Bulletin #710

 

 

 

 

Subject: Fear Pornography and the Corporate Practice of FEAR MONGERING.

 

 

20 August 2016
Grenoble, France

 

Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,

 

We are all Chelsea Manning bruised by the cyber winds and thrown into a black hole because we refuse to collaborate with “the lesser evil.” Even the best among us are afraid. We want to live, at no matter what price. We will renounce all that we have said and done in order to remain alive. One-hundred-thousand years from now it will make no difference to anyone; no one will remember! The octogenarian keepers of the gate want out, we all want out! We’ve seen nothing, we’ve heard nothing, we’ll say nothing . . . .  In the long run we are nothing! But we’ve learned to reason, and this perhaps will keep us alive a little longer. The young Chelsea Manning, born Bradley Manning on December 17, 1987 at Crescent, Oklahoma, is an inconvenient truth for all of us, including Chelsea Clinton, also born of Hillary….

 

State terrorism is a fact of life. According to many political theories, the state should rightfully possess a monopoly on lethal force, which is to say that only state agencies are legitimately endowed with the right to inflict deadly violence on designated targets. No other agent is a legitimate practitioner of such power. This, according to Marxist theory, makes one central question all the more compelling: Who will control the state, the capitalist class or the working class? Will the interests of capitalist accumulation or those of working people be protected by this monopoly of state power?

 

Anarchists hold a different view, of course; they believe that force should never be monopolized, and that all physical coercion is ultimately self-defeating. While this may be true, “ultimately” can be a very, very long time! (Witness the relationship between the homo sapiens sapiens and homo sapiens erectus, like the Neanderthals, who were exterminated by the former after more than 2500 centuries of successful symbiotic living with their natural environment.) Meanwhile, contemporary state violence and the threat of state violence in defense of capitalist interests has a lurid history of collateral damages and unexpected results, including the very real danger of extinguishing our own species, after our relatively brief existence.

 

The 19th century Russian anarchist, Michael Bakunin, expressed the danger of state monopoly of force in his own words:

 

There is no horror, no cruelty; sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction; no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible: ‘for reasons of state.’

 

 

The 6 items below speak to the violence we have inherited, a violence of epic proportion that threatens our very species. The corporate control over this massive violence is, of course, produced by capitalist private profit motives. The glib ideologues who attempt to govern this destructive force –either by ignoring it or by justifying it—depend on our willful self-deception to achieve their criminal goals. In the past, the cost has been repeated acts of genocide; the future promises the extinction of our species. Only the courage of those who have resisted, like Chelsea Manning, make this deplorable history visible.

See, also, John Pilger’s new documentary, Utopia at :

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article36877.htm
Two years in the making, John Pilger’s controversial new film Utopia reveals a shocking national secret behind the postcard image of the “lucky country”. As it premiers in the UK, the award winning documentary filmmaker talks to Australian Times about the devastating inequalities suffered by the Aboriginal community.

 

Sincerely,

Francis Feeley

Professor of American Studies

University of Grenoble-3

Director of Research

University of Paris-Nanterre

Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and Social Movements

The University of California-San Diego

http://www.ceimsa.org  

 

 

 

a.

Assassination – The New Trend Weapon of the Elusive Mighty?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45291.htm

by Peter Koenig

 

Assassinations to reach an objective is not new for the all-powerful. The practice has been going on at least for centuries, if not for millennia, but it has intensified drastically in the last fifty years, and it is becoming ever bolder, as the rulers of the Anglosphere tighten their grip on humanity – on Mother Earth and her resources.

 

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b.

WikiLeaks' Julian Assange: Attacks Against Jill Stein Are "Going to Go Through the Roof"

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/8/8/wikileaks_julian_assange_attacks_against_jill

 

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c.

Jill Stein vs. Ben Jealous: Should Progressives Reject Hillary Clinton & Vote Green?

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/26/jill_stein_or_hillary_clinton_green

 

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d.

US War Crimes or ‘Normalized Deviance’
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/08/15/us-war-crimes-or-normalized-deviance/
by Nicolas J S Davies

 

The U.S. foreign policy establishment and its mainstream media operate with a pervasive set of hypocritical standards that justify war crimes — or what might be called a “normalization of deviance,” writes Nicolas J S Davies.

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e.

Ukraine’s ‘October Surprise’ – may be coming in September
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45281.htm
by Justin Raimondo

 

When a Russian FSB agent and a Russian soldier were killed by a team of Ukrainian saboteurs, and one of the captured Ukrainians was shown on Russian media in handcuffs, US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt tweeted:

“US government has seen nothing so far that corroborates Russian allegations of a ‘Crimea incursion’ & Ukraine has strongly refuted them.”

Apparently two dead Russians don’t count for much in Pyatt’s book: perhaps Putin personally killed them, and the whole thing is a set up.

 

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f.

How Capitalism and Racism Support Each Other

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/35804-how-capitalism-and-racism-support-each-other

by Richard Wolff

 

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