MLK: “Why I oppose the Vietnam War”
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Category Archives: War
Censorship double standard
MPAA thinks the above poster is inappropriate for all audiences because hoods are scary.
Unlike these.
Taxi to the Dark Side is a documentary, these bottom three are horror films whose graphic images are apparently agreeable to the general public, including the necons. The good news is that the documentarians got some free publicity out of this.
Alex Gibney’s new critically-acclaimed documentary Taxi to the Dark Side follows the path of Afghan taxi driver Dilawar, who was innocent of any terrorist ties but still “tortured to death by interrogators in the U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base.” It also examines the Bush administration’s torture practices at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has rejected Taxi’s poster, displayed to the right, as being “not suitable for all audiences.” The poster for the film simply shows two soldiers walking away from the camera, holding a hooded detainee between them.
Shooting the War
I’m a big fan of graphic novels, and this one promises to be a terrific exegesis on Iraq and the media. What follows in an excerpt from an interview with Shooting War author Anthony Lappe…
AlterNet: War on Iraq: Shooting War: The Horror of Iraq Goes Graphic [Video]:
Shooting War was in part inspired by my own reporting in Iraq for a documentary I produced for the Guerrilla News Network (with my partner Stephen Marshall) called BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire’s Edge. We traveled across the country just as the insurgency was beginning to gain strength, trying to understand the various forces that were fueling resistance to the coalition occupation. Near the end of our trip, we found ourselves smack in the middle of the Sunni Triangle interviewing Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman; the cocky former West Point quarterback had become a legend among his men for his aggressive attitude and tactics. After vehemently denying allegations locals made to us that his unit beat up old ladies, shot pets and hauled off innocent young men in midnight raids, a frustrated Sassaman blurted out, “My life is a surreal movie. Everyday I wake up, and it’s a surreal movie.” (Sassaman later resigned in disgrace after trying to cover up the killing of an Iraqi teenager by two of his men.)
Technorati Tags: Shooting War
Theocons of the universe
Air Force Academy chapel, Colorado Springs, CO
Cylon Resurrection Ship, somewhere in outer space
In case you haven’t seen Sci-Fi network’s Battlestar Galactica (I highly recommend that you do), the premise of the story is that a race of robots created by humans decides to destroy their creators. The cyborgs, called Cylons, have developed a theistic construct of the universe, believing in a single God (the humans are polytheists who warship something akin to the the Greek pantheon). It’s one of the more interesting twists in the series plot lines. The Cylons eventually believe they are doing “God’s” work, so instead of simply destroying the fleshy heathens they decide to invade and occupy a human colony in order to convert them to their cybernetic lord (sound familiar?). In the process of the occupation the Cylons torture, detain and kill the humans without a hint of irony (again, sound familiar?). The hint that perhaps the Cylons are stand-ins for fundamentalists comes with their ability to “resurrect” their consciousness into cloned bodies whenever one of their advanced humanoid models is killed. The “resurrection ship” (pictured above) contains fresh cyborgs that can be downloaded with the consciousness of terminated or killed Cylons.
The religious pursuits of the Cylons obviously have their real world analog, and is a sophisticated commentary on the nature of fundamentalist religion. In it I find echoes of my own sense that monotheism is a bit like a dangerous thought virus that has no logical basis in reality, yet has a way of repeating and transferring itself from one generation to another. Thus I was intrigued to discover the similarities of the Air Force Academy chapel (the first image) with the resurrection ship. Since we know Cylons are not modernists (as the chapel was made in the 1960s and is clearly inspired by modernist architecture), it’s probably a clue that Battlestar Galactica’s writers do in fact view the Cylons as a type of fundamentalist culture which is militaristic, dogmatic and homogeneous. After all, one of the key reasons the Cylons initially attack the human race is that they are viewed as sinful and impure. All these elements happen to be aspects of what is transpiring at the Air Force Academy– and the US military in general– which has become a fierce fundamentalist conversion center, thereby combining high tech with militancy and intense faith. Things get a little loopy, however, when it turns out that it’s tied to the ministry of Ted Haggard (you know, the preacher guy who apparently loved speed and hard (male) bodies).
According to David Antoon, who writes about the academy in a scary article about Christina fundamentalism in the US military:
The Christian supremacist fascism first reported at the Air Force Academy is endemic throughout the military. From the top down, there has been a complete repudiation of constitutional values and time-honored codes of ethics and honor codes in favor of religious ideology. And we now have a revolving door between Blackwater USA, which is Bush’s Praetorian Guard, and the U.S. military at every level. The citizen-soldier military dictated by our founding fathers has been replaced with professional and mercenary right-wing Christian crusaders in control of the world’s most powerful military. The risks to our democratic form of government cannot be overstated.
It’s expedient for the warmongering neocons to encourage fundamentalist militancy in the armed forces because it gives them a hardcore base to execute their goals for economic domination of Muslim controlled oil fields. But like the Cylons, the danger of cultivating such a class of “theo-cons” is that they ultimately may not be controllable and will put forward their own agenda of apocalypse and rapture, something Bush apparently believes in, although I find that to be an excuse at best, and a deadly ruse to hide more nefarious goals. The connection between the mercenary army, Blackwater, and Christian supremacy is an example of the kinds of bad things that happen when you let the tiger out of the cage. In the end, by deploying its private fundamentalist army in the heart of Iraq, the White House may have ultimately undermined its mission. It’s hard to put a smily face mask on extremists in the age of transparent global media. So we may be saved from a Cylon attack after all.
Militainment and Media War
These are a few videos a made a while back. The first started as a little experiment to see if I could splice the sound from one commercial to the visuals of another just to see what would happen. It actually began as an accident because I was in a class giving a talk about advertising when I ended up running a Navy and X Box ad at the same time. I noticed that they both had the same pacing so I combined them, and lo, look what happened. I extended the experiment to combine an Army and WWII movie ad, and so on. You can see all five of my experiments, one after another.
The second video was more intentional. I captured as much news footage as I could during the first couple of weeks of the US invasion of Iraq and then combined that with other programming from the same time period. The networks should be embarrassed by the Stalinist spectacle they constructed.
The fantasy of virtual control
I’ll admit that watching this short video made me cry. Not because I believe all of its arguments–that war and our opinions can be controlled virtually, or that journalism is the answer to our problem of war–but because our military technological mind is getting so out of whack that it increasingly is turning people into aliens who can abstract death and destruction. Still, I’m not afraid because hypocrisy is not sustainable. The control fantasy future of the military planners is founded on nothing substantial except destruction. Some day the only thing left to destroy will be destruction itself. But it’s depressing to see this process in action. To quote the opening of The Great Turning (a book about moving our culture from one of empire to earth community),
[This book is] George W. Bush, whose administration exposed to full view the imperial shadow side of U.S. democracy, stripped away the last of the illusions of my childhood innocence. and compelled me to write this book.
Monks Versus the Military
Monks Versus the Military – CommonDreams.org:
Throughout the protests, the monks have used the symbols and practices of Buddhism to express their discontent and rally public support. At first only a few monks demonstrated in towns such as Pakokku, where the authorities used hired thugs, now called Swan Arr Shin (Possessors of Strength) to lasso and catch the fleeing monks with lariats. Then the thugs threw the monks in prison where they forced them to disrobe and tortured them. In Pakokku, the monks kept some army officers captive for a few hours, but since then, they have walked through cities and towns silently, observing the Theravada monks’ traditional discipline of silence and downcast eyes. They have also been chanting the Metta Thoke or Loving Kindness Sutra, which sends and shares merit to all living beings.
Technorati Tags: Burma
Is MySpace censoring anti-war Websites?
I don’t know anything about a government regulated Internet 2, nor am I familiar with Prison Planet (an image I don’t agree with), but I did find the following news of MySpace censorship disturbing, but not surprising.
MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites:
MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites
Prison Planet blocked as the model for government regulated Internet 2 gets a dry runPaul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, September 25, 2007Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace has been caught in another act of alternative media censorship after it was revealed that bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet.com were being hijacked and forwarded to MySpace’s home page. MySpace has placed Prison Planet on a list of blocked websites supposedly reserved for spam, phishing scams or virus trojans.
It has been apparent for at least two weeks that all bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet were being censored but we decided to wait and see if it was just a technical error before drawing any attention to the problem.
Now there is little doubt that MySpace has deliberately filtered out Prison Planet, preventing anyone from accessing the site via the social networking giant.
Technorati Tags: prison planet
Random daily thought
It’s ironic that the industrial military mindset backed by the most advanced technological image generating mechanism in world history finds itself bogged down in the Middle Eastern desert as its effort to control the information, power and military paradigm of the 20th century is literally being ripped apart one cell phone-powered IED at a time by an insurgent, decentralized, human powered cultural force that decries the representation of god in all forms of media. Just an observation.
Haunted by a brilliant monolog from the past
Operation Silent Thunder
Once again the fake news surfs the real, and gets down and dirty by reporting on the “real” Iraq. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant commentary how how news is staged.
Technorati Tags: Daily Show
The “semiwarriors”
Dr. Stadelmann by Otto Dix, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, W.Landmann Collection
(via Allthingsbeautiful.com)
One of the ideas I’m working for my book is “GridThink” which is an age old dualistic way of thinking that pervades the non-sustianable mititary-industrial-information-entertainment-complex. It has also been called by some, “WhiteThink.” This insidious, world and mind destroying mentality finds its most extreme expression in the so-called National Security State; I say “so-called” because it is one of the most paranoid and insecure ways of viewing the world. Anyhow, the following essay that ran in The Nation discusses the post-war rise and institutionalization of this thinking pattern.
It’s both enlightening and frightening because it suggests that unless this tight clique of paranoids gets checked, the Democrats can do no better reigning them in. Sadly they are completely blind to their Thanatos- Freud’s term for death wish. The worse thing is that they are too chicken to test it themselves, they have to send others to do their bidding. It’s one of the ugliest and darkest qualities generated by the human mind. After Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq, my impression is that they will do no better than the Romans, and will self-destruct, hopefully not taking too many down along the way.
The real affliction is more insidious. For want of a better label, call it “semiwar,” a term coined after World War II by James Forrestal to promote permanent quasi mobilization as the essential response to permanent global crisis. A man who saw demons everywhere, Forrestal was convinced that he alone grasped the danger they posed to the United States.
Forrestal was also a zealot, the prototype for a whole line of national security ideologues stretching across six decades from Dean Acheson to Donald Rumsfeld, from Paul Nitze to Paul Wolfowitz. Geoffrey Perret’s acerbic description of Acheson applies to them all: His “mind turned to the apocalyptic as easily, if not as often, as other men’s thoughts turn toward money or sex.” For semiwarriors, time is always short. The need for action is always urgent. The penalty for hesitation always promises to be dire.
Technorati Tags: Andrew J. Bacevich, The Nation
Some thoughts on McLuhan and war
This is why I think the traditional/classical military empire is on it’s way out. (All supplemental quotes from McLUhan’s Understanding Media, “Roads and Paper Routes” chapter)
The Dali Lama has said that war is irrelevant because in a global culture, if you attack in one space, it affects everyone else (MM: “Our electric extensions of ourselves simply by-pass space and time, and create problems of human involvement and organization for which there is no precedent,” p. 105 and “What emerges is a total field of inclusive awareness. The old patterns of psychic and social adjustment become irrelevant,” p.104).
The idea that a land and its peoples can be controlled afar through military means is an outmoded way of being, based on old concepts of the world that I feel are on there way out (such as the retribilization of our world described by McLuhan). In “paper routes” McLuhan talks about the fringes of empire becoming new centers, and in a sense, in our flat, decentralized and atomized world, we have become a network of nodes and minicenters based on information exchange (“Sea powers thus tend to create centers without margins, and land empires favor the center-margin structure. Electric speeds create centers everywhere. Margins cease to exist on this planet,” p.91).
In my view, the power of the future is who controls information and flows of information, not bodies in space as the military model is based on (“Now that man has extended his nervous system by electric technology, the field of battle has shifted to mental image making-and-breaking, both in war and in business,” p.103). Furthermore, we are bankrupt. It is a matter of time before international finance pulls the plug. It happened to the British after they invaded the Suez Canal. Look what happened to them (“The time factor in every decision of business and finance will acquire new patterns. Among the peoples of the world strange new vortices of power will appear unexpectedly,” p.99).
This is not to say that there won’t be continued efforts to unleash violence upon the world in an attempt to control the chaotic situation, but as they say in South Africa, the dying bull kicks the most (“War is never anything less than accelerated technological change,” p.102).
And finally, when the US attacked Iraq did its best to destroy arguably the weakest military in the world and its infrastructure, and it still can’t control the situation. If this isn’t an argument against empire, I don’t know what is. Mao was wrong. Power does not come from the barrel of the gun. That’s mugger’s logic. That kind of control is ultimately ephemeral and impermanent. As the Aztecs say, empires come and go, but what remains is flower and song (flor y canto). The illusion of eternal control via empire should have gone away with the Nazis. Beware of anyone who still holds this thought form. They are very dangerous to you, me and everyone around them, especially themselves.
You are a node, and don’t you forget it!
The military gets creepier.
Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale | The Register:
… the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.
Tunnel at the end of the light?
Dear peeps,
Sorry for the infrequent postings, but I am traveling and running workshops with little Internet access and time. I’ll be back on a regular schedule soon. Meanwhile, here is a little film trailer to show that I remember and love you. I know it’s not so uplifting, but if there is one the we can do that will make us the “greatest generation” is to end the war.
Here is the link for the film’s Web site. Please pass it along.
Technorati Tags: No End in Sight
Crazy for antiwar viral media
Children of war
Image link
Two summers ago I was mugged at gunpoint. The experience was terribly traumatic and took a tremendous amount of therapy and meditation to heal from. After that my commitment to nonviolence deepened, and I felt even more strongly that these kinds of traumas are reasons why everyone should be against war. So it saddens me, but also confirms my worst expectations, that the war on Iraq has greatly affected children. The number US casualties is sad enough, but when you factor in the lifelong damage this war is causing for thousands of the survivors, I can’t imagine a single argument that would justify inflicting this kind of psychological pain on anyone. Shame on the warmongers!
The following report explains in more detail how the war is hurting children. It does not mention the broken families of US soldiers, but alas that is another story that needs to be told and amplified to stop this insanity.
Iraqi Youth Face Lasting Scars of War – washingtonpost.com:
In a World Health Organization survey of 600 children ages 3 to 10 in Baghdad last year, 47 percent said they had been exposed to a major traumatic event over the past two years. Of this group, 14 percent showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. In a second study of 1,090 adolescents in the northern city of Mosul, 30 percent showed symptoms of the disorder.
Today, toy weapons are among the best-selling items in local markets, and kids play among armored vehicles on streets where pickup trucks filled with masked gunmen are a common sight. On a recent day, a group of children was playing near a camouflage-colored Iraqi Humvee parked in Baghdad’s upscale Karrada neighborhood. One boy clutched a thick stick and placed it on his right shoulder, as if he were handling a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. He aimed it at cars passing by, pretending to blow them up. Two soldiers pointed at the children and laughed.
Many of the children Abdul Muhsin treats have witnessed killings. They have anxiety problems and suffer from depression. Some have recurring nightmares and wet their beds. Others have problems learning in school. Iraqi children, he said, show symptoms not unlike children in other war zones such as Lebanon, Sudan and the Palestinian territories.
War Made Easy
A new documentary on war, press and propaganda from the good folks at MEF, War Made Easy. Check it out.
Guns and cameras
I was once on a panel with Lance Strate. He is a thoughtful, smart media ecology expert who recently wrote a provocative blog on the Virginia Tech murders. He is not the first to equate guns with cameras (Susan Sontag and Paul Virilio have each made the connection on a deep level), but I thought he made some particualry sharp observations about the manner in which news media allow themselves to be exploited by sensationalism. I encourage you to read the entire post.
Lance Strate’s Blog Time Passing: Guns and Cameras:
Guns and cameras are both media of communication, as McLuhan makes clear in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man where he includes chapters on the photograph, motion picture, television, and weapons–both guns and cameras are extensions of the human body, guns extending the fist and fingernail in their offensive capacities, cameras extending the eyes in their voyeuristic capacities. Both guns and cameras are means by which we mediate between ourselves and elements of our environment, they go between us our environment, and in doing so keep the environment as a distance from ourselves. Guns and cameras are both methods by which people communicate, sending messages to their target, and to bystanders alike–that is why we have phrases like, “the shot heard around the world” after all. Guns and cameras are both weapons, both used to attack and cause harm (e.g., the paparazzi, the private detective stalking the adulterer), both used to control and imprison–that is why we talk about cameras using words like shoot, snapshot, load (the film), capture (the subject, the moment), etc.–this is a deep metaphor that reveals an often-unconscious understanding of the link between the two technologies.
Technorati Tags: media, Lance Strate, Virginia Tech
From empire to earth community
I’m a big fan of solution oriented thinkers. Thus it’s refreshing to hear the clarity of David Korten‘s ideas and his overview of history. His book, “The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (BK Currents)” (David C. Korten) comes highly recommended. Please, if you have time, watch this video.
“The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (BK Currents)” (David C. Korten)
Technorati Tags: community, David Korten, earth, empire