Twilights Last Gleaming

More posts to come, but in the meantime, go see Ulzana's Raid at BAM tomorrow night. NE loves Robert Aldrich!

No Empires' Favorite Records of 2007 (so far, and in no particular order)

• Mika Miko - 666 (PPM)
• Judee Sill - Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972-73 (Easy Action)
• Silver Daggers - New High & Ord (Load)
• Throbbing Gristle - Part Two: The Endless Not (Mute)
• Shearing Pinx/Modern Creatures - Split cassette (INW)
• Dead Moon - Echoes of the Past (Sub Pop)
• Meg Baird - Dear Companion (Drag City)
• Acid Reflux - EP 7" (TKO?)
• Tyvek - Summer Burns 2x7" (Whats Your Rupture?)
• The Vicious - Igen 7" (YAN)
• Blues Control - S/T (Holy Mountain)
• Sir Richard Bishop - While My Guitar Violently Bleeds (Locust)
• Neil Young - Live at Massey Hall 1971 (Reprise)
  
  

Well-Made World 17

Europe

Loose directs us to a missive from Terry Eagleton, on the Guardian's blog, calling curtains on Britain's centuries-old tradition of subversive/contrarian writers--making an exception for Harold Pinter, who, Eagleton admits, may only be offering a form of "champagne socialism." Unsurprisingly, TE's examples are overwhelmingly male, though he does toss in the obligatory Virginia Woolf/"Three Guineas" reference, and notes the brief flashes of Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing. Still, Eagleton's contemporary targets (Larkin, Hare, Rushdie, Amis the Younger, et al.) are worthy ones.

The "War on Terror"

Some of the most "well-behaved" prisoners at Guantanamo, many of whom have been slated for release for upwards of a year, have recently been awarded new freedoms including access to select films once a week and limited access to tv. This and other "concessions" to detainees, rather than softening the image of the atrocious conditions at Guantanamo, highlight the absolute horror that is the system, and the dangerous paranoia that prevents detainees from doing just about anything. Read Andy Worthington on these new developments here.

Near East/ The "Muslim World"

No Empires admits to our own lack of analytical depth re: the situation obtaining in Pakistan since the military coup that put Gen. Pervez Musharraf in (increasingly shaky and dubious) power in 1999. It is, without a doubt, a country that has, for ideologically nefarious reasons, found itself swirling in the politics of George Bush's "War on Terror." But this month's seige at the "Red Mosque" in Islamabad, which had been brewing for months, certainly helps us place things in some perspective, at least as much as the previous crisis over the Pakistani judiciary did. We defer, for the moment, to Tariq Ali, who finds that the Pakistani electorate is hesitant to side with either of the groups--in Ali's words, "the Judges or the jihadis"--that have drawn the ire of Musharraf's authoritarian regime.

Richard Falk takes on the difficult, and often morally/politically dubious, task of drawing parallels between the approach of Israel and the "international community" toward Gaza, and the record of "collective atrocity" left in the wake of the Third Reich. There is, of course, nothing that galls Israel's supporters more than equivalences of this sort, which Falk is extremely careful in drawing out; what is preferred, of course, is an Israeli monopoly on the legacy and moral resonance of the Holocaust, which is cynically used to justify Israel's deplorable behavior. For more on what has been called "The Holocaust Industry", see the work of Norman Finkelstein.

The Independent has published a downright horrifying preview of interviews with American veterans of the War in Iraq, conducted by the Nation magazine. It's all here: utterly racist disregard for the lives of Iraqi civilians; hackneyed "information-gathering" techniques; unencumbered bloodlust; and psychological destruction of both civilians and G.I.'s. Harrowing reading ahead, but is anyone all that surprised?

An IRIN report reveals that the Iraqi Ministry of Finanace is now offering life insurance, as well as bodyguards, to Iraq's university professors. Iraq's education system was once the envy of the Near East; a decade-plus of UN-sponsored economic sanctions--not to mention Saddam Hussein's well-documented paranoia and anti-intellectualism--irrevocably changed this situation. George Bush's war has brought the death of more than 200 professors, and the flight of thousands more.

In a charged piece for Al-Ahram Weekly, reprinted at the Electronic Intifada, Columbia's Joseph Massad rails against the subversion of Palestinian democracy that has been taking place over the past year-and-a-half.

Following her death on March 16, 2003, the parents of Rachel Corrie (subject of one of the best plays in recent memory, finally brought to the Minetta Lane theater last winter) filed a civil suit against Caterpillar, Inc. the American company that has a contract with Israel and provides it with the bulldozers that are regularly used to destroy Palestinian homes, a particularly long-standing and odious instance of illegal collective punishment. A judge dismissed the case in 2005, but Corrie's parents have moved to have the case reopened, citing the spuriousness of Caterpillar's original argument that they just couldn't possbily have known, and therefore have taken responsibility for, what Israel intended to do with their bulldozers.

The U.S.

The New York Times reports on the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, which would see the installment of hundreds of cameras to monitor car (and, presumably, foot) traffic from the East River to the Hudson, to the tune of $90 million.

In a piece for Le Monde Diplomatique, Alex Cockburn writes on the sluggishness of the American anti-war movement, and points out that, for an anti-war demonstration to be "memorable and effective," it has to be "edgy, not comfortable"--something No Empires has grappled with recently, in the wake of our attending in June the first-ever protest specifically directed against the Israeli occupation.

Rudy Giuliani's campaign takes a hit in the South, as Rep. David Vitter becomes ensconced in his own hypocrisy. Sinner! No Empires isn't sure who we'd like to see drop out, or drop dead, first: Giuliani, or John McCain.

On elitism, and complacency

You can talk about the doltishness of our president all you want, but you have to acknowledge his power and influence, and that your snarky comments aren't going to change anything when no one is listening. Rather than ignore (with more than a tinge of self-righteousness and elitism) the idiocy and dogmatism of Washington at this completely formative moment in US history, try and be engaged. Rather than throw up your hands and drop out completely as soon as you recognize the emptiness of "official" Washington language, and realize that emptiness does not translate into impotence--parse the rhetoric and recognize its destructiveness. Decades from now, when historians are doing the difficult and vital work of figuring out just what the fuck went wrong with American foreign and domestic policies at the beginning of the 21st century, where do you think they will turn? Just because contributors to a website like Counterpunch, or intrepid journalists like Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk, seem to be telling the "right" story in their current work, doesn't mean we can just leave it at that.

Nota bene: despite the repeated use of the second-person pronoun in this post, this really isn't directed toward one person/group of people in particular. Rather, it bemoans a general trend that helps no one understand what is happening in the world around us.

Of course, it's not easy. If you're declaring yourself to be "above" paying attention to a Bush press conference, you're not better off turning to the major American print news outlets.

Coverage in the mainstream media of George Bush's press conference yesterday only serves to highlight, in our opinion, the absolute complicity of the American press in the criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq. In a typically muddled piece of "analysis" printed today, the New York Times's David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker--politely--lend their voices to the growing chorus of those who think that, in the end, George Bush must inhabit an ideologically perverse and analytically barren alternate universe. That this is, at this point, far too easy to suggest, seems not to matter. By sticking, albeit tepidly, to Bush's executive war-speak about what shape the American "mission" will take in a "post-surge" scenario, Sanger and Shanker not only serve to legitimize and reinforce Bush's corrupt Near East agenda; they also (purposely?) obscure their own paper's role in selling the public an unmitigated atrocity. On top of this, their piece ends with a move that could have come from Bush, Cheney, Rice, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama themselves: namely, to blame the occupied for the crimes of the occupiers. To say that the government of Nuri al-Maliki just simply won't have the wherewithal, or even the desire, to perform the difficult task of political reconciliation among Shia and Sunnis in Iraq, is to absolve the U.S. government of all wrongdoing in bringing unthinkable death and destruction through an illegal invasion, and a military occupation that is almost five years old.

Yesterday, the editors of the Washington Post accused, it seems, everyone but themselves of "wishful thinking" on Iraq, saying that if Bush seems over-optimistic about the likelihood of the situation in Iraq changing by mid-September, then Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton are, at best, guilty of the same as regarding the consequences of a troop "withdrawal." Borrowing a tactic, it would seem, from Bush's own speechwriters, they stoop even lower than the execrable Times and offer the trillionth repetition of a "stay the course" mantra.

This comes hot on the heels of a Times editorial on Saturday demanding an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Nevermind that whenever ANYONE in the White House, Congress (excepting Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul), or mainstream media talks about "withdrawal," they are being disingenuous, for what they really mean is "redeployment," and a contuining presence of US troops in the Near East and Gulf states. Anthony DiMaggio sees right through the Times' and other mainstream US news publications recent "anti-war" turn on their editorial pages, and asks why it's come about 50 months too late--though this hypocritical about-face did prompt the Washington Times and Wall Street Journal to condemn the Times' "appeasement." The best we can say about these two latter publications is that, hey, at least they're consistent in their support of unbridled aggression to protect U.S. "interests."

What the fuck is Ryan C. Crocker talking about?

Crocker is the U.S.'s ambassador to Iraq--an undesirable, if not downright impossible, job, to be sure. But while he's being interviewed inside Saddam's old Republican Palace, THIS CRAZY SHIT is what he has to say about the current policy debate on withdrawal swirling in Washington:

Setting out what he said was not a policy prescription but a review of issues that needed to be weighed, the ambassador compared Iraq’s current violence to the early scenes of a gruesome movie.

“In the States, it’s like we’re in the last half of the third reel of a three-reel movie, and all we have to do is decide we’re done here, and the credits come up, and the lights come on, and we leave the theater and go on to something else,” he said. “Whereas out here, you’re just getting into the first reel of five reels,” he added, “and as ugly as the first reel has been, the other four and a half are going to be way, way worse.

If this is the level of abstraction that administration officials are resorting to, then no matter what George Bush says shortly in Cleveland, his Iraq misadventure is beyond doomed, and his legacy is in the toilet (as it should be).

The Washington Post's "ANGLER" series on Dick Cheney

This is David S. Addington. As Dick Cheney's lawyer, he is the scariest person in the Bush administration that you have maybe never heard of. Allow No Empires to direct you, if you haven't read it already--and we bet you haven't!--to the Washington Post's series on the underside of the Cheney vice-presidency, in four parts.

Works Consulted #3

• Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians (Routledge, 2007)
• Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
• Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987)
• Ahdaf Soueif, In The Eye of the Sun (Anchor Books, 2000)
• Orhan Pamuk, Snow (Vintage, 2005)

Army of Islam Frees Alan Johnston

While we were busy grilling hamburgers, the Palestinian faction Army of Islam released Alan Johnston. No Empires is thrilled at this outcome, especially considering how unlikely it had seemed, and is interested to see whether it is true, as The New York Times reports, that in securing Johnston's release, "Hamas has undoubtedly given its image a boost and gained in respectability."

No Empires Misses Alan Johnston Pt. 2

Both the BBC and The New York Times recently reported that Hamas arrested "a spokesman" for Army of Islam, the Palestinian group that kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston. Of course, this is absolutely terrifying, considering the tape AOI recently released in which Johnston explains how his captors will kill him if any rescue attempts are made. The Hamas government has rightly made the Johnston case a major issue in its attempts to stabilize Gaza.

The article can be found here. Note that while the Times's Steven Erlanger can't come up with much negative to say about Hamas's latest attempts to free the Johnston, he adds to the end of his article a bizarrely disconnected fact-sheet of sorts on the organization and on Israel/Palestine in general, starting with information on how the Hamas government "organizes religious and charitable institutions that are also used to recruit members and sometimes armed fighters" and later outlining recent arrests of Hamas members, which of course brings the article full circle and seems to call into question whether the democratically elected Hamas government has any right to arrest anyone at all.

About six months ago, one-half of No Empires wrote a letter to the NYT editor to bemoan Erlanger'sround shoddy reportage from Israel--he's a huge fan of the bumbling, ideologically-motivated subject change evidenced above. The letter apparently couldn't pass muster at "the paper of record," and was never printed.

Both at home and abroad, this insistance on the illegitimacy of the Hamas government allows the vacuum of leadership evidenced by groups such as the AOI, as well as the Johnston kidnapping, to continue. This crisis of leadership dates back at least to the death of Yasir Arafat, if not to the era of the thoroughly-discredited Oslo accords, and it seems that despite Hamas's efforts, the situation is only getting worse. No Empires would finally like to point out that NOTHING good can come of this, particularly if Johnston is indeed killed (which, unfortunately, seems more and more likely as those on all sides get increasingly desperate).