a good man in a bad system, and Yang considers the merits and drawbacks of benevolent dictatorship.

Death Star Squared

The more I get into Legend of the Galactic Heroes, the more surprised I am that nobody talks about this show’s action more. All the conversation surrounding it focuses on the politics and themes and characters, which, to be fair, are what it’s about moreso than spaceships blowing each other up among the stars. But you’d think someone would poke their head in at some point and say, “Oh hey, by the way, this show’s space fights also kick fucking ass.” Seriously, the two-episode clash between Iserlohn and Geiersberg would slot perfectly into a more action-oriented series without missing a beat. There’s so much energy and creativity in the way it plays out that I barely noticed the passage of time until the episodes were over. It’s not just spaceships shooting lasers at each other, we’ve attack bikes strafing each other across the liquid-metal shields like bloody, futuristic jousting! We’ve got using the intense gravitational pull of the planet-sized fortresses to mess with each other’s defenses! We’ve got commanders on both sides making smart plays to outmaneuver each other, proving it’s not just Reinhard and Yang who can kick ass at the head of an army! And the way it all comes together in the end, Yang’s fleet swooping in just in time to derail Geiersburg and blow it to pieces in a fireworks show second only to the destruction of the Death Star... goddamn. Just, goddamn. Y’all really need to start doing a better job selling this show’s strengths on the action department. I’d never have known from the outside how great it is at delivering this kind of spectacle.

A Good Soldier

That said, yes, LOTGH is definitely more focused on characters and themes than it is on action. And one of the most prominent consequences of the dual fortress showdown is that Julian is starting to rise up the military ladder at last, whether Yang likes it or not. It was only a matter of time, really; the sharp judgement Julian showed in this fight proves he’s got what it takes to stand on Yang’s level as a strategist. But that puts both us and Yang in a very conflicted position. On the one hand, we’re really proud of Julian for proving his worth and chasing his dream. On the other hand, having him follow Yang into the viper’s nest that is the Alliance military was the last thing we wanted. On the other other hand, though, the military is in desperate need of more people like Julian. People who aren’t just skilled and smart, but who actually care about doing the right thing. People who want to uphold the Alliance’s actual ideals, to fight not for oppression and aggression, but for the freedom and equality of all people. But then again, on the other other other hand, we’ve seen firsthand the limits of Yang’s ability to make a difference as just one man in a corrupt system. How much good can well-meaning people like him and Julian even do, when those calling the shots are directing the entire apparatus toward dark ends? Hell, the last large-scale attempt to fix what’s broken in society only ended up making it so, so much worse. And once again, the parallels between the Alliance and modern America are so spot-on it’s terrifying. The way Truhnilt and his administration suppress peaceful protests and call them riots when it’s really the police causing the violence in the first place... fuck, man, it’s barely been a year since George Floyd’s murder inspired a new wave of Black Lives Matter protests. This is present day history to me, and this show from three decades ago had captured it to a T. Time really is a flat fucking circle.

Still, while Yang might not have all the answers, at least he’s never at a loss for an incredible pep talk. His entire speech to Julian at the end of episode 35 is lovely, but I particularly love his bit expanding on the idea of the pen being mightier than the sword. Yes, war is sometimes necessary, and speech can’t always be stronger than violence. But at least in history, the power of the pen is unmatched. It can look back on events that have come before and contextualize them for the future. It can unwrite lies told by powerful people in the then-present and give us in the current present advice on how now to make the same mistakes. The ability to affirm the truth of the past and use it as a guidebook for the future is, in many ways, humanity’s greatest power. That knowledge is our greatest weapon in the fight against all the evils of the world, as long as we’re able to use it. It can show us the limits of individual action in broken systems. It can teach us that “good cops” or “good soldiers” may not be able to do much in police and military run by warmongers, fascists and dolts. It can remind us that violence of oppression and violence of liberation are two very different things, and it’s important to draw a distinction between them. It’s the reason Yang doesn’t celebrate at Geiersburg’s destruction, but instead takes his hat off to mourn the countless lives he just wiped off the face of reality. Julian would do well to heed the advice of history, even as he dives deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast. Otherwise, he might as well lie down right now and let himself be steamrolled by the military machine.

Curse of the Great Man

But perhaps the most interesting lesson history has to teach is about men like Reinhard. And this is where I get to flex my college education a bit, because Yang’s perspective on dictators reminds be a lot of reading Aristotle. The uncomfortable truth is, a single great man in charge of a country can do a lot more good than a collection of powers all butting heads and arguing. A great leader with absolute power can instantly enact reforms to make people’s lives better, nothing holding him back from constantly improving his country and everyone within it. In that sense, a dictatorship can be better than democracy... at least for a time. But what happens when that great man inevitably succumbs to the passage of time? Can you trust that the next ruler will be just as great? Or the ruler after him? Or even the next one? How long before the seat of power is filled by someone who doesn’t deserve to hold it? Someone who will wield absolute power in all the wrong ways and bring his people to ruin with the same tools his predecessors used to work wonders? The only way one-man rule is sustainable is if you can trust- fully, 100% trust- that the one man in question will always be the best man for the job. And it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever work out a system to make that a reality, let alone a system guaranteed to keep working hundreds and thousands of years after its construction. Inevitably, someone dangerous will end up in control, and the people under him will pay the price. Compared to that, the slow, plodding stability of democracy is a much preferable outcome, albeit flawed in its own unique ways.

In short, it’s a very dangerous prospect for a nation’s rule to depend entirely on one man’s character. There’s a reason George Washington made such a big deal of setting term limits and didn’t try to govern the newly established America for life; he knew from experience under British rule that allowing one man that much control was a recipe for disaster. His country needed to become accustomed to a peaceful transfer of power, otherwise it would just end up as authoritarian as the country they’d broken away from. And while the results of the American experiment have been... let’s say mixed at best, Washington’s instinct here was undoubtedly the right one. And Yang, being a proper scholar of history, understands that the Empire is currently in a similarly precarious position. Reinhard may well end up a benevolent dictator who only does good things for his people, but once he’s forced to pass that power down, the risk of someone fucking it all up rises exponentially. He might dish out sound advice to his subordinates, show mercy toward soldiers who suffer defeat, and rule with wisdom and courage, but if he keeps the dictatorship as is and doesn’t open power up to a more egalitarian system, then it doesn’t matter how good a job he might do; he all but guarantees his country’s eventual destruction at the hands of an incompetent successor some ways down the line. To his credit, he at least recognizes the evils of bloodline dynasties and refuses to run a system where power is bestowed by birthright instead of merit. But he needs to go further if he wants to ensure this nation’s long-term survival. Can he expand his perspective to that extent? I honestly don’t know. Hopefully Kirchies’ ghost voice can work a few more hat tricks on him before Oberstein sinks his cynical claws in too deep.

Odds and Ends

-Aaaand now the tabloids get to work. Lovely.

-”You dare call us parasites?” “That’s the only thing you managed to hear?” CALL! THEM! OUT!

-”Who does he think he is?” “The man who saved our nation, I believe.” sdjfhsdkfhdskf at least someone gets it

-Yeah respect is earned, shitheads. And you haven’t done shit to earn it.

-Man, everyone’s worried about Yang becoming another Rudolph. But I haven’t seen any of that from him yet.

-”It had never been damaged. But the time has come where that will be spoken of in past tense.” Oh fuck me, that’s such a cool way to put it.

-Lol at this guy twirling his coffee cup around.

-Boo, bad romantic subplots. Stop it.

-”Even in death, I refuse to compromise on women or coffee.” pfft

-Hah, now even Yang being away from the fortress is a source of confusion for the Empire. Really dodged a bullet there.

-”Admiral Kenpff may think we’re here to usurp his achievements.” “Don’t worry. it’s possible he hasn’t achieved anything at all.” sdkfjshdfkhsf savage

-”Perhaps he should have just crashed the fortresses into each other.” Damn. Reinhard’s wilding this episode.

-”We merely raised objections, and you accepted them.” Fuck Fezzan, man.

-”History is full of possibility, and fate full of caprice.” Oh fuck you, you don’t get to have cool lines.

-”How long till a full recovery?” Holy shit, this guy’s a badass.

-”Hahahaha, well I’ll be! We’ve been tricked!” Lmao, the about-face from laughter to anger was great.

-Huh, so this one Fezzan guy is the other’s bastard son. That’s an interesting dynamic.

-”If one could win by determination alone, one wouldn’t have to work hard.” Interesting how we’ve now heard two unrelated Empire folks say this phrase. Wonder where it comes from?

-Julian and Yang’s domestic life is very wholesome, ngl.

Damn, lots going on here. See you next time!

[lightinalexandria]

Dictatorship vs Theocracy: The Lesser of Two Evils?

August 11th, 2021 اغسطس ١١

If you were reading this post in Arabic from me as an Egyptian journalist, or even in English, and the police found it...in the best case scenario I'm brought down to the station, "scared straight" and let off with a promise never to criticize the govt again. But I’ve heard of lots of scenarios anecdotally, as recently as 2 years ago, where activists just disappear. Want to know what life would have looked like in a dystopian alternate universe 30 years after Trump succeeded in his coup and never left? That said, the way the situation is viewed by politically moderate Egyptians and Americans -if such a thing still exists- is so very different, and that’s the real point of this post.

After the Egyptian revolution in 2011, when Mubarak left, from what I’ve read and heard, there were 3 main paths forward. The most exciting was Egyptian civil society fielding an organized enough field of candidates to become viable as a governing power. The second was the Muslim Brotherhood candidates, an ultra-religious Salafism-influenced theocratic organization. The third was an interim military govt. That thin strand of spiderweb hope for civil society fell apart, and someone who is much more versed in Egyptian history and culture than me no doubt has an explanation. The first real election after the revolution saw Morsi from the Muslim Brotherhood elected, and a scant year after the military coup that brought Sisi to power, where he remains almost 10 years later.

Okay, you could have read that from a history article. Here are stories from friends on the ground, though; I know at least 2 Egyptians in my circle that would have FOR sure voted for Biden over Trump, but have come to look positively at Sisi. One of them was active in student protests AGAINST Sisi during the revolution; he still has the scars where one of Sisi’s military police shot him in the face during a demonstration. That said, he’s terrified of what a theocratic govt. under the Muslim Brotherhood might look like. As a queer Egyptian, it’s already a risk to have liaisons with men, and you can still be arrested, but that’s way ahead of the Salafi death penalty. He also carries so much trauma from the year after the revolution without any functioning govt -standing outside his house during looting with a sword because civilians don’t have guns and all the police ran away- that to have a strong govt feels like a relief. Of course, of course he hates the lack of free press, but puts it way higher up Maslow’s hierarchy of Societal Needs than most of us Americans would.

The other Egyptian in my circle who supports Sisi sees the Muslim Brotherhood as an existential threat to Egypt because their primary loyalty is to a pan-African Islamic caliphate and not the state of Egypt. She points to a very controversial Ethipoian dam project at the mouth of the Nile that was green lighted during Morsi’s short reign as Muslim Brotherhood leader of Egypt. Ethiopia is building it, and Egyptians are furious because the Nile flows through Egypt after Ethiopia. She also -and I see strong echoes of my Chinese friends thinking- points to Sisi’s anti-poverty programs as strong and necessary authoritarian measures. Sisi has starting razing unplanned buildings and slums, including in my city of Alexandria, and forcing residents to move to new apt. buildings in different parts of the city. They cannot sell the new apartments for 20 years. Of course many residents are delighted at the new digs; TV this summer is oozing with govt propaganda videos showing sad Egyptians with sad music in slums and happy Egyptians with happy music in new flats. And…residents don’t have a choice to move. In Alexandria that land under the slums has been sold to a Saudi conglomerate to develop a water park.

For me it’s helpful to think of gov’t philosophy in different countries as reflecting family structures; in Egypt, the man is the undisputed head of the household, legally and socially. We cringe at paternalism of Europeans towards their colonies now, and I don’t have the full perspective to say how similar or different it is from intra-national paternalism like this, but there’s definitely a relation.

A final note, about the economy under Sisi. If you suspected a military dictator might not prioritize the lower and middle classes, you’d be right. (You could argue the housing program I mention above does mean he’s prioritizing them, but maybe wait to reserve judgement). Simply put, the army has taken over the economy. I’d say it follows the playbook of nationalization that other socialist or communist govt has followed, but in so many sectors, it seems like the army is just undercutting local businesses. All the army brass is involved in running disparate businesses; telecom, mango export, apartment construction. The army companies don’t pay taxes as a national subsidiary like other Egyptian private companies, so they can undercut most prices. I’m surprised it hasn’t produced a seething mass of disgruntled Egyptian businesspeople ready to fund another revolution, which makes me think there must be some sweetheart deals in the back room.

And what has Sisi done about the pollution, overcrowding and generally lower living standards in a city like Cairo? Invested in improving local infrastructure, pollution mitigation technology/funding? Nope. He’s building new cities for upper-middle and upper class Egyptians to move to. Not neighborhoods. Cities, in the desert, like a pharaoh of old. Look up “New Cairo” or “New Alamein.” I’ve been there, it’s spooky, like a fancy mall that goes on forever. Big middle finger to the broke, un-educated masses staying behind. I guess you could make an argument for the benefits of lessening over-crowding. Maybe Sisi has a grand plan to swoop in once the old cities empty out a bit and work some magic. But I don’t think so.

The Muslim Brotherhood might have done more to improve at least the economic conditions of Egypt’s more vulnerable citizens. I don’t think they would have built the separate cities, or involved the army as a business octopus in every lucrative industry. But then, the very little social freedom Egyptian women enjoy would be cut back another 40 years, maybe to full body niqabs and mandatory accompaniment by a male family member. Public displays of affection of any kind, even between opposite sex couples, banned in any sort of public space. I want to be clear that the Muslim Brotherhood represents one far end of the Islamic spectrum in the same way that ultra-orthodox Zionist Judaism represents one far end of the Jewish spectrum, one that has little to no relation to the way I understand and practice Judaism. I’ve had many discussions with friends here -who are simulateously progressive feminists and devout Muslims- on the 5 pillars of Islam, the way they support a reflective and fulfilled life, and the way more extreme interpretations twist the original intention.

To bring it back around, Egypt is now a military dictatorship, and has both repressed dissent and consolidated economic power so effectively I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The world is such a very complicated and Machiavellian place. From the American perspective with a free press, democratic-ish elections, social freedom, a stable govt and a booming economy, of course Sisi’s dictatorship seems irredeemably, one sidedly terrible. But what if you had to choose just 2 or 3 of those 5 things? Of course us dreamers and activists want to push for all of them, and we should, but what if the only organized factions capable of governing brought only some of those benefits to the table. What would you choose?

[xhxhxhx]

Alan Allport’s Britain at Bay (Knopf, 2020) is great on all the ways the United Kingdom was an only imperfectly free country at the beginning of the Second World War. 

On the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act:

Police power in Northern Ireland was very different in character from elsewhere in the UK, owing to the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act, or SPA. The SPA was originally passed in the emergency conditions of 1922 at the end of the Irish War of Independence. Its powers had only been supposed to last one year, but it was found to be so useful that it was annually renewed by Stormont up to 1933, and made permanent thereafter.

Using the authority granted to it by the SPA, Northern Ireland’s government could impose curfews, prohibit public gatherings and protest marches, ban newspapers, arrest members of the public wearing uniforms or bearing items associated with proscribed organisations, search for and seize contraband goods, indefinitely detain those suspected of ‘subversive activity’ or exclude them from entering Northern Ireland, punish anyone making a report ‘intended or likely to cause disaffection to His Majesty’ and, in broad terms, ‘take all such steps and issue all such orders as may be necessary for preserving the peace and maintaining order’. In December 1938 the SPA was used to introduce internment without trial for suspected IRA men. Some of these detainees were taken to a prison hulk called the Al Rawdah, moored off Killyleagh, into which they were packed in bronchitic squalor for five months. The SPA granted Craigavon’s executive virtually unlimited domestic powers of control and surveillance, which were directed specifically at an ethno-religious minority regarded as a parasitical and disloyal enemy within. The SPA formed, in the words of a National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) report in 1936, ‘the basis for a legal dictatorship’. W. J. Stewart, a progressive Unionist critical of the UUP, described Northern Ireland’s government in the 1930s as ‘more completely in control of the six counties than either Hitler or Mussolini in their own countries’.

[...]

The police responded to the [IRA’s 1939] bombing campaign in different ways, some constabularies taking great pains to distinguish IRA terrorists from the Irish community at large, some less so. Newspaper stories from the Spanish Civil War had been full of reports about seditious ‘Fifth Columnists’, and the possibility that Irish migrants might be providing sanctuaries for IRA men did not seem completely fantastical. In London the Metropolitan Police asked hotel and boarding-house staff to provide details about any new visitors with Irish addresses or accents. The public was encouraged to report sightings of Irishmen ‘idling’ during daylight hours on the streets of the capital. S-Plan attacks provoked panicky and legally dubious police work. After the Piccadilly bombing constables ‘dashed through the crowd haphazardly’, as one witness later put it, rounding up dozens of men with Irish brogues. The whole operation was conducted with such a lack of basic procedure that all of the detained men had to be released later in the day for want of evidence – including a couple of suspects who, it turned out later, really had been involved in planting the bomb.

On the Prevention of Violence (Temporary Provisions) Act:

Earlier in 1939, the S-Plan terrorist campaign had provoked a similar kind of test, on a smaller scale, of how far the British were willing to compromise their traditional civil liberties in the name of public safety. In July 1939 the home secretary had introduced the Prevention of Violence (Temporary Provisions) Act to the Commons, a remarkable piece of legislation rushed through Parliament at breakneck speed, largely forgotten in the subsequent hubbub of war but something that ought to be better remembered than it is. The Prevention of Violence Act granted the home secretary the authority to prohibit anyone who had been resident in Great Britain for less than twenty years from entering or re-entering the country if it was believed that they were ‘concerned in the preparation or instigation […] of acts of violence designed to influence public opinion or Government policy with respect to Irish affairs’. He could expel such persons from the United Kingdom and detain them for up to five days prior to that expulsion. The Act allowed, for the first time in history, a political appointee to imprison, deport and exile British subjects without reference to the courts. It also empowered the police, under certain circumstances, to conduct searches and seizures of suspects’ property without obtaining a judicial warrant first. British subjects – as all Irishmen and -women still legally were in 1939, even those living in the Free State – had never been subject to such peacetime restrictions before.

Hoare insisted to Parliament that the new Act was a ‘temporary measure to meet a passing emergency’ which would remain on the statute books for no longer than two years. Some MPs were not convinced. They saw it as an attack on Britain’s culture of democracy. ��We are proud that this is a free country,’ argued William Wedgwood Benn (father of Tony and grandfather of Hilary). ‘Our people hold their heads a little higher because they believe they enjoy a measure of freedom […] I do not think public opinion will be assisted by giving the Home Secretary power to turn us all into ticket-of-leave men, if he so wishes.’ In return, supporters of the Act regarded these objections as a sop to terrorists. ‘What about King’s Cross?’ demanded Sir Joseph Nall, Tory MP for Manchester Hulme. ‘What about the people who are being maimed and killed?’ It was much better, he argued, ‘to deport a dozen innocent persons than to allow one innocent person to be killed’. The Prevention of Violence Act passed into law.

Even before the Second World War broke out, then, fears of terrorism had already caused the government drastically to revise traditional assumptions about the freedoms of the individual British citizen. The Prevention of Violence Act was a first step in the creeping Hibernicisation of British law during the twentieth century, a process in which restrictions on civil liberty originally applied in ‘troubled’ Ireland were progressively transferred to the rest of the United Kingdom as well. In time, an indefinite state of emergency would become the new normal.

On the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act and Treachery Act:

All of this [invasion scare] seemed to suggest that the democracy itself could not be trusted in a crisis. Only by abandoning the ‘present rather easy-going methods’ of national life and adopting a set of restrictions ‘which would approach the totalitarian’ could Britain survive a Nazi onslaught, the Cabinet was warned by Chamberlain on 18 May. The legal apparatus for such a siege dictatorship was established four days later, when a new Emergency Powers (Defence) Act was passed by the Commons in its entirety in just two hours. This was an extension of the existing emergency legislation passed at the outbreak of war which now gave the government almost unlimited authority to regulate people, property and capital without the need for parliamentary scrutiny. As the new minister for labour later observed, it made him ‘a kind of Führer with powers to order anybody anywhere’. A Treachery Act passed the same day made it a capital offence to assist the enemy’s military operations or to hamper Britain’s own.

As the Times put it, the Emergency Powers Act ‘comes near to suspending the very essence of the Constitution as it has been built up in a thousand years. Our ancient liberties are placed in pawn for victory.’ A slew of regulations soon circumscribed even the most quotidian features of the British citizen’s life. It was unlawful to ‘endeavour to influence […] public opinion in a manner likely to be prejudicial’ to the war effort, to take part in a strike, to withhold information about an invention or patent if the state demanded it, to hold an unauthorised procession, to put out flags, to operate a car radio or to put icing on a cake (wickedly wasteful of sugar). Chamberlain hoped that public opinion would back these restrictions; but if not, recalcitrant non-cooperators could be drafted into a compulsory labour corps under prison discipline.

The creation in mid-May 1940 of the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), later renamed the Home Guard, ought to be seen in this context of government nervousness. Private citizens had responded to news of the German parachute landings in the Netherlands and Belgium by announcing the formation of ad hoc militia companies to defend their homeland. Whitehall felt it had to act quickly to control the process. One quarter of a million men aged between seventeen and sixty-five registered to join the new auxiliary force within the first week of its announcement, and by July 1940 its nominal strength stood at 1.5 million.

On Regulations 39BA and 18B:

Sir John Simon’s 1938 prophecy that rearmament and war would turn Britain into ‘a different kind of nation’ seemed to have come true. Moreover, it had happened with a remarkable lack of discussion or opposition. ‘A united nation feels no hesitation or misgiving’ about the abandonment of its personal freedoms, insisted the Times when the Emergency Powers Act was rushed through Parliament: ‘the temporary surrender [of liberties] is made with a glad heart and a confident spirit.’ That was not altogether true. There would be resistance to some of the more controversial powers the government had acquired for itself. That said, the assault on other values, particularly the presumption of innocence in law and the protection of minorities, inspired rather less sympathy.

The very British right to grumble out loud produced an early skirmish in this conflict over liberties. Regulation 39BA, introduced in June 1940, made it a criminal offence, punishable by up to a month in prison, to circulate ‘any report or statement relating to matters connected with the war which is likely to cause alarm and despondency’. It was announced at the same moment the Ministry of Information launched a ‘Silent Column’ campaign that condemned spreading rumours and gossiping about the war effort. The government was not shy about using its new power. By late July there had been over seventy prosecutions. A tradesman in Yeovil was jailed for thirty days for saying ‘Hitler will be here in a month’. A Bristol septuagenarian earned himself a week in prison for claiming that the Swastika would soon fly over Parliament.

As the summer wore on, however, a press backlash caused the government to retreat. Churchill admitted to the Commons on 23 July that, however ‘well-meant’ it had been, Regulation 39BA had had the unfortunate effect of criminalising ‘silly vapourings which are best dealt with on the spur of the moment by verbal responses’. The Silent Column was put into what he called ‘innocuous desuetude’, and the Home Secretary was asked to review all ‘alarm and despondency’ convictions. To what extent the Order’s continued existence had a chilling effect on free expression is unknowable. (‘Best to pass no opinion these days,’ as one Briton was reported saying by Home Intelligence. ‘You might get hung.’) Could anyone be certain that that innocuous pollster or Mass Observer asking them questions about the war was not a government provocateur?

A more ominous issue came up in August, when the government sought to create special regulations to deal with a crisis in which heavy bombing or invasion had halted normal legal procedures in some parts of the country. It proposed the creation of regional ‘War Zone courts’, presided over by experienced judges and appointed by the lord chancellor. Although these would not be military tribunals or courts-martial, they would nonetheless have the power to impose death sentences without appeal. ‘If we are not shot by the Germans we are evidently going to be shot by our own people,’ one Briton commented on hearing the news. The proposal was attacked in the Commons as far too vague, considering its life-and-death stakes. The Home Secretary’s reassurance that such courts would only operate with the greatest restraint was condemned as feeble by the barrister and Liberal MP Frank Kingsley Griffith: ‘it is all very well for anybody to come before this House and say, “I have a Bill which entitles me to cut off your head, but I can assure you that I am only going to cut your toe nails.” ’ In the end, the government retreated and promised that all War Court sentences would be subject to appeal. They were, in the end, never used anyway.

The Home Office received enough popular pushback against both Regulation 39BA and the War Zone courts for it to moderate its plans on the grounds of civil liberty. There was much less public concern provoked by the mass incarceration without trial of British citizens, which began on the morning of 23 May with the arrest of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Under Defence Regulation 18B, the Home Secretary could detain indefinitely anyone of ‘hostile origin or associations’ or who had recently committed ‘acts prejudicial to the public safety’. Anyone so interned had a right of appeal to an advisory committee, but they were not allowed to know who had recommended their arrest, or why.

Regulation 18B had existed since the outbreak of war but was only now applied with any seriousness. By July 1940 over 700 BUF members and fellow-travellers of the far right had been swept up, most to Brixton Prison (only a single Communist Party member, a Yorkshire shop steward accused of sabotaging workplace production, joined them).

Not great!

[letterboxd]

Sculpting in Time.

As the world inches into the future, we invited Justine Smith, author of the ‘100 Films to Watch to Expand your Horizons’ list, to look to the cinematic past to help us process the present.

It is said that the essential quality of cinema that distinguishes it from other arts is time. Music can be played at different tempos, and standing in a museum, we choose how many seconds or hours we stand before a great painting. A novel can be savored or sped through. Cinema, on the other hand, exists on a fixed timeline. While it can theoretically be experienced at double or half speeds, it is never intended to be seen as such. Cinema’s fundamental quality is experiencing time on someone else’s terms. As the great Andrei Tarkovsky said in describing his work as a filmmaker, he was “sculpting in time”.

The perception of time, however, is not universal. Our moods, our emotions, and our ideologies shape our relationship to it. Most Western audiences are further acclimated to Western cinema’s ebbs and flows, which similarly favor efficiency and invisibility. When we see a Hollywood film, we don’t want the story to stop. We want to be swept away and forget that we are all moving towards a mortal endpoint. Cinema, though, in its infinite possibilities, exists far beyond these parameters. It can challenge and enrich our vision of the world. If we open ourselves up, we can transfigure and transform our relationship to time itself.

When I first put together my 100 Films to Watch to Expand your Horizons list, I did it quite haphazardly. I imagined countries, filmmakers and experiences that I felt went under-appreciated in discussions of cinema’s potential. Intuitively, I went searching for corners of experience that expanded my own cinematic horizon. Some of these films are well-loved and seen by wide audiences; others are virtually unknown. It was often only after the fact that the myriad of intimate connections between the films came to light.

Manuel de Oliveira’s ‘Visit, or Memories and Confessions’ (2015).

“The only eternal moment is the present.” —Manoel de Oliveira

Released in 2015 but made in 1982, Visit, or Memories and Confessions is a reflection on life, cinema and oppression by Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira. If we were to reflect on cinema’s history, few filmmakers have the breadth of experience and foresight as Oliveira. His first film was made in the silent era using a hand-cranked camera. By the time of his death at 106 years of age, he had made dozens of movies, including many in a digital format.

He made Visit, or Memories and Confessions in the shadow of the Portuguese dictatorship. While filming, he imagined he was in the twilight of his life. It revisited essential incidents in his history but also that of his country. It’s a film of reconciliation, violence and oppression, told tenderly in a home lost as a consequence of a vindictive dictatorship. Oliveira’s film, like his life, spanned time in a way that stretches perceptions. It’s a film without significant incident, about the peaceful pleasures and tragedies of daily life.

Elia Suleiman’s ‘The Time that Remains’ (2009).

What worlds have changed over the past one hundred years? The same breadth of perception, which often feels too seismic to tackle in traditional narrative cinema, was also explored in The Time that Remains. In a retelling of his family’s history, Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman also tells Israel’s story. It is a film of wry comparisons and Keatonesque comic patterns. As borders change and time passes, few things fundamentally change, except on a spiritual plane. What happens to people without an identity or a country? What damage does it do to their souls?

The question of time looms heavily in both Oliveira’s and Suleiman’s films. They are movies that contemplate centuries of experiences and explore how those stories are guarded, twisted and erased by the powerful.

Alanis Obomsawin’s ‘Incident at Restigouche’ (1984).

The echoes of history and attempts to break with old patterns often emerge in other anti-colonial and anti-imperialist films. They can be seen in Alanis Obomsawin’s vital and angry Incident at Restigouche, about an explosive, centuries-in-the-making 1981 conflict between Quebec provincial police and the First Nations people of the Restigouche reserve; In Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, villagers must win a cricket match to free themselves from involuntary servitude; and in Daughters of the Dust, the languid pace of the Gullah culture is challenged by the promise and violence of the American mainland.

Time, more than just a tool for chronology, becomes in itself a tool for oppression. Those who control time maintain power. If we are to break with dominant histories, the rhythms of oppression must be broken and challenged.

Forugh Farrokhzad’s ‘The House is Black’ (1963).

“The universe is pregnant with inertia and has given birth to time.” —Forugh Farrokhzad, The House is Black

Persian filmmaker and poet Forugh Farrokhzad made just one film before her untimely death in a car accident when she was 32. The House is Black is a short documentary about a Leper colony, which utilizes essay-esque prose taken from the Quaran, and Farrokhzad’s poetry. It is a film about people who are seen as invisible by society at large, cast away and hidden. The film reflects on beauty, sickness and reconciliation. How does one experience time when you’ve been ostracized and cut off from the larger world?

Barbara Loden’s landmark independent film Wanda asks a similar question. A solo mother who cycles from one abusive situation to the next exists outside of time and space. She is invisible. If we look at most American cinema, it might as well be propelled by people who take control over their destiny, but what of the people who are (un)willingly passive to the whims of society and other human beings? In her powerlessness, Wanda stands in for the invisible labor and sacrifices of so many other women. The ordinariness of Wanda’s life, the dusty and dirty environments she inhabits, rebound with significance. It is, however, not a victorious film. Instead, it is a profound portrait of loss and beauty. It’s the only film Barbara Loden ever made.

"If you don't want anything you won't have anything, and if you don't have anything, you're as good as dead." —Norman Dennis in Wanda

Barbara Loden’s ‘Wanda’ (1970).

In 2020, it seemed all we had was time. What seemed like an opportunity quickly became horrific. Time became a burden. We were reminded of our finite time on this Earth and all the hours spent commuting, working and surviving. The pandemic has had a seismic impact on our perceptions. In processing the ongoing crisis, we’ve transformed our relationship to the passage of time. We’ve altered the state of our reality.

This new pandemic gaze offers us new perspectives on time and history. The oldest film on the list is Erich Von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands, released in 1919 during the grips of the Spanish flu. The film does not reference the event, but its sensuality and class conflicts speak to a world on the brink of seismic change. It is a movie about an Austrian military officer who seduces a surgeon’s wife. The men grapple with jealousy and violence on a literal mountaintop, fighting for survival in an increasingly mechanized society.

Poster for Erich Von Stroheim’s ‘Blind Husbands’ (1919).

To this day, Blind Husbands is shocking. It’s profoundly fetishistic and loaded with heavy sexual imagery. It’s a movie about touch and desire absent of love and affection. It speaks to aspects of current life that feel lost and impenetrable. It speaks to growing and changing social disparities as well. Surviving the modern world is more than just surviving the plague; it has to do with value compromises and shifting power dynamics.

But, a pandemic is also about loss. Gregg Araki’s 1992 film The Living End explores the AIDS crisis from the inside out. Rebellious and angry, the film is about a gay hustler and a movie critic, both of whom have been diagnosed with the HIV virus. With characters who are cast out from society at large, gripped with a deadly and unknown fate, The Living End is apocalyptic—much like other Araki works from the 90s, such as The Doom Generation and Totally Fucked Up. It captures the deep sense of hopelessness of experiencing a pandemic while also belonging to a marginalized group. What is so radical about Araki’s cinema, though, is that it is also fun. It is a film that transcends mourning and becomes a lavish punk celebration. It is a film about survival, out of step with dominant ideology and histories.

Gregg Araki's ‘The Living End’ (1992).

The connections between Blind Husbands and The Living End bridge together to form common passions and changing perceptions. Both films are products of their time, at once part of distant histories but also uncomfortably prescient. More than films about a specific time and place, they are transformed by the time we live in now. To watch and connect with these movies in a pandemic means looking and living beyond the current moment.

While it seems like cinema might be facing an especially precarious future, it feels like the ideal art form to process what is happening right now. Caught in the vicious patterns of our own creation, giving ourselves up to the rhythms of someone else’s will might be a necessary form of healing, as well as an ongoing project in compassion. Time does not have to be a prison; it can be an agent for liberation.

Related content

100 Films to Watch to Expand Your Horizons

The Oxford History of World Cinema

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

The Great Unknown: High Rated Movies with Few Views

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[scripttorture]

what do you know about the use of torture in the military dictatorships in 20th century Latin America? i'm brazilian, so i learned a bit about them in history classes, and i've always known they (or at least the brazilian one) used a lot ov torture

I got in contact with the asker about this to get a better idea of what they were interested in and hopefully this will answer most of those questions.

 What I know is mostly what Rejali collected in his book about this period.

 Rejali’s particular focus was on what he calls ‘clean torture’, that is torture that doesn’t leave any obvious physical marks on the victims. He’d noticed that the practice of torture seemed to have undergone a rapid, global change: scarring tortures were becoming rarer and clean tortures more common.

 Going forward it’s important to be aware that clean tortures can leave temporary marks. But they’re generally things that could come from something other then torture.

 For instance the swelling that stress positions cause is also caused by some diseases. This makes it harder for a survivor to prove they were tortured, even if they have evidence of this swelling. Because they need to prove they weren’t ill.

 A big part of what Rejali was looking at was the use of electrical torture in particular and how it spread across the globe. He maps the Brazilian use of electrical torture from the 1970s onwards but his data doesn’t seem to show a clear pattern of different devices.

 What he does show in that during the 1970s most Brazilian tortures used magnetos. In the context of torture these are usually small portable, hand cranked electrical generators. They had legitimate uses in police and military groups globally; they were often used to operate field telephones and other electrical equipment.

 Here’s a description of their use from the Franco-Algerian war:

‘Suddenly, I leapt in my bonds and shouted with all my might. Cha- had just sent a first electric charge through my body. A flash of lightning exploded next to my ear and I felt my heart racing in my breast. I struggled, screaming and stiffened myself until the straps cut into my flesh. All the while the shocks controlled by Cha-, magneto in hand, followed each other without cease.[…..] Suddenly I felt as if a savage beast had torn the flesh from my body. Still smiling above me Ja- had attached the pincer to my penis. The shocks going through me were so strong that the straps holding me to the board came loose. They stopped to tie them again and we continued.

After a while the lieutenant took the place of Ja-. He had removed the wire from one of the pincers and fastened it down along the entire width of my chest. The whole of my body was shaking with nervous shocks getting ever stronger in intensity, and the session went on interminably. They had thrown cold water over me in order to increase the intensity of the current and between every two spasms I trembled with cold.’ (H Alleg in The Question)

 By the early 2000s Brazil had transitioned to mostly using stun guns.

 Both devices can be clean but my understanding is that stun guns are less likely to leave marks and are more easily ‘explained’ as ‘essential equipment’ in a more modern context.

 According to Rejali Brazilian police torture started to the transition from scarring to clean some time in the 40s.

 In the 1930s victims were most commonly beaten, whipped and choked. There were also records of; teeth and nails being pulled out, burning with torches, cigars and electrical devices, and the use of needles.

 In the 40s they started to use elements of the American National Style at the time, possibly as a result of greater contact with American and British agents in 1943 during a large investigation into a German spy ring.

 Sleep deprivation and the ‘standing cuffs’ stress position were used when they hadn’t been before. More beatings were clean. But they also kept some scarring techniques such as burning with cigarettes.

 The later records show similar mixes of clean and scarring techniques. What stands out as unusual to me is the rapid changes in regular used techniques decade by decade.

 This might be due to changes in government, purges of torturers or just differences across a very large country. The data I have doesn’t break down the techniques by region. It’s possible that the shifts in ‘common’ techniques are actually shifts in regional rather then national styles.

 In the 60s there were reports of the following clean tortures:

Electrical torture

Near drowning (it’s unclear if this is waterboarding or holding victim’s heads under water)

Exhaustion exercises

Clean beatings

Stress positions using furniture

Temperature torture using meat lockers

 And the following scarring tortures:

Suspension

‘Pepper’, in this case by pouring alcohol in the anus

Pulling flesh with pincers

 In the 70s-80s clean electrical torture was still prominent. Other clean tortures included clean beatings (some with historical objects used during slavery), sleep deprivation, pumping and standing stress positions. Suspension (scarring) was still used and more rarely insects, snakes and drugs were used.

 In early 2000 suspension was still in use but otherwise torture was entirely clean. Electrical torture, falaka (beating the soles of the feet), exhaustion exercises, clean beatings and sweat boxes.

 Brazil does have the most well recorded example of direct torture ‘training’. In the 1960s American operatives supplied Brazil with magnetos and actively encouraged their use in torture. Rejali examines a discussion of this in N Chomsky and E Herman’s The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. He rejects their conclusions that the US was behind the overall spread of electrical torture but accepts that in the case of Brazil particularly the US played a role in its spread and promotion. I think Rejali’s evidence is persuasive.

 Brazil in the 60s is also one of the few examples we have of torture actually being taught in a classroom style (see Langguth Hidden Terrors 1978). The demonstration included suspension, clean beating, falaka, magnetos, pumping and forced standing on sharp cans.

 Pumping is forcing a victim to swallow a huge quantity of liquid. It causes the internal organs to swell and it’s incredibly painful. It also causes diarrhoea and vomiting. It’s sometimes accompanied by beating the stomach which causes- well bluntly it causes liquid to spew out of every possible orifice. It’s incredibly messy but it also leaves no lasting marks.

 The type of suspension favoured in Brazil is something I refer to as ‘the parrots perch’. It was also used in France historically. Essentially the victim’s hands and feet are cuffed. The legs are bent in front of the body and the arms go over the knees. A stick is then put through the gap, so that it’s under the knees and over the elbows. The victim is then hoisted up and often beaten or subjected to electric shocks.

 This isn’t a recent torture but I’m unsure how old exactly it is. It was certainly used through European colonies in the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade; mostly against enslaved people.

 The kind of active training program described above seems to be very rare. In fact there isn’t any evidence that this was a regular occurrence in Brazil at the time. Rather the evidence suggests that most torture is ‘learnt’ on the job, ie by observation of other torturers.

 Brazil also provides another rare case: clearly documented evidence of the extent to which torture fractures organisations.

 This is documented elsewhere. Examination of Japanese police departments shows deskilling and there are a lot of well documented cases of torture leading to rogue groups that refuse to obey orders. But the Brazilian case is both unusually well attested and unusually extreme.

 In the 60s Brazilian intelligence units had stopped communicating and working together to the point where they were conducting active raids on each other’s prisons. Rejali quotes records of blackmail, extortion, active violence within the military, murder of fellow soldiers and finally imprisoning and torturing fellow officers.

 Here’s a quote Rejali repeats from the time ‘The torturers were going to have to be isolated, marginalised and eliminated, so as to save the Army.’

 For a more in-depth discussion of the incident Rejali references Huggins Political Policing (180, 186).

 This might give the impression that Brazil during the 60s is somehow unique in torture use. I don’t think this is the case. I think that what we have in Brazil is uniquely good quality record keeping.

 It makes it a valuable case study and comparison.

 What does seem ‘different’ about Brazil is the extent to which torture techniques have kept changing. There isn’t a sense of a settled modern ‘style’ that some countries have.

 That could be because of changes in leadership. It could be because it’s common for torturers to be periodically purged (often violently), however these purges occurred in the Soviet Union with no accompanying stylistic changes.

 It could also be because Brazil is huge. It’s possible that rather then a ‘National Style’ Brazil has several distinct ‘regional styles’, some of which are more prominent at different times or better recorded at different times.

 I hope that’s given you enough to work with, if you can I would recommend getting hold of Rejali’s Torture and Democracy. I feel like it puts Brazil in a more global context and comparison with neighbouring countries may be helpful for you. :)

Availableon Wordpress.

Disclaimer

[argyrocratie]

Did anarchist abstentionism ever, in the slightest degree, affect the course of events? There was one occasion when it was tested simply because it was one of the rare times and places when anarchism really influenced a mass movement. And the irony was that the effectiveness of abstentionism was demonstrated only when it was abandoned.

In Spain, in the 1930s, there were two huge trade union federations. On one side was the socialist UGT and on the other the syndicalist CNT, strongly influenced by the anarchist federation FAI. The membership of both these bodies was vast. (By the time they agreed on joint action each could claim, according to whose estimates you read, between a million and one and a half million members.) After the dictator Primo de Rivera resigned in 1930, his supporter the King abdicated in 1931, but the new socialist-republican government continued the repression of the revolutionary left. In the elections of 1933 the CNT used the slogan Frente a las urnas, la revolucion social (the alternative to the polling booth is the social revolution). The triumph of the right was attributed to the mass abstention of the workers, and the usual sporadic confrontations followed.

Then came another chance to vote in the February elections of 1936. Very quietly, the CNT leadership tacitly abandoned the position it had held since 1911, that elections were a fraud and that “workers and peasants should seize the factories and the land to produce for all. They and their members voted for the Popular Front (a kind of joint Alliance and Labour tactical voting). Our most revered chronicler of the events of 1936, Gerald Brenan in his Spanish Labyrinth, explained that the electoral victory of the Popular Front ‘can to a great extent be put down to the anarchist vote’. And certainly a deal behind the scenes ensured that many thousands of political prisoners would be released. Brenan says that ‘in many places the prisons had already been opened without the local authorities daring to oppose it’.

But the triumph of electoral common sense over the convictions of a lifetime had many consequences in Spain that no one had anticipated. The Spanish workers were ready to take on the political right, but the politicians of the left were not. The army was poised to seize power, but the government was not willing to resist. In his book Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, Vernon Richards raised a forbidden question: did the CNT leadership take into account that by ensuring the electoral victory of the left it was also ensuring that the generals of the right would stage a military putsch which the respectable left politicians would not restrain? ‘On the other hand a victory of the right, which was almost certain if the CNT abstained, would mean the end of the military conspiracy and the corning to power of a reactionary but ineffectual government which, like its predecessors, would hold out for not more than a year or two. There is no real evidence to show that there was any significant development of a fascist movement in Spain along the lines of the regimes in Italy and Germany.’

In fact, Spain had three different Popular Front governments on 18 and 19 July 1936, each of which was anxious to cave in to the insurgent generals. It was only the popular rising ( on traditional anarchist lines) and the seizure by workers and peasants, not just of arms and military installations, but of land, factories and railways, that ensured that there was any resistance at all to the generals. These are ordinary facts, totally contrary to what Orwell used to call the News Chronicle / New Statesman version of what happened in Spain. The Spanish revolution of 1936 was forced upon the working class by the election of the Popular Front and its capitulation to the insurgent generals. It was subsequently eliminated in the name of national unity in combating the right, which by then had won international backing. Having participated in the elections the next step was participation in government by the CNT/FAI leadership. This led to the permanent destruction of their own movement and the suppression of the popular revolution, and was followed by 40 years of fascist dictatorship.

And all this because of the decision to abandon the tradition of non-voting. If history has any lessons for the conscientious abstentionists it is that every time they get lured out of their self-imposed political isolation into participation in the electoral lottery, they make fools of themselves.

We might object that there is no parallel between Spain in 1936 and Britain in 1987. But isn’t it interesting that the same politics-fixated people who peddle horror tales about the power over government of various non-elected bodies, whether it is the secret services, the military chiefs of staff or the Association of Chief Police Officers urge us to abandon any notion of principles or policies, and vote strategically?

Form an effective Popular Front, they imply, and cast a tactical vote for whoever the market researchers tell us is likeliest to unseat the Conservative candidate. At the same time they revel in the allegations that recent governments have been under suspicion from the State’s own secret services because Harold Wilson was thought to be a Moscow agent, and that the service chiefs were planning a takeover of power should anyone to the left of Wilson take office.

- Colin Ward, The Case Against Voting (1987)                    

[fromgreecetoanarchy]

[Video] Chile: Protester evades 5 riot police bikers chasing him down (Never give up!) [Video recorded in Temuco, Chile, 7 November 2019] Not Falling for It: How the Uprising in #Chile Has Outlasted State Repression And the Questions for Movements to Come  As of today—Friday, November 8, 2019—the government of Chile has spent three full weeks switching back and forth between strategies of brutality, division, and deceit without yet succeeding in stemming the tide of resistance. The events of these weeks offer a useful primer in strategies of state repression and how to outmaneuver, outsmart, and outlast them. On October 6, the Chilean government headed by rapacious billionaire Sebastián Piñera announced a new austerity package that would further impoverish struggling Chileans. Unfortunately for the authorities, it was an inopportune moment to squeeze an already restless population. The next day, in Ecuador, thousands of indigenous people arrived in the capital city to protest an austerity package, occupying the Parliament building and clashing with police forces. On October 14, the Ecuadorian government backed down, repealing the austerity bill.That same day, students swung into action in Chile, organizing a series of mass fare-dodging protests against the hike in public transit costs. These culminated on October 18 in clashes, vandalism, and arsons that damaged 16 buses and 78 metro stations, as well as various banks and several other major buildings, including the headquarters of the Italian energy company Enel. In retaliation, Piñera announced a state of emergency and curfew, hoping to bludgeon the population back into submission. Conspiracy theories have circulated about the arsons. This always happens when ordinary people manage to get the better of the authorities, shocking those who take it for granted that the state is the only protagonist of history. Conspiracy theories about how the government arranged for the destruction of its own public transit infrastructure are disempowering and irrational; they also obscure what was strategic about the arsons. Whether by smashing the turnstiles or burning entire stations, it was precisely by making business as usual impossible that demonstrators made the desperate circumstances of their daily lives a problem for their rulers. Without the vandalism and looting, the movement would never have become the force that it is. The next day, October 19, Piñera suspended the metro price increase. The speed with which he did this shows that he knew he had pushed people too far. If he could have waited to suspend the fare increase, he might have been able to announce it later, in order to give demonstrators a feeling of accomplishment and get them out of the streets; instead, having already pushed his luck, he had to suspend it immediately in hopes of discharging popular resentment before the crisis deepened. It didn’t work. For a government, the goal of making concessions is only to trick enough people into leaving the streets that it will be possible to isolate and defeat those who remain. On October 20, Piñera expanded the state of emergency to most of the country, announcing from the headquarters of the army that his government was “at war against a powerful and implacable enemy.” This gesture, and above all the place from which he spoke, was a not-so-coded declaration that he intended to return Chile to the murderous state violence of the Pinochet dictatorship. Yet once again, the people in the streets did not back down. They continued to demonstrate, even as the military injured and killed people, and they refused to permit the authorities to sow divisions, sticking together with the same cohesion that has given the movement in Hong Kong its long life. This is why, on October 23, Piñera was forced to announce the suspension of the whole austerity package and the introduction of some minor reforms—what Chileans have been calling “table scraps.” Again, Chileans knew better than to settle for this. That same day, Chile’s trade unions declared a general strike. On October 25, the largest demonstration in Chilean history took place, bringing 1.2 million people into the streets of Santiago to show that they supported this movement that had originated in massive public criminal activity and continued in defiance of the express orders of the government. This was a massive defeat for Piñera—it showed that he could neither resolve the situation by brute force nor by petty bribery. This is why, on October 26, he promised to lift the State of Emergency and to swap out some of the ministers in his government—though not to relinquish power himself. He also changed his rhetoric, congratulating Chileans on a “peaceful” demonstration and suggesting a distinction between law-abiding families and criminal hooligans. Let’s review: when Piñera couldn’t suppress the movement by police violence, he played for time by suspending the fare increase—while declaring martial law and mobilizing the army. When didn’t work, he shifted to a new strategy of divide and conquer, flattering the majority of Chileans by suggesting that their concerns were legitimate while demonizing the brave demonstrators who launched the movement. Now that things seem to have plateaued—not to say calmed down—Piñera is trying, yet again, to return to his original strategy of brute force. On November 7, he introduced an array of bills to increase the penalties for militant protest tactics including self-defense against police and concealing one’s identity against state surveillance. Congratulate the movement on its victories, but crack down on the means by which it won them. Over 7000 people have been arrested and many thousands injured; despite their obvious loyalty to the uniformed mercenaries of the state, prosecutors admit to over 800 allegations of police abuse, torture, rape, and battery. Piñera has expressed his “total support” for the conduct of the police and military throughout this sequence of events, but he is saying that all this brutality is not enough—in addition to arresting, beating, shooting, and killing people, he wants the police and military to be able to imprison additional massive numbers of people for long periods of time. Make no mistake, the movement in Chile would not have gotten off the ground if not for the students organizing mass illegal activity. It would not have spread countrywide if not for the vandalism, arson, and acts of self-defense against police attacks. It would not have created a crisis that demanded a response if not for looting and disruption. To make a distinction between the “law-abiding” participants and the “criminals” in the movement is to say that it would be better if the movement had never taken place—it is an attempt to ensure that no such movement will ever take place again.We have seen this many times before. The movement against police and white supremacy that burst into the public consciousness with the riots in Ferguson only got off the ground because the original participants openly attacked police officers, burned down buildings, and refused to divide into “violent” and “nonviolent” factions. Democracy itself, the system via which Chile, the United States, and so many other nations are governed, began in blazing crime; if not for criminal revolutionaries, we would still be living under the heel of hereditary monarchs. Once again, the movement in Chile faces a crucial juncture. If the majority of the participants accept Piñera’s flattery and congratulate themselves on being “peaceful” and “honest” in contrast to those who are “criminals,” this will enable him to push through draconian measures to ensure that it will never be possible for Chileans to defend themselves against austerity measures again. On the contrary, what is needed is for the tactics of the “criminals” to spread to every honest citizen, to every person who sincerely wants peace. Neither Piñera nor anyone else who aims to rule by force will ever create peace; it can only arise when their totalitarian aspirations are thwarted. To understand what Piñera wants, we need only look at what has happened in Egypt. Since regaining control of the country with the military coup in 2013 and introducing new measures like the ones Piñera is proposing, military strongman al-Sisi has [crushed protests] of all kinds. He now aspires to rule until at least the year 2034. Those who make only half a revolution dig their own graves, as the saying goes. So the stakes are high. Demonstrators in Chile must permanently delegitimize the instruments of state power such as the police, the courts, and the army, making it impossible for them to maintain order by any combination of brutality, concessions, and prosecution. This is the only way out of the nightmare of neoliberal austerity. This is how movements win against oppressive governments: by a winning combination of confrontational direction action, solidarity across different demographics and tactics, persistence, and strategic innovation. The movement in Chile has demonstrated this already. (Text published by CrimethInc) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VRQ2A_vCag

[oh-you]

no. 3

This is a list of common traits fascist countries have. And, if you’re in the U.S.A. There is reasonable room for concern. Yes, yes we’ve all heard about fascism. Usually we’re told that our country is one where we don’t have to worry about totalitarianism or dictatorships. Knowing the difference between these terms is important, but they’re all synonymous. Something we should sort of all be looking at right now is the legacy our predecessors left for us. Let’s go through this list and knock off which of them the U.S. has covered. Nationalism. That’s a given. It’s almost stifling. Disdain for human rights, of course. That’s what these protests are about. Uses enemies as a unifying cause, we’ve got that. Have you seen the president’s twitter? Rampant sexism, unfortunately. Controlled mass media; overlaying several different media outlets will show you a clear synchronization with what they’re saying and the kind of language they use. Like, dude it’s insane. Obsession with National Security, Religion and government, corporate protection, we have all of it. Every single category checks out. Except for one. We don’t have a clear military supremacy. Not yet. But based off of how things are going right now? That might not be something we can keep saying for a while. Here’s a list of videos showing how the police are treating peaceful protesters: https://vm.tiktok.com/E58KMt/ https://vm.tiktok.com/E5auV6/ https://vm.tiktok.com/E5dqkA/ https://vm.tiktok.com/E5eHQS/ https://vm.tiktok.com/E52GPx/ https://vm.tiktok.com/E519Mo/ https://vm.tiktok.com/E5xeRW/ https://vm.tiktok.com/E5uvkJ/ https://vm.tiktok.com/E57FQ2/ https://vm.tiktok.com/E5qtNW/ https://vm.tiktok.com/E5y7jg/ https://vm.tiktok.com/E5n3Cc/ https://vm.tiktok.com/E5V4ox/ I dunno. Just something to keep in mind. 

[innuendostudios]

[edit: the video was false-flagged as “hatespeech” on YouTube, so I have swapped the embed with a mirror on Vimeo. I will swap them back when I get the YouTube version reinstated/replaced in a re-edited form.]

It would not be possible to continue The Alt-Right Playbook without sitting down and defining fascism, so here we are. I know I said the next one would be shorter, and I was proven a damned liar. Maybe the next one! As ever, keep this series, and all my other videos, coming out steadily by backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

"Fascism" is a term I've heard thrown around since I was a kid, but, most of the time, idiomatically. "Fascist" is what you called your Type A, passive-aggressive roommate: "Stop being such a fascist, Debra." Through osmosis, I knew its literal meaning was among a cluster of related words: Authoritarianism, totalitarianism, white supremacy, nationalism, dictatorship. But, for much of my life, if you pressed me to define any of these words, I could have only said, "You know, Nazis. Hitler, the Gestapo... you know, Nazis!"

This colloquializing of fascism, and its association with the cultural shorthand for pure evil, makes it very hard to discuss as an ideology, because even using the word, "fascism," sounds both hyperbolic and like a punch below the belt. To call a person, group, or idea "fascist" is to exaggerate for the purpose of dragging them.

Counterintuitively, this prevents us from criticizing fascist groups, even though most everyone agrees fascism is terrible, because, saying it, you sound ridiculous. You’re talking about Indiana Jones villains. So I'm going to be using the word, "fascism," kind of a lot in this video, hoping that we can semantically satiate it just enough that its connotative meanings - irreverent sarcasm and the envisioning of stormtroopers - are dulled to the point that we can talk about fascism as a system of beliefs, and as a mode of political organizing, and about who practices it today.

Our work necessitates a conversation about fascism; specifically, white fascism.

(Fascism, fascism, fascism.)

I. Fascism

Central to fascism is the belief that some people are more deserving of power than others, and that society’s appropriate structure is a hierarchy where increasingly smaller groups of betters rule over the lessers. This is not unique to fascism; this is the organizing principle of many social systems.

The difference between systems is whom each hierarchy says should be at the top. In a feudal monarchy, the top is the king and his family, and they get there by royal bloodline. In a capitalist free market (*cough*), people earn their place at the top by success in business. In fascism, the ones at the top should be “us,” whomever “us” happens to be, and they should get there by any means available.

The most succinct definition of fascism comes from Roger Griffin: “palingenetic ultranationalism,” a wonderful term because it fits a great many ideas into only two roots and a bunch of affixes, and a terrible one because both words need definitions of their own. (That’s not how efficiency works, Rog!)

So, OK: Palingenesis is the idea of rebirth, with some frankly Biblical overtones. The word “palingenesis” is used to refer to reincarnation, or the remaking of the world after Judgment Day. In terms of fascism, it is the notion that “we,” as a unified people, are ancient, that our former glory has waned, and that we are due to rise again. The implications that this rebirth will come by purging the world in fire with boiling seas and a blood-red sky are not entirely accidental. It is the granting of “us” with mythological importance.

Nationalism is, in the broadest sense, thinking of oneself through the lens of national identity. A single person holds a lot of identities: White, male, gamer, New Englander, cyclist, sports racer, and so on. Nationalism is the lens through which thinking of oneself as, for instance, American, is distinct from being Canadian, Liberian, Chilean, and that putting stock in this distinction is desirable. This can play out a lot of ways: Nationalism can be a colonized people forming an identity distinct from the ruling class and arguing that this people should have its own state, as in the American or Haitian Revolutions; Black nationalism has argued, at times, that Black Americans, while coexisting with other Americans, should maintain a distinct identity rather than be assimilated into white culture; and where Black nationalism has also sometimes argued for the repatriation of Black Americans to African nations, white nationalism typically argues that whites should have a nation of their own, not by returning to Europe, but by removing non-whites from the US (something Native Americans have opinions about). This would be an example of ultranationalism: The emphasizing of national identity as among the most, if not the most, important.

(These are not rare traits, and I want to stress that it is not the presence but the confluence of them that gives fascism its character.)

So, palingenetic ultranationalism: The belief that the nation is of the utmost importance, that the people running the nation should be a narrowly defined “us,” and that “we” should rule because it’s, more or less, our destiny.

The religiosity of this framing is intentional. Most hierarchical systems will make some case for why society should be structured a certain way: The king has been groomed for his role since birth, Steve Jobs did real good at the business factory. Fascism suspends the need for explanation: We belong at the top because we just do. Destiny. When pressed, fascists will offer pseudo-rational justifications for why they should be in charge which fall apart under the barest scrutiny, but debunking these claims is largely ineffective because, while they follow the cadences of reasoned argument, they’re operating on the level of emotion, faith, and a sense of belonging.

There’s a reason fascist regimes rely heavily on propaganda: Propaganda traffics not in arguments but in symbols. For the Nazis, it was the German soldier; for the Soviets, it was the worker. Propaganda relies on inspiring imagery that evokes cherished aspects of the culture, like the family or the countryside - “the babe in his cradle is closing his eyes, the blossom embraces the bee” - and ties those images to fascist ideals - “but soon, says a whisper, arise, arise, tomorrow belongs to me.” All of this is meant to make one swell with pride in such a way that it’s very hard to think about what is actually being said. Racist caricatures of Black and Jewish people - or whomever is “not us” in a given system - serve the same purpose by evoking hatred, or fear of what might happen to “us” if “they” were in control.

Jason Stanley calls this “affective override,” the moment where emotion shuts down critical thinking. If you’ve ever had a conversation with a conservative about, like, healthcare or something, and after a few exchanges they’re chest-beating about how “this is the nation of freedom and choice, the greatest nation that ever was, and I’m not going to let you take from me my god-given…” you’ve seen this in action. Fascism depends on this passionate fervor because it can’t convincingly pretend to be rational. The reason why one particular “us” should be at the top of the hierarchy, or why there should even be a hierarchy in the first place, is arbitrary. It’s that way because a particular “us” wants it that way.

II. Authority

We usually associate fascism with the image of state violence, be it the punishing of The Other, the policing of citizens, or the conquering of other nations, and, while this is almost always the case, fascism is not, as a rule, militant. In practice, fascists are not authoritarians or pacifists. For that matter, they're not capitalists or anti-capitalists. They're not statists or anarchists. They're not monarchists, oligarchists, or plutocrats. They are Whatever Puts Us In Power-ists.

For instance: Capitalism is a hierarchical system, and so fascists will often try to influence policy such that the capitalist hierarchy starts to resemble the desired fascist one, but only until the point that it stops suiting their needs. The “us” of fascism is always defined by essential qualities like race or heritage, qualities that don’t change. A poor person can become less poor, but a Black person can’t become less Black, so, no matter how biased and stratified capitalism becomes, so long as it is still technically possible for someone from the lower classes to rise above their station, there will come a time when fascists must leave capitalism behind in favor of a system fully without social mobility.

Similarly, if fascists have the ability to take governmental control through nonviolent means, they will often do so - remember, Mussolini took power in a coup but Hitler was elected. If democracy and nonviolence can be put to fascist ends, they will be. But instituting a system that benefits the few while the many suffer and where, by design, no one suffering is allowed to improve their situation, might as well be writing ad copy for guillotines, and that’s how you get the SS. So, yes, fascist power trends towards authoritarianism because, on a long enough timeline, it will be the only way fascism can maintain itself.

But, also, fascists and authoritarians think power, brutality, and subjugation are sexy in more or less identical ways, so, while not all authoritarians are fascists, most fascists are authoritarians. And state violence is often a way of getting people invested in a hierarchy that doesn’t directly benefit them: “You may not be at the top, but if you’re somewhere around the middle, we can employ you as military or police to keep the lower classes in line.” Many people will relinquish their rights to fascists in exchange for being “the arm of the law,” and, the more powerful the state becomes, the more vicarious power they get to wield. So long as they’re not at the bottom, they have some investment in the system continuing as is, because it authorizes them to fuck people up.

The other way fascism justifies itself to the masses is to insist that the only alternative is death. “We are a great and noble people with an illustrious history, and if we achieve our fated rebirth we will form the most glorious nation in all of history and take our rightful place as world leader, and if we fail we will be eradicated.” There is no in between. “They are coming for us, they are everywhere, we can beat them, but this is the only way.” Race war is the usual go-to, claiming Black people are savages and razing our cities to the ground is their nature, or that they want revenge for slavery (which, I mean…). Sometimes they go with a Jewish conspiracy as revenge for the Holocaust. Or both at the same time. Right now Islamophobia’s in fashion. Each depends on downplaying slavery or the Holocaust or the Crusades as the horrific acts that they were, insisting that the crimes are greatly exaggerated by history, because these are all pretty damning counterarguments to “us” being the greatest people who have ever lived.

III. Whiteness

Race is like gender and money: It’s real, but only because we make it real. But fascism necessitates the belief that whatever makes “us” us is not only extremely real, in the biological and/or spiritual sense, but that people can be ranked by it. And, when stacking the hierarchy, white fascists put themselves at the top. So: What is whiteness?

The short answer is that whiteness is whatever it needs to be. Whiteness was created to differentiate one people from the people they were oppressing. Whiteness is a means to an end. The people most fixated with the definition of whiteness are racists, but there is no anti-racist definition. Racists invented whiteness, and all white people are folded into it.

And the way white people conceive of whiteness is fundamentally different from how they conceive of other races. A common example of this phenomenon is Barack Obama: Obama had one Black parent and one white parent. But, while he can call himself the first Black President, he could never call himself a white President. (Or, well, he could call himself whatever he wanted, but white people wouldn’t agree, and no one would treat him like a white President.) White people are only white if they’re purebreeds, or if non-whiteness is far enough back in their family tree that one can pretend it isn’t there. These rules of purity don’t apply to other races: When Black and white people have children, those children are allowed to be Black, or any number of (often racist) terms for mixed-race children. But, whatever they are, they can’t be white.

This frames interracial families as an increase of one race and a decrease in whites. So, by this logic, where other races spread, whiteness has to be maintained.

White people don’t consider whiteness a race; it is the absence of race. The undiluted form of which all other races are deviations. And, if it goes, it can’t be brought back.

This is, of course, nonsense. It’s a bunch of made-up rules to justify white supremacy. There’s only so long fascists can insist, “If we don’t strike first, they’re going to kill us all,” before people start to notice that the race war they’ve been promising for a century doesn’t seem to be happening. So, then, the terms have to be updated: Now the existential threat is a generational project. Now Black people even existing near white people is the race war. They’re literally going to fuck us out of existence.

And, because whiteness is made up, it can be endlessly redefined. A tension inherent to fascism is that rather a lot of people are required to bring it into existence, but, by design, only a small number of people will run it once it exists. So, commonly, the definition of “us” is broadened while building coalitions, and gets progressively narrower the more fascist society becomes.

White fascists in the US and Europe go back and forth on whether or not Jewish people get to be white. For a while it was kiiiind of a soft yes, and now it’s tipping the other way as they gain influence. Ethnic groups formerly considered non-white, like Italians and the Irish, became white when white culture feared marginalized immigrants might ally with slaves in revolt.

Bigotry is intersectional; there aren’t a lot of single-issue bigots, people who hate Mexicans but fight for everyone else’s rights. People generally don't apply this hierarchical thinking to just one aspect of their lives. So - commonly - racism is comorbid with anti-Semitism is comorbid with misogyny is comorbid with transphobia is comorbid with homophobia is comorbid with religious intolerance. I mean, just listen to a Klansman talk about Catholics sometime, or, better yet, don’t. Any marginalized group may be inducted into the tribe to consolidate against a common enemy, but, should that enemy be defeated, the inductees become the new enemy.

We can see the history of social progress in the US as successively disenfranchised groups demanding and, sometimes, gaining their rights one by one, with reactionaries trying to beat back the tide. Transphobia is recently rampant in fascist circles and conservative politics because, with the legalization of same-sex marriage, the battle against homosexuality is thought to be lost - or, at least, at a ceasefire. This gives some cause to welcome gay transphobes into the ranks. But, should they seize enough power to strip what few protections trans people have gained recently, and the alliance is no longer useful, their gaze refocuses, and it’s last hired, first fired for the homosexuals. And then the African-Americans, and then the women, and on and on, stripping rights from social groups in the order opposite to which they were gained, like the plot of Final Destination 2.

IV. Goals

You might be thinking the endgame here is a nice, homogenous group of white men to sit at the top of the pyramid, and the white fascists would be thinking the same. But, in reality, there is no endgame. It’s not like, if the fascists get their ethnostate, they’re just gonna call it a day. It’s the flaw in obsessing over racial purity: Whiteness is defined by what it’s not. If it isn’t contrasted with something else, it ceases to be an identity. So, if the whites kick all the non-whites out of their country, suddenly the Irish and Italians aren’t white anymore. And then maybe the albinos, or the brunettes, or the Virginians, it doesn’t matter, the rules are made up. One way or another, the pyramid grows thinner.

The authoritarian mindset is one that just likes stripping rights from people. Leave authoritarians no one to strip rights from and they start stripping them from each other. (And yes, that’s what the research says.) The other outlet for this restless energy is war, invasion, colonization: Deport all the Mexicans and then follow them into Mexico. Go seeking an Other to define yourself against.

You’ve maybe noticed that these three drives - the seeking out of conflict, the need to subjugate more and more people, and the shrinking of one’s base of power - is not a recipe for success. Most hierarchical systems seek equilibrium, finding the point where the masses are just happy enough that they don’t disembowel you. But the trajectory of fascism is to make enemies, cast out allies, narrow the gene pool, and stuff your ill-gotten wealth into the military until you’re fully stocked with the kinds of weapons that ensure mutual destruction.

I’m not the first to say: white fascism is a suicide cult.

The history of fascism is one of atrocity followed by failure followed by disgrace, so modern fascists operate in a cycle of constant reinvention as they try to distance themselves from movements that came before. The ideology doesn’t change, but the rhetoric does, primarily by stealing rhetoric from the Left, because it’s, flatly, more popular. White nationalists calling themselves “identitarians” is an appropriation of progressive identity politics. The rhetoric of “white power” is an intentional bastardization of Black power movements. Even the Nazis, while installing a dictatorship, knew to call themselves socialists, and, despite German antifascism being formed predominantly by socialists and the first death camp being originally built to throw communists in, some people still believe this?

This appropriation of rhetoric is how each generation of fascists rebrands itself. “We’re not like those fascists who got hanged for what they did; we’re young, hip, and successful! Come back, baby, it’ll be different this time.”

V. The Administration

So, with all this explanation of what fascists believe and how they operate, I hope it’s clear that there is no workable definition of fascism that does not include the Alt-Right. They are, to the letter, a white fascist movement. That’s neither a diss nor an exaggeration, it’s a simple statement of fact.

So, then, to ask the trickier question: “Is the current administration fascist?” And, well, that depends on where you draw the line between “fascist” and “opportunist.”

Consider the evidence: The administration has staffed multiple fascist figureheads. It’s repeated a number of fascist slogans. It employs a nationalist thinking in which the nation should always get more out of any deal than the other participants. It holds the hierarchical belief that the President need not follow the same laws as the citizens. It relies on fear and demonization of a racial Other and portrays their mere presence in society as an invasion. It permits and makes justifications for violence against dissenters. It threatens to strip rights from opponents and members of the press. It relies on nostalgia for a mythologized past to sell a narrative of cultural rebirth. And its followers are intersectionally bigoted against women, the poor, Muslims, Black people, trans people, and queer people.

The only hesitance I feel around saying “this is fascism” centers around intent. How much of what they do and say do they believe in, and how much is just riding a wave of fascist sympathy to fuel a narcissistic lust for power and ram through policies that make them rich? But, ultimately, while there is some tactical value in this distinction - you have to deal with an opportunist differently from a true believer - in most contexts, the difference doesn’t matter.

Many will just tell you, “The correct term for ‘Nazi sympathizer’ is ‘Nazi,’” but if you won’t take that leap, consider this: Even if they have no particular plan or aptitude for creating a fascist government, any body in power that uses fascist rhetoric, lays the groundwork for future fascism, and empowers fascist movements needs to be at least viewed through the lens of fascism. Whether or not they’re fascists in their hearts is a question for historians. Whatever they are, they are, some percentage of the time, doing fascism. And, for our purposes, that's all we need to know.

[theculturedmarxist]

January 16, 1986 12:00PM ET

Double agents selling secrets to foreign governments; defectors running amok in the streets of Washington; allies betraying allies — these days spies are out of the shadows and on the spot. Yet espionage isn’t what it once was, and at least one Cold War vet fondly remembers overthrowing unfriendly governments, planning assassinations and performing dirty tricks. Most of all, retired CIA officer Miles Copeland (whose brood of rock & roll overachievers includes oldest son Miles Copeland III, manager of the Police and solo Sting; Ian, founder of the music booking agency FBI; and youngest son Stewart, drummer first for Curved Air and later for the Police) yearns for the good old days when secret agents kept their secrets secret — from the government and especially from the press.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Copeland joined the U.S. Army in 1940. Assigned to the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC), he transferred in 1942 to the new Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the first U.S. secret intelligence agency. After the war, Copeland was station chief in Damascus, “putting Syria,” as he recalls, “on the path to democracy by starting a military dictatorship.” For this achievement, he was awarded a presidential citation. Copeland became a member of the Central Intelligence Agency when it was founded in 1947; he was appointed chief of the agency’s Political Action Staff, the dirty-tricks department, in 1950. “Nobody,” he says, “knows more about changing governments, by force or otherwise, than me.”

Copeland left government service in 1957 to form his own “private CIA,” which he claims became the largest private security service operating in Africa and the Middle East. Today the seventy-two-year-old Copeland and his wife, Lorraine, a well-known British archaeologist, live in a stone cottage in the tranquil hamlet of Aston Rowant, near Oxford, in England.

The White House has given the CIA part of the Job of handling terrorism. What do you think they will do that is different from what has already been done? You know, you’re opening a real can of worms here. The difference between the CIA’s counterterrorist experts and this new kind that’s been proliferating all over the place is that the CIA has operators who know the terrorists, who’ve actually talked to a few, who’ve even lived with them, or who, like myself, have actually been terrorists. We understand the enemy, while these instant experts who’ve been advising the White House have never in their lives laid eyes on a terrorist, and they think of them as common criminals. Maybe they are, and maybe they aren’t, but where these recent “experts” are wrong is that they assume they are criminals simply because they are judging them as though they are Americans, brought up on American ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong. They are making moral judgments that aren’t relevant to the situation. What may be effective in combating crime is not likely to be effective in dealing with wrong doers who in their own eyes, whether rightly or wrongly, think they are engaged in some noble cause. The Pentagon wants to kill them; the CIA wants to win them over.

Who’s winning? It’s not a matter of winning. Just different viewpoints. The president of the United States has got to say what is necessary to keep himself in office. We have a domestic foreign policy and a foreign foreign policy. The domestic foreign policy, which is the more important one, is what he has to do to make the American public think he’s doing the right thing. Whether it’s the right thing or not doesn’t matter. The American people have to think he’s doing the right thing because we have a democratic society. Now, the American people were highly indignant about what happened in Beirut [the hijacking of TWA flight 847 in June 1985]. They wanted to do something. They wanted to punish the people without regard to the consequences. The president had to say things to them, make threats, to show the American people that, by God, we were doing something. But the professionals inside the government were worried about the consequences of this. Because what it takes to please the American people is not what it takes to please a lot of people who did not grow up in the American culture but grew up in cultures quite different from our own. We’ve got most of the world against us at the moment. When we drag out our gunboats, bomb villages and kill a lot of women and children — a lot more than the terrorists kill — we turn the world against us. And the American people don’t care. They don’t give a damn. But those people whose job it is to look after the interests of the U.S. government abroad, they’ve got to care. They have to think of the consequences of everything we do. And they know the consequences of dragging out the gunboats are absolutely the wrong ones. In fact, these are the consequences the terrorists created acts of terrorism in order to provoke. That’s the purpose of terrorism, not to kill, maim or destroy, but to terrorize, to frighten, to anger, to provoke irrational responses. Terrorism gains more from the responses than it gains from the actions themselves.

So how do you deal with it? You’ve got to know who they are. You’ve got to know their reasons for doing it. And you’ve got to manipulate them in one way or another. We have to somehow come to grips with the problem. The Israelis went in to Lebanon and killed tens of thousands of people. They say, “That’s exaggerating, we didn’t kill but 5,000 people.” Okay, let’s say they killed only 2,000 people, which is a very modest estimate. But they destroyed Lebanon. They then set up groups against each other, made chaos ten times worse than it already was. Instead of helping the Shiites — the Shiites welcomed the Israelis in — we, the United States, gave a billion dollars to the Israelis. One billion we gave because it costs a lot of money to destroy someone else’s country. We gave peanuts — Red Cross supplies — to the Shiites. What we should have done is gone in there and said to the Shiites: “Look, a lot of injustice has been done. We’re going to put your orange groves back and put you back commercially. . . . “

Is that your answer for potential terrorists? Give them lots of aid to keep them sweet? No. Let’s get back to the reason these guys are terrorists. They’re terrorists because their orange groves have been destroyed and they’ve got nothing to do. They can’t even get to their farms because the Israelis have declared them out of bounds and destroyed a lot of them. Now, the CIA’s job is to explain all of this to our government. That’s the main job of the CIA — to go to the White House and explain to the president that the only reason these terrorists are terrorists is because of the way they’ve been treated, and they’ve got nothing else to do. In fact, I’ll tell you quite frankly, if people came into Alabama, my home state, and destroyed my farms and kicked me around and kicked my children around, I’m going to become a terrorist, just as the French became terrorists under the Germans in World War II. It’s understandable. The CIA understood this and understood it very well and explained it to the president. But we had pressures from Congress. The members of Congress don’t give a damn about foreign affairs. They give a damn about their next election. They have to do what makes them popular enough with their constituents to get reelected. And their constituency cares about one place in this world, and that’s the United States.

You have told me what we should have done. What should we do to combat terrorism now that the damage has been done? Well, most terrorists in the world are coming down to two categories. The first kind are people such as the Palestinians, who’ve had — listen, I’ve known this one family for the past forty years. The guy has polio, he’s crippled. He has some teenage kids who are nice kids, nice family. The Israelis showed up at six o’clock in the evening and said: “Everybody out! Everybody out!” They all got out, and the Israelis razed his house. He says: “I haven’t done a damn thing! I’m just looking after my orange groves!” They said, “You had a terrorist in your house six months ago.” First place, he said he hadn’t, and I believe he was telling the truth. But the Israelis had no good reason to believe he wasn’t — no name, no information at all. Now this is information that our embassy reported. This is official, not something I heard from the PLO information office. Now those two teenage kids stood there and watched their family being destroyed and their mother kicked downstairs when she refused to leave the house. Can you imagine their not becoming terrorists? They don’t have an air force or artillery. I had a Shiite ask me: “You say we shouldn’t use terrorism. What should we use?” Well, you shouldn’t use anything, we might say. You should make peace with Israel. Make peace with Israel? They’ve just destroyed my land! I have nothing! My house is flattened! The whole village is destroyed! This isn’t just the Shiites talking. Our own embassy says this. You know something that very few people know, and I suspect you ought to leave all this out, but the fact is, in the American foreign service, there are a lot of patriots. You’ve never seen such patriots in your life. They all fight for American policy, right or wrong. Central America, Vietnam, wherever, except in the Middle East. The whole career service in the Middle East spends all its time fighting its own government. Anyone who doubts that can use the Freedom of Information Act to get the cables, all of them pleading with our own government to stop this support of Israel to that point. I don’t mean stop supporting Israel, but stop the behavior of Israel, which is making them hated. And we are backing them against these people they’ve kicked around. And how did the Israelis get in power? Terrorism. You’d think they’d know something about terrorism since the heads of their government have been terrorists themselves. In fact, Israel wouldn’t be there if it hadn’t been for their effective terrorists. But they know nothing about terrorism. A friend of mine in Mossad [the Israeli intelligence agency] said: “Terrorism is not going to destroy Israel, but our counterterrorism might, because it costs us a million dollars a day. It might drive us into bankruptcy.”

So what’s the answer to terrorism? Like I was saying, we have to find the reason these people are terrorists. The job of the CIA is to report why they are terrorists. Now I said there are two categories. The first, people who have been deprived and been ruined. The second category is this: A lot of these guys have found a way of life. They’re like gunslingers in the Old West. They drive Mercedes. There are professional terrorists now. It’s a profitable business. Maybe they were criminals originally, criminally inclined, but now they have political motivations to justify themselves. You’re not going to find them. Many of them are in Paris, and the French police don’t give a damn. The fact is that we are fighting a “proxy war” right now in which Soviet proxies face our proxies. Today’s war, between us and the Soviets, is a mosaic of regional wars. The Soviet policy is one of denial, not to gain territory for themselves but to deny it to us, to deprive us of the raw materials from Africa — cobalt, magnesium, chromium — that we have to have for a highly technological society like ours.

Are you saying the Soviets are behind terrorism? No, they exploit the troubles. Most of the terrorism in the world today the Soviets do not instigate. They may train key people to go in and stir things up, but that’s as far as they go. The Soviets are delighted when we draw up a gunboat in the Beirut harbor. They love this. It makes people hate us. The thing we should have done about the TWA hijacking in Beirut was get the damn thing over with right away as the CIA advised.

And how would we have done that? Let the Shiites loose. Forget it. We’ve lost this one.

Wouldn’t giving in like that encourage more terrorism? No. What encourages them is to get all that prime time on television. They wanted the publicity they got. And they wanted us to look like jackasses, which they succeeded in doing. In a war, you lose battles now and then. The best thing to do is cut your losses and get the hell out. They were hoping we’d drag it out.

You think the media was out of control? The media is always out of control. It’s not supposed to be under control. That’s what we have to live with in a free society. You can’t prevent the media from doing what it wants to do. But you can prevent the media from getting the information in the first place, by having rules for those who have the secrets not to release them to the media.

All right, how would the rules have worked in Beirut? How could you have prevented the madness that ensued? You know, if a plane lands in Turkey right now, the minute they establish there are hijackers on it, you know what happens? Nothing. They cut off all communications. “We want you to release so-and-so.” Silence. They just sit there and rot as far as the Turks are concerned. So there’s no news whatsoever. It’s not unethical to give the press false information. We do have a kind of adversary relationship with the press. There’s nothing we should try to do to shut them up, but it is absolutely permissible to tell the press whatever is in the interests of the American people to have the press know or think. And they can use it any way they want to. They can be suspicious, as they should be. A good pressman is suspicious of what anyone tells him.

How does your vision of the CIA fit Western democracy? [Laughter.]

Come on, what are Miles Copeland’s principles of democracy? Let me tell you about democracy. First place, I remember Syria. We decided we were going to bring democracy to Syria. So we got a translator in Arabic, and we got signs. We were going to have an election. This is 1946, ’47. The signs say, Get Out And Vote For The Candidate of Your Choice. We had people coming in the embassy and saying, “Look, these signs are no good — they don’t tell us who the candidate of our choice is.” In the United States, if we had true democracy, it would be a good thing. But true democracy is impossible now because of the fact that the general population cannot possibly keep themselves well enough informed to decide on issues except on a very parochial basis. The average person, the best he can do is something he’s not allowed to do — that’s to vote for a man because he’s known to be honest and competent. But now a candidate has to tell you what his issues are and get elected on that basis. We have to sell the idea to the American public that there are many things about foreign policy the American people simply cannot understand, because foreign policy requires, above all else, judging people according to their own standards. The emphasis should be in choosing people we trust. Where the CIA can work as an institution in a democratic government is, we have to set up criteria where nobody can get into the CIA unless he’s honest and patriotic. And I think they’ve succeeded at that. The guys in the CIA are the most strait-laced people you ever saw.

Who gets your highest marks as CIA director? I’d have to name two people, and for totally different reasons. I think George Bush was the best. He came in knowing he didn’t know a damn thing about the CIA, but he did know how to judge people whose opinions he could trust, and he listened to them.

Who is second? Dick Helms. Helms lied to a congressional committee. That’s one of his fortunate traits, that he’s willing to lie to a congressional committee. William Colby didn’t have the guts to do this. Lacking patriotism, he did not lie to a committee.

Wait a minute — lacking patriotism? Absolutely. Why should he tell a group things he knew would leak to the newspapers? He should have lied to them. If he were really a patriotic American, he wouldn’t have thought of telling them the truth.

And Helms gets high marks for perjury? With me and with everyone who has ever been a career officer in the government. Absolutely. You can call it perjury if you like, and maybe it was, but he should have been willing to go to jail for it.

It’s okay to lie under oath if you’re in the CIA? I said nothing of the sort. If what you know means that telling the truth is going to damage the national interest, it is your obligation. . . .

Who decides the national interest? Do you want me to give you a hard time or do you want an answer?

Both. Okay, I’ll give you an answer: The CIA is set up so that it’s impossible for a person as an individual to arrogate to himself the right to lie to a congressional committee or to anyone else. But what he can or cannot say is clearly specified from the day he is sworn in. He can lie to people who are not his bosses, who do not have security clearances. Most congressmen do not have security clearances. When Senator Frank Church asked me something, and he said, “Will you take an oath,” I said, “Senator, I’ll take the oath, and I wouldn’t think of telling you the truth.” Personally, I like Colby very much. He’s a very fine man, but he’s just the wrong kind of guy to be head of the CIA. He’s a good guy.

You’ve got to be a bad guy to head the CIA? You have to be prepared, as a good soldier does. A good soldier could be religious and have read the Bible, but he’s got to go out and kill people. The CIA has to have a separate set of morals. In that sense, you have to be amoral.

Is it true you were once asked by your CIA bosses to kill President Nasser of Egypt? My old boss, Frank Wisner, passed on to me orders that I was to “explore the possibility” of assassinating Gamal Nasser. Poor Wiz didn’t like doing even that. But the order came straight from the White House. Anthony Eden, who was Britain’s foreign minister at the time, believed the world would be a happier place without Nasser in it, and the belief grew to enormous proportions after the Suez fiasco. The head of British intelligence, who had a somewhat wry sense of humor, used to say that if either his boys or ours didn’t assassinate Nasser “professionally,” Eden was likely to do it himself “amateurishly,” and the results would be “messy.” Eden’s attitude was “At least we should look into it.” He said as much to his opposite number in Washington, John Foster Dulles, and Dulles discussed it with President Eisenhower, who said, in effect, “Anything to keep Tony quiet.” The order was passed down, from the president to the secretary of state to the director of the CIA — Foster’s brother, Allen — to Frank Wisner to Kermit Roosevelt to me. I was to visit Nasser, have coffee with him, say, “That’s an interesting vase you have over there in the corner,” and when he turned his head to look, make the motion of slipping a cyanide pill into his cup just to see if he would catch me at it.

Did you do it? Sort of, and I didn’t have to use the “look over there” trick. Nasser kept looking the other way out of sheer boredom at what I had to say. Just sitting there with Nasser, rehearsing in my mind just how I would go about sneaking something into his lemonade or coffee, I saw how easy it would have been-theoretically, that is. When I got back from the Nasser experiment, I went into the whole question of assassination, from the philosophy behind it to all the ways of doing it.

Philosophy of assassination? Very important. All these post-Watergate liberals forget that assassination was once a healthy alternative to war. There is only one justification for assassination: to save lives, lots of lives. One life to save many. But as for a weapon of strategy, that’s a different story.

What is the justification? The rationalization by which the so-called war of dirty tricks is justified is that it takes the place of a real war in which millions may be killed. Given such a justification, anything goes. For example, you can sometimes gain points in the war of dirty tricks by killing an expendable person on your own side and blaming it on the other. But that kind of nonsense is talked about only in meetings where “contingencies” are being considered. In those meetings, it is permissible to suggest literally anything.

One CIA target was President Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, in the summer of 1960. . . . Well, now, I’ll tell you a brief story to illustrate what a great farce that was. The CIA station chief in the Congo at the time, who I knew very well, was a very sober, conservative fellow who harbored the ambition to get into the State Department. Since he was really a CIA man, his State Department job was only a cover — and at a lower grade than his CIA job called for, to the disgrace of his wife. So his main worry was his wife, who was complaining that she wasn’t invited to parties and wasn’t seated high enough above the salt at dinners. And he was wondering how he got this lousy job in the Congo. One day he was contemplating the sadness of his lot when a message arrived from Washington. It had a code word which means this is something you take seriously because this comes from the White House. Ordinarily, when you get an order from headquarters you never obey it the first time because you’re not sure they mean it. It might be some guy telling you to do something to get himself off the hook, being on record as having ordered it. So you always wait until the second time. But if there’s a White House code word, you’d better take it seriously. The message from the White House said he was to assassinate Lumumba — to explore means to terminate with extreme prejudice. He couldn’t believe his eyes. The last thing he wanted to do was assassinate anyone, except perhaps his wife! But this thing said he had to go kill Lumumba, and he hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about it. Well, then another cable came in, saying somebody was coming out from the scientific section. And up showed this weird little Dr. Strangelove type. So not only does this guy have an order from the White House, he’s also got on hand this creep who was going to show him how to do it! Well, the station chief just blew his top, said, “The hell with this,” and told Dr. Strangelove to get the hell out.

What else did you get up to in the CIA? Well, I got my foot in the door in the psychopharmacological department by virtue of my interest in assassination. There are two categories: those which are made to look like natural deaths and those which serve their purpose only if they are known to be assassinations. For the first kind, there is a variety of methods, most of them involving poison. Somehow you introduce into the body of your victim two separate substances, at different times, each of which is harmless by itself but which becomes poisonous when mixed with the other. You wouldn’t believe what those weirdos come up with! The congressional subcommittee which went into this sort of thing got only the barest glimpse.

What did they miss? You can kill a man by putting a certain substance on a letter you send to him which gets into his system simply through his holding the letter in his fingers. You can make him allergic to almost anything — alcohol, aspirin tablets, even coffee or tea — that if he takes even a small quantity of it he will drop over dead. You can program a pair of dogs — even his own dogs — to savage him to death upon a given signal. You can do any number of imaginable and unimaginable things. But you don’t have to kill him; you can just make a fool out of him.

For example? You can slip an LSD pill into his lemonade as he is about to make a speech or have an electric fan blow “distress gas” onto him, or you can doctor his notes so that simply by holding them in his hands he will absorb enough hallucinatory materials to make him think he is God. One of [Indonesian president] Sukarno’s best, most electrifying speeches, I understand, was made after one of his assistants, a CIA agent, doctored his shaving lotion. The agent simply forgot that Sukarno’s wildest ramblings were made when he was cold sober and that a hallucinogen could only make for an improvement!

What do you think of today’s CIA? The organization itself is great, and Mr. Casey is tops, but the government won’t let it move, and the press is intent on preventing any secret operations it might try to run. As you know, unlike The New York Times, Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee, my complaint has been that the CIA isn’t overthrowing enough anti-American governments or assassinating enough anti-American leaders, but I guess I’m getting old. What’s keeping the agency inactive is Congress and disinformed public opinion. With modern communications being what they are, we’re supposed to be the best informed people in history, but we’re not. We’re the most informed, which is hardly the same thing.

You seem to take an active interest in American politics. Do your sons share your interest? It’s my impression my oldest son, Miles, has actually contributed to Republican congressional campaigns, but I’m not all that sure. That’s one area of my son’s activities he doesn’t confide in other members of the family about. [Laughs] My son Miles — he wants everything everybody says about him these days to be cleared in advance.

Does Miles have anyone in mind for the presidency in 1988? I know Miles has his eye on Congressman Jack Kemp [Republican — New York]. I think that’s his candidate, but I don’t know. [Miles Copeland III denies that he supports Jack Kemp or any other Republican or Democratic candidate for Congress or for the presidency.] He’s always planning several years ahead. Miles is pretty secretive about his affairs. He should have been in the CIA instead of me. Yeah, I’m “blah blah blah,” and he’s “hush hush.” I’m not sure he’s thought through all the implications of the power he’s got.

What do you mean? The next time you go to a Police concert — say, one like that in Shea Stadium, with 70,000 young minds open to whatever the Police decide to put into them — you can answer that question for yourself.

[v-e-l-v-e-t-g-o-l-d-m-i-n-e]

Given the fact that you're an actual brazilian lol I gotta ask: Did anyone believe two years ago that someone like Bolsonaro could win? Because I'm not an expert in brazilian politics but I'm really shocked, like we have a right wing president but he is like... a normal right wing asshole? As in he doesn't defend torture and so on. I guess I'm scared bc I see our countries as quite similar, I think Brasil is a little more conservative and you guys have more issues with crime but still similar.

This is really, really big, but I wanted to give you the full picture of what happened in my country. I hope it doesn’t happen on yours or any other country from Latin America (or anywhere, no one deserves it).

Honestly… it depends who you ask. His fans/electors have been yelling that Bolsonaro would be president for the good part of two, three years, but big part of the population didn’t take him seriously because he honestly sounds like a caricature. It’s hard to believe a person can be like this, and therefore people did not take him serious.

Big mistake, that was.

To give you a little context: during most of our democratic history (that isn’t very long), Brazil was ruled by right wing parties. We have several political parties in here, but the biggest one from the right wing side was PSDB (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira). The biggest political party on the left wing side is PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores).

Brazil was a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. This was a horrible, bloody piece of our history, and we only started to have a democratic state after 1985. During the years that followed, in most of the elections the main dispute was between PT and PSDB, PT always losing until 2002, when Lula aka Luís Inácio Lula da Silva won for elections.

Lula ruled from 2002 to 2010; a presidential term on Brazil lasts for four years, but we have reelections and Lula won a second term in 2006.

His time as a president was marked for several things. There was several social projects for poor people, projects to fight famine, to give finantial help to people who received too low income, projects to help poor people get into universities. They were not perfect projects by any means but I can assure you that it made a HUGE difference for millions of people in this country.

Another thing that marked Lula’s time as a president was the corruption scandals.

You see, it’s not that Brazil didn’t have corruption before, because corruption is in this country’s bones. But it was during Lula’s time as a president that we came to know how big the proportions of this corruption was. This was called the ‘mensalão’; Lula claimed that he did not know about it (which I doubt very much), but people from all political parties were implicated, including from PT.

Lula was still very popular and loved by many people, but this was the first seeds of the so called anti-petismo, that would take much bigger proportions later.

After Lula, we had Dilma Rousseff, also from PT, supported by Lula; her first term was from 2010 and 2014.

Dilma had little experience for this charge, and her time as president showed it. Her term was very mediocre, and popular insatisfaction began to rise, especially because of the World Cup that happened here on 2014 - a LOT of money was spent on it, and often the planning was really bad.

More popular insatisfaction rising; the elites were never happy to have a left wing party on power, but now middle class people started to being deluded that they were elite and anti-petismo started to get bigger. Dilma still won reelections in 2014, but it was a close call with her oponent.

Now we have a very divided country. And during the World Cup there was plenty of jobs everywhere, but after it there was a huge wave of unemployment all over the nation, the economy was a shambles. Even MORE popular insatisfaction. Things getting ugly and uglier by minute.

I won’t give you all details because this is already getting ridiculous long and it is a very long story, but Dilma suffered an impeachment. She was not very competent, but that was bullshit and clearly a coup, because we have recorded audios of the right wing opposition plotting to get her out so they could put in power her vice, Michel Temer, a right wing politic.

So now that’s still our president, Michel Temer. Just two years on power, but boy, the man did so much of damage all around, and no one, not people sympathetic to the left nor people sympathetic to the right like the man.

More popular insatisfaction, all around now. No one is happy in this country; everyone wants a change.

Now, take Bolsonaro, this dumb piece of shit we just elected. The man have been a congressist for 27 years. In this time he aproved like, two projects. In several opportunities he voted against the rights of poor people. You may remember the video of him talking with Ellen Page or Stephen Fry and how horrible that was. No one would want a horrible AND incompetent man like that as a president, right?

Right?

Well. Brazil have a wide variation of people in our nation and most people have black relatives, but we’re still a very racist, misogynistic, homophobic country. This people started to enjoy Bolsonaro’s speeches because they identify with him. Their mentality was something like… we need to stop the corruption in this country, and Bolsonaro will do it! Never mind he says that gay people should be beaten. That his white son would never marry a black woman because he received good education. That police should straight up invade favelas and kill poor people. That he said to a woman that the only reason he wouldn’t rape her was because she was not worth raping. They don’t care if women and queer people, and black and poor people get hurt or killed in this process; our lives are a small price to pay for them.

Now I do believe that even if this planet is loaded with horrible awful people, there’s still more good than bad. There’s still more good people than not, and how could good people vote for this man?

The means they used to get these votes was mass manipulation. Very similar tactics that Trump used in this campaign; dozen, hundreds of fake news all around. While in US they used mainly Facebook for this means, in Brazil they used an app called WhatsApp, because not everyone has facebook on Brazil but everyone has a cellphone and uses this app for easy communication.

In these groups they exalted that Bolsonaro would end corruption, would be a ‘correct christian man’, would stop the ‘LGBT doutrination of children on schools’. He would save this country. Mito (mith) is how his fans call him, or Messias (his middle name), and they absoluted demonized the opposition.

Now Bolsonaro is extreme right wing; the centrists and the normal right wing assholes are another story. PSDB tried to launch a candidate with no sucess, and PT was planning to launch Lula again as a candidate… but Lula was arrested in april (another bullshit). If he was not, he might have won; at least all the surveys showed Lula was more popular than even Bolsonaro. Because of that, PT tried to launch Lula as candidate even from inside prison, and of course, it didn’t work out, so there was a huge delay in PT choosing a candidate.

Eventually, Fernando Haddad was chosen. He’s a professor, a good man; was mayor of São Paulo. Was a ministry in Lula’s term, helped to create several education projects. But he was also not very known - I didn’t even know him until like four months ago.

The fact that he was not very well known helped a lot the pro-Bolsonaro groups to demonize the man and his vice. Many fake news were made up about him, stuff like him trying to legalize paedophilia, that he he was going to give a ‘gay kit’ for kids in school and therefore incentive the erotization of children, that he was a rapist. That he was against traditional family, but Bolsonaro would save the Brazilian Family. All of this being spread in those WhatsApp groups with little to no fiscalization, being spread out by hateful people and by people who don’t have a good grasp in politics and believe everything they read.

There was also a great demonization of PT as a party - oh no, you can’t let PT back on power again, right? PT is corrupt! They stole us! Don’t you remember mensalão? They DESTROYED the country, they’re gonna do it AGAIN, they BROKE this country and tore it apart (anyone would thing we lived in some sort of paradise before), PT is gonna transform this country in a COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP we’re gonna be the next Venezuela.

(I kid you not. I heard this last part from my father’s mouth last time I saw him. People really believed this)

Nevermind that PT was on power for 14 years and we didn’t become communists and if anything they appllied a more centrist line of ruling the leftist; we can’t let PT win. Bolsonaro will save this country.

Now another thing you need to understand is that Bolsonaro is DUMB. He’s dumb as fuck. In the first part of the elections he showed up to a few presidential debates and said horrible things like “Portugueses (our collonizers) never even set foot on Africa, Black people slavered themselves” that caused some popular outtrage. For that reason, in the second part of the elections he didn’t showed up in any debate, least he opened his mouth and people realize the kind of person they were trying to elect to represent them. Bolsonaro also suffered an attack in September (was stabbed in the belly), which helped to incentivate his popularity (after all, the man is a martyr now).

These were the main ingredients that elected Bolsonaro. Anti-petismo, misguided and ignorant people being led on in a flood of fake news, fascists that knew exactly who they were electing, a refusal to hear good arguments, since his supporters think that every piece of evidence we have of Bolsonaro being a piece of garbage was edited or taken out of context (it was not).

They also had a little help from their American friends; in this picture you can see Eduardo Bolsonaro (the son of the piece of shit, also a piece of shit himself) cozying up with Steve Bannon, the white supremacist from Trump’s presidential campaign, and give yesterday’s results, his tips sure seem to have worked here too.

Edit: this article can also help you to understand a little the reasons of why he won:

Bolsonaro business backers accused of illegal Whatsapp fake news campaign

[crimethinc]

Taking a Global View of Repression: The Prison Strike and the Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners

In the United States, a practically unprecedented prison strike is underway, setting new precedents for coordination between struggles in prisons and detention centers and for solidarity from those not behind bars. Meanwhile, August 23-30 is also the sixth annual week of global solidarity with anarchist prisoners, when anarchists around the world coordinate solidarity struggles between different countries and continents. We strongly believe that every prisoner is a political prisoner, and that the best way to support anarchist prisoners is to build a movement against the prison-industrial complex itself. At the same time, the week of global solidarity is an excellent opportunity to get context from our comrades in other parts of the world about the different strategies of repression that various governments are employing today and how to counter them.

In the following text, we’ll explore contemporary patterns of repression targeting anarchists around the world and some of the ways that movements have responded. Looking at this as a microcosm of the way that repression functions in relation to the broader population can give us a way to understand prisoner solidarity as one part of wider struggles against prisons and towards freedom for all people. As anarchists, we aim to analyze state tactics of repression in order to develop better security practices, build international connections, and become more skilled at supporting and caring for each other.

Graffiti from Khabarovsk, Russia in support of the week of solidarity, reading “”Freedom to political prisoners. #ABC. No torture!”

Waves of Repression, 2017-2018

The first two decades of the 21st century have seen steadily intensifying repression directed towards anarchists and their comrades. Some of the most widely known examples of the past few years include the Tarnac case in France, an investigation of “terrorism” that started in 2008 and concluded this year with the defendants completely exonerated; Operations Pandora, Piñata, and Pandora 2 in Spain, which began in December 2014 and concluded this year; Scripta Manent in Italy, since 2017; Operation Fenix in the Czech Republic, since spring 2015; the raids the police have been carrying out across Europe since the battle of Hamburg in summer 2017; the Warsaw Three arson case in Poland, 2016-2017; and mass repression in the United States resulting from the occupation of Standing Rock and the resistance to Trump’s inauguration, the latter case finally having concluded this past July. We are also witnessing ongoing repression in Belarus dictatorship and Russia, most recently with the “Network” case.

All around the world, states and their police forces choose from the same assortment of tactics to achieve the same ends. The specific choices they make vary according to their context, but the toolbox and the fundamental objectives are the same.

For example, the same computer programs are used in many different countries to carry out online censorship. In some countries, they are only used to shut down a few websites, while elsewhere, they block a vast array of content; but the same principle is at work in both cases, and all it would take for the former situation to become the latter would be for the authorities to check a few more boxes in their repression software. The same goes for other forms of police repression. This shows how the difference between a supposedly permissive liberal democracy and an autocratic dictatorship is quantitative, not qualitative.

When police in one part of the world develop a new strategy or begin to employ a specific tactic more often, that often spreads to other police agencies around the world. For example, we can draw a line between the various entrapment cases in the United States—Eric McDavid, David McKay, Bradley Crowder, Matthew DePalma, the NATO 3, the Cleveland 5—and the subsequent Operation Fenix case in the Czech Republic, in which agents provocateurs attempted to seduce people into planning an attack on a military train and attacking a police eviction squad with Molotov cocktails. In the beginning, Operation Fenix was framed as a campaign against the Network of Revolutionary Cells, a network that had claimed responsibility for various arsons against police and capitalists; at the end, it concluded as an unsuccessful attempt to stigmatize anarchists and restore the legitimacy of the Czech police in the eyes of the public.

Likewise, we can also understand Operation Fenix in the context of decades of efforts from police in Italy, the US, France, Spain, and elsewhere to set a precedent for fabricating terrorist conspiracy cases with which to discredit and imprison anarchists. Viewed individually, the Marini trial in Italy, the Tarnac 9 case, Operations Pandora and Piñata, and Operation Fenix are nothing more than perplexing examples of prosecutorial overreach. But when we consider them as part of a global pattern in which the repressive forces of the state have been seeking a new method via which to neutralize the networks that connect popular social movements, we can recognize what they all have in common. In this context, it also becomes clear how the Russian tactic of torturing arrestees into signing false confessions could spread to other countries, if we don’t take steps immediately to publicize it. This is why it is important to take a global approach to studying state strategies of repression.

Growing International Police Cooperation

Across the globe, police forces are cooperating more than ever before. Continent-wide repression in Europe shows international police collaboration and the extremist and terrorist laws in action.

The recent Aachen bank robbery case in Germany illustrates this: a European arrest warrant, the sharing of intelligence between police forces, and the intensification of cooperation between various legal authorities following two bank expropriations in 2013 and 2014. Spanish and German police cooperated in obtaining the DNA of the alleged expropriators, who were convicted of robbing the Pax Bank, the bank of the Catholic Church.

We can also see evidence of this trend in the last case connected to the SHAC campaign (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty), which targeted current animal liberation prisoner, Sven van Hasselt. Six European states collaborated in his arrest.

We are also seeing police in different countries exchanging education and experience on a more organized basis. For example, the College of European Police (CEPOL) held a seminar about terrorism in Greece in July 2012, at which the Italian authorities offered an in-depth overview of the repressive measures they have used against the insurrectionary anarchist movement. The European Police Office (EUROPAL) publishes an annual report, the Terrorism Situation and Trend Report (TE-SAT), in which you can find a chapter dedicated to supposed left-wing and anarchist “terrorism.” This kind of collaboration has gained momentum in other venues, such as the European Union Intelligence and Situation Center (SitCen); European Union Member States also cooperate on the legal level through institutions like Eurojust.

Governments in the Global North routinely equip and train states in the Global South to employ their technology and repression strategies. For example, Germany and Israel made a fortune equipping Brazil ahead of the 2014 World Cup. In an extreme example of this Great Britain is now looking to outsource imprisonment to Africa, building a new prison wing in Nigeria. All of these are good reasons to interlink our struggles.

Terrorism Discourse and Legislation

Laws and rhetoric against “extremism” and “terrorism” are some of the most powerful contemporary tools to criminalize and delegitimize social struggles. Many states developed anti-terrorist laws as a result of the previous generation of political movements, such as the Basque independence groups in the Spanish State or the Red Army Faction (RAF) in Germany in the 1970s. In a way, this can make the framework of “terrorism” somewhat outdated when it comes to contemporary social movements, which usually lack formal hierarchies like the RAF.

The chief function of the “terrorism” framework is to legitimize the suspension of legal rights, in order to empower police to employ unlimited surveillance, indefinite detention without charges or trial, total isolation in prison, torture—all the tactics that were once used to maintain colonial regimes, monarchies, and dictatorships. Since September 11, 2001 and the declaration of the so-called “war on terror,” anti-terrorist laws have been upgraded all around the world to make these tactics available to repress anyone who might be able to threaten the stability of the reigning order.

This is why the most liberal European democracy can concur with the authorities of a virtual dictatorship like Putin’s Russia that the same legal framework should be used against both anarchists who defend the public against police violence and fundamentalists who carry out attacks on random civilians for the Islamic State. These two cases have nothing in common in terms of tactics or values or goals; the one thing that connects them is that they both contest the centralized power of the prevailing government.

Repression: An International Language with Local Dialects

“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”

-Frederick Douglass

There are some new developments in the field of state repression. For example, we see an rapid development in repression tactics in Russia with the example of the “Network” case, in which many activists have been kidnapped, threatened, beaten, and tortured via electroshocks, hanging upside down, and other methods. Using these tactics, the officers of the Russian Security Forces (FSB, the successor to the KGB) have forced arrestees to sign false confessions corroborating the existence of an invented group called “the Network” which was allegedly planning to carry out the terrorist attacks during the presidential elections in March 2018 and the FIFA World Cup. These tactics created an atmosphere of fear, isolation and uncertainty in Russia, making it very difficult to mobilize solidarity.

The innovation here is using torture to confirm the existence of a “terrorist network” invented by the state. Torture itself is not a new thing to anarchists and other prisoners in post-Soviet countries; it remains one of the most powerful tools in the context of a penal system that is notoriously corrupt and permissive towards the police, giving them even less legal oversight than police experience in places like the United States. The Russian and Belarusian contexts are distinct in that in both cases, the state is openly authoritarian, not hesitating to crack down violently even on basic forms of expression such as banner drops.

Currently, this strategy seems to be working in Russia and Belarus, but in the long run heavy-handed oppression makes the authorities vulnerable to sudden outbursts of pent-up anger. In Belarus, for example, despite tremendous pressure from the totalitarian government, anarchists were at the forefront of one of the most powerful social movements of 2017.

By contrast, in the “Western” countries, we see more legalistic strategies of repression, such as extreme bail and release conditions that function to isolate and pacify individuals via attrition. This presents subtler forms of repression that are more socially acceptable to those who like to think of themselves as the citizens of a democracy. One police research report described the repression of the SHAC campaign as a process of “leadership decapitation” achieved through lengthy prison sentences and extreme bail and post-prison conditions aimed at absolutely isolating people from their movements.

Police cooperation between different European states does not always take the same form. For example, while Greek, Italian and German conferences take place regarding anarchist “terrorism” and “extremism,” countries that have experienced fewer militant actions and less popular unrest employ different approaches. Many states carry out intelligence gathering in the guise of academic research in “extremism and terrorism studies,” in order to monitor the presence of particular ideas or tactics. This was clear in the Czech Republic, where such studies were used to analyze the local anarchist movement. For example, despite lacking any demonstrable links to the FAI/FRI or Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, recent anarchist actions in Czech Republic from the aforementioned Network of Revolutionary Cells were described and charged mostly via academic and police research that presented them as a manifestation of the former groups.

More art from Russia promoting the Anarchist Black Cross: “Support political prisoners. #ABC.”

Learning from Successful Support Campaigns

“We learn a thousand times more from defeat than we do from a victory”

-Ed Mead, member of George Jackson Brigade and Men against Sexism, long-term anarchist prisoner and gay liberationist

It’s not easy to measure the effectiveness of repression. A campaign of repression could be said to succeed if the targets receive prison sentences—or if the movement they are associated with is effectively divided, pacified, or destroyed—or if the social struggle that the movement is engaged in becomes co-opted.

So, for example, you could say that Operation Fenix was unsuccessful because the legal charges that were pressed did not succeed. However, Czech police were able to collect an enormous data on the anarchist movement in the Czech Republic—and despite failing to win the case against the defendants, they succeeded in implanting anti-terrorist rhetoric and “anti-extremism” sentiment in the public discourse. Yet, despite this, Czech anarchists gained a lot of support from all around the world, which was very important for the people who were behind bars, isolated and charged with extremism.

One the most inspiring recent support campaigns was the defense of the J20 arrestees in the US, a case that ended in almost complete defeat for the state. We can see another inspiring example under much less favorable conditions in the campaign against the ongoing “Network” terrorist case in Russia, where defendants’ parents have created a “Parents’ Network” supporting their children and opposing the totalitarian regime.

Undertaking Movement Defense

Repression often imposes isolation and other hardships. Everyone is unique, but in general, those on the receiving end of repression need some of the same things: financial support, emotional support, support for the family and friends of defendants, secure or at least reliable channels of communication, publicity about the case, and—most importantly—continuing the struggle.

Different groups can play different roles in the fight against repression. There are groups that form in order to react when repression hits, such as the campaign to support the J20 defendants, or Solidarat Rebel, which spreads information about the Aachen bank robbing case, or the Antifenix initiative, which promotes analysis and resistance against Operation Fenix in the Czech Republic. These projects are very important in that they respond to an immediate and urgent need for support. There are also groups that maintain consistent long-term anti-repression organizing, such as the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC). The Anarchist Black Cross is an international network of anarchist groups engaged in practical solidarity with prisoners that is now a century old.

We can work to counter repression on several levels. We can raise awareness about the usefulness of security culture and the different tactics of repression so as to prepare for the inevitable response of the state to our efforts to create a better world. We can also build up material resources—raising money to pay legal fees and related expenses such as travel costs and to support prisoners during their sentences and when they are released. This can involve organizing fundraising events or seeking donations in other ways. Most importantly, we have to provide care and emotional support to the targets of oppression and to others who support them.

Finally, we can spread information about legal cases and prisoners and how to do support work through various media channels including websites, pamphlets, podcasts, books, speaking tours, and social networks both virtual and real. For example, this zine composed by various ABC groups around Europe introduces the basics of Anarchist Black Cross organizing.

We have to understand our efforts to support specific prisoners as part of a much broader struggle against prisons themselves. If we are already organizing in solidarity with prisoners in general, anarchist prisoners will be in a much better position. That means supporting prisoner organizing, sending reading material and resources to prisoners, acting in solidarity outside the prisons when prisoners revolt, and spreading a popular discourse that identifies what everyone stands to gain from dismantling the prison-industrial complex.

From a Week of Solidarity to Prison Abolition

Anarchists are fighting on the front lines of the struggle against prison society alongside other poor people, people of color, indigenous people, and everyone else who is targeted by the prison system worldwide.

The sixth annual week of solidarity with anarchist prisoners is one of many opportunities to connect all these different struggles, seeking to set an example of what long-term coordinated anti-repression work might look like. The date of the beginning of the week is the anniversary of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian-American anarchists, in 1927. They were convicted with very little evidence, punished above all for their anarchist views.

Anarchists are not always the chief targets of the state, which often prioritizes attacks on people of African heritage, migrants, Muslims, and other ethnic groups on the receiving end of colonial violence. Nevertheless, we are almost always somewhere on the list of targets because our values and our actions threaten the hegemony of the state. Prison is the glue that holds capitalism, patriarchy, and racism together. As we strive for a society based on cooperation, mutual aid, freedom, and equality, we inevitably come into conflict with the police and the prison system. Let’s build a broad movement against them.

So long as there are prisons, the most courageous, sensitive, and beautiful among us will end up inside them, and the most courageous, sensitive, and beautiful parts of the rest of us will be inaccessible to us. Every one of us can become a prisoner. No one is truly free until all of us are free.

A prison van burned in the riots of “Angry Friday” on January 28, 2011 during the Egyptian Revolution.

Further Reading

Till All Are Free—the hub organizing the International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners

Repression Patterns in Europe

[updcbc]

July 15, 2018 - “The Daring Commitment” Nehemiah 2:1-20

Click KEEP READING to read the full sermon.

Introduction

Ms. Raissa E. Robles risked her life through the might of a pen. Her book Marcos Martial Law: Never Again is a historic account of the oppressive regime of Marcos dictatorship. It won the prestigious National Book Awards in 2017. Ms. Robles made her message clear.

“On September 22, 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos imposed Martial Law through Proclamation 1081. Claiming the government was in mortal danger of being overthrown by a widespread Communist conspiracy and armed rebellion, Marcos gave himself emergency powers that put the military and police at his personal beck and call. With the stroke of a pen, the Philippines’ 10th president destroyed democracy, concentrating executive, legislative and judiciary powers in his person, removing institutional checks and balances, accountability and the citizen’s rights and liberties. For the next 14 years he would rule as he pleased by issuing decrees (which took the place of laws) that he wrote himself accountable to no one. Overnight, Filipinos lost freedom they had enjoyed for generations.” (Ibid., p. 12)

The fight for our democracy cost the bloodshed of countless Filipinos. Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr., an exile in the United States, was warned that once he returned to his homeland he will surely die. At the tarmac in the airport before making a step in his own land, he was assassinated. He was true to his word, “The Filipino is worth dying for.” And we regained our freedom through a peaceful revolution. Never again to dictatorship!

Nehemiah was a Jewish exile in Persia. In his great love for his people he decided to go back to his homeland. He was committed to restore the wall of Jerusalem and rebuild the fallen Israel. And he dared to present his plan before the Persian king (2:1-3). God moved the heart of the king (2:4-8). So the building of the wall began with divine blessing (2:9-20).

A.  The Fearsome Bravery (2:1-3)

Nehemiah was the cupbearer to King Artaxerxes of Persia. As a trustworthy royal official, his life was in great danger to foil any assassination plot to poison the king. Nehemiah faced a greater danger when he decisively appeared before the king to present his plan to build the wall of Jerusalem. This was a matter of life and death. The rebuilding of the wall could be taken by the king as a rebellion against his empire. Yet Nehemiah dared to face death to rebuild his own nation.

1. The Malady of Heart

The devastating news about the destruction of the wall of Jerusalem reached Nehemiah on the month of Nisan (November – December). He mourned, fasted and prayed as he pleaded before God for his divine favor. He made up his mind to appear before the Persian king.

“In the month of Nisan in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was brought for him, I took the wine and gave it to the king. I had not been sad in his presence before; so the king asked me, ‘Why does your face look so sad when you are not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart.’” (2:1-2a)

The Jewish month of Nisan is from March to April. It took Nehemiah at least three months to painfully wrestle with God in prayer until he courageously braced himself in taking all the risks of disclosing his breaking heart to the great king of Persia about his deep concern for his Jewish countrymen in his homeland in Israel. The day when Nehemiah attended to his duty for the daily provision of wine to the king, Artaxerxes noticed his very unusual sad countenance. King Artaxerxes knew Nehemiah as a faithful and delightful cupbearer. The king was greatly surprised for his servant to appear to him with a somber look on his face though he was physically well and healthy. The king pointedly described the unexplained inward agony of his servant, “This can be nothing but sadness of heart.” And he was definitely right!

Nehemiah is one among us. When we have an inner agony it manifests in our facial countenance. Since Nehemiah heard about the sad news, initially he was able to manage his own composure before the king. Yet as he internalized the suffering of his countrymen and he was consumed in his passion of rebuilding his fallen nation, it eventually worn him out until he could no longer hide the malady of his heart. The king himself confirmed it. Likewise, the people who closely know us will see and feel the great difference when we are under much stress despite all our efforts to hide and cover up our struggle within. If we are sensitive to the pain of others, a careful look to one’s face can uncover a grieving heart.

2. The Unnerving Fear

Nehemiah inwardly trembled before the great king. In great fear he remained calm and composed.

“I was very much afraid, but I said to the king, ‘May the king live forever! Why should my face not look sad when the city where my fathers are buried lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?’” (2:2b-3)

Nehemiah resolutely stepped out of his comfort zone. He could have chosen to remain silent for personal security and self convenience. But he was heartbroken and restless until he could do something on behalf of his own people. The time had come for him to disclose his heart and deliver his message to the king. In the kingdom of Persia, the word of the king was an irreversible law. Nehemiah knew it well that whatever the king would say could spell for his life or death.

I wonder if we, like Nehemiah, have the unbreakable will to embrace the invaluable cost to stand for what is true, right and just in rebuilding the breaking principled walls of our motherland. Rebuilding a fallen nation is an offering of life for one’s own people. The brave-heart stands up!

B.  The Divine Favor (2:4-8)

Nehemiah, as a trustworthy cupbearer, was greatly esteemed by the royal king. The king trusted his loyal servant. The close bond between them made a great difference on how the king wisely and carefully addressed the bewildering and destabilizing personal concern of Nehemiah for Israel before the majestic royal officials of the kingdom.

1. The Imperial Inquiry

King Artaxerxes asked Nehemiah a direct question about his problem. In great fear, Nehemiah laid down his plan before the king. And no one could ever help Nehemiah but the LORD who is sovereign over all.

“The king said to me, ‘What is it you want?’ Then I prayed to the God of heaven, and I answered the king, ‘If it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in his sight, let him send me to the city in Judah where my fathers are buried so that I can rebuild it.’” (2:4-5)

The idea to rebuild the city of Jerusalem was no ordinary thing. Among all the kingdoms which the Babylonians and Persians had conquered, the nation of Israel was known as a formidable and powerful people. Joshua, David and Solomon had ruled kings and conquered kingdoms in the past generations. The political foothold of Israel was indeed a potential threat to the Persian Empire. In rebuilding Jerusalem, Nehemiah was courting his own death and the national disaster for his own Hebrew people. As Nehemiah stood before the king in great fear, he entrusted his life and nation to the LORD, “Then I prayed to the God of heaven.”

 2. The Comprehensive Plan

And the LORD God moved the heart of King Artaxerxes. He honored the petition of Nehemiah and inquired of his personal movements. In the sight and hearing of the king, Nehemiah laid down his detailed plan.

“Then the king, with the queen sitting beside him, asked me, ‘How long will your journey take, and when will you get back?’ It pleased the king to send me; so I set a time. I also said to him, ‘If it pleases the king, may I have letters to the governors of Trans-Euphrates, so that they will provide me safe-conduct until I arrive in Judah? And may I have a letter to Asaph, keeper of the king's forest, so he will give me timber to make beams for the gates of the citadel by the temple and for the city wall and for the residence I will occupy?’” (2:6a-8a)

First, Nehemiah set the timetable in his governance over Judah. Based on his narrative account, he had spent twelve years as the governor of Judah (5:14) then he returned to the citadel of Susa on the 32nd year rule of King Artaxerxes (13:6). Definitely, this was the time set by Nehemiah before the king. And he had kept his word. If not, the Persian Empire could have had destroyed Nehemiah and his people because of rebellion.

Second, Nehemiah asked for safe-conduct in his travel to Jerusalem. An imperial letter sealed by the signet ring of the king would ensure for his safe travel from the unfriendly governors of the Trans-Euphrates. The peoples beyond the Euphrates River in the Palestine region were hostile against the Jews and were enemies of the Israelites. In the time of the Persian kingdom, anyone who would disregard the letter of the king would mean capital punishment.

Third, Nehemiah asked to avail of the natural resources for his great project. An authorization letter from the king to Asaph the keeper of the king’s forest would give him access in securing timber for the temple, his residence as governor and the wall of Jerusalem. All the forest and the natural resources within the kingdom belonged to the kingdom. And no one could access to them without the authorization of the king.

 3. The Divine Intervention

The daring plan and the bold petitions of Nehemiah were miraculously approved. “And because the gracious hand of my God was upon me, the king granted my requests” (2:8b). This was the sovereign work of God!

C.  The Great Project (2:9-20)

Under the sovereignty and grace of God, Nehemiah made his journey toward Jerusalem. The people in the region were greatly alarmed and sought for effective measures to oppose him and destroy his plan for the welfare of Israel. Nehemiah made a careful assessment of his great project to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem. The Jews embraced the project. And the rebuilding of the wall began under the blessing of God.  

1. The Alarming Opposition

The presence of Nehemiah unsettled the people in Trans-Euphrates.

“So I went to the governors of Trans-Euphrates and gave them the king's letters. The king had also sent army officers and cavalry with me. When Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard about this, they were very much disturbed that someone had come to promote the welfare of the Israelites.” (2:9-10)

King Artaxerxes ensured the safety of Nehemiah. With the letter of the king in his hand, army officers and cavalry accompanied him. Such formidable imperial safe-conduct for Nehemiah stirred the enemies of the Jews led by Sanballat and Tobiah. The designation of Sanballat as the Horonite probably indicated the town of his origin, possibly Horonaim of Moab (Is. 15:5; Jer. 48:3, 5, 34) or Beth Horon in Ephraim near Jerusalem (2 Chr. 8:5). In papyri documents found at the Jewish settlement in Elephantine, Egypt, Sanballat is called the governor of Samaria. Tobiah was an Ammonite official who made a close alliance with Sanballat against Nehemiah and the Jewish people. The Ammonites came from the descendants of Lot the nephew of Abraham. In the time of the Exodus, God instructed Israel not to associate with the Ammonites (Deut. 23:3) who were hostile to Israel and became her enemies. Sanballat and Tobiah resisted Nehemiah because he came to promote the welfare of the people they hated—the Hebrew people.

We should not be surprised if we meet great opposition in our advocacy in restoring the breaking walls of truth, righteousness and justice in rebuilding our failing nation. There will always be people who will use all their authorities, powers and resources to oppose our noble cause in upholding our sovereignty, preserving our democracy and advancing the kingdom of God in our homeland. Unfortunately, there are fellow-Filipinos who seem to be patriots but prove to be enemies of the state. Like Nehemiah, we pray to the God of heaven over our homeland.

 2. The Night Surveillance

The coming of Nehemiah in Jerusalem with the edict of King Artaxerxes compelled the Jews to respect Nehemiah as a man of great authority and power to govern over his own people. Nehemiah has yet to disclose his agenda as he settled down in Judah. The first thing he did was a thorough assessment on the ruined wall of Jerusalem. And he did it himself secretly at night with few trusted associates he could have chosen to be respected elders and reputable leaders among the people.

“I went to Jerusalem, and after staying there three days I set out during the night with a few men. I had not told anyone what my God had put in my heart to do for Jerusalem. There were no mounts with me except the one I was riding on. By night I went out through the Valley Gate toward the Jackal Well and the Dung Gate, examining the walls of Jerusalem, which had been broken down, and its gates, which had been destroyed by fire. Then I moved on toward the Fountain Gate and the King's Pool, but there was not enough room for my mount to get through; so I went up the valley by night, examining the wall. Finally, I turned back and reentered through the Valley Gate. The officials did not know where I had gone or what I was doing, because as yet I had said nothing to the Jews or the priests or nobles or officials or any others who would be doing the work.” (2:11-16)

Nehemiah possessed the acumen of a great architect, the skill of a strong builder, the courage of an effective administrator and the dignity of a transformational leader. Above all, he humbly feared God and fully yielded to his sovereign rule. Undoubtedly, under the grace of God, he covered the daring project of rebuilding the wall in earnest intercession.

3. The Project Began

The time came for Nehemiah to unveil the great project to his people.

“Then I said to them, ‘You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.’ I also told them about the gracious hand of my God upon me and what the king had said to me. They replied, ‘Let us start rebuilding.’ So they began this good work. (2:17-18)

Nehemiah carefully presented the vision to build Israel by focusing on the great trouble and disgrace of his people. Then he persuaded them to embrace the mission of building the wall of Jerusalem by reinforcing it with the divine intervention of God who moved the heart of the Persian king. And the Jewish leaders with the support of the people listened to the message of Nehemiah and heeded to his call. With one voice they declared, “Let us start rebuilding.” And the good work began. This was the sovereign and gracious movement of the LORD God of Israel. Like the Israelites, if we deeply share our suffering with one another and see our need to help each other, then we nurture our solidarity by working together. As a community, we are accountable to serve one another.

 4. The Divine Blessing

The enemies of the Jewish community were unhappy.

“But when Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite official and Geshem the Arab heard about it, they mocked and ridiculed us. ‘What is this you are doing?’ they asked. ‘Are you rebelling against the king?’ I answered them by saying, ‘The God of heaven will give us success. We his servants will start rebuilding, but as for you, you have no share in Jerusalem or any claim or historic right to it.’” (2:19-20)

Sanballat, Tobia and Geshem solidified their alliance and mocked the Jews. For them the wall project was rebellion against the king. For Nehemiah, it was the work of God. The enemies of the Jews had no historic and ancestral right to it whatsoever. And the great work began.

Conclusion

Nehemiah stood in great fear before the king and presented his plan to restore the broken wall of Jerusalem. King Artaxerxes extended his favor to his loyal servant. The king gave him his imperial authority, secured for his safety and provided for his needs. Sanballat, Tobias and Geshem were greatly alarmed and opposed Nehemiah to deliver his service for the welfare of the Jewish people. But the LORD God was with Nehemiah to bless his dream in rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem. So the great work began. The legacy of Nehemiah guides our mission to restore our broken walls in rebuilding our nation. We join our hearts and hands together.

We love our homeland. Nehemiah wrestled with God concerning the great trouble and disgrace of his Hebrew countrymen. He stood before the king in the LORD’s name, “Then I prayed to the God of heaven.” We enthrone God in the heart of our Filipino people. Inscribed in our peso bill is the great truth in the Holy Scriptures, “Pinagpala ang bayan na ang Diyos ay ang Panginoon.” That is the solid foundation of our nation.

We embrace our noble dream. Israel cherished the dream of Nehemiah to build the wall of Jerusalem. The Jewish people stood on their ground, “Let us start rebuilding.” And they worked as one people, “So they began this good work.” As a Filipino nation, our dream to build our land is born out of our pain as a people. In our great trouble and disgrace we nurture our solidarity to offer our lives for the welfare of our countrymen.

We plead for divine blessing. Nehemiah anchored his confidence in the LORD, “The God of heaven will give us success.” Unless the LORD builds our nation our labors would be in vain. What then is our response to all the evils in the land and the disgrace in our beloved motherland? Enough is enough! We choose a stronger word, “Never again!”

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Positive Coronavirus Test? Canadians Worry Their Neighbors Will Find Out (NYT) For a time, Cortland Cronk, 26, was Canada’s most famous—and infamous—coronavirus patient. Mr. Cronk, a traveling salesman, went viral after testing positive in November and recounting his story of being infected while traveling for work to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He was called a virus-spreader, a job-killer, a liar and a sleaze. Online memes painted him as the Grinch, since subsequent outbreaks led to restrictions against Christmas parties. Many people, including a newspaper columnist, made elaborate fun of his name. He also received threats. So many, in fact, that he fled his hometown, Saint John, for Victoria—a city on the opposite end of the country, 3,600 miles away. “They were acting like I purposely got Covid,” Mr. Cronk said from his new apartment. “I had hundreds of death threats per day. People telling me I should be publicly stoned.” Canadians might be known internationally as nice, apologetic and fair-minded. But, a year after the pandemic arrived, some Canadians worry it has exposed a very different national persona: judgmental, suspicious and vengeful. Covid-shaming has become fervent in parts of the country, with locals calling for the heads of not just politicians and doctors breaking the rules but their own family members and neighbors. “It’s not getting Covid—it’s breaking the rules that worries us,” said Randy Boyagoda, a novelist and English professor at the University of Toronto, noting that a Canadian foundational motto is “peace, order and good government.”

A Utah city has been forgiving parking tickets in exchange for food donations (CNN) city in Utah is letting residents donate food in exchange for wiping out their parking tickets. Heber City tried to get folks to move their parked cars off the streets to make room for snowplows, but the warnings didn’t work and police had to issue a lot of citations. So, starting last week and going to February 22, police will toss a parking ticket for anyone who brings in five non-perishable, non-expired food items. “Covid has taken means away from people and it’s tough times. We wanted to be able to have another solution and maybe have a positive charge to the negative on the parking citations,” said police Sgt. Tammy Thacker. The city has received tons of donations since announcing the program on a Facebook post, she said. “We did have several people that have called in and donated food without (having) parking citations,” Thacker told CNN.

What a Texas Plumber Faces Now: A State Full of Burst Pipes (NYT) Randy Calazans is one of the hottest commodities in Texas right now. He’s a plumber. The winter weather nightmare that swept through the state last week cut off power and heat to millions of homes that were never designed for frigid temperatures. Up and down the state, people were driven from their homes, or came back to find them badly damaged, by pipes and valves and tanks that froze and burst. So when the snow started to defrost and the sun made a coveted return, plumbers were suddenly like roofers after a hurricane: Everybody seemed to need one, all at once. At One Call Plumbing, the plumbing business where Mr. Calazans works, employees have been answering the phones nonstop in a small office with sprawling maps of Houston on the walls. The owner, Edgar Connery, said he had been in the business for nearly 40 years and had never seen a crush like this after other natural disasters. Some other companies had gotten so swamped that they stopped answering the phone at all. With power largely restored and temperatures back to the more seasonable 60s and 70s, Texans continued to grapple on Sunday with the state’s continuing water crisis. Some reservoirs in the state were refilling again after nearly being drained by all of the burst water mains, leaking pipes, and faucets that were left running to keep from freezing.

Shops, haircuts return in April as UK lifts lockdown slowly (AP) British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a slow easing of one of Europe’s strictest pandemic lockdowns on Monday, saying children will return to class and people will be able to meet a friend outside for coffee in two weeks’ time. But those longing for a haircut, a restaurant meal or a pint in a pub have almost two months to wait, and people won’t be able to hug loved ones that they don’t live with until May at the earliest. Britain has had Europe’s deadliest coronavirus outbreak, with more than 120,000 deaths. Faced with a dominant virus variant that scientists say is both more transmissible and more deadly than the original virus, the country has spent much of the winter under a tight lockdown. Bars, restaurants, gyms, schools, hair salons and nonessential shops are closed, people are urged not to travel out of their local area and foreign holidays are illegal.

China calls for reset in Sino-U.S. relations (Reuters) Senior Chinese diplomat Wang Yi said on Monday the United States and China could work together on issues like climate change and the coronavirus pandemic if they repaired their damaged bilateral relationship. Wang, a Chinese state councillor and foreign minister, said Beijing stood ready to reopen constructive dialogue with Washington after relations between the two countries sank to their lowest in decades under former president Donald Trump. Wang called on Washington to remove tariffs on Chinese goods and abandon what he said was an irrational suppression of the Chinese tech sector, steps he said would create the “necessary conditions” for cooperation. Before Wang spoke at a forum sponsored by the foreign ministry, officials played footage of the “ping-pong diplomacy” of 1972 when an exchange of table tennis players cleared the way for then U.S. President Richard Nixon to visit China. Wang urged Washington to respect China’s core interests, stop “smearing” the ruling Communist Party, stop interfering in Beijing’s internal affairs and stop “conniving” with separatist forces for Taiwan’s independence.

Myanmar grinds to a halt as hundreds of thousands strike against military coup (Washington Post) Bank tellers, cooks, grocery workers and hundreds of thousands of others in Myanmar answered a call for a general strike on Monday to protest the military coup, bringing cities to a standstill despite fears of a violent crackdown. The show of defiance was the largest and most coordinated since the military seized power on Feb. 1, and it came against the backdrop of official warnings of bloodshed. Protesters hoped to send a signal that they will not accept military rule and are willing to cripple the economy and risk death to achieve democracy. Killings of protesters “can happen anytime in Yangon, but we have to keep doing what we should do, even if the soldiers are ready to shoot us,” said Thura Zaw, a 32-year-old resident. “Under the military dictatorship, no one is safe whether you take to the streets or sit at home, so we chose to voice our objection rather than staying silent.” Resistance has been building since the armed forces ousted Myanmar’s elected government three weeks ago, returning the country to direct military rule after a decade-long quasi-democratic experiment. Since then, the military has detained more than 400 people, including civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and ousted Myanmar president Win Myint, charging them with minor infractions to keep them locked up.

Six months after massive Beirut explosion, official investigation has been upended (Washington Post) The Lebanese judge leading the investigation into the August explosion that tore through Beirut had set his sights on the caretaker prime minister and three former ministers, charging them with negligence for ignoring the highly combustible material stored for six years on the waterfront. But when two of the former ministers filed a complaint, alleging Judge Fadi Sawan had demonstrated a lack of neutrality by charging prominent figures to appease the public, he was dropped last week from the case. More than six months after the explosion, which killed more than 200 people, injured more than 7,500 others and devastated large portions of the capital, the official investigation is struggling to break through Lebanon’s culture of corruption and political influence to hold anyone of consequence accountable.

Deals For Doses (NYT) The official story given for last week’s release of a young Israeli woman being held in Syria was that it was a straight prisoner swap, with Israel releasing two Syrian shepherds it had been detaining. That wasn’t the whole story, however. Pursuant to a ‘secret’ deal negotiated by Russia, Israel also agreed to pay Moscow to send enough Russian-made Sputnik V coronavirus vaccines to Syria to inoculate nearly half that country’s population. The Israeli government declined to comment on the vaccine part of the deal, while the Syrian Arab News Agency denied that vaccines were ever part of the arrangement. Even so, the story highlights how vaccines are increasingly becoming part of international diplomacy. It also reflects the vast and growing disparity between wealthy countries like Israel that have made considerable headway with coronavirus vaccines and could soon return to a kind of normalcy, and poor ones like Syria that have not.

Oil spill leads Israel to close beaches (CNN) Israeli authorities are trying to locate the source of a suspected oil spill that has been described as one of the most severe ecological disasters to hit the country, threatening wildlife, forcing beaches to close and prompting a mass cleanup. Blobs of sticky tar started washing up on the country’s Mediterranean shores last week. Images posted on official government accounts showed sea birds and turtles covered in tar and sticky oil. “The enormous amounts of tar emitted in recent days to the shores of Israel from south to north caused one of the most severe ecological disasters to hit Israel,” the country’s Nature and Parks Authority said Sunday. The extent of the pollution is so bad, Israel’s Ministry of Interior issued an advisory Sunday urging people to stay away from the country’s beaches. A massive cleanup is underway but the Nature and Parks Authority said it would take a long time to make the marine area safe again.

Dozens of Boeing 777 planes grounded in US and Japan after engine failure (The Verge) Airlines in Japan and the US have grounded dozens of Boeing 777 aircraft after the dramatic engine failure that United Airlines flight 328 experienced over Denver this weekend. According to the National Transportation Safety Board’s ongoing investigation, two fan blades on the plane’s number 2 engine had developed fractures. The Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency airworthiness directive that requires “immediate or stepped-up inspections of Boeing 777 airplanes equipped with certain Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engines.” The administration noted that this was likely to result in aircraft being removed from service. Boeing has also told airlines to stop flying planes equipped with the engine, according to The Wall Street Journal. “We reviewed all available safety data following yesterday’s incident,” FAA administrator Steve Dickson said in a statement. “Based on the initial information, we concluded that the inspection interval should be stepped up for the hollow fan blades that are unique to this model of engine, used solely on Boeing 777 airplanes.”

[sere22world]

How Did South Korea Become a Democracy?

Struggle. A lot of struggle.In 1945, Japan finally relinquished Korea from occupation and transferred their authorities to the People's Republic of Korea, which was a social democratic Provisional Government under Lyuh Un Hyung.

However, the Allies quickly came to the realization that they would benefit from dividing the peninsula because the Soviets needed the natural resources from the North and the Americans needed a buffer for Japan in the South.Fast forward to 1948. The unification talks between the United States and the Soviet Union stalled and the Americans pushed for unilateral elections in the South, electing Syngman Rhee, a famous independence activist and statesman, as president.

The Soviets followed suit, having Kim Tu Bong and Kim Il Sung as leaders (Communists liked collective leadership). The South had major defects in governance. First, the political culture there did not see democratization, so no one really understood this liberal democracy.

Myopically, the republic copied its constitution from the Weimar Constitution (the project of revising the constitution continues today). The Americans didn't allow the South to have effective leadership because a major shakedown would mean instability and possible communization. Therefore, pro-Axis collaborators and corrupt officials remained in power as the basic fabric of leadership.

Fast forward once more to 1960. In exposing a rigged election, the citizens of Masan clashed with the police, resulting in more than 870 casualties. One death of a high school student, with a tear gas grenade in his eye.

The vice president defended the confrontation by asking Weren't the guns given to be fired? in a press conference. The battle on the streets of Seoul involved rifles on both sides and a howitzer from the government, but the citizenry prevailed with the help from the academia, the clergy, the students, and the American ambassador.

Rhee (was still in power) resigned and the government leaders involved in the incident received heavy penalties, including death for most. The country reformed to a parliamentary democracy soon after. Some of you thought that I finished my story.

The Second Republic soon crumbled after a military coup d'etat led by a military council including Park Chung Hee assumed power, leaving Park the president for life. He reestablished a presidential republic and instituted a system of indirect democracy. As a result, of constitutional revisions much later, cities like Busan and Masan (again) clashed with the military in 1979, resulting in martial law for those cities.

Then, the head of intelligence shot the president during a dinner. The motive still remains hazy.You all again thought that democracy would flourish soon after (unless you are already familiar with the story).

I really love human optimism. Soon after, another military dictatorship shook the country in political convulsion as Chun Du Hwan and his military government took over the country and finished the task that Park has started, establishing a regime with no regard for the country, the nation, or its people. In Gwangju, a protest met police resistance, quickly escalating in a shootout and a military siege.

The soldiers started to experiment with the citizenry, torturing citizens, including minors. These tortures surpass the amateur brutality of other examples of torture in history, including creative methods like ashtray crafts on people's eyeballs, forcing people to crawl and lick feces in the bathroom, and preparing sashimi with bayonets from victims. The revolt failed, the government successfully covered up the story as a communist insurgency.

Many Koreans still believe that the atrocities were committed by an imaginary communist guerrilla army because their heroes on drugs could not commit such crimes. Years later, the flames of revolution, previously kept alive by college students, erupted again like a volcano in 1987 when a Seoul University student came of a police interrogation dead. The police claimed that the student died from a heart attack after an officer hit a table, but autopsies soon showed blunt force trauma (citation needed) and asphyxiation.

In reality, the police repeatedly shoved the students head into a bathtub until he died. When the word got out, the citizenry of the entire country rebelled in what we now call the June Struggle. The Catholic church revealed the crimes of the police because some of the perpetrators felt indignant over the fact that they received the blame for when other people involved didn't.

Then, word of the cover-up got leaked via a report on toilet paper (classy) and found its way to the Catholic church. The press exploded in a media frenzy, and entire universities poured out in protest. Citizens of Seoul and other cities began to join the battle en masse.

My father participated in the revolution (according to him) because he moved to Seoul to attend a university in 1987 as a freshman. His school boycotted classes, and he couldn't attend lectures or take exams. Apparently, he inhaled enough tear gas to make his decade-old smoking habit a joke and made and threw Molotov cocktails (real classy).

The military couldn't hold back the massive tsunami of the masses and surrendered, leading to the constitution of 1987 - the current constitution. As an addendum, I must add that the democratic bloc dissolved and the military leaders still retained the government in 1987 and then merged with the conservatives (who still retain that streak today).Finally, the republic became democratic in 1987 • Suggested Reading What gear is essential for a new cyclist?

Your question is tagged as u2018Urban Cyclingu2019 and u2018Road Cyclingu2019. Since there are many different forms of cycling, Iu2019ll focus on these two. One of the other answers mentions SPD pedals, foldable spare tyre etc.

These are Mountain biking things. SPD pedals are not that good for road cycling and during the 20 years I have been taking cycling more seriously (though I am no professional racer) I have never suffered a catastrophic tyre damage on road which the rim survived undamaged. I had one couple of years ago but the rim was wrecked.

So the spare foldable tyre would not help. For mountain bikers who ride downhill or enduro this is a good idea to take but not for road cycling and definitely not for urban cycling.For urban cycling where the bicycle is just a mean of transport, you need just the bicycle and preferably a helmet.

Small led lights with a day flash are good if you are riding in a light rain and can be used if you return after dusk. If you have a public transport system where you can take your bicycle with you (or you can call someone to pick you up) you do not even need repair tools or spares. Just do not forget your bicycle lock.

Especially if your bicycle is new or a good looking one, you need a lock which makes it harder to nick than nearby bicycles.For road cycling you need basically this to take with you:And for gear, you need:Cycling padded shortsSpecialized road biking shoes, cleats and pedals (not SPD*)Preferably a good bicycling jersey,Cycling fingerless glovesnThey are fingerless for good control of the combined brake and shift levers on the road bike while protecting your palms when hitting the tarmac which will happen in the beginning - the guys from the video above ride without gloves to avoid tan lines, not a good practice for a beginner. Cycling raincoat which you can pack into a jersey pocketGood helmetnHelmets are not mandatory in most jurisdiction.

Some neurologists argue that they have a lot of patients with brain injuries after cycling accidents caused by the imperfect protection the cycling helmets offer. However the number of people who suffered no head injury at all (or lived to be bitched about by the neurologists) are rather invisible to them. Helmets are expensive and not perfect but they can save your life.

Just donu2019t buy the cheap ones. The difference between $10 and $100 helmet is that the $10 one is a total waste of money not even worth $1.LightsnAsk in a specialized shop.

This is a very broad topic. Basically you can split them into 3 categories: a) to be seen (good just for urban cycling or to be combined with other lights) b) to see the road in front of you c) to blind all the incoming traffic and look like a locomotive (popular with mountain bikers who ride downhill in a crazy speed at night, not suitable for anything else). I have small led lights permanently mounted to my bike but they only make me visible.

Then I have a small 300lm light which I can mount on handlebars or my helmet which offers me a well-lit spot. If I plan to arrive during daylight but I might be late by an hour, I take this, mount it on the handlebars and set it to a full beam. If I plan to arrive at night (or go for a night spin), I mount it on my helmet and I take another 800lm light (with frame-mounted battery).

Then I set the handlebar one for 50% beam in urban areas 75% generally and 100% beam when descending through forest, the helmet-mounted to 50% beam. This gives me roughly 3 hours of ride with a good amount of a reserve time. For riding mountain bike downhills on specialized difficult trails or crazy-speed free-rides you will need more than that, obviously.

All my lights are USB-chargeable so I always depart with full batteries.Cold weather gear:Cross-country skiing pantsnThey can be put over your cycling pants. Neoprene shoe coversCross-country skiing glovesSome thermo long-sleeve t-shirt which you can put under your jerseyLong-sleeved wind-proof jersey if it is really coldCap under helmetSoft-rubber tyres if riding in winterFenders (the winter road salt in your mouth is anything but tasty)* Speaking of pedals, I do ride SPDs because I have a cyclocross bicycle.

For road riding I simply switch tyres. SPDs are made for off-road use, they work even if they are clogged with mud (well, the better quality ones) and the SPD shoes are made in a way you can walk and run in them. The downside is that the system does not hold your foot well in the pedal (there is a lot of play) and the contact surface between the shoe and the pedal is rather small compared to the road one.

Your feet will hurt after 100km ride. The fun thing is that cyclocross or cross-country riders seldom ride such a distance and the rest of us simply think u2018other parts of my body hurt much more than feet so whatu2019. The road-specific shoes and cleats are much better for road use however they are unsuitable for anything else.

Urban cyclists, mountain bikers except cross-country guys and most of the other categories of cyclists simply do not use clipless pedals. And if you are a beginner, check whether you really want to use them. I would suggest you start riding on some affordable normal pedals and switch to clipless when you have a good command of your bicycle for road biking.

For urban cycling, I would not use that. Most of the good bicycles are sold without pedals because the cyclist usually put there their own favourites.