Cronaca Sovversiva Feneon-- Faits Divers & Fate's Divers

"The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death"--A Preview of our next Crime Feature

2009-11-23T17:28:00.000-08:00

From%2BOut%2BThat%2BShadow%253A%2BThe%2BLife%2Band%2BLegacy%2Bof%2BEdgar%2BAllan%2BPoe

2009-11-16T11:16:00.000-08:00

From%2BOut%2BThat%2BShadow%253A%2BThe%2BLife%2Band%2BLegacy%2Bof%2BEdgar%2BAllan%2BPoe

David Chirot--Visual Poems from "Death from this Window"

2009-03-12T09:22:00.000-07:00

ICH: 5 re Freeman & Chavez--Silencing/Attacking

2009-03-11T16:33:00.000-07:00

Freeman Withdrawal Marks Victory for Israel Lobby

By Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe

Amb. Chas Freeman withdrew from consideration for a top intelligence post in the Obama administration on Tuesday, following a vitriolic battle that pitted Republican lawmakers and pro-Israel hardliners opposed to his appointment against liberals and members of the intelligence and diplomatic communities who had come to his defence.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22190.htm

===

The Tactics Of the Israel Lobby

By Charles Freeman

I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22192.htm

U.S. analyst withdraws from top post after criticism for anti-Israel views:

Silencing/Attack Freeman and Chavez

Since news of Freeman's nomination, Jewish organizations have leveled criticism at the pick due to his history of opposition to Israel's policies in the Palestinian territories.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1070041.html

===

Freeman: US run by Israeli Lobby:

"The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors,"
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=88235&sectionid=3510203

===

Demonizing Chavez: Israel to use 'anti-Semitic' card against Chavez?:

Tel Aviv embarks on a quest to turn its allies against Caracas after President Hugo Chavez ordered a break in diplomacy with Israel.
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=88203&sectionid=351020202

Windows Live™: Discover 10 secrets about the new Windows Live. View post.

Letter & Links for Linh Dinh: The " New McCarthyism" & American Sheep Sleep--w/Visual Poetry & Fotos--

2009-03-11T15:56:00.001-07:00

This Letter is a couple weeks old now, but thought to put it up as a "Companion Piece" to today's # new articles, one of which is the statement made by Charles Freeman as he withdrew from the Chair of the NIC he had been offered due to the combined efforts of "the Israeli Lobby."

Since the Letter below is about such efforts in other areas of American life, the two entries combined may give a bit of a picture of activities that many have have pointed out, and backed with evidence, are negative in their effects for both the USA and Israel.
Not to mention tens millions of people in the Middle East

As Linh himself writes, he is shocked to find such things going on Bard, the liberal college has taught at in the summers for five years. This example gives some idea of how unquestioning, unaware so many are in the US regarding things happening right in front of them that deeply affect their lives, and their rights as American citizens. This marks the fourth year at this blog I've hoped to present some information, examples, and have Mail Art and Visual Poetry Calls that may help give a "sharper picture" of these events and their effects on the daily lives of Americans and persons worldwide.

In the Declaration of Independence there is a warning about exactly the situation which Charles Freeman in his statement calls " . . .constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country."

When double standards regarding the International and Civil Laws and Rights of persons are accepted unquestioningly as "the norm," in order to protect an Apartheid State, and that further double standards, falsehoods, twistings of language are needed to silence any form of open discussion, let alone to call an Apartheid State's practice
Apartheid, what begins to be created is the kind of approach to language itself which has steadily been developing in the last quarter century in the USA.
This language of sophistry and double talk, Orwell's "Newspeak," has made it possible for the acceptance without much protest of the use of torture, of rendition flights, Guantanamos in side and outside the US, the idea of there being a "Wrong War" and a "Right War," . . . one can go on and on--

One aspect of this damage to language is that it takes away awareness of what is in front of people, Hidden in Plain Site/Sight/Cite. This unawareness leads to the unquestioning acceptance of falsehoods as "true," to the unblinking beliefs in whatever so and so the Authority has said, and the lack of research into issues in al fields and the continual revisions of history that are creating a new form of standardization in knowledge which is to be the One, the True, the Great--

If one cannot ask questions, if one cannot discuss and create in freedom from suppression and harm, then one no longer is living in a Democracy. And for some time now, Americans have not been.

It is amazing to me that so very few American artists, poets, writers, "intellectuals" and citizens have been speaking out against the events of the last decade. It is in part due to the suppression of debate by a variety of very powerful, very well funded and very much embedded in the media pressure and interest groups have in the US, and in part to "cowardice," such as that of "avant" and "language"and other poetries Amiri Baraka wrote of three years ago, and recently the new Attorney General spoke of in terms of race.

One is suppressed from saying what is obvious, and so one begins to be afraid, and then one begins to accept things which are the opposite of the obvious, and tries to convince oneself that this "new" "avant" "flarf" or "conceptual" way is something "transgressive," "liberating" and "real" that will both make one feel "far out" and at the same time keep one's job safety on the tenure or administrative tracks.

Perhaps the fleeing to the page began due to the opening fire on students at Kant and Jackson State--? The Age of Nixon, of law and order, the Silent Majority, did't take a dive with Nixon, but found new life under guises that would have received plaudits and happy laughter at the "fun" from Nixon and the Great Revolutionary of Reaction, Ronald Reagan. After all , now poets and writers were succumbing to the forms of language recommended by these "pioneers"--

And once language had abandoned the streets, it became an ever easier mark for the Newspeak and Double Standards and silencing that exist now, along with the ongoing torture, bombings, renditions and al the rest.

This is the Time of the New Extreme Experimental American Poetry & Arts . . .

Note: I began this a few days ago as a letter for fellow poet and translator Linh Dinh, primarily as a means to provide him with some links that I thought might be of interest/use for him. Recently the Attorney General of the USA called his fellow citizens “cowards” when it comes to questions concerning race. This is a provocative pronouncement, especially coming from an Attorney general who under the Clinton Administration in a different capacity worked so hard for the pardon of the fugitive criminal financier Marc Rich, while Clinton ignored the plea for pardon for Leonard Peltier, American Indian Movement activist, writer and artist, now serving his 37th year of imprisonment for a crime evidence points to his never having committed, convicted after a trial in whcih the number of illegalities employed made it a virtual kangaroo court.

As my mother and some friends pointed out to me, the Attorney General perhaps may be thinking of racism regarding White and Black peoples, and not those racisms in the US towards American Indians, Asians, Latinos, and Inuit Peoples.

Since I began writing, I posted at one of my blogs two brief articles on the refusal of the Obama Administration to participate in an international conference on racism (while possibly participating in a form of study committee--) because, while it is opposed to anti-Semitism, it lists Zionism as a form of racism, with racism defined as the belief/practice of superiority of one race over another(s). Even if one claims Zionism is not Racism, certainly the practice of State Apartheid supported by the USA wholeheartedly and backed up with weapons, fuel, and cash is.

http://davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com/2009/02/obama-admin-to-boycott-un-racism.html

I also posted the latest update from Muzzlewatch re the situation at Hampshire College in re its efforts to become the first American campus calling for boycott and divesture of the college from firms linked to the Apartheid policies of the State of Israel, just as Hampshire was also the first college to do so against the then Apartheid regime of South Africa. With the entry of Alan Dershowitz into the fray, the College has begun to back off and to disown the actions of some of the students.
http://davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com/2009/02/selective-divestment-at-hampshire.html

A few days ago, Linh Dinh wrote to inform me that a foto of mine was at one of his blogs, and to give the link of a letter by Joel Kovel to Bard College that is at his other blog. Linh expressed surprise and dismay that Bard, a liberal arts college where he has taught in the summers, would be capable of acting in the manner which Kovel accuses it of; that is, that his being relieved of his teaching duties there is related to his having stirred unwanted controversy in a number of quarters with his writings and ideas regarding a “One State Solution” to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and his being critical of both Israel State Policies and aspects of Zionism.
http://wwwwsonneteighteencom.blogspot.com/2009/02/statement-of-joel-kovel-regarding-his.html
Photo is at:
http://lowerhalf.blogspot.com/2009/02/to-sister.html

The Bard/Kovel incident is but the latest in a long series of such controversies, reaching back through many years, and is not even the first time Kovel has been a lightning rod for attacks from various Right Wing Pro-Israel groups, in what in many other Western countries and journals—including in Israel-- has been called America’s “New McCarthyism.”
(See links below for more re Kovel and the termination of U Michigan’s Distributing of Pluto Press in the USA due to objections to one of his books by Stand with Us.)
Ironically at the same time the Bard-Kovel controversy is going on, Bard and the Palestinian Al Quds University are opening an exchange program:
Colleges join hands in U.S.-Palestinian venture
By Ethan Bronner
Published: February 16, 2009
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/16/africa/15quds.php

JERUSALEM: It would be hard to find two institutions of higher learning that seem more different than Bard College, an upscale, bucolic college in Dutchess County, New York, and Al Quds University, a struggling, sprawling Palestinian institution in and near this disputed capital.
Yet the two schools have decided to join forces in an unusual venture aimed at injecting American educational values and expertise into Palestinian society, in hopes of contributing to a future democratic State of Palestine. Although the effort has been many months in the planning, those involved say the recent war in Gaza and a political turn rightward in Israel make it more important and urgent.
The plan, relying largely on outside financing, includes a liberal arts honors college and a master's degree program in teaching, both located at Al Quds and granting joint degrees, as well as a model high school to serve as an educational laboratory. The starting date for the first two is September; the high school is to open in 2010.Rregarding Joel Kovel and the stoppage of Pluto press’ Distribution in the USA by U Michigan Press, following continual pressure from Stand With Us, a right-wing pro-Israel “watch group,” here are a series of links detailing the history of that controversy. The Dearborn Underground link is included to give the “other side of the story” from those of the other links.

The University of Michigan Press, which was the American distributor of books published by Pluto Press, a radical, British publisher, went through a long saga with Kovel’s book: First they stopped distribution of it, then reinstated it, then stalled over whether to keep their contract with Pluto Press, then decided to keep the contract, then all but cut ties Pluto Press by changing the terms of third-party distribution deals.

http://www.andykroll.com/higher-education/joel-kovel-author-of-overcoming-zionism-loses-professorship-at-bard-college
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/10/29/university_of_michigan_press_to_continue
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2007/11/01/u-of-michigan-says-yes-to-pluto-press/
http://dearbornunderground.blogspot.com/2008/06/university-of-michigan-dumps-pluto.html
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/category/academia/page/4/
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/about/
Muzzlewatch’s self-description: “Tracking efforts to stifle open debate about US-Israeli foreign policy.”
Another irony, among so many in the current situation, in which being critical of what is often called “the world’s last Colonial Power” is subjected to attack and silencing, is not only reminiscent of McCarthyism, but is one of the causes for the Declaration of Independence, in which separation from a Colonial Power and its silencing of criticisms against it and its influence on the ideas and behaviors of those in positions of power to suppress freedom of thought and expression is deemed of the utmost necessity. A further irony is that in the USA, which is so good at imposing its ideas & ideals on other countries By All Means Necessary, is in turn being treated in the same manner by a Colonial Power which is heavily armed, funded and supported by the US. In a bizarre way, the US has come full circle and returned to being a Colony, or Colonies, manufacturing goods and paying “taxation without representation” to a Colonial master, one which demands that there be no criticism allowed of the actions of the Master, nor any regulation or control over what the Master does with the weapons and monies continually supplied to it; even, as with the demand for more cluster bombs during the Invasion of Lebanon, the supplying of such weapons violates the US’ own laws against providing them to a State known to be using them on civilians.
One may say then that America, so noted for “American Exceptionalism,” in turns makes exception for Israel within the US’ own laws and life as a society. That this exceptionalism impinges so often on the First Amendment Rights of American citizens is in itself a question that is as much as possible removed from the realm of discourse and debate. Since so many decisions made involving tax payer dollars, the rights of individual citizens, and much of American Foreign Policy are contingent upon suppression of discourse and information, inquiry, one may ask what it is that is so important to keep out of the public mind and view that is necessary to the continuance of such actions?
There is one other exception to American Laws and Rights and that is the American Indian, as the USA consistently refuses to sign the International Recognition of the Rights of the Indigenous. Perhaps this holds one of the keys to the silencing of questions regarding the actions undertaken by the US on the part of the State Policies of the Israeli Administrations through the decades.
Recently the new Attorney General of the US accused Americans of “cowardice” when it comes to facing questions of race. To what extent and into how many areas the Attorney general meant, I cannot say; I wonder if he meant in such areas as that even with the election of a Black president the US vigorously supports the world’s one Apartheid State, not to mention the exceptions made—and an impending judgment before the Supreme Court will have more to say regarding this—for the recognition and treatment of American Indians as well as a great any other Racial, Ethnic and Religious groups within the US.
How can Democracy reconcile itself with “Exceptionalisms” which make the practice of Apartheid acceptable? In an open, democratic society there would at least be present debate and inquiry on the subject, and protests allowed, if that is the “will of the people.” Instead, one finds that in order to protect the status quo of “exceptions,” suppression must be used by “Any means Necessary,” including loss of livelihood of “out of line” individuals, , interference with distribution of presses, threats made by means of blackmail, intimidation, campaigns with vast funding and influences and the deliberate use of disinformation. All of these actions contribute to creating indeed an atmosphere not only of silence, but of “cowardice,” due to the continual application of the pressures of FEAR—aka “scare tactics.”
In short, in order to protect and advance undemocratic ideas and ideals, undemocratic methods are necessary.
In the last four decades especially there has been an erosion, slowly, steadily and in recent years more swiftly –of the Constitution, of Human Rights, Civil Rights, of the first Amendment and the Fourth Amendment has been turned into not much more than a fig leaf so full of holes it is not much use for covering or protecting even a mouse hole. This continual assault does indeed produce forms of cowardice, of silencing, of caving in to pressures which go against what once had been considered—if not always protected and practiced-- “inalienable rights,” and are now basically reserved for the elites and the extremely wealthy.

A Year ago, Linh wrote:
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Crimes against humanity in Gaza
David-Baptiste Chirot is about the only American poet who's focussed on Israel's enormous crimes against humanity in Gaza. As Israel's enabler, the U.S. has even more blood on its hands.

Since 2006, I have hosted two Mail Art/Visual Poetry calls to due with not only Lebanon/Palestine, begun at the start of the July 2006 Israeli Invasion of Lebanon, but also, in the current call, Walls, Prisons, Surveillance, Torture in Gaza, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the prisons across the world and the “Gitmos Across the USA,” for which there is a detailed sidebar of informations and links at my blog
http://davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com

This Call is concerning these practices as world wide phenomena, and in especial these practices which are funded by the USA in Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, and in nations where Americans ship rendition detainees to such as Egypt, and a host of others, including in eastern Europe, as well as actions sponsored by the 700 plus bases the USA has worldwide.
Currently the US is constructing its newest most mega-Prison at Bagram, in Afghanistan, at which the policies of the Bush Administration are being continued by the Obama government.
While Gaza is the world’s single largest prison in history, the USA currently boats 2, 000, 000 civilians of its own in prisons, leading the world both numerically and by percentage of population in this category of “achievements.”
This does not include the untold numbers of “illegal aliens” and their families kept in horrific conditions in both work places such as were found at Pottsville, Iowa, (the world’s largest kosher meat packing plant) and many another, and in the camps set aside for the families of such workers when the workers are arrested, instead of the owners who have also broken the law in hiring them.
The focus on events in Israel/Palestine is due to a number of reasons; first, because the US spends ten million dollars a day minimum in aid to Israel, supplies it with the most advanced possible weaponries, surveillance systems and in turn purchases a good deal from Israel, which is the world’s 4th largest military as well as the 4th largest exporter of surveillance/security/weapons technologies. Second—the US is supporting Apartheid, which calls into question the US’ own attitudes and ideas regarding racism and the “superiority” of one race or ethnic group over another, supposedly something banned in the US. Third, it is supporting an ethnic cleansing which is very reminiscent of that which the US conducted against Indigenous peoples, including my relatives and ancestors in the US, and continues now by other means.
When a child, one is told that a person’s friends are a reflection on one’s own character. Historically the US has backed, installed, funded, protected, armed a great many anti-democratic States and Governments, Regimes, Elites, Juntas and Emperors, Shahs, Dictators and hosts of other criminals. Torture, taught at the School of the Americas, has been a routine method for extending American influence—until recently, when it has openly become part of the US’ own practices and is continuing to be despite the fine statements of the President.
The use of torture, the use of rendition, the support for Apartheid, all these corrode any semblance of democracy and in turn are disastrous for Free Speech, Free Expression and for the language itself, which becomes riddled with so many double standards, hypocrisies and sophistries, that it ceases to have any “direct meaning” and devolves into Orwell’s Newspeak, a kind of automaton Double Talk.

Almost a year after the post re my blog, Linh posted a note at the Harriet Blog with the following:

Tahseen al-Khateeb, whose translations of Arabic poetry I've featured on this blog, circulated an understandably outraged email:
It's very obvious-- without a single thread of doubt-- that the "conscience" of the Western intellectuals (if there's any!) is in a deep COMA! As if the Palestinian blood is water and what's happening in Gaza is some kind of a video game! What a shame! SLEEP WELL!
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/01/players_grandma_is_angry_1.html

In the weeks since this statement was made, the US has seen a flurry of activities of protest, as well as the expected heavy counter attacks from such well known figures as Alan Dershowitz (who authored, following 9/11, a NY Times piece suggesting modifications in the First Amendment and who has made public calls in the past for the extermination of Palestinians, as well as leading the charge in the 2008 overturn of Norman Finkelstein’s approved tenure at DePaul, followed by Finkelstein’s being banned for ten years from entering Israel) and a host of such groups as Stand with Us, a right-wing Pro-Israel group that was instrumental in the loss of Pluto Press’ University of Michigan American distributorship because of one book it had published by—--the afore-mentioned Joel Kovel.

Here are some recent examples--

http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2009/02/19/joel-kovel-accuses-bard-of-firing-him-for-his-anti-zionist-scholarship/

http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2009/02/17/directv-censors-us-campaign-to-end-the-israeli-occupation%E2%80%99s-gaza-tv-ad/
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2009/01/27/media-circus-bill-moyers-60-minutes-bob-simon-and-the-backlash/
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2009/01/28/bbc-thinks-that-some-humanitarian-aid-is-more-biased-than-others-the-exceptionalism-of-israel-yet-again/
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2009/01/14/noted-israeli-peace-activist-and-commentator-banned-from-speaking/

Here is one example in full that is of great importance:

UCLA professor helps launch boycott of Israel

Nearly 200 US professors follow suit; others cite need for pressure on
Palestine, too

By *Anna Andersen *

Monday, February 23, 2009
The committee was
formed in response to a call for support by
Palestinian civil society and follows the guidelines drafted by the
Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel,
which was launched in 2004, according to its Web site.

The call is “inspired by the struggle of South Africans against
apartheid and in the spirit of international solidarity, moral
consistency and resistance to injustice and oppression,” according to
its mission statement.

Although there have been local efforts to boycott and divest from
Israeli companies in the past, this is the first attempt in the United
States to organize an academic and cultural boycott on a national level,
Hale said.

The U.S. boycott was largely provoked by the recent attack on Gaza, in
which hundreds of children were killed, Hale said.

“The bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza was an important
impetus,” she added.
“That made us think Israeli academics should take a
stand and put pressure on their universities, which are highly
implicated in the developing of weapons through scientific research, not
unlike other universities.”

However, the boycott is institutional and is not aimed at individual
academics and cultural figures, Hale said.

It means that foreign exchange and cooperative programs with Israel
would cease, but it doesn’t mean that Israeli academics would stop being
invited to speak at UCLA or that their work would cease to be published,
Hale added.

The academic and cultural boycott of Israel is part of a global boycott,
divestments and sanctions movement supporting Palestine . . .

Still, the U.S. Academic and Cultural Boycott of
Israel campaign
believes it is time to take a stance, “especially in light of the
censorship and silencing of the Palestine question in U.S. universities,
as well as U.S. society at large,” according to the campaign’s mission
statement.
http://davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com/2009/02/ucla-professor-helps-launch-boycott-of.html

WALL OF SILENCE/SCREAMING WALL AND THE QUIET AMERICAN

Before continuing, here are examples of some links dealing with silencing of dissent, different points of view, on line and in print and in speech--
Dissent despite repressive silencing in Israel
Posted on January 23 2009 by Jewish Peace News
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2009/01/23/dissent-despite-repressive-silencing-in-israel/

The silencing of dissent in Israel part II
Posted on January 23 2009 by Rob Lipton
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2009/01/23/the-silencing-of-dissent-in-israel-part-ii/

The following are just a very few taken from a long article which cites a great many specific cases as well as providing a huge amount of informationm with tons of links, about on line censorship practised by various pro-Israel groups: on line censorship of you tube, facebook, Wikipedia etc are all from this link, as also is the information below, given just to show some of the examples—
http://irish4palestine.blogspot.com/2009/02/online-censorship-by-israel.html
“megaphone”, endorsed by the IDF (Israeli army) and government
See here:

Megaphone desktop tool
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Megaphone desktop tool is a Windows "action alert" tool developed by Give Israel Your United Support (GIYUS) and distributed by World Union of Jewish Students, World Jewish Congress, The Jewish Agency for Israel, World Zionist Organization, StandWithUs, Hasbara fellowships, HonestReporting, and other pro-Israel public relations, media watchdog, or activism organizations. The tool delivers real-time alerts about key articles, videos, blogs, and surveys related to Israel or the Arab-Israeli conflict, especially those perceived by GIYUS to be highly critical of Israel, so that users can vote or add comments expressing their support of Israel. The tool was released in July during the 2006 Lebanon War.
According the Jerusalem Post, Amir Gissin, head of the Public Affairs Department of the Foreign Ministry of Israel, has expressed support for the tool's use. "The Foreign Ministry itself is now pushing the idea, urging supporters of Israel everywhere to become cyberspace soldiers in the new battleground for Israel's image."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaphone_desktop_tool
• Current list of Internet Megaphone alerts

http://irish4palestine.blogspot.com/2009/02/online-censorship-by-israel.html
The above as well as a huge number of specific cases and groups performing on line censorship of you tube, facebook, Wikipedia etc are all from this link, as also is the information below, given just to show some of the examples—
http://irish4palestine.blogspot.com/2009/02/online-censorship-by-israel.html
And a little tidbit from the Jpost on JIDF. Notice that this JIDF group infiltrated and then took over a FACEBOOK group using some type of software, because they did not like the answer they got from FACEBOOK when they complained. The group, according to FACEBOOK was a political discourse group, and as such, FACEBOOK refused to close it down. So the JIDF took action themselves. See here:
Jul 29, 2008 21:16 Updated Jul 30, 2008 9:47
Jewish Internet Defense Force 'seizes control' of anti-Israel Facebook group
In the JIDF's latest efforts, the group has been working around the clock to dismantle the group on Facebook titled, "Israel is not a country! Delist it from Facebook as a country." That group had tens of thousands of members.
Facebook's negligence and abdication of responsibility gave us no option but to take matters in our own hands," the JIDF added.
The JIDF would not specify what technological methods it used to gain access to the group, but said it succeeded in doing so after the old administrators left.
The JIDF received a response from Facebook, he said, which called the anti-Israel group "legitimate political discourse." Facebook was not available for comment.
"[The JIDF] gained control of the group without compromising Facebook's security," Oboler said. "What they have done… is taken away the hate that was spreading through [the group's] membership. It's a shame that Facebook themselves did not remove it. It has taken a lot of effort from [the JIDF], while it would have taken Facebook one click."
The JIDF said its efforts are not limited to Facebook, but extend to anti-Semitism and anti-Israel posts found throughout the Internet, including on sites such as Google, Google Earth, YouTube and Wikipedia.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1215331137728&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
So what group or site will they come for next? Beware of who you allow to join your groups and blogs, they will join and then destroy your site.
Remember this, he who controls the internet controls the news and controls the battle for the hearts and minds of the general public. If any of this makes you angry or outraged, write to your Elected Representatives and demand that Israel stop censoring the internet. Who made them “Judge, Jury and Executioner”
We are all intelligent enough to make up our own minds *if* we are allowed to see unfettered information ourselves, why is Israel so worried? Because the internet is the LAST place news is free and where news can freely be put online for all to see. Don’t’ let Israel gain control of what you see, hear and read. America must stop being Israel’s “poodle”.
More information on this subject in tomorrow’s blog, check back then or subscribe to this blog.
PEOPLE READING THIS BLOG SHOULD CHECK TO SEE IF THEIR YOUTUBE CHANNEL OR ACCOUNT IS LISTED AS A TARGET OF THE CENSORING ZIONISTS WHO WORK FOR THE ISRAEL ARMY AND GOVERNMENT
Here is the JIDF’s YOUTUBE LIST OF CHANNELS AND USERS (note the first scrolling box are all the accounts they have managed to suspend or close down, but scroll down the page more to see the active list they are currently working on now, you may be listed!)
http://www.thejidf.org/2008/02/problematic-youtube-channels-and-videos.html
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, don't say anyhing bad about Israel, or they will come for you in the night…………………
thus concludes Sinéad's fine report.
And this is what I found while digging into it some more:
Wage Cyberwar Against Hamas, Surrender Your PC
By Noah Shachtman EmailJanuary 08, 2009 | 1:10:27 PM

A group of Israeli students and would-be cyberwarriors have developed a program that makes it easy for just about anyone to start pounding on pro-Hamas websites. But using this "Patriot" software, to join in the online fight, means handing over control of your computer to the Israeli hacker group.
http://irish4palestine.blogspot.com/2009/02/online-censorship-by-israel.html

Perhaps lost in the brouhaha is a fundamental question for a democracy: can a highly funded narrowly focused lobbying group force the banning of an entire Press from distribution with the USA, all in the name of suppressing one book and continuing attacks on its author, resulting in the present controversy??
During both the period the Pluto Press controversy and also the truly “cruel and unusual punishment” meted out to Professor Norman Finkelstein’s tenure at DePaul University, I sent out all the petitions that came my way for both controversies, and updates re the events as they transpired. None of these emailings seemed to generate any discussion, nor gain any interest in the pattern of attacks on persons, galleries, institutions, bookstores, museums, that was going on continually and still is. The silence was deafening, as the phrase goes. Since I received no responses, I can only wonder what the reasons were and are. Yet it has been noted since the Iraq Invasion that American intellectuals, artists, poets have seemed to ignore the events going on in their name—the uses of torture, the breaking of international and American Laws on a routine basis, and the ongoing funding and support for an Apartheid State that also has showed no concern at all for the Laws it expect every other country to live by.
Amiri Baraka wrote a couple years ago in the Poetry Project Newsletter of the cowards of academia and the poetic establishments there and in the mainstream regarding voicing any kind of direct and open opposition to the policies of the US and Israeli governments who are massacring citizens with US tax payer dollars, dollars which are taken away from the tax payer and invested in mass death, torture, imprisonments and Apartheid.
In Torture: Cancer of Democracy, Phillipe Vidal-Naquet describes how the use of torture by a Nation’s armies eats away at the inner being of that country’s citizens. Once the boundary line has been crossed in which the citizens are aware of what is happening, and accept it as a matter of daily routine, they have begun to surrender any sense of ethics, inquiry, questioning and independent thought unless they begin to become aware that it is not simply torture alone that is destroying the Democratic/ values of a Nation, it is the entire system which is supporting it, which is involved and which is responsible. Infected by this “Cancer,” the inner life of a society is eaten away and what remains on the outside are a bunch of shells going through the motions of being a “Democratic Society.” The Cancer of Torture joins that of Apartheid support and the acceptance of Exceptionalism as being an absolute and moral Right for the US and Israel, while condemning al others to a second rate at best if not a far more inferior status.. The treatment of the Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Lebanese and many others is well into the War crimes territory, yet it is not noticed at all, because it is claimed that any thing but non-human treatments to be given to the non-humans who constitute the populations of these areas of colonization, invasions, occupation, hatred and lies. History and language become ever more distorted with each passing day, and it is especially language which functions as the method for maintaining silence on the one hand and on the other the forcing to speak of torture.
While millions scream in pain, in terror, in loss, and agony that they are not recognized nor treated as human beings are guaranteed to be treated by Internal Law, while these screams go on on one side of the Wall on the other side is the face of the Wall of Silence, as though complicit yet not opposed carry on their daily existence.
This Wall is built of words as much as mortar and cement, steel rods—for it’s the language one uses that enables one to employ two standards at the same time regarding the rights of persons, the freedom of peoples, and their vey existences. As one observer said of what is allowed by the Israelis to enter Gaza as food and supplies—“Enough to exist, but not enough to live on.”
Can one not hear immediately the debates over how many calories people need to live? It was discovered already two years ago that Palestinians in the West Bank were allowed substantially less drinking and washing water per annum that is considered possible to live on. And that is the West Bank—in Gaza there is basically no water that is potable at all. But then, one can imagine debates about how much water people really need, how much they may be thirsty and how much might just be elaborate acting to play to the cameras of the world’s scarce journalists and humanitarian organizations allowed to even go inside these areas. In Iraq, there is far less water and electricity available to the people than there was before the Invasion and Occupation. In Afghanistan, conditions have steadily deteriorated below even the levels of deep poverty the society has always existed in as far as the invaders are concerned. During the early phases of the disaster in Afghanistan, when the US claimed to be winning the War—an interview on television with a high ranking US official made it very clear that t in order to sustain any kind of life in Afghanistan, it was necessary to look the other way while the heroin trade erupted twice each year in ever grater frenzies of dollars and demonic strengths never before seen on the streets of the US, especially in the suburb, where heroin is considered higher class than smoking crack.
The official was asked the same question three times and each time gave the same answer—that allowing the heroin trade to go on was the most immediately available means by which the State of Afghanistan could begin to fund its efforts towards becoming a “democratic State” free of terrorism and terrorists.
With one stroke so to speak, this smilingly bland “Quiet American” had just opened the Gates of Hell of heroin addiction to millions of Americans. And their deaths also, as a very high number of overdoses have occurred, even in older users which had before been unheard of, due to the strength of the new heroin on the streets.
The costs to families, health care providers in a time of scarcity for treatment centers and programs, cannot even begin to be measured—and these are “behind the lines” in the invaders’ own” "homeland,” on top of the full scale murder being conducting on the Afghan people.
The wars waged abroad take many more tolls on the American people than they are allowed to know of—
For example, a huge number of obvious Post Traumatic Stress Disorder returned veterans of the Wars are not diagnosed deliberately, so that the government will not have to pay for any of the costs of their treatment. Left out in the wind, dangling by a slim thread at best—ever more soldiers return home to kill themselves, and others also—but the suicide rate among the returnees is of an epidemic proportion.
A friend of mine who was two years in Iraq is in such agony and insanity—his very being is a scream for help—a walking time bomb that will destroy himself and al those around him—and no doctor who has seen him will offer any form of diagnosis. For once the diagnosis is made; the doors are open for the government to start paying to take care of its veterans—
Not taking care of these women and men is a sentence of death for a vast number of veterans, who return home to find no one to defend them after they have done their defense of their country. Families are helpless after a certain point, and are in torment as this unknown monster runs rampant until stopping its agony with its own hands.
Yet the “Quiet American” in charge of al this death and destruction at home and abroad remains just that—Quiet, and makes sure as much as possible that the American public remains quiet.

When a friend of mine first used the term “School of Quietude” I thought he was speaking of the Language and avant poets, who have been so silent al these years regarding any of these events. It was hilarious in a bitter way to find out that this is a name for certain kinds of “mainstream” poets and their imitators.
Yet—are they not al of the same school, that of the Quiet American--?
In Graham Greene’s novel of that name, the Quiet American seems innocent young person filled with virtues gleaned from various US policy books and the guru author of a number of these. Yet below the nice, quiet surface there is lurking as ever the mass murderer an his influx of destructive weaponry, his aim to install a dictator in the place of either a Democratic Government or a Communist one, and the fervent hope that someone the world could be much “cleaner.”
Those who have mania for cleaning today are ethnically cleansing with the full support of the USA, and the American language meanwhile gets a good purging also, of the words and ideas and books, documentaries, you tube videos, films, songs, art and dance performances which they are told might contaminate them with the dirtiness of those non human existences barely existing who are in store for as an Israeli Minister put it last year, a Shoah for the Palestinians, and no doubt sooner than later an attack on Iran.
Will there be any language other than a Double Newspeak of a quiet language which is held in the mind simultaneously with that one which demands vengeance, destruction, violence, torture and bombing bombing ever more bombing?--

US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (uscampaign@mail.democracyinaction.org)
Join the US Campaign and our allies around the world in a month of action supporting boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) targeting Israel's military occupation. March offers many opportunities for action, including Israeli Apartheid Week (March 1-8), Rachel Corrie Remembrance Day (March 16) and Global BDS Action Day (March 30). We also urgently need to support Hampshire College Students for Justice in Palestine's recent victory winning campus divestment from Israeli Apartheid.
Two weeks ago, Hampshire College announced that it was divesting from a mutual fund which has holdings in six corporations that support Israel's military occupation. Now Hampshire's administration is caving to pressure from Alan Dershowitz and trying to reinvest in two of these corporations - Motorola and Terex. Write to Hampshire College's President, Ralph Hexter, and tell him to stand strong for divestment. Click here to send him an email! Click here to organize locally for our national boycott of Motorola.
Take Action: President Obama to Sanction Israel?
February 23, 2009
Learn more about the Obama Administration's deliberations to cut aid to Israel and find out how to take action to hold Israel accountable for its misuses of U.S. weapons against Palestinians

Galleanisti Manifesto: Plain Words: 'Plain Words' was found at the site of a series of bombings against capitalist targets in 1919,

2009-03-11T15:40:00.000-07:00

Plain Words
'Plain Words' was found at the site of a series of bombings against capitalist targets in 1919, including billionaire John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Alexander Palmer. The primes suspects were Galleanists, followers of insurrectionary anarchist Luigi Galleani (1861-1831), founder and editor of the newspaper 'Cronaca Sovversiva.' Published for over 15-years almost entirely in Italian, the magazine made a strong case for "propaganda by the deed," that is: revolutionary violence as opposed to simply propaganda by the word. The Galleanists tried to put the ideas into practice; for example, a Chicago chef added arsenic to the soup for 200 at a banquet to honor Archbishop Mundelein (no one died - he added too much poison and it was all vomited back up). The June 1919 bombings did kill three - one of the bombers, a woman walking by, and a night watchman; in contrast, from 1914 to 1918, tens of millions were maimed or killed in the capitalists' first World War.

The powers that be make no secret of their will to stop, here in America, the world-wide spread of revolution. The powers that be must reckon that they will have to accept the fight they have provoked.
A time when the social question's solution can be delayed no longer; class war is on and can not cease but with a complete victory for the International proletariat.
The challenge is an old one, oh "democratic" lords of the autocratic republic. We have been dreaming of freedom, we have talked of liberty, we have aspired to a better world, and you jailed us, you clubbed us, you deported us, you murdered us whenever you could.
Now that the great war, waged to replenish your purses, and build a pedestal to your saints, is over, nothing better can you do to protect your stolen millions, and your usurped fame, than to direct all the power of the murderous institutions you created for your exclusive defense, against the working multitudes rising to a more human conception of life.
The jails, the dungeons you reared to bury all protesting voices, are now replenished with languishing conscientious workers, and never satisfied, you increase their number ever day.
It is history of yesterday that your gunmen were shooting and murdering unarmed masses by the wholesale; it has been the history of every day in your regime; and now all prospects are even worse.
Do not expect us to sit down and pray and cry. We accept your challenges and mean to stick to our war duties. We know that all you do is for your defense as a class; we know also that the proletariat has the same right to protect itself, since their press has been suffocated, their mouths muzzled; we mean to speak for them the voice of dynamite, through the mouth of guns.
Do not say we are acting cowardly because we keep hiding, do not say it is abominable; it is war, class war, and you were the first to wage it under cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws, behind the guns of your bone-headed slave.
No liberty do you accept but yours; the working people also have a right to freedom, and their rights, our own rights, we have set our minds to protect at any price.
We are not many, perhaps more than you dream of, though but are all determined to fight to the last, till a man remains buried in your Bastilles, till a hostage of the working class is left to the tortures of your police system, and will never rest until your fall is complete, and the laboring masses have taken possession of all that rightly belongs to them.
There will be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.
We are ready to do anything and everything to suppress the capitalist class; just as you are doing anything and everything to suppress the proletarian revolution.
Our mutual position is pretty clear. What has been done by us so far is only a warning that there are friends of popular liberties still living. Only now we are getting into the fight; and you will have a chance to see what liberty-loving people can do.
Do not seek to believe that we are the Germans' or the devil's paid agents; you know well we are class-conscious men with strong determination, and no vulgar liability. And never hope that your cops, and your hounds will ever succeed in ridding the country of the anarchistic germ that pulses in our veins.
We know how we stand with you and know how to take care of ourselves. Besides, you will never get all of us * * * and we multiply nowadays. Just wait and resign to your fate, since privilege and riches have turned your heads.
Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny!
THE ANARCHIST FIGHTERS.

MuzzleWatch: Charles Freeman's statements & 2 articles re his withdrawal from NIC Chair

2009-03-11T13:54:00.000-07:00

"MuzzleWatch" - 3 new articles

1. Charles Freeman’s statement on shameful smear campaign
2. Bullies win: Charles Freeman out.
3. Greenwald declares end of the “neocon lynch mob”- Charles Freeman tests thesis.
4. More Recent Articles
5. Search MuzzleWatch

Charles Freeman’s statement on shameful smear campaign

Wow. Wow. Wow. Chas Freeman says, ” I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country….It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends.” Foreign Policy has his entire statement:

Retired Amb. Chas Freeman, who said today that he no longer accepts an offer to chair the National Intelligence Council, has just sent this message:

You will by now have seen the statement by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair reporting that I have withdrawn my previous acceptance of his invitation to chair the National Intelligence Council.

I have concluded that the barrage of libelous distortions of my record would not cease upon my entry into office. The effort to smear me and to destroy my credibility would instead continue. I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country. I agreed to chair the NIC to strengthen it and protect it against politicization, not to introduce it to efforts by a special interest group to assert control over it through a protracted political campaign.

As those who know me are well aware, I have greatly enjoyed life since retiring from government. Nothing was further from my mind than a return to public service. When Admiral Blair asked me to chair the NIC I responded that I understood he was “asking me to give my freedom of speech, my leisure, the greater part of my income, subject myself to the mental colonoscopy of a polygraph, and resume a daily commute to a job with long working hours and a daily ration of political abuse.” I added that I wondered “whether there wasn’t some sort of downside to this offer.” I was mindful that no one is indispensable; I am not an exception. It took weeks of reflection for me to conclude that, given the unprecedentedly challenging circumstances in which our country now finds itself abroad and at home, I had no choice but accept the call to return to public service. I thereupon resigned from all positions that I had held and all activities in which I was engaged. I now look forward to returning to private life, freed of all previous obligations.

I am not so immodest as to believe that this controversy was about me rather than issues of public policy. These issues had little to do with the NIC and were not at the heart of what I hoped to contribute to the quality of analysis available to President Obama and his administration. Still, I am saddened by what the controversy and the manner in which the public vitriol of those who devoted themselves to sustaining it have revealed about the state of our civil society. It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends.

The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

The outrageous agitation that followed the leak of my pending appointment will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues. I regret that my willingness to serve the new administration has ended by casting doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what policies might best serve the interests of the United States rather than those of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government.

In the court of public opinion, unlike a court of law, one is guilty until proven innocent. The speeches from which quotations have been lifted from their context are available for anyone interested in the truth to read. The injustice of the accusations made against me has been obvious to those with open minds. Those who have sought to impugn my character are uninterested in any rebuttal that I or anyone else might make.

Still, for the record: I have never sought to be paid or accepted payment from any foreign government, including Saudi Arabia or China, for any service, nor have I ever spoken on behalf of a foreign government, its interests, or its policies. I have never lobbied any branch of our government for any cause, foreign or domestic. I am my own man, no one else’s, and with my return to private life, I will once again – to my pleasure – serve no master other than myself. I will continue to speak out as I choose on issues of concern to me and other Americans.

I retain my respect and confidence in President Obama and DNI Blair. Our country now faces terrible challenges abroad as well as at home. Like all patriotic Americans, I continue to pray that our president can successfully lead us in surmounting them.

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Bullies win: Charles Freeman out.

In my post this morning, I suggested the nomination of Charles Freeman for top intelligence analyst post would be the test for Glenn Greenwald’s optimistic theory that the age of right-wing “pro-Israel” bullying was over. Well, score one for the bullies:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The candidate for a top U.S. intelligence post withdrew from the running on Tuesday after angering some in Congress with remarks on Israeli “oppression” of Palestinians, and about China.

The office of Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said in a statement that Charles Freeman, who had been picked to head the National Intelligence Council, had asked not to proceed.

Blair had accepted Freeman’s decision with regret, the statement said.

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Greenwald declares end of the “neocon lynch mob”- Charles Freeman tests thesis.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, one of the smartest commentators on the blatant hypocrisy (and self-destructiveness, it sadly needs to be said) of the Israel-right-or-wrong crowd. He has been writing lately about what he sees as the new irrelevance of the neocon/Israel-is-always-right bloviators.

Greenwald tends to group the Abe Foxman/Dershowitz types and the Wolfowitz/Perles in the same category, which may not be entirely fair. Nonetheless, as unpleasant as it may be to contemplate, the Israel/Jewish ties of many neocons who pushed for war with Iraq have now been thoroughly picked dry (by both both fair-minded analysts and anti-Semites, for good measure.)

Greenwald’s point is that these guys led us down the road to a terrible and useless war, and that folks aren’t going to listen to them now when they start screaming about Iran and Israel.

A few weeks ago, Greenwald took on The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg after Goldberg accused Greenwald of “doing the work of anti-Semites”, you know, for writing smart analysis about bad Israeli policy. One wonders if it occurs to any of these critics that nobody does the work of anti-Semites better than Israel- as Olmert himself recently observed as brought to our attention by Sol Salbe’s Middle East News Service- when they seemingly remorselessly attack a completely trapped and largely civilian population… but I digress.

Greenwald takes on the shrill tone of Jeffrey Goldberg’s attacks:

Indeed, people like Goldberg are becoming extra rancid and reckless in their rhetoric precisely because they know that these rhetorical devices have ceased working. There is a definite sea change when it comes to American policy debates toward Israel. They no longer possess the ability to stifle dissent through thuggish intimidation tactics and they know that, which is why they can now do nothing but turn up the volume on their name-calling attacks.

Whereas these smear tactics once inspired fear in many people, now they just inspire pity. They no longer work. Very few Americans are going to refrain from expressing their views on American policy towards Israel out of fear that the Jeffrey Goldbergs of the world are going to screech “anti-Semitism” at them. Neocons are far too discredited and their policies far too self-evidently destructive for them to intimidate anyone out of questioning their orthodoxies. Now, watching neocons recklessly spew their bitter little epithets in lieu of (and in order to suppress) debate is like watching an old, dying dragon sadly trying to breathe mighty fire from its mouth but collapsing in a debilitating coughing fit instead — or is like watching a disgraced, post-censure Joe McCarthy in 1956 stand in an empty Senate chamber and rail against hidden Communists. Nobody cares.

People like Jeffrey Goldberg — and his comrades at places such as Commentary and the ADL — have so abused, over-used, manipulated and exploited the “anti-semitism” and “anti-Israel” accusations for improper and nakedly political ends that those terms have become drained of their meaning, have almost entirely lost their sting, and have become trivialized virtually to the point of caricature.

In a different lengthy piece, also worth reading in full, Greenwald also points to NYT columnist Roger Cohen’s latest gutsy columns, the predictable blowback by the usual “neconservative lynchmob”, and Cohen’s refusal to back down. While I want to believe Greenwald that it’s a brand new day, and that analysts in this country might finally start to have reality-based conversations about Israel and US policy, the fact is that being a cohanim must play no small role in giving Cohen the cojones required to stand up to charges of anti-Semitism.

And now, here’s the chance to test Greenwald’s thesis: Charles Freeman. He’s been nominated to be the chair of the National Intelligence Council. As Stephen Walt wrote:

As soon as the appointment was announced, a bevy of allegedly “pro-Israel” pundits leapt to attack it, in what The Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss called a “thunderous, coordinated assault.” Freeman’s critics were the usual suspects: Jonathan Chait of the New Republic, Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, Gabriel Schoenfeld (writing on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal), Jonah Goldberg of National Review, Marty Peretz on his New Republic blog, and former AIPAC official Steve Rosen (yes, the same guy who is now on trial for passing classified U.S. government information to Israel)….

What unites this narrow band of critics is only one thing: Freeman has dared to utter some rather mild public criticisms of Israeli policy. That’s the litmus test that Chait, Goldberg, Goldfarb, Peretz, Schoenfeld et al want to apply to all public servants: thou shalt not criticize Israeli policy nor question America’s “special relationship” with Israel. Never mind that this policy of unconditional support has been bad for the United States and unintentionally harmful to Israel as well. If these pundits and lobbyists had their way, anyone who pointed that fact out would be automatically disqualified from public service.

Andrew Sullivan has a timeline of the attack machine and how it all works.

Phil Weiss says former AIPAC honcho-turned-spy-suspect Steve Rosen, is now calling for the head of Israel Policy Forum’s MJ Rosenberg, of all people (the clear-eyed progressive Zionist Rosenberg is one of the better true friends Israel has ever had), for supporting Freeman. Rosen can yell all he wants, but is anyone listening?

Now support is building in Congress for putting the kabosh on Freeman, so perhaps it is way too soon to do the victory dance over the death of pompous bully-ism.

As Greenwald said:

Ultimately, the greatest weapon to defeat these campaigns is to highlight the identity and behavior of their perpetrators. Just consider who is behind the attack on Freeman; how ugly and discredited are their tactics and ideology; and, most importantly, how absurd it is, given their disgraceful history, that they — of all people — would parade around as arbiters of “ideological extremism” and, more audaciously still, as credible judges of intelligence assessment. …..

It’s destructive enough to artificially limit debate on a matter as consequential as U.S. policy towards Israel. We’ve been doing that for many years now. But it’s so much worse that the people who have been defining and dictating those limits are themselves extremists in every sense of that word when it comes to Israel and U.S. policy towards that country. Their demands that no distinctions be recognized between Israeli and Americans interests have been uniquely destructive for the U.S. Few things are more urgent than an expansion of the debate over U.S. Policy in this area, which is exactly why this radical lynch mob is swarming with such intensity to destroy Freeman’s reputation and fortify the limitations on our debates which, for so long, they have thuggishly enforced. If someone like Freeman can occupy a position like Chair of the National Intelligence Council — handpicked by Obama’s DNI, an Admiral — the taboos they are so desperate to maintain will erode just that much further.

Thierry Tillier:: ((((((((((( Fingerpainting on Mars /////////////////// ,

2009-02-22T12:58:00.001-08:00

Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:03:11 +0100
Subject: ((((((((((( Fingerpainting on Mars /////////////////// ,
From: thierry.tillier@gmail.com

~~Fingerpainting on Mars~~

~~Fingerpainting on Mars~~

Matthew Stolte: New Visual Poetry

2009-02-22T12:55:00.000-08:00

Dear Spiders,

check out a series of new works either on my flickr page or the Home page of my website Word Work.

NA PROA DE LINGUA--Poetry of the Portuguese Speaking Countries

2009-02-22T12:53:00.000-08:00

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paulo Bacedônio <divulgacao.pb@gmail.com>
Date: 2009/2/20
Subject: Na proa da língua...
To:

Visite a coluna

NA PROA DA LÍNGUA*

de Poesia dos Oito Países de Língua Portuguesa

http://br.geocities.com/paralelo_30/index.htm

assinada por

Paulo Bacedônio

Poetas do mês de Fevereiro:

BRASIL

Basílio da Gama – Castro Alves

Narcisa Amália – Fontoura Xavier – Mário Totta

Vespasiano Ramos – Maria Eugênia Celso

CABO VERDE

Pedro Cardoso

GUINÉ-BISSAU

Vasco Cabral

ANGOLA / BRASIL

Fernando Ferreira de Loanda

PORTUGAL

António Feliciano de Castilho – Guerra Junqueiro

Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues

Jayme Câmara – Emnauel Félix

*A coluna Na Proa da Língua, integra a REVISTA LITERÁRIA

PARALELO 30, que é editada e coordenada pelo poeta

e ativista cultural Paulo Monti.

Write Yr. Support/NYCLAW denounces the NYU admin's attack on student protesters‏

2009-02-22T12:52:00.001-08:00

[Write messages in support of the NYU student protesters to: john.sexton@ nyu.edu, jhb5@nyu.edu, provost@nyu. edu, evp@nyu.edu]

New York City Labor Against the War denounces the NYU administration's attack on student protesters of Take Back NYU.

The students demand that the university serve its student body through financial transparency and accountability.

They demand that the administration recognize the Graduate Student Organizing Committee/UAW Local 2110, and agree to fair labor contracts for all university employees.

They are particularly courageous in calling on NYU to support the people of Gaza and end University complicity with the Israeli apartheid regime -- demands that parallel recent student protests at the University of Rochester, Hampshire College, and two dozen universities through the UK.

When the administration arrogantly ignored these concerns, protesters nonviolently occupied their student center, a direct action in the tradition of the civil rights, Vietnam antiwar and anti-apartheid movements.

The administration's response has been typically deceitful and vindictive.

It called in the NYPD to attack protest rallies outside the building. It falsely agreed to negotiate, only to detain the students' representatives. It forcibly removed other protesters -- some of whom were assaulted by NYU security, and at least one of whom was arrested. It suspended eighteen protesters and evicted them from university residences.

We are proud of these students' protest and refusal to be silenced. NYU administration must immediately:

1. Rescind suspensions, dorm evictions and all other disciplinary action.

2. Drop all criminal charges.

3. Meet the students' demands.

-----------

Issued by NYCLAW Co-Conveners:

Larry Adams
Former President, NPMHU Local 300

Michael Letwin
Former President, UAW Local 2325/Assn. of Legal Aid Attorneys

Brenda Stokely
Former President, AFSCME DC 1707; N.E. Regional Coordinator, Million Worker March Movement

Access your email online and on the go with Windows Live Hotmail. Sign up today.

Windows Live™ Hotmail®:…more than just e-mail. Check it out.

BOEK 861--convocatoria mail art fira magica 2009 y Boek Visual

2009-02-22T12:50:00.001-08:00

Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 23:03:56 +0100
From: cesar@boek861.com

http://boek861.com

http://boek861.blog.com.es

NUEVA COLABORACION DEL BOEK 861 Y EL BOEK VISUAL
CON LA CONVOCATORIA DE MAIL ART
Y EL SALON DE POESIA VISUAL DE LA FIRA MAGICA DEL 2009

La temática de este año es JOAN BROSSA, LOS DERECHOS HUMANOS Y DE LOS PUEBLOS
y la forma de participar es totalmente abierta pero con la clara intención de llenar de estandartes el entorno de la Fira
y su castillo.

En el boek861, ademas de las bases de la convocatoria del 2009,
podeis ver el cartel-catálogo completo de la convocatoria de mail art
del 2008 en el que se incluyen las imagenes de 70 obras de los participantes

VERLO EN PROYECTOS RECIENTES
http://boek861.com

BOEK VISUAL

Video de la obra fotografica poetica y experimental de Joel Peter Witkin

Este autor no solo lleva de nuevo la imagen al terreno de la poesía visual
sino que ademas hace una clara inmension en el terreno de lo existencial
y más profundo del ser humano

.

VER EL VIDEO EN

http://boek861.blog.com.es

Documentary by John Pilger: YEAR ZERO THE SILENT DEATH OF CAMBODIA

2009-02-22T12:48:00.000-08:00

Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia

John Pilger vividly reveals the brutality and murderous political ambitions of the Pol Pot / Khmer Rouge totalitarian regime which bought genocide and despair to the people of Cambodia while neighboring countries, including Australia, shamefully ignored the immense human suffering and unspeakable crimes that bloodied this once beautiful country.

A Documentary Film By John Pilger

Click to view
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13769.htm

Windows Live™ Hotmail®:…more than just e-mail. Check it out.

Chomsky: Israel is a Terrorist State by definition

2009-02-22T12:46:00.000-08:00

Israel is a Terrorist State by Definition: Chomsky

By Christiana Voniati

Is Israel a terrorist state? Well yes according to official definitions.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22067.htm

Windows Live™: Discover 10 secrets about the new Windows Live. View post.

Chomsky: Obama OKed Israel's Gaza War

2009-02-22T12:45:00.000-08:00

Chomsky: Obama OKed Israel's Gaza war

By Press TV

Renowned US intellectual Noam Chomsky says Barack Obama did not comment on Israel's war on Gaza, as it was part of the "premeditated" plan. We have been informed by an Israeli source that the recent invasion of the Gaza Strip was completely premeditated, Chomsky said in an interview with the French Al-Ahram daily.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22066.htm

===

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After Fleeing North Korea, an Artist Parodies Its Propaganda

2009-02-22T12:43:00.000-08:00

The Saturday Profile

After Fleeing North Korea, an Artist Parodies Its Propaganda

By CHOE SANG-HUN

Published: February 20, 2009

Enlarge This Image

Choe Sang-Hun/The International Herald Tribune

"I cannot help being political. How can I ignore the reality of the North, where my parents are still suffering?"
SUN MU

IN one of Sun Mu's best-known paintings from his "Happy Children" series, uniformed North Korean kindergartners sing like birds huddled together on a clothesline, their beaming faces so alike they could be clones. At the bottom of the posterlike image, a red slogan leaps out against a yellow background: "We are all happy children!"
When Sun Mu, an artist from North Korea who uses a pseudonym for security reasons, first exhibited paintings like this in Seoul two years ago, the police showed up to investigate. They had been tipped off by viewers who, missing the intended irony, were upset by what they took to be Communist propaganda — a possible crime under South Korea's national security laws. After all, rapturously smiling child performers are a familiar feature of North Korean pageants, and the style mimics posters celebrating the North's authoritarian regime.
"I'm not pro-Communist, far from it," said Sun Mu, 36, who fled North Korea in 1998 to escape famine and arrived in the South in 2001. "When people look at my paintings, I hope they can hear the children asking, 'Do you really think we're happy?' "
Sun Mu, who was trained to create posters and murals for the Communist government, is the first defector from the North to have won fame as a painter in the South by applying that same propagandistic style to biting parodies of the North Korean regime.
His renown, however, is shaded by political concerns. In addition to adopting a pseudonym, he refuses to allow his face to be photographed, afraid that the family he left behind might face reprisals for his art. South Korean news outlets often refer to him as the "faceless" or "nameless" artist from North Korea.
His work has not always been well received.
Soon after his arrival in 2001 he enrolled at Hongik University, a leading arts institution in Seoul, where his socialist-realist technique put him at odds with prevailing notions of what constituted art. One of his professors called his political imagery "cheap, fit for old barbershops" — a reference to the cold war years when South Korean barbershops often were decorated with crude propaganda posters with slogans like "Let's exterminate Communists!"
Now, many here say that imagery, with its subverted content, addresses issues central to Korean identity. "His work touches the national trauma of the divided Korea," said Kim Dong-il, a visual arts critic and lecturer at Sogang University in Seoul. "His style is North Korean, but when he brought it to South Korea it became something completely different. The children's smiles in his paintings become too idealized to be real. A smile is not always an expression of happiness, and can even mean the opposite."
Sun Mu's paintings have also depicted his own fearful journey across the river border into China in 1998, and the plight of a shackled North Korean defector who was repatriated to North Korea from the same Laotian prison where he himself was detained before proceeding on to Thailand and eventually to South Korea.
So far, however, his signature work has been the "Happy Children" series, with its relentlessly smiling North Korean youngsters. The smile has been variously interpreted by commentators as grotesque, a joke on the collectivism of North Korea, or a mask to hide the helplessness many North Koreans feel.
SUN MU said he used to wear that smile himself. In North Korea, he and his classmates smilingly sang hymns to Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, and would march out to perform for soldiers and farmers toiling in the fields. "They teach you how to smile that regimented smile — there's a certain way to shape your mouth," he said. "We children thought we were happy. We didn't realize that our smile was fabricated and manufactured."
Later, while serving in the North Korean Army, Sun Mu was assigned to create propaganda paintings. He produced images of North Korean soldiers cutting the throats of American soldiers or crushing Japanese invaders.
"One of the rules was that South Korean puppet soldiers be depicted as small and inconsequential at the corner of the canvas and running away from North Korean soldiers," he said with a chuckle. "We'd finish off our paintings by adding slogans like 'Let's defend our revolutionary leadership with our lives!' "
He was an art student in college when he decided to flee North Korea, during a famine in the late 1990s that is thought to have killed two million people.

SOME of the political satire in his current output is hard to miss. In one painting, a woman raising her middle finger is naked except for the North Korean flag slipping off her body. Nudity is strictly forbidden in the North, denounced as capitalist decadence.
Sun Mu paints something else he could never have dared to depict in the North: portraits of Mr. Kim and his father, North Korea's founder, Kim Il-sung. In the North, portraits of the Kims are considered sacred, and only a few artists are authorized to paint them.
In any case, the official portraits would never look like these. In one, Kim Jong-il is dressed not in his trademark Mao-style suit but in a pink Nike sports jacket, red Adidas pants and mismatched running shoes. Mr. Kim is transformed from supreme leader to bourgeois loafer.
Nonetheless, displaying the Kims' images has also proved controversial.
When Sun Mu presented a portrait of Kim Il-sung titled "Sun of Korea" at an international biennale last September in Pusan, the South Korean organizers removed it at the last minute, saying they wanted to avoid potential problems with a "pro-Communist" painting.
At an exhibition in 2007, South Korean viewers objected to a Sun Mu portrait of Kim Jong-il that carried the title "God of Korea." They apparently did not notice that the North Korean flag in the background had been hung upside down.
Sun Mu is undeterred.
"I cannot help being political," he said. "How can I ignore the reality of the North, where my parents are still suffering? I would like to believe that art can change the world in whatever little way it can."
>"One of the rules was that South Korean puppet soldiers be depicted as small and inconsequential at the corner of the canvas and running away from North Korean soldiers," he said with a chuckle. "We'd finish off our paintings by adding slogans like 'Let's defend our revolutionary leadership with our He was an art student in college when he decided to flee North Korea, during a famine in the late 1990s that is thought to have killed two million people. SOME of the political satire in his current output is hard to miss. In one painting, a woman raising her middle finger is naked except for the North Korean flag slipping off her body. Nudity is strictly forbidden in the North, denounced as capitalist decadence.
Sun Mu paints something else he could never have dared to depict in the North: portraits of Mr. Kim and his father, North Korea's founder, Kim Il-sung. In the North, portraits of the Kims are considered sacred, and only a few artists are authorized to paint them.
In any case, the official portraits would never look like these. In one, Kim Jong-il is dressed not in his trademark Mao-style suit but in a pink Nike sports jacket, red Adidas pants and mismatched running shoes. Mr. Kim is transformed from supreme leader to bourgeois loafer.
Nonetheless, displaying the Kims' images has also proved controversial.
When Sun Mu presented a portrait of Kim Il-sung titled "Sun of Korea" at an international biennale last September in Pusan, the South Korean organizers removed it at the last minute, saying they wanted to avoid potential problems with a "pro-Communist" painting.
At an exhibition in 2007, South Korean viewers objected to a Sun Mu portrait of Kim Jong-il that carried the title "God of Korea." They apparently did not notice that the North Korean flag in the background had been hung upside down.
Sun Mu is undeterred.
"I cannot help being political," he said. "How can I ignore the reality of the North, where my parents are still suffering? I would like to believe that art can change the world in whatever little way it can."

THE DAY WALL STREET EXPLODED--by Beverly Gage--NYT Review

2009-02-22T12:27:00.000-08:00

Mike Davis's book is named after the now leading suspect in the bombing, the long history of a futile search for one is detailed in Beverly Gage's excellent new book--
Buda's Wagom is named for the wagon that Buda is supposed to have parked in front of the JP Morgan building--a horse drawn wagon like thousands of others that carried produce to markets--
on 16 September 1920--
in protest, according to the pamphlets scattered about NYC that day--of the
9/11/1920 indictments handed down to Sacco and Vanzetti
(another overlooked 9/11 in American history--as it led to this first bombing of the city--)
Buda, Sacco and Vanzetti were all followers of Luigi Galleani--

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- By KEVIN BAKER

Blood on the Street

At the stroke of noon on Sept. 16, 1920, a bomb exploded along Wall Street, killing 38 people and maiming hundreds more. It was the worst terrorist bombing in the United States until the Oklahoma City attack in 1995, the worst in New York until the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Enlarge This Image

Brown Brothers

The aftermath of the bombing on Wall Street on Sept. 16, 1920.

THE DAY WALL STREET EXPLODED

A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror

By Beverly Gage

Illustrated. 400 pp. Oxford University Press. $27.95

Multimedia

Kevin Baker Discusses 'The Day Wall Street Exploded' on the Book Review Podcast (mp3)

The bomb was an immeasurably cruel device, most likely dynamite tied to iron sash weights that acted as shrapnel. It blew people apart where they walked out on a cool, late-summer day, tore arms and legs, hands and feet and scalps off living human beings. Others were beheaded or eviscerated, or found themselves suddenly engulfed in flames. Still more injuries were caused by a cascade of broken glass and the terrified stampede that followed.
The bomb's target was presumed to be the House of Morgan, which sat like a blockhouse just across the street from where the explosive had been left in a horse-drawn wagon. The Morgan bank had emerged from World War I as the single most powerful financial institution in the world, and both the firm and its principals had been under increasing attack, rhetorical and otherwise, ever since it had arranged a huge loan a few years before to help the Allies and keep the Great War going. But the only fatality inside the firm was a 24-year-old clerk. Nearly all the bank's employees were back at their desks the next morning, some of them still bandaged and bruised. The explosion merely pocked the firm's impenetrable, marble walls, the marks defiantly left where they can be seen to this day: "the stigmata of capitalism."
As with all terrorist attacks, most of the victims were innocent bystanders, "messengers, stenographers, clerks, salesmen, drivers," men and women for whom "Wall Street was not a grand symbol of American capitalism" but "a place to make a modest living by selling milk, driving a car, typing reports, recording sales." Only seven of the dead were over the age of 40. Five of them were women, four of them teenagers.
Who would do such a thing? A bevy of the nation's most prominent lawmen and private detectives immediately descended on Wall Street, blaming first anarchists, then paid agents from Lenin's new government in Moscow. But years of investigation yielded nothing — no indictments, no trials, no culprits. No one ever came forward to take responsibility for the crime, or to state what it was supposed to accomplish, and before long it had dropped from public view, lost among the sensations of the racing, giddy '20s.
Beverly Gage, a writer and history teacher at Yale, has brought the bombing to life again in her outstanding first book. "The Day Wall Street Exploded" describes in detail both the bombing itself and the hunt for the perpetrators, but Gage also does us the great good service of placing it in the wider history of industrial warfare that once proliferated in America. Like much of American history, these battles have dropped out of mind because no one wanted to look at them too closely. As Gage points out, the right was loath to discuss the decades of brutal labor and political repression that preceded the Wall Street bombing; the left, to admit that extremists really were willing to resort to violence to overthrow the capitalist order.
Between 1881 and 1905 alone, there were more than 37,000 labor strikes in the United States, many of them bloody, bitter struggles. Efforts to unionize were routinely met with clubbings, shootings, jailings, blacklistings and executions, perpetrated not only by well-armed legions of company goons, but also by police officers, deputies, National Guardsmen and even regular soldiers. Dozens of workers were killed in these conflicts — at Ludlow in 1914, in the Homestead and Pullman strikes of the 1890s, at Telluride and Cripple Creek and Colorado Springs.
Some unionists, seeing the state aligned with the employers, struck back with dynamite, invented in 1866 and readily available at American construction sites. In Idaho in 1905, a bomb ripped the legs off Gov. Frank Steunenberg in his own front yard, after he stuck a thousand miners from the Coeur d'Alene strike in makeshift jails for months without trial. Twenty-one men died when labor radicals blew up the rabidly anti-union Los Angeles Times building in 1910. Relatively few workers were involved in such outrages, but millions did turn to the Socialist Party and the far-left Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), organizations that promised to sweep away the entire capitalist system. "Far from being an era of placid reform," Gage writes, "the turn of the century was a moment in which the entire structure of American institutions — from the government to the economy — seemed to be up for grabs, poised to be reshaped by new movements and ideas."
A murky underworld developed, one in which some radicals — particularly the small but implacable cells of anarchists — really did plot assassinations and bombings, while companies tried to frame strikers and their leaders with phony bomb plots and other accusations.
Things came to a head when America entered World War I and the ostensibly progressive Wilson administration put aside the Constitution, jailing thousands of dissidents and suppressing the antiwar Socialists and Wobblies. On June 2, 1919, a new wave of bombs hit in apparent retaliation, including one that wrecked the home of Woodrow Wilson's attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, who opportunistically used the incident to start the nation's first "Red scare." It became one of the most shameful campaigns in the country's history, with hundreds deported merely on suspicion of having radical proclivities. In perhaps the worst episode, an anarchist named Andrea Salsedo was found dead in his underwear on the sidewalk of Park Row in New York, below a room where the Bureau of Investigation — predecessor to the F.B.I. — had secretly held him for weeks.
The feds claimed suicide; Salsedo's family and friends saw murder. Four months later came the Wall Street bomb. What few clues there were pointed to Salsedo's comrades, members of a particularly ruthless anarchist group called the Galleanisti, named after their founder, Luigi Galleani. But the Red hunters had done their work too well, having already deported Galleani and many other potential witnesses.
Even though the crime was never solved, it had other repercussions. The bungled investigation and its wholesale violation of people's civil liberties, as Gage shows, led to a major housecleaning at the Bureau — which, paradoxically, enabled the rise of the biggest civil liberties violator in American history, J. Edgar Hoover. And the bombing contributed to an atmosphere in which two other anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, were convicted of murder in a case that would become the great leftist cause of the decade.
Over time, the bombings petered out, though organized violence in labor and other disputes continued. Even now, as Gage writes, "there remains a tendency to think of violence as an anomaly, something outside the American experience, rather than as one of the many ways that Americans have long carried out their political disputes."

Kevin Baker is the author, most recently, of the novel "Strivers Row."

WANTED LIST: AMERICAN POEMS

2009-02-11T14:14:00.001-08:00

Israeli forces open fire on Palestinian farmers and internationals in Al Faraheen

2009-02-08T07:44:00.001-08:00

Israeli forces open fire on Palestinian farmers and internationals in Al Faraheen

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Once again, Azzoun is under curfew; internationals and Palestinians assaulted during warantless house invasion

2009-02-08T07:36:00.001-08:00

Once again, Azzoun is under curfew; internationals and Palestinians assaulted during warantless house invasion

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Oh yeah/Gloria/It always happens that way/Dark side - Shadows of Knight

2009-02-07T16:19:00.001-08:00

Chicago band who had the first American hit version of Them's Gloria (Van Morrison on vocals)
Dark Side is a GREAT song
and Oh Yeah one of the original "Nuggets" selections by Lenny Kaye

Stop AIPAC! Confronting the Lobby for Militarism & Occupation

2009-02-07T16:17:00.001-08:00

See the web version. Go Here.

Stop AIPAC!
Confronting the Lobby for
Militarism & Occupation

Stop AIPAC Newsletter

Feburary Newsletter

Gaza and AIPAC

Protests

Quick Links

Stop AIPAC

Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation

Just Foreign Policy

Join Our List

February 2009

Greetings!

In this issue we take a look at massacre of Gaza, the terrible toll and the work of AIPAC in garnering congressional support of the criminal actions of the Israeli military.Review Protests of AIPAC in San Francisco in early December, then a larger protest in late January (Post-Gaza attack) in New York.

Don't forget to send in a donation. You can also buy a T-Shirt to support our work.

Gaza and AIPAC

Gaza.
The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre For Human Rights (PCHR) puts the death toll at 1,285, with nearly 70% of the dead civilian. 280 were children. 111 were women. Over 4,000 injured, many with life-long debilitating injuries, including over 1,000 children and over 700 women. The damage to the infrastructure of Gaza is beyond belief. 2,700 buildings damaged or destroyed.

AIPAC did its best to garner political support the carnage, to stall efforts toward a cease-fire (as it did during the war on Lebanon), to blame the victims. An AIPAC-sponsored bill passed, defending this attack as "self-defense", passed the Senate by unanimous consent and the House with only 5 voting No and 27 voting "Present". (If your congressperson was one of the 32, please take the time to thank them... see the roll call here). See our Gaza and AIPAC page.

While most politicians blindly supported Israeli actions, there were some notable exceptions. Rep. Dennis Kucinich called for an investigation of possible violations of Arms Export Control Act. More importantly, grassroots action across the country protested Israeli actions. In the Bay Area, dozens of protests took place in those three weeks. It was clear that Israel was losing support on the American street, if not in the US Congress. It is the power of the people fighting for justice that will eventually create a change in US policy.

AIPAC Protests- From San Francisco to New York!

San Francisco, December 9, 2008

At this protest, organized by Stop AIPAC, we had about a hundred folks that turned out to protest their extremist policies at an AIPAC event that took place at the Marriot Hotel. As usual, the protesters were a diverse group demanding a change in US policy that will lead to peace with justice. Pics and more here.

Times Square, January 29, 2009

The post-Gaza massacre event organized mostly by local students, brought out a larger crowd of some 250 people and ended with the blockade of the front doors of the Marriot Hotel by 10 determined protesters, who were arrested and spent a night in jail. This is a great way to start the year. Our goal is to have many of the AIPAC events that take around the country confronted by people who will not tolerate their political leaders in a relationship with a lobby for War.

Check out more about the New York Protest and Support the AIPAC 10.

We Need your help Now.
Stop AIPAC aims to oppose the militaristic agenda of AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and replace it with an agenda based on human rights, respect for international law, and support for peace based on justice for all.

This will be a wonderful way to start out the new year...AIPAC'S annual budget is a whopping $100 million. Ours is ... much less. So YOUR donation, even a modest one, can make all the difference.
Please send your donations to
Stop AIPAC
PO BOX 11311
Berkeley, CA 94712

You can help the work of Stop AIPAC by making your check out to TriCity Peace and Justice! Your donation can be tax-deductible if you make your check for $40 or more payable to "Tri-City Peace and Justice", a 501(c)3 organization. Send these checks to the address above too. Don't need a tax-deduction? Just send a check made out to "Stop AIPAC" for any amount to the address above.

Sincerely,

Jim
Stop AIPAC!

Say No To War Makers/Protest AIPAC T-Shirts!

When journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw his shoes at George W. Bush, he spoke for billions of us who oppose war makers of all kinds - from politicians to political lobbies. What better way to express our outrage than this T-Shirt featuring an original drawing by Jos Sances of the famous Shoe incident. On the back of the shirt is the phrase "Protest AIPAC Lobby for War" with our website address (and a union logo!). Wear yours proudly at the next protest.

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Video: Israeli Ambassador in Sweden gets a shoe thrown at him and the shoe hits its target.

2009-02-07T16:14:00.001-08:00

Israeli Ambassador in Sweden gets a shoe thrown at him and the shoe hits its target.

http://gerontios48. wordpress. com/2009/ 02/04/1022/

http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=ANclSnICGXY&eurl=http:// gerontios48. wordpress. com/2009/ 02/04/1022/&feature=player_ embedded

A shoe was thrown at Israel's Ambassador to Sweden, Mr. Benny Dagan, when He was giving a speech at Stockholm University today. The shoe hit its target. It was followed by two books and a note pad, all hitting the severely embarrassed ambassador.

The two protesters, a young woman and a young man, shouted "Murderers!" And "Intifada!" while pelting Dagan with the objects. They are currently under arrest, suspected of assault and public disturbance. The lecture was organized by the Foreign policy association at Stockholm University. The Ambassador was supposed to talk about the upcoming Elections in Israel, but turned quickly to issues of Hamas and Iran and developed a lengthy defense for Israel's recent actions in the Gaza Strip. Some 20 minutes into the lecture, a woman stood up in the audience, threw a red shoe at the ambassador and shouted "Murderers!". The shoe hit Dagan in his stomach. Another protester then joined in and hurled two books and a note pad. Dagan was dumbstruck and paralyzed, but returned to his lecture shortly after a few minutes, only to face shouts and other verbal protests from the audience. The meeting ended in chaos, while the two protestors were taken to custody.

Mike Odetalla..."A seed in the eternal fruit of Palestine"

"Come, I'll tell you about Palestine" www.Hanini.org

My Home Town: http://www.beithani na.org/
http://www.palestin ecalendar. org/
http://www.palestin eonlinestore. com/
http://www.alnakba. org/
http://www.nakbainh ebrew.org/
http://www.palestin eremembered. com
http://www.al- awda.org

http://www.pcwf. -org
The link to the website of Palestine Children's Welfare Fund ...Click to buy Palestinian embroidery online, sponsor a Palestinian child, buy a flag or a Kuffiya to feed one, or a donation of 25 dollars to plant an olive or orange tree in honor of some one you know or to commemorate a hero of yours .

"The ink of the scholar is holier more than the blood of the martyr"- Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him)

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land

2009-02-07T16:12:00.001-08:00

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land U.S. Media & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict How Israel manipulates and distorts American public perceptions Through the voices of scholars, media critics, peace activists, religious figures, and Middle East experts, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land carefully analyzes and explains how--through the use of language, framing and context--the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media, and Israeli colonization of the occupied terrorities appears to be a defensive move rather than an offensive one.

Video available for sale here : http://www.mediaed.org/videos/MediaRaceAndRepresentation/PeacePropaganda Watch current Israel/Palestine news: http://newstree.org/search.jsp?query=Israel%20palestine%20video:1&hp=10&sort=ndateinmin&reverse=true&vx=1

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Quincuagésimo aniversario del natalicio de César Espino Barros

2009-02-07T16:08:00.000-08:00

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Roberto Saavedra <soporte2007orama@gmail.com>
Date: 2009/2/7
Subject: Quincuagésimo aniversario del natalicio de César Espino Barros

AÑO DEL JUBILEO

En las elecciones del 2005, 2006 y 2008 sorprendió a la población mexicana como promotor de la democracia directa a nivel puestos públicos, actividad por la que no tuvo ningún problema y ofreció lo que los otros partidos no pueden, revisar el efecto del gobierno a un nivel interpersonal, no colectivo, y hacer del gobierno una entidad racional. Se trata de César Espino Barros, un aficionado a la literatura cuya afición se transformó en vocación universitaria y posteriormente en práctica constante y psiconalítica, ajena a círculos y movimientos. Su producción se agrupa en volúmenes que son editados en CD y distribuidos por él mismo. Literato por más de 35 años, antihéroe por excelencia, el próximo 11 de octubre cumple cincuenta de edad, invita a la población a recordarlo en sus celebraciones y declara a éste, año del jubileo.

webpages:

http://espanol.geocities.com/slang_poetry/fotoscesar.html
http://luznegra.es.tl/ the official webpage
http://catalo.fr.gd/ catálogo
http://espinobarros.fr.gd/ Espino Barros virtual
http://mx.geocities.com/ezrapound28/fotossepia2.html
http://www.geocities.com/homeropound/photopagerock.html
http://elanturio.es.tl/ cenizas de spam poemario visual
http://issuu.com/espinobarros/docs/poesiavisual e- book

blogs de poesía y fotografía

http://www.photoblog.com/luznegra/
http://flimmerline.unblog.fr/ biblioteca virtual
http://espinobarros.unblog.fr/ espino barros visual
http://apresurado.blogcindario.com/ expo on-line

foros

http://www.foroswebgratis.com/foroext.php?id_foro=47569
http://puesia.forumup.com.mx/?mforum=puesia
http://despenalizacion.mundoforo.com/ nuevo

grupos

http://groups.msn.com/LaGnosis
http://groups.msn.com/artgotartecorreo/artgotartecorreo.msnw
http://mx.groups.yahoo.com/group/artgot/
http://mx.groups.yahoo.com/group/ignorArte/

propuestas

http://antiazar.spaces.live.com/
http://slang_poetry.blogspot.com/
http://antiazar.blogspot.com/
http://transporte.unblog.fr/

revista
http://ignorarte.unblog.fr/
http://condicionamiento.unblog.fr/

mail :
slang_poetry@yahoo.com.mx

COLABORACIONES ONLINE

colaboraciones y exposiciones

http://descargas.cervantesvirtual.com/servlet/SirveObras/12593390887031538532624/024159_0002.pdf

Biblioteca del Soneto, autores, letra E.

>Biblioteca Cervantes Virtual

http://www.boek861.com/ Boek861, en Proyectos Recientes, requiere navegador Mozilla

http://pastizal.antesalas.net/ Pastizal, who doesn't like grass? (luz negra)

http://isla_negra.zoomblog.com/ blog de Isla negra

Isla Negra 114, 25 de setiembre de 2007

http://www.elcalamo.com/ El Cálamo Editorial en la sección poesía (sep. 2008)

http://artepostalartifariti.blogspot.com/search/label/C%C3%A9sar%20Espino%20Barros%20%28MX%29 Sahara Libre

http://picasaweb.google.es/edubarbero61/CONTRALAVIOLENCIADEGENERO?authkey=k2pad_ujD8A#
vs. la violencia de género

http://sapiens.ya.com/poesiaya/tuspoe/tupoemaespinobarros01.htm
poema

http://poesiamas.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1508:poemas-de-cesar-espino-barros&catid=20:mis-poemas&Itemid=68

http://www.periodicodepoesia.unam.mx/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=733&Itemid=82
periódico de poesía

http://www.puntodereunion.org.mx/letras_libres/ensayos/letras_pena_de_muerte.html

http://iuoma-network.ning.com/profile/CesarEspinoBarros

MÚSICA

Para escuchar música de MENOS CE escriba slangpoetry en la búsqueda de YouTube (SEARCH)

Si tuviéramos que hacer un resumen del pensamiento político, psicológico, filosófico, sociológico de César Espino Barros este quedaría comprendido con el mote de "Vivir mejor" que utiliza el gobierno federal en alguno de sus programas o secretarías. Feliz coincidencia de objetivos y metas de dos entidades diametralmente opuestas, gobierno federal y un escritor aficionado, pequeño comerciante en la vida práctica, defensor acérrimo de la libertad y de la despenalización del cannabis que apenas sí estudió una licenciatura en letras hispánicas en Guadalajara pero ha enriquecido voluntaria y concientemente su acervo cultural personal al grado de ser considerado por los expertos como una figura destacada dentro de la expresión artística no-oficial y sin reconocimiento. Para unos un simple delincuente, para otros un charlatán más del colorido folclor nacional, César Espino Barros ha conquistado el único espacio de difusión que le ha sido permitido alcanzar y se ha convertido en el exponente mexicano más asiduo e interesente de la llamada cibercultura, cuya presencia se ha dejado sentir tanto en el ámbito político virtual como en el artístico. Cualquiera diría que recibe un salario por su participación, pero no existe un trabajo que lo otorgue. Premios literarios no los ha ganado. No dispone de becas ni de patrocinio. Su labor es por lo tanto fantástica, más propia de un prestidigitador o un mago, que de un activista.

Músico y poeta, su obra literaria se agrupa en dos volúmenes, Afasia y Flimmerline, y responde activamente como artista postal y poeta visual a las convocatorias que a nivel internacional se le presentan.

propuestas

-modificación del transporte con base en el riesgo
-partido político antiazar, democracia directa
-votación política electrónica
-que los concursos literarios reciban originales por correo electrónico
-vigilancia electrónica en toda la ciudad
-penalización de la infracción de garantías constitucionales
-despenalización del cannabis
-despenalización de la pornografía en México.
-revisión de los patrones de conducta.
-revisión de la naturaleza del trabajo y el fin de la pederastia laboral.

Como ensayista o articulista se desplaza en foros de red y sintetizado su pensamiento podría resumirse así:

"La gente no habla de los patrones de conducta que nos rigen, no habla del aspecto intrínseco del trabajo. Sin mucha preparación en el terreno de la psicología, mi entendimiento es suficiente para distinguir un patrón de sedimentación, el cual puede representarse con un hombre sentado en cuclillas, y un patrón de delación (o denuncia) el cual puede representarse con un hombre señalando con el dedo. No son los únicos, pero sí los más notables, y cabe señalar que son implantados de manera anónima o secreta por el llamado condicionamiento social operante, detrás del cual deben estar los partidos políticos, las autoridades, el poder judicial, la clase armada, que son los que implantan esas formas de comportamiento y a la aceptación de las mismas la gente le llama "trabajar". Sedimentación en lo afectivo, lo cultural, lo económico, obviamente, a ojos vistas, no es nada positivo. Es entrar en terrenos de la negatividad. Y ser delator, soplón de todo lo que ocurre, es una degradación, denigración, otra negatividad. Desde esta perspectiva el mundo es un criadero de tontos y al que lo entiende pero no lo es pues no le queda más remedio que ponerse el uniforme del pendejo y tratar de adaptarse a la estulticia generalizada. Pero eso no es todo. Delatores sedimentados no estarían completos con voluntad propia. Falta que hayan doblegado toda iniciativa individual y digan y hagan lo que los otros les dicen y hacen, eso los vuelve en cierta forma correveidiles, seres sin ninguna responsabilidad por lo que hacen y dicen, simples emisarios. Entonces sedimentados soplones correveidiles no estarían completos trabajando en áreas productivas que arrojen beneficios y progreso, falta involucrarlos en el procesamiento de información y en el procesamiento de los demás para que hagan del mitote su grano de oro como una forma de congraciarse con un condicionamiento que los acepta o los rechaza, y de ello deviene el alimento. El alimento podría obtenerse directamente, entonces el enemigo de todo esto es la productividad, la producción individual, y nos guste o no, la libertad y el uso de las facultades racionales con las que nacimos dotados.

César Espino Barros cree que un azar inteligente no nos va a llevar por la ruta de la salvación, que es labor del que así lo quiere trabajar por el mejoramiento de la situación como la conocemos, que la búsqueda de la felicidad como objetivo político es coherente y sustentable, lo que es más, ningún partido de la entropía y la esclavitud puede ofrecerlo porque no está en sus manos otorgarlo a sus integrantes. Cuando se pide una dignificación de la naturaleza del trabajo, básicamente esa es la idea, acercar el trabajo al marco constitucional de dignidad y utilidad que el artículo 123 const. confiere a tal actividad..."

abrazos fraternos

ultimas noticias boek861 bn 050209

2009-02-07T16:06:00.001-08:00

Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 21:43:20 +0100
From: cesar@boek861.com
To: cesar@boek861.com
Subject: ultimas noticias boek861 bn 050209

http://boek861.com

ANTONIO GOMEZ nos ha enviado para su publicación la ponencia que presentó en el "Simposio Archivos y Fondos Documentales" / En la misma hace un detallado recorrido sobre las ediciones de los últimos años del libro objeto y las revistas ensamblandas. En dicha ponencia hace un estudio de los movimientos previos que propiciaron esta revolución editorial, desde el dadaismo a Fluxus, pasando por el mail art, la poesia visual, situacionismo,conceptualismo, etc.

Lo puedes ver en PROYECTOS RECIENTES
http://boek861.com

Boek Visual

En el Boek Visual se presenta un video de la obra del fotógrafo neoyorkino Roger Ballen y donde se presenta una cuestión interesante: ¿Dónde acaba la fotografia y empieza la poesia visual?

Lo puedes ver en:

http://boek861.blog.com.es/

V SALON INTERNACIONALDE MAIL ART Y POESÌA VISUAL.KEYLA HOLMQUIST, VENEZUELA

2009-02-07T16:04:00.001-08:00

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Keyla Holmquist H <holmquistartecorreo@gmail.com>
Date: 2009/2/7
Subject: V SALON INTERNACIONALDE MAIL ART Y POESÌA VISUAL.KEYLA HOLMQUIST, VENEZUELA

V SALÓN INTERNACIONAL MAIL @RT 2009

Amigos Mail Artistas un saludo desde Venezuela.

En los meses de Junio-Julio del presente año se llevará a cabo el 6to Festival Mundial de Poesía 2009 en el que será homenajeado el poeta venezolano Juan Calzadilla (Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas 1996).
Este evento será auspiciado por el Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Cultura y la Casa Nacional de las Letras Andrés Bello.
En el marco de este prestigioso festival nuestro archivo realizará el:

5to ENCUENTRO INTERNACIONAL DE POESÍA VISUAL

CONVOCATORIA ABIERTA - NO SELECCIÓN - NO JURADO.
Se expondrá todo lo recibido – Documentación a todos.
NO DEVOLUCIÓN.
Todos los envíos pasarán a formar parte del
ARCHIVO MAIL ART KEYLA HOLMQUIST.

Todas las obras deben enviarse por correo postal a:

Keyla Holmquist
ARCHIVO DE ARTE CORREO
Apartado Postal 326
Maracay 2101
Estado Aragua VENEZUELA

RECEPCIÓN HASTA EL 31 DE MAYO DE 2009

Las obras o expresiones deberán enviarse perfectamente embaladas para prevenir deterioros en su traslado y movimiento, con una copia de la ficha técnica pegada en el dorso de la misma.

CATEGORÍAS:

DIBUJO, PINTURA, GRÁFICA, FOTOGRAFÍA, SELLOS DE ARTISTA, COPY-ART, ARTE EXPERIMENTAL, CONTRAPUBLICIDAD.

OBJETOS / LIBROS DE ARTISTA:

Las medidas podrán ser hasta un máximo de A4. Los objetos y libros de artista que requieran de una base o pedestal deberá ser provista por participante.

POESÍA, VERSO LIBRE O RIMADO, PROSA, NARRATIVA, ENSAYO, RELATOS.

POESÍA VISUAL:

Poesía Proceso, la Poesía Ilustrada, los Poemas Laberintos, Holopoemas, Letrismos, Poesía Concreta, Poesía Semiótica, Polipoesía, Palíndromos, Collage, Fotoacciones, Videoacciones, Espacios de Resonancia, Poemas Objeto, Poesía Fonética, Poesía Sonora, Poesía Pseudovisual, Poesía en Braille.

VIDEO, CORTO METRAJE, DOCUMENTAL, ANIMACIÓN:

Serán admitidos todos los videos, corto-metrajes, fotografías, documentales, animaciones que no rebasen los 8 minutos de proyección y sean entregados en un CD ó DVD listos para su presentación.

EXPRESIÓN MULTIMEDIA:

Será admitida en CD ó DVD lista para su presentación incluyendo la ficha técnica y la lista de las fuentes sonoras, las fotografías, la música utilizada y el nombre de su autor.

FORMATO DE AUDIO:

El formato de audio admitido será:

Wave 44,100 Hz 16 bit Stereo.
Mp3 desde 96 hasta 320 KPSS.
Si la expresión es sonora, cuide la fidelidad de su grabación.

-------------------------------------------------

Artists friends greetings from Venezuela.

The 6th World's Poetry Festival 2009 will take place on june and july as a tribute to a venezuelan Poet named Juan Calzadilla (National Prize of Plastic Arts 1996).

This event will be sponsored by Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Cultura and Casa Nacional de las Letras Andrés Bello, so my art archive willheld:

THE 5th INTERNATIONAL ENCOUNTER OF VISUAL POETRY

OPEN NOTIFICATION – NO SELECTION – NO JURY
Everything received will be exhibited – Documentation [to all of you].
NO RETURNS.
Everything sent will be part of the MAIL ART ARCHIVE KEYLA HOLMQUIST.

All the material has to be mailed to:

Keyla Holmquist
ARCHIVO DE ARTE CORREO
Apartado Postal 326
Maracay 2101
Estado Aragua VENEZUELA

DEADLINE MAY 31,st 2009

All the material should be sent perfectly packed in order to prevent damage and with a copy of a data card, stuck on the back of the package.

CATEGORIES:

DRAWING, PAINTING, GRAPHIC, PHOTOGRAPHY, ARTIST SEALS, COPY-ART, EXPERIMENTAL ART.

OBJECTS/ARTIST'S BOOKS:

Measures UP TO A4 MAXIMUM. The base or pedestal needed should be provided by the artist.

POETRY, FREE VERSE OR RHYME, PROSE, NARRATIVE, ESSAY, STORIES.

VISUAL POETRY:

Collage, visual poems, process poetry, illustrated poetry, labyrinth poems, phonetic poems, audible poems, semiotic, palindrome, holopoems, concrete poetry, video action, photo action, object poem, pseudovisual poetry, braille poetry.

VIDEO, SHORTFILM, DOCUMENTARY, ANIMATION:

All videos will be admitted, shortfilms, photography, documentaries, animations that do not exceed 8 minutes of length and they must be delivered on CD or DVD format ready for its presentation.

MULTIMEDIA EXPRESSION:

They will be admitted on CD or DVD format ready for its presentation including the credits, the photography, the list of the soundtrack that was used and the name of the author.

AUDIO FORMAT:

the audio format admitted has to be:

Wave 44,100 Hz 16 bit stereo
Mp3 from 96 'til 320 KPSS
If the expression is audible, high fidelity required.

KEYLA HOLMQUIST

2009

RODOLFO FRANCO No Sieges, Tortures, Starvation & Surveillance

2009-02-07T16:02:00.001-08:00

from Rodolfo:

Colaborations,

Thanks!

--
RODOLFO FRANCO
www.picasaweb.google.com/doorforfalcon
www.youtube.com/doorforfalcon
www.myspace.com/doorforfalcon
http://rodolfofranco.artelista.com
www.myspace.com/comandomacondo

Brumaria 12-- 'Art and Terrorism' out now

2009-02-07T15:59:00.001-08:00

DAV

February 5, 2009


	Brumaria
			Brumaria issue no 12: ART AND TERRORISM Brumaria: artistic, aesthetic and political practices. C/ Santa Isabel, 28 28012 – Madrid Spain +34 915280527 http://www.brumaria.net
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	Art and Terrorism War, terrorism and counterterrorism form a part of our time and our lives. Whether we like it or not, the artistic, aesthetic, and political material of the topic presented in this volume is far from being exhausted. Every day the media bombards us with information about terrorist attacks, military offensives and political declarations. The majority of the time these events are directly related to intervention campaigns headed by the United States in the Middle East, particularly in the case of its reaction to the attacks of 11 September 2001, the 'War on Terror'. It is not possible to separate contemporary art from the world in which it is produced and perceived in the same way that we cannot live in isolation from reality and our fellow humans. The conflict to which we are continuously referring is the 'War on Terror'. 'Terrorism', then, may be considered a very problematic key term. In the present volume we have compiled a series of texts that, from the vantage of theory and visual culture, directly discuss this term. There are great differences, especially thematic, among the sixteen texts we have chosen, but we can group them up along three distinct axes. On one hand, we find ourselves with the terror of the RAF, examined in the 2005 Kunst Werke exhibition Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF-Ausstellung in Berlin, and contextualised in Slavoj Žižek and Peter Weibel's essays. On the other hand, we have Horacio González and Lila Pastoriza's articles that get straight to the difficult political and cultural question of 'what to do?' with the remains of the tragically infamous ESMA, touching on Argentina's dramatic problem of State terror and its memory. Both these axes, together with the Mike Davis's unclassifiable work on car bombs, are of great help when it comes to contextualising and tracing the historical antecedents of the current international predicament which we refer to in the third block, focused on the events of the last six years and formed by the majority of materials here presented (Marius Babias, Ross Birrell, Bernardette Buckley, Boris Groys, Ken Neil, W. J. T. Mitchell, Khaled D. Ramadan, Retort, Irit Rogoff, James A. Walker and Joseba Zulaika). Who are really our enemies in this conflict if we apply the Hegelian notion that what is projected in the Other is that which constitutes the Self? How does this global terrorism affect our geopolitical perception and our cultural coordinates? Is not terrorism the means of combat that is historically most coherent given the position of the media's control, something which, half a century ago, Guy Debord called the 'society of spectacle'? These are some of the important questions proposed to us by the materials of this volume; but what art can do in an historical moment in which our vision is becoming increasingly dominated by media-produced images of terrorism is probably the fundamental question that we have to ask ourselves upon seriously confronting the intersections between art, aesthetics and politics. Contents Marius Babias. Zones of Indifference. The World in a 'State of Exception'. On the Relations of 'Populism', 'Public Sphere' and 'Terrorism' Ross Birrell. The Gift of Terror: Suicide-Bombing as Potlatch Bernardette Buckley. Terrible Beauties Mike Davis. Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb Horacio González. Shadows of the Building: Construction and Anti-Construction Boris Groys. Art at War W. J. T. Mitchell. Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to Abu Ghraib Ken Neil. Double Trauma: Mute Art of Terror Lila Pastoriza. Memory as Public Policy: The Axes of the Debate Khaled D. Ramadan. Suicide-Bombers/Martyrs' Videos and Site-Specific Art Retort. Afflicted Powers: The State, the Spectacle and September 11. Irit Rogoff. Engendering Terror James A. Walker. A Terror Lexicon: Shadows, Places and Ghosts Peter Weibel. Theories on Violence Slavoj Žižek. Discomfort in Democracy Joseba Zulaika. In Cold Terror: Capote versus the Counterterrorists. Brumaria is an independent and unofficial Spanish project whose research focuses on the relations between art, aesthetics and politics.
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41 Essex street
New York, NY 10002, USA

VALDOR: GUANTANAMO--El fum del politica conte mes de 4,000 components alatament toxicos, fatals ---

2009-02-07T15:55:00.001-08:00

Gracias Valdor!

"El fum del ([[tabac]]) politica conte mes de 4,000 components altament toxicos, fatals, per a tu i per als altres"
span style="font-weight:bold;">"Political smoke contains more than 4,000 highly toxic ingredients, fatal to yourself and all others/everyone else."

HILDA PAZ: VISUAL POETRY--" BASTA DE TERRORISMO DE ESTADO!"

2009-02-07T15:52:00.001-08:00

THANK YOU VERY MUCH HILDA FOR SENDING THIS GREAT WORK AND FOR YOUR CONTINUAL CONTRIBUTIONS AROUND THE WORLD IN MAIL ART AND VISUAL POETRY AND MANY MEDIAS BESIDES--

BASTA DE TERRORISMO DE ESTADO!//Enough State Terrorism!

LILIANA ESTEBAN: MECHANISMS OF CONTROL--for Prisons/Torture/Walls Call Ongoing here

2009-02-07T15:48:00.000-08:00

"Mecanica del poder--cuerpos dociles--cuerpos sometidos dominacian acrecentada"

"Un cuerpo bien disciplinado forma el contexto operatario del nenor gesto"

"trabajo el cuerpo como si fuera una unidad indisociable"

Luigi Galleani & Pietro Gori: I Martiri di Chicago nella Rievocazione Storica

2009-02-07T15:38:00.001-08:00

FOR KEITH BUCHOLZ WITH THANKS AGAIN FOR HIS ANARKOLOGY--HAYMARKET VISUAL POEMS--

LUIGI GALLEANI

THE 1886 CHICAGO HAYMARKET RIOT,BOMBING, TRIAL AND EXECUTIONS, LIKE THE LATER TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF SACCO AND VANZETTI (1920-27) HAD IMMENSE INTERNATIONAL REPERCUSSIONS

The events ignited the lifelong radicalism of immigrants in the USA, most prominently known today the young worker Emma Goldman, and that of a future immigrant, Luigi Galleani, founder of La Cronaca Sovverisiva described by Federal Agents during the "Red Scares" of 1917 and 1919 as the most dangerous journal ever published in the United States--and which it probably remains as to this day:

Under threat of prosecution, he took refuge in France, from which he was expelled for taking part in a May Day demonstration. Moving to Switzerland, he visited the exiled French anarchist and geographer Elisée Reclus, whom he assisted in the preparation of his Nouvelle Géographie universelle, compiling statistics on Central America. He also assisted students at the University of Geneva in arranging a celebration in honor of the Haymarket Martyrs, who had been hanged in Chicago in 1887, for which he was expelled as a dangerous agitator. Returning to Italy, Gaileani continued his agitation, which got him into trouble with the police. Arrested on charges of conspiracy, he spent more than five years in prison and exile before escaping from the island of Pantelleria, off the coast of Sicily, in 1900.
(more below)
Note: Elisee Reclus is one of the greatest geographers of the 19th Century and one of the Founders of Social Geography still very much in use today. Reclus was forced into exile as a surviving member of the Paris Commune of 1871.
see also this blog link
http://davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com/2008/12/anarkeyology-of-social-geography-elisee.html

EXECUTION OF THOSE CHARGED, FOUND "GUILTY" AND SENTENCED TO DEATH FOR HAYMARKET RIOT

GALLEANI'S PIECE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN CRONACA SOVVERSIVA 3 MAY 1913

PIETRO GORI'S "IL MARTIRIO CHICAGO" ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN "IL PENSIERO" 16 NOVEMBER 1910

The Direct Role of the Haymarket Events in the Life of Luigi Galleani

Gaileani was born on August 12, 1861, in the Piedmont town of Vercelli, not far from the city of Turin. The son of middle-class parents, he was drawn to anarchism in his late teens and, studying law at the University of Turin, became an outspoken militant whose hatred of capitalism and government would burn with undiminished intensity for the rest of his life. Gaileani, however, refused to practice law, which he had come to regard with contempt, transferring his talents and energies to radical propaganda.

Under threat of prosecution, he took refuge in France, from which he was expelled for taking part in a May Day demonstration. Moving to Switzerland, he visited the exiled French anarchist and geographer Elisée Reclus, whom he assisted in the preparation of his Nouvelle Géographie universelle, compiling statistics on Central America. He also assisted students at the University of Geneva in arranging a celebration in honor of the Haymarket Martyrs, who had been hanged in Chicago in 1887, for which he was expelled as a dangerous agitator. Returning to Italy, Gaileani continued his agitation, which got him into trouble with the police. Arrested on charges of conspiracy, he spent more than five years in prison and exile before escaping from the island of Pantelleria, off the coast of Sicily, in 1900.

Galleani, now in his fortieth year, began an odyssey that landed him in North America. Aided by Elisée Reclus and other comrades, he first made his way to Egypt, where he lived for the better part of a year among a colony of Italian expatriates. Threatened with extradition, he moved on to London, from which he soon embarked for the United States, arriving in October 1901, barely a month after the assassination of President McKinley. Settling in Paterson, New Jersey, a stronghold of the immigrant anarchist movement, Galleani assumed the editorship of La Questione Socialelhe Social Question, then the leading Italian anarchist periodical in America. Scarcely had he installed himself in this position when a strike erupted among the Paterson silk workers, and Galleani, braving the anti-radical hysteria which followed the shooting of McKinley, threw all his energies into their cause. In eloquent and fiery speeches he called on the workers to launch a general strike and thereby free themselves from capitalist oppression. Paul Ghio, a visitor from France, was present at one such oration. "1 have never heard an orator more powerful than Luigi Galleani," he afterwards wrote. "He has a marvelous facility with words, accompanied by the faculty—rare among popular tribunes — of precision and clarity of ideas. His voice is full of warmth, his glance alive and penetrating, his gestures of exceptional vigor and flawless distinction."

[[Paterson N.J. was an important city for Italian Anarchists as it was there that Gaetano Bresci --Born in Tuscany in 1869, killed May 22, 1901 by prison guards who claimed it a "suicide--was working & living in when mass protests over high bread prices all over Italy led to the massacre of hundreds of peaceful demonstrators in Milan by the canons of General Bava Beccaris. To honor this brutal "return to order,' King Umberto I decorated the butcher-General. Determined to kill the king. Bresci went to Italy & in Monza, where the King was visiting, put three bullets into him on July 29, 1900]]

The strike occurred in June 1902. Clashes took place between the workers and the police, shots were fired, and Galleani was wounded in the face. Indicted for inciting to riot, he managed to escape to Canada. A short time after, having recovered from his wounds, he secretly recrossed the border and took refuge in Barre, Vermont, living under an assumed name among his anarchist comrades who regarded him with intense devotion. It was in Barre, on June 6,1903, that Galleani launched La Cronaca Sovversiva, the mouthpiece for his incendiary doctrines and one of the most important and ably edited periodicals in the history of the anarchist movement, its influence, reaching far beyond the confines of the United States, could be felt wherever Italian radicals congregated, from Europe and North Africa to South America and Australia. In 1906, however, during a polemical exchange with G.M. Seratti, the socialist editor of Il Proletario in New York, the latter revealed Gaileani’s whereabouts (a charge also levelled at the English writer H.G. Wells), and Galleani was taken into custody. Extradited to New Jersey, he was tried in Paterson in April 1907 for his role in the 1902 strike. The trial, however, ended in a hung jury (seven for conviction, five for acquittal), and Galleani was set free.
Galleani returned to Barre and resumed his propaganda activities. Now in his late forties, he had reached the summit of his intellectual powers. Over the next forty years his fiery oratory and brilliant pen carried him to a position of undisputed leadership within the Italian-American anarchist movement. An eloquent speaker, Galleani had a resonant, tilting voice with a tremolo that kept his audience spellbound. He spoke easily, powerfully, spontaneously, and his bearing was of a kind that made his followers, Sacco and Vanzetti among them, revere him as a kind of patriarch of the movement, to which he won more converts than any other single individual. Galleani was also a prolific writer, pouring forth hundreds of articles, essays, and pamphlets that reached tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of readers on several continents. Yet he never produced a full-length book : the volumes appearing over his signature, such as Faccia a Faccia coi Nemico, Aneliti e Singulti, and Figure e Figuri, are collections of shorter pieces previously published in La Cronaca Sovversiva. In this respect he resembles Johann Most, Errico Malatesta, and Benjamin Tucker (author of Instead of a Book : By a Man Too Busy to Write One), rather than, say, William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, or Peter Kropotkin

// --

"When we talk about property, State, masters, government, laws, courts, & police, we say only that we don't want any of them."
— Luigi Galleani, The End of Anarchism?

Luigi Galleani, (1861-1931)

KEITH BUCHOLZ: ANARKOLOGY (Murder & Exploitation of Memory of Haymarket MartYRS

2009-02-07T15:35:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Keith Bucholz for sending this beautiful and powerful protest series-
I have another series sent by Keith to put up re Voodoo, Visual Poetry & Email Money Scams which is brilliant.
Here also is a previous series by Keith at this blog, done for the Gaza-Guantanamo_Abu Ghraib-Prisons/Walls/Tortures Call ongoing here.

http://davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com/search?q=keith+bucholz

FAITS DIVERS--FATE'S DIVERS- 1 FEB 09--SLOW POETRY, CONCEPTUAL POETRY, FLARF, FENEON COLLECTIVE, AVANT POETRY & L'AMOUR PROPRE

2009-02-01T09:29:00.000-08:00

"Jails, Institutions and Death." X's death reminded friends of that fatal love they share with the departed. For Eurydice, Orpheus traveled through the land of Death; addiction's lovers also traverse the poet's path. Returning, what different love might an addict find--what Eurydice found, what unexpected poet's path. Or what other death, torn into 14 pieces, sonnet lines, sung by the river borne head.

Expecting only a stroke victim, the ambulance arrived within minutes of the call at 29th and Wells, only to learn two more victims had been added to the passenger list. One shooting, one knifing, both critical. Calling for more paramedics, the ambulance driver was shot by a drive by. Recently returned from Iraq, Lieutenant F.W., passing by, experienced total flashback and, according to witnesses, screamed repeatedly he was taking control as he commandeered the vehicle, beginning a high speed chase still in progress.

Announcements Abound of Absolutely Avant Essential & Epochal & Now Available MOST-AVANT--
--THE WORKS WHICH IN THE VERY ACTS OF OUR READING THERM ARE BECOMING THE INSTANT AND FOUNDING CLASSICS OF THE NEW ERA

Amour propre - Essentially, the opposite of self-preservation (amour de soi). Amour propre is an acute awareness of, and regard for, oneself in relation to others. Whilst the savage person cares only for his survival, civilized man also cares deeply about what others think about him. This is a deeply harmful psychological deformation, linked to the development of human reason and political societies. At its root is a difference between being and appearing. Savage man can only "be", and has no concept of pretence: civil man is forced to compare himself to others, and to lie to himself. Rousseau traces the development of amour propre back to the first village festivals, in which competition to dance and sing well increases the villagers' awareness of each other's talents and abilities. Amour propre is best expressed in a society in which wealth dominates; there, all are compared on an insubstantial and harmful basis.

As he grew deaf to Echo's cries of love, Narcissus drowned in the doubly reflecting love by and for his own reflection. In his self contained love Narcissus needed no other's attentions other than his own and that of his own reflections. In these he differed greatly from the contemporary poets of the Mirror and Gaze
who assert their identities under the brand names of Flarf, Slow Poetry, Conceptual Poetry, Feneon Collective, Avant and those Purest of Seekers, whom one might call the Most Avant.

One of the most striking aspects of al these various branches of the "American Tree' is that each labors on under the same delusions of the Language poets that thy are furnishing a critique of capitalism, or a critique of some aspect of capitalist manifestations in language, and so have, even for some brief interval of time, a radical edge to them, a transgressive and sexily dangerous "aura" of the Benjaminian "original."

Yes--the "original" and its aura--not to mention the incredibly high value of its aura--have endured and multiplied beyond imagining despite al the philosopher's insights. And what poet today does not still aspire, even in being a machine, unoriginal, boring, copying, to be still, al the same, WORTH A LOT OF MONEY--AND OF A MUCH HIGHER VALUE CULTURALLY ALSO--TO BE AMONG THE ELITE--as Kenny G argued in a recent Harriet post which was discussed here in terms of the Garden Dwarfs of Hans Richter--

One of the great paradoxes of American language of any kind today is that it is so riddled with double talk and hypocrisy it is almost incapable of expressing anything which actually exists in terms of facts and "events on the ground." The possibility of persons seeing the doubleness of the words in front of them has vanished entirely. An unquestioning belief has set in which is usually reserved for the reading of fictions, and the sort of skepticism and jeering usually thrown at make believe is saved for facts and actualities.

Having far to much to do today i asked my friend G-A Vidiamodopo to write something until i have more time--
and he has surprised me by not at al writing in his customary vein--

i agree with him that American poetry is already so Slow is missing everything al around it in the world--
what i cal the Hidden in Plain Site/Sight/Cite
working directly from materials in the streets with rubBEings and clay impressions, the materials on one side of the paper, the hands on the other, touching each other and and the paper--collaborating--
teaches the hands to see and the eyes to touch, to feel and the ears to see and touch also--

the high speeds of perceptions and the senses are entering in with the awarenesses of each moment which is happening in the world as the pieces are being made--the movements of the wind, the dust, dirt, the noises of machines, voices of passersby, sounds of birds or animals--stenches of dumpsters--

these things moving with great speed and as Robert Smithson noted the ART OF LOOKING of the artist takes place in time--and creates art as real as any object--and why make an object which is sold and owned for far less than what the artist has earned by his time--the time in the learning how to create in this way the years of discipline dedication devotion to working in a way which is not dependent on the networks of things and systems which the so called Slow Poetry is--and the so called Fast Poetry is also

all of them are slow already!!

there is no critique in any of these works as they simply replicate and mirror the systems they pretend to critique--the reasons for this are in part that in order to function in their jobs and continue writing as they do do, poets have to deny the reality of a great many things--the whole US policy towards Israel alone as a Democratic nation has to be examined for what is--as an Apartheid War Criminal Nation breaking laws--as are the USA-- by the minute with the equipment we supply and the vast sums of money--
so that --is electing a Black President meaningful if we al support Apartheid?

a simple denial of reality like this means that the language is already on such shaky grounds that its claims to be critical of itself collapse like castles made of sand--
if one starts to examine the news and the reviews the essays the claims made in books and al around one on all manner of things historical economic philosophic and begins to detect patterns of falsehoods or bias, or finds out that so many things held up as authoritative are simply plagiarisms or lies, copied over and over and repeated ad nausuem until they are are taken as truths--
then of course one wil believe that these poetries are "critical" of the very things they mirror in every way

truly this is the reason one finds amour propre the major mode among so many of the avant poets--in their behavior and thinking--the destructiveness and the lack of critique anything outside the tiny world--the absolute lack of historical perspective or denial of it--ahistorical claims and colonializations of badly or deliberately distranslated versions of hackneyed copies of texts whose origins are dubious--

truly this is why i have invented what has already been existing--the New Extreme Experimental American Poetry--
where the use of torture which is continuing under different guises despite what the President says, and the installment right away of lobbyists despite the new standards, and the killing of civilians despite the President's words of non respect for anyone who does this--
when the leader every day contradicts every firm statement he makes not only in word but in deed, it gives the green light for the continued contradiction of al uses of language, al words to mean their opposites, al words to mean nothing or mean only what one wants them to at that moment--

and the words only mean what the strong and the rich want to them to and only now and later on they will mean something else

that is whY there is no critique launched in anY of these poetries--
none of them examines is the fundamental problem which is that in order for the system to exist one has to accept al the lies with which one lives every day and not only accept them but begin to assert loudly and with hostility towards others that they are true

GUANTANAMO

JENNY HOLZER'S MEGABUCKS EARNING "PROJECTIONS" EXHIBITION

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: DARK AT END"

AS SO OFTEN IN THESE TIMES CHAOTIC, CONFUSING AND CROWDED WITH SO MANY POETIC ALTERNATIVES AMONG THE AUGUST AVENUES OF THE AISLES OF AN AMERICAN ACADEMIC AVANT, I HAVE FOUND IT NECESSARY TO TURN TO MY FRIEND PROFESSORE G-A VIDIAMODOPO, IL FONDATORE, IL MAESTRO DI LE PAROLE IN LIBERACE

FOR SOME BASIC QUESTIONS WITH WHICH TO BEGIN THINKING ABOUT THE ISSUES WHICH CONFRONT ONE IN THOSE INSTANCES WHEN ONE IS PREVAILED UPON TO EXAMINE THE BLOGOSPHERES OF THE VARIOUS ALREADY INDUCTED STATUARY OF THE EPOCHS PRESENT AND TO ARRIVE AND BE SUSTAINED VIA GENERATIONS OF ANNOTATIONS AND FOOTNOTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF STANDARDIZED ENTRIES--

HERE ARE THE GRACIOUS AND GENEROUS WORDS WHICH IL MAESTRO HAS BEEN SO KIND TO SHARE WITH US TODAY--

First, thank you for inviting my participation in these matters; AND THANK YOU FOR THE SANDWICHES AND COFFEE. aS YOU KNOW, THE PRIMARY REASON FOR AN ARTIST TO ATTEND SUCH EVENTS IS TO EAT A BIT BETTER THAN ONE DOES AT HOME, IF ONE MAY SO Designate THE SITE WHERE ONE IS PERMITTED TO PLACE ONE'S BODY FOR PORTIONS OF THE 24 HOUR CYCLE OF DAY AND NIGHT.

Having PERUSED THE MATERIALS WITH WHICH i HAVE BEEN PROVIDED REGARDING slow poetry, conceptual poetry, flarf, Feneon collective, avant poetry, i THINK THAT THEY ARE ALL BOUND BY A COMMON PURPOSE. That IS TO PLACE THEM AT THE CENTER OF ATTENTION OF THE POETIC UNIVERSE IN WHICH THEY PERCEIVE THEMSELVES DWELLING. By ANY MEANS NECESSARY, AND SOME OF THEM VERY MEAN. IN FACT THEY MEAN SO TO SPEAK MAY BE DEFINED AT TIMES AS BEING MEAN, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN. AFTER ALL, ONE MUST HAVE ONE'S LITTLE JOKES, YES!

IF oNE READS CAREFULLY IN AL THESE VARIOUS BRANCHES OF THE GREAT "AMERICAN TREE"--THEY ARE ALL PREPONDERANTLY HEAVY WITH THE SAME FRUIT--THAT OF THE SELF, THE EGO, THE AUTOBIOGRApHICAL I--EVEN IN CRITIQUING THE SELF, THERE IS THE RESORT TO CONFESSION, SELF EXAMINaTION, WHICH HAS ITS OrGINS IN LITERATURE IN ROUSSEAU--WHO LIKE HENRY MILLER FOUND HIMSELF THE MOST IMPORTANT AND INTERESTING OF TOPICS ON WHICH TO DISCOURSE--

NOTE THAT IN EACH OF THESE SCHOOLS OF POETICS THE CONCENTRATION OF EMPHASIS IS ON ThE EGO WHICH LIKE THE EGG BINDS ToGEHER THE SEEMINGLY WILLFULLY AND STRAINED EFFORTS TO APPEAR AS THOUGH RANDOMLY CHOSEN. NOTE IN THAT PARAGON OF THE URGE TO BECOME a MACHINE MR KENNY G THAT HIS ENTIRE WORKS ARE CONCERNED WITH HIMSELF. HIS RECORD OF HIS MOEVEMENTS IN A DAY, HIS NOTATIONS OF THE WEATHER IN HIS NICHE OF THE WORLD, OR NECK OF THE WOODS TO QUOTE A FAMOUS WEAtHER PERSON WHOM HE NO DOUBT EMULATES.

WHAT IS FLARf BUT AN AGGRESSIVE ASSERTION OF ONE'S EGO VIA THE SELECTION OF AGGRESSIVE PHRASES AND WORDS FROM OUT OF THe AGGRESSIVE AND INTRUSIVE BOMBARDMENTS OF SPAM, THOSE NON STOP SALESPERSON

AND NOSeY NeIGHBORS THOS EPOLICEPERSONS AND PENTECOSTALS KICKING DOWN ONES FIREWALLS AND dOORS ONES MIND AND ENTERING IN AND TAKING OVER IF ONE IS NOT CAREFUL?

FLARF THEN IS A MODE OF RESISTANCE ONE IS TOLD TO THIS HOME EVASION. AND IS IT NOT THE RIGHT OF EVERY HOME OWNER TO SECURE AND PROTECT THEMSELVES, DOES NOT ISRAEL HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEFEND ITSELF?

THE FENEON COLLECTIVE IS ANOTHER ASPECT OF THE HOME INVASION TACTIC. FEELING CONTINUALLY INVADED, IT PREPARES TO LAUNCH A COUNTER TERRORISM ATTACK I n WHICH THE INVADERS ARE SATIRIZED AND MOCKED AND MImicED BY NAME.

HOWEVER MY YOUNG FRIEND AS AN OLD DETECTIVE OF LITERARY CRIMES, DOES THIS NOT MEAN THAT THE VICTIM KNOWS THEIR ASSAULTER AND IN FIGHTING BACK HAS RECOGNIZED THEM AHEAD of TIME AND SO MAY BE ACCUSED OF A PEREMPTORY SELF DEFENSE?

IMMEDIATELY ONE FINDS THAT POETICS INVOLVES A LANGUAGE AND MINDSET OF WAR. THIS IS DUE TO COMPETITION AND NOW THAT THE ECONOMY IS GOING TO NOSEDIVE LIKE A KAMIKAZE PLANE IN A HEROIC OLD FILM OF THE LAST GREAT GENERATION DEFEATING THE AXIS OF EVIL AND BEING ABLE TO DROP WITH OUT DEBATE THE ATOMIC BOMBS--WELL--

YES--NOW IN THIS NEW PERIOD OF THE LEAN AND MEAN FIGHTING MACHINES AS FORESEEN AND DEFINED AND PREPARED DESPITE ALL PROOFS TO THE CONTRARY AT THE TIME BY THAT VISIONARY POET NOW STUDYING AT STANFORD WITH THE WORLD'S LEADING CRITICAL THEORIST OF AVANTISM MAJOR GENERAL MARJORIE PERLOFF, THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE HIS EMeNinCE ME DONALD RUMSFELD, In THESE LEANER MEAN TIMES, OF COURSE, THE POETIC COMPETITIONS ARE GETTING EVER FIERCER FOR EVER FEWER JOBS--

SO EACH ONE, EACH POET MUST SHARPEN THEIR skills, their nails, their teeth--their wits their knives--, MAKE THEM AL THE MORE DANGEROUSLY BARBED, AL THE MORE ARMED WITH A WEAPONRY NOT ONLY OVERT BUT COVERT, RESORTING TO SUCH UNDERHAND TACTICS AS THE GOVERNMENT DOES, TApPING PHONES AND hacking COMPUTERS AND ASSIGNING AL MANNERS OF DOCUMENTS AND IDENTITIES THEFTS IN ORDER TO SUBVERT NOT SIMPLY GRAMMAR BUT ALSO THE HARD WON NETWORKS AND EFFORTS OF RIVALS

THIS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND CONFESSIONAL MODE IS EVER PRESENT IN THAT THE ONE WAY IN WHICH COMPARISONS AMONG POETS MAY BE MADE IS TO EXPOSE THEMSELVES IN WHAT THEY FEEL ARE THEIR MOST TELLING AND PRECIOUS DIFFERENCES THEIR DIFFERENCES THE MOST VALUABLE IN TERMS OF THE RANKINGS WHICH SOCIETY AND CULTURAL ESTYABLISMENTS ACCORD THEM.

THEREFORE ONE HAS A VESTED INTEREST IN KEEPING ALIVE VARIOUS ASPECTS OF ETHNICITY AND ARGUMENTS WHICH ARE NOT IN THE BEST INTERESTS OF THAT REACHING ACROSS THE AISLES OF WITCH THE NEW PRESIDENT SPEAKS, BUT INSTEAD, TO DEEPEN THESE DIVIDES IN ORDER TO MAKE SURE THAT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

ONLY IN THAT WAY MAY ONE SAY THAT ONE POETIC MODE IS MORE WORTH WHILE MORE VALUABLE MORE DUE TO BE TAUght AND PURCHASED THAN ANOTHER

DO YOU SEE MY YOUNG FReinD?

READ EACH OF THESE KINDS OF POETRY CLOSELY AND LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK

ALSO you HAVE ASKED ME--WHAT DO AND WHY DO THEY SAY AND ACCUSE--EACH OTHER AND NOT ACCUSE EACH OTHER BUT REMAIN SILENT--OVER WHO HAS OR NOT WRITTEN OR SPOKEN ABOUT THE WARS OR PRISONS--OR GAZA GITMO OR GAPS IN RICH AND POOR--

THIS IS THE REASON MY FRIEND--NO ONE DARES TO SPEAK ON ANY OF THESE THINGS BECAUSE IF THEY DO IT MAY NOT BE THE OPinION OF THEIR BOSSES OF THEIR COLLEAGUES OF THE PEOPLE WHO HANDLE THE PUrSE STRINGS AND ALREADY THEIR ARE SOME EXAMPLES, MANY, IN WHICH PERSONS WHO HAVE SPOKEN OUT IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER OFTEN VERY SMALL HAVE BEEN MORE THAN SEVERAL already REPRIMANDED--AND THERE IS PRESSURE TO HAVE THE NEW PRESIDENT MAKE MUCH TOUGHER THE ALREADY EXISTING ACTS OF 2004

DO YOU SEE MY FRIEND THE SILENCE IS BECAUSE THAT IS THE WAY IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE. EVEN THOSE WHO ASK AND POINT FINGERS AND SAYS--WHY AR THOSE PEOPLE SILENT--HAVE THEY THESMLVES EVER SPOKNEN OUT? NO THEY HAVE NOT. THEY POINT AT OTHERS TO SHOW BRAVADO BUT WHEN IT COMES DONE TO MAKING A CRITIQUE IT IS NOT THERE AND WILL NOT BE THERE.

MY FRIEND THE SUM TOTAL OF AL THESE EVENTS SLOW CONCEPTUAL FLARF FENEON COLLECTIVE AVANT IS THAT AL OF THEM ARE EXTREMELY SLOW ALREADY

VERY CAUTIOUS AND SAFE BECAUSE THE MAIN THING IS

ALREADY AL THESE MOVEMENTS ARE ENSHRINED VERY SWIFTLY.

SLOW POETRY--AMERICAN POETRY IS SO ENTROPIC THAT IT IS ALREADY NEARLY AT A STANDSTILL--

THE SIGN OF THIS IS THAT IT CRAVES EVEN MORE SLOWNESS

IT WANTS TO LIE DOWN AND NAP!!

FOR ALONG TIME!!

TAKE A NICE LONG SNOOZE!!

IF ONE EXAMINES THE SITUATION MY FRIEND WHAT IS THE FOUNDING PRINCIPLE IN AL THESE MOVEMENTS BESIDES THE MIRROR AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

IT IS BOREDOM

BAUDELAIRE WARNED OF THE GOUFFRE-THE HORROR OF THE GOUFFRE, LE NEANT--THE HORROR OF THIS HAUNTED HIM TERRIFIED HIM--

"L'ACEDIE, LA MALADIE DES MOINES"--ACEDIA, THE DISEASE OF MONKS--

BECAUSE --IDLE HANDS DO THE DEVIL'S WORK--MENTAL AND SPIRITUAL MASTURBATION--LST AND ANGER AT OTHERS--PETTY JEALOUSIES--OBSESSIVE TAKING NOTE OF OTHER'S MINOR FAULTS--DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR WITH WITH WHICH TO FEEL THE CHASMS OF THE VOID--

ETHICAL NITPICKING STEADILY INTERFERING AND EVER MORE INTERTWINED WITH AESTHETICS--

PREJUDICES AND OPINIONS DEVLOPED INTO SYSTEMS OF THOUGHT AND PHILOSOPHY--RESEARHCES SUBSTITUTED BYT MEMORIZATIONS OF THE WORDS OF THE LEADERS, THE SAINTS, THE ONES THEMOST IMPORTART TO QUOTE FROM AT THE MOMENT

THE BLUFFER'S GUIDE TO BEING A WORLD CLASS ASS LICKER A BROWN NOSER A KOW TOWER AN EARNER OF BROWNIE POINTS A TEACHER'S PET A SYCOPHANT--

OUT OF BOREDOM THE WEAVING OF WEBS--NETWORKS IN WHICH SPIDERS CATCH FLIES AND DRAINOF THEIR JICES AND PROCAOIM THSMLEVES TOUGH GUYS OR ESLE bUDDHISTS AND DISCUSS THE MORALITY OF TERRITORIALIAING INTELLECTUAL PROPERIITES

COLONIZATIONSOF ETHNO POTICS RIPPING OFF THE OTHER AND BEING HAILED AS A SAINT--BOBOREDOM LEDS TO THE ERASURES OF THE PAST SO THAT ONE MAY CLAIM THEM AS ONE'S OWN--

REVISIONIST HHISTORIES CREATED BY BORED MISSIONARIES OF THE EVIL SPIRITS--SETTLERS OF EMPT SPACES--HEAVY WITH WORDS--NAMES--RULES--SYNTACTICAL TACTICS--

DISCUSSIONS OF SUBVERSIONS OF CAPITAL--TEXT MESSAGING FROM THE POLLUTING AUTMOPMOBILE LISTENING TO THE CD PLAYER AND RELAXED BY HUNDREDS OF DOLLARSOF THERAPY AND PILLS--OR SESSIONS WITH THE ROSHI

IDLE HANDS DO THE devil's WORK--THE BORED GO OUT AND COMMIT CRIMES OR GET INTO DOPE OR START OFF BEING ENTERTAINED AND WIND UP IN THE BUSINESS OF ENSLAVING OTHERS TO SELL TO ENTERTAIN OTHERS FOR MONEY--

AND THESE POETS AL OF THEM HAVE GROWN SO BORED WITH THE USUAL ROUNDS OF THE SAME OLD SAME OLD THEY ARE CONTINUALLY TRYING TO COME U WITH SOME THING TO WHILE SITTING IN FRONT OF THEIR SCREENS IN WHICH THEY ARE CONTINUALLY CONFRONTED BY THEIR REFLECTIONS--

AND SO BEING BORED AND SELF ABSORBED THEY REALIZE MY GOD I WANT EVERYBODY TO PAY ATTENTION TO ME

AND SO THEY START GOING ABOUT I ABOUT I BY MAKINGS UP SOME RADICAL INNOVATIVE MOVEMENT WHICH ULTIMATELY FOUNDS--BASES-- ITSELF ON THE IDEA OF BEING BORING

kEROUAC QUOTED cELINE: tHE pOLICE OPERATE WITH NINE LINES OF BORDOM AND ONE LINE OF LAW--

THE MOST RADICAL MOVE TO GAIN THE MOST ATTENTION FOR ONESELF

THIS IS WHY NO ONE WRITES OR THINKS OF ANYTHING TO DO OUTSIDE THEMSELVES

IT IS FORBIDDEN IF ONE IS to KEEP ONE'S JOB

AND TO KEEP ONES JOB MEANS ONE IS LOCKED iNTO WATCHING NOT SO JUST OUT FOR ONESELF BUT PRETTY MUCH ONLY ONESELF--ON EVERY SIDE, VIA AL THE MIRRORS AND CAMERAS ONE CAN AFFORD AND AL THE ATTENTION DRAWN GAMES OF AL THE ONES ONE HAS MNANGED TO HOOK INTO ON'ES SHOW AT EVERY POSSIBLE MOMENT--

WHICH MEANS ABSORBED IN ONESELF

WHICH MEANS BORED

AND THAT MEANS DESPERATE FOr ATTENTION

AND SO ONE WILL GET EVER MORE

POETRY MOVEMENTS

OF EVER

TINIER

AND NARROW SCOPES

AND WITH EVER MORE DEBATES AND ever MORE COUNTER MOVEMENTS AND CONFERENCES PAPERS BLOGS AND NAMES AND TEXTS AND Glorious WONDERFUL ATTENTION AND MAYBE SOME PAY RAISES AND ADORING STUDENTS

AND MY GOD

ONE WON'T BE SUFFERING THAT AWFUL BOREDOM FOR AT LEAST A FEW HOURS

UNTIL ONE IS AGAIN LEFT ALONE WITH ONESELF CONFRONTING

LE GOUFFRE

AND THE PRESSURES

OF THE BILLS AND THE FACT THAT SOMEONE ELSE IS GETTING MORE ATTENTION THAN YOU ARE FOR THE MOVEMENT

AIN'T THAT SO MY MAN--

NOW LOOK AT THIS POET HERE WITH IS GUN --

LOOK AT HIM

DEATH IS MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN LIFE

THAT IS HIS MUSE

AND YOU KNOW HE DID DIE FEW YEARS LATER

DRUGS AND DEATH METH AND DEATH

NOW YOU SEE THAT IS AN HOnEST DEATH

AN HONEST LOVE A LOVE OF SOMETHING OUTSIDE ONESELF

DOPE AND DEATH--DON'T YOU THINK SO???--SEE WHAT I MEAN--

LEAVE IT TO THE POETS TO LOVE THEMSELVES--IT'S MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN LIFE TOO---

AND FOR THE REST OF US TO HAVE THE HONOR OF CLEANING THE GUANO OFF THEIR Equestrian Fascist STATUES UNTIL ONE DAY THEY ARE JUST Stowed AWAY—

Outta sight--IN THE CEMETERY--OR THE MUSEUM--OR SMASHED AND USED FOR MORTAR TO HOLD SOME GARDEN OR LAWN WALLS TOGETHER--

AS THOUGH EITHER ONE OF US MY DEAR FRIEND WOULD EVEN ON THE PENALTY OF DEATH WIPE THE HORSE'S ASS OF A FASCIST THE WAY THESE OTHERS WOULD TO SURVIVE!!
WRITING HYMNS OF PRAISE TO THIS FUNCTION--AND NOTING THE BEAUTY OF THE QUALITY OF THE PEDIGREE--
MUCH AS DOES MR KENNY G--
NO MY FRIEND EVEN AFTER WE HAD KILLED THIS HORSE THIS PETRIFIED STATUE WE WOULD NOT EVEN EAT ITS MEAT OR USE IT DUST TO MAKE ANYTHING WITH AT ALL--
Amour propre - Essentially, the opposite of self-preservation (amour de soi). Amour propre is an acute awareness of, and regard for, oneself in relation to others. Whilst the savage person cares only for his survival, civilized man also cares deeply about what others think about him. This is a deeply harmful psychological deformation, linked to the development of human reason and political societies. At its root is a difference between being and appearing. Savage man can only "be", and has no concept of pretence: civil man is forced to compare himself to others, and to lie to himself. Rousseau traces the development of amour propre back to the first village festivals, in which competition to dance and sing well increases the villagers' awareness of each other's talents and abilities. Amour propre is best expressed in a society in which wealth dominates; there, all are compared on an insubstantial and harmful basis.

"PLAIN WORDS" : SUSPECTED GALLEANISTSI MANIFESTO FOUND AT SITES OF A SERIES OF BOMBINGS IN 1919

2009-02-01T06:32:00.000-08:00

HOUSE OF ATTORNEY GENERAL PALMER FOLLOWING BOMBING

Plain Words

'Plain Words' was found at the site of a series of bombings against capitalist targets in 1919, including billionaire John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Alexander Palmer. The primes suspects were Galleanists, followers of insurrectionary anarchist Luigi Galleani (1861-1831), founder and editor of the newspaper 'Cronaca Sovversiva.' Published for over 15-years almost entirely in Italian, the magazine made a strong case for "propaganda by the deed," that is: revolutionary violence as opposed to simply propaganda by the word. The Galleanists tried to put the ideas into practice; for example, a Chicago chef added arsenic to the soup for 200 at a banquet to honor Archbishop Mundelein (no one died - he added too much poison and it was all vomited back up). The June 1919 bombings did kill three - one of the bombers, a woman walking by, and a night watchman; in contrast, from 1914 to 1918, tens of millions were maimed or killed in the capitalists' first World War.

The powers that be make no secret of their will to stop, here in America, the world-wide spread of revolution. The powers that be must reckon that they will have to accept the fight they have provoked.
A time when the social question's solution can be delayed no longer; class war is on and can not cease but with a complete victory for the International proletariat.
The challenge is an old one, oh "democratic" lords of the autocratic republic. We have been dreaming of freedom, we have talked of liberty, we have aspired to a better world, and you jailed us, you clubbed us, you deported us, you murdered us whenever you could.
Now that the great war, waged to replenish your purses, and build a pedestal to your saints, is over, nothing better can you do to protect your stolen millions, and your usurped fame, than to direct all the power of the murderous institutions you created for your exclusive defense, against the working multitudes rising to a more human conception of life.
The jails, the dungeons you reared to bury all protesting voices, are now replenished with languishing conscientious workers, and never satisfied, you increase their number ever day.
It is history of yesterday that your gunmen were shooting and murdering unarmed masses by the wholesale; it has been the history of every day in your regime; and now all prospects are even worse.
Do not expect us to sit down and pray and cry. We accept your challenges and mean to stick to our war duties. We know that all you do is for your defense as a class; we know also that the proletariat has the same right to protect itself, since their press has been suffocated, their mouths muzzled; we mean to speak for them the voice of dynamite, through the mouth of guns.
Do not say we are acting cowardly because we keep hiding, do not say it is abominable; it is war, class war, and you were the first to wage it under cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws, behind the guns of your bone-headed slave.
No liberty do you accept but yours; the working people also have a right to freedom, and their rights, our own rights, we have set our minds to protect at any price.
We are not many, perhaps more than you dream of, though but are all determined to fight to the last, till a man remains buried in your Bastilles, till a hostage of the working class is left to the tortures of your police system, and will never rest until your fall is complete, and the laboring masses have taken possession of all that rightly belongs to them.
There will be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.
We are ready to do anything and everything to suppress the capitalist class; just as you are doing anything and everything to suppress the proletarian revolution.
Our mutual position is pretty clear. What has been done by us so far is only a warning that there are friends of popular liberties still living. Only now we are getting into the fight; and you will have a chance to see what liberty-loving people can do.
Do not seek to believe that we are the Germans' or the devil's paid agents; you know well we are class-conscious men with strong determination, and no vulgar liability. And never hope that your cops, and your hounds will ever succeed in ridding the country of the anarchistic germ that pulses in our veins.
We know how we stand with you and know how to take care of ourselves. Besides, you will never get all of us * * * and we multiply nowadays. Just wait and resign to your fate, since privilege and riches have turned your heads.
Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny!
THE ANARCHIST FIGHTERS.

ITALIAN ANARCHISM IN AMERICA: from THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF SACCO AND VANZETTI by PAUL AVRICH

2009-02-01T02:00:00.001-08:00

LUIGI GALLEANI--EDITOR/PUBLISHER OF CRONACA SOVVERSIVA--PROPONENT OF "LA SALUTE E IN VOI"--PROPAGANDA OF THE DEED--

HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE SACCO-VANZETTI CASE

Italian Anarchism in America: An Historical Background to the Sacco-Vanzetti Case by Paul Avrich

A few years ago I received a phone call from a woman in New York City who told me that she was planning to write a book about Sacco and Vanzetti. She wanted to know what sources there were about their lives and activities. I asked her if she read Italian: I was going to recommend La Cronaca Sovversiva and other Italian anarchist journals. She said, "No, I don't." "In that case' " I said, "I think you ought to abandon the project, unless you are prepared to learn the language well enough to read it." She replied that she was not interested in the anarchist aspect of the case. I told her that it was essential for her to study the anarchist movement if she planned to do any serious work on Sacco and Vanzetti, to which she replied: "The anarchists are not serious people, and I prefer not to deal with that aspect of the case." At this point, I strongly urged her to embark on some other subject that was more congenial to her interests.

For one cannot deal with Sacco and Vanzetti without talking about anarchism; and, as Professor Pernicone pointed out, the greatest single shortcoming in the literature on the case-a literature that is vast, enormous-is its failure to come to grips with Sacco and Vanzetti as anarchists. Anarchism was a central feature of their lives. To write about Sacco and Vanzetti without talking about the anarchist connection, the anarchist dimension, is equivalent to writing about Eugene Victor Debs without talking about socialism, or to writing about Lenin and Trotsky without talking about communism. Anarchism was the passion, the great idea of Sacco and Vanzetti. It was the driving force of their lives. It was their obsession, their love, their chief interest on a day-to-day basis.

I'd like to read three quotations from their writings which illustrate this point. First, a quotation from Vanzetti's brief autobiography, The Story of a Proletarian Life:

I am and will be until the last instant (unless I should discover that I am in error) an anarchist communist, because I believe that communism is the most humane form of social contract, because I know that only with liberty can man rise, become noble, and complete.

We find a similar idea in Sacco's writings- for example, in one of his last letters to his son Dante, written on August 18, 1927, five days before the execution. He advises Dante to help the persecuted and oppressed "as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all and the poor workers." One final quotation we can find numerous statements of this kind in their manuscripts and published works - from a letter of Vanzetti to Virginia MacMechan, who was one of those Boston "Brahmins" of whom Professor Solomon spoke so eloquently yesterday, who helped to teach him English in prison. This letter dates from 1923, right in the middle of the case:

Oh friend, the anarchism is as beauty as a woman for me, perhaps even more, since it include all the rest and me and her. Calm, serene, honest, natural, vivid, muddy and celestial at once, austere, heroic, fearless, fatal, generous and implacable-all these and more it is.

Sacco and Vanzetti, then, were two of the many thousands of Italian anarchists in the United States. What I'd like to do for the remaining 15 or 20 minutes of my talk is to give you some general idea of what the Italian anarchist movement was like, the movement to which these two men dedicated their energies and ultimately their lives: its origins, its ideas, its chief figures, its activities. This is a very difficult thing to do in such a brief period of time, but in the afternoon session, when we discuss the case in greater detail, if anybody has specific questions about this or that aspect of the Italian anarchist movement, I and the other participants will be happy to try to answer them.

The first Italian anarchist groups in the United States appeared in the 1880s, at the same time as the beginnings of large-scale Italian immigration into this country. Most of these immigrants were of the peasant and working classes, and the anarchists came largely from these segments of Italian society. The initial group was formed in 1885 in New York City, which became a leading center of Italian anarchism in America. It was called the Gruppo Anarchico - Rivoluzionario Carlo Cafiero, Cafiero being one of the most famous of the anarchist leaders in Italy in the late nineteenth century. Another group of the same name was formed two years later in Chicago, the most important center of Italian anarchism in the midwest. The first newspaper published by the Italian anarchists in the United States appeared in 1888. It was called simply L'Anarchico, The Anarchist, and was issued by the Cafiero group in New York.

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From New York and Chicago the movement began to spread as the immigrants increased in number. At first, it was concentrated mainly in the large port cities on the eastern seaboard, where the immigrants tended to settle when they arrived. Consequently, by the early 1890s we find Italian anarchist groups in such places as Boston and Philadelphia besides New York. From the east, the movement gradually filtered westward, with small groups appearing in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit. Finally, by the mid-1890s we have groups as far west as the Pacific coast, the first Italian anarchist group in San Francisco being founded in 1894.

Among the events which gave an impetus to the formation of these groups was the Haymarket Affair of 1886 and 1887. It is often said in history books that the explosion in Chicago's Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886, which caused the death of seven policemen and led to the hanging of four anarchists and the suicide of a fifth in his cell, precipitated the downfall of the anarchist movement in the United States, because the authorities proceeded to crush the movement in Chicago and to suppress it in New York and other cities around the country. Precisely the opposite was the case. The Haymarket executions stimulated the growth of the anarchist movement both among native Americans and immigrants, and there was a rapid rise in the number of Italian anarchist groups after 1887. November 11, 1887, marks a key date in the history of anarchism in the United States and around the world. That was the date of the hanging of the four anarchists , who were demonstrably innocent of any connection with the bomb-throwing. The fact that these men were ready to sacrifice their lives for their fellow workers was so moving to many young people around the country, some of them newly arrived, that they began to read anarchist literature and to join anarchist groups.

A second important event was the arrival from Italy of a series of distinguished anarchist writers and speakers. Beginning in the 1890s, virtually every famous Italian anarchist visited our shores. Some stayed only three or four weeks, some several years, and a few, like Luigi Galleani and Carlo Tresca, remained for much longer periods of time. I'd like to tell you a little bit about them and about their impact on the anarchist movement.

The first major figure to arrive here was Francesco Saverio Merlino, who came to New York City in 1892, at a very early phase of the movement. Merlino had not only a beautiful command of his native Italian, but he also spoke English quite fluently, having lived in London for a number of years before coming to the United States. This, by the way, was not always the case with the leading Italian anarchists in America, to say nothing of the rank and file, whose English often left much to be desired. But Merlino, had this great advantage. As a result, he was not only able to found one of the earliest Italian anarchist journals in this country, Il Grido degli Oppressi (The Cry of the Oppressed), but he also founded an English-language anarchist journal called Solidarity, which appealed to native Americans as well as to Italians who were beginning to learn the language of their adopted land. In addition to founding these papers, Merlino conducted a speaking tour through the United States, remaining for some months in Chicago. Hi s propaganda, both oral and written, gave anarchism another strong impetus, and so it was unfortunate for the movement that he should have returned to London in 1893.

But Merlino was only the first of a whole series of anarchist spokesmen. The second, Pietro Gori, who arrived in New York in 1895, had an even greater impact on the growth of the movement. Gori spent a whole year in the United States. Like Merlino, he was trained in the law, as was Luigi Galleani. (The rank and file, as I have noted, were virtually all working people) These leaders, coming from middle-class and upper middle-class families, were akin to the Russian Populists, those conscience-stricken noblemen, Bakunin and Kropotkin among them, who felt that they had a debt to the people and went to teach the people about revolution. Gori too was from a prosperous family, a university graduate, a lawyer by profession, who cast his lot among the working people. He was a magnetic speaker, a poet and playwright, whose poems were often recited and plays often performed at Italian anarchist gatherings in North and South America as well as Europe.

During his stay in the United States Gori held between 200 and 400 meetings- estimates vary - the space of a single year. This meant that he held a meeting almost every day. He would bring along his mandolin and begin to sing songs, and this would attract a crowd who would stay to listen to what he had to say about anarchism. In this way he won numerous converts and started many new anarchist groups. He resembled a religious evangelist, a wandering minstrel, going from town to town between Boston and San Francisco, preaching the gospel of anarchism, which to some became a kind of secular religion. Gori, unfortunately for the movement, fell ill after his return to Europe, and died in 1911, at the age of 45, depriving anarchism of one of its most capable and beloved apostles.

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I must proceed more quickly now, because I could go on and on about each of these fascinating figures. One of the most impressive, yet least well known, of these speakers and writers was Giuseppe Ciancabilla, who had been born in Rome. (Gori, incidentally, hailed from Messina, Merlino from Naples, Galleani from the Piedmont, and Tresca from the Abruzzi, and the rank and file similarly came from all parts of Italy.) Ciancabilla arrived in America in 1898 and settled in Paterson, New Jersey, a major stronghold of Italian anarchism in the east. He became the editor of La Questione Sociale (The Social Question), a paper which

Gori had helped to establish in 1895 and which was now one of the leading organs of Italian anarchism in the United States. Ciancabilla eventually moved westward, settling among the Italian miners of Spring Valley, Illinois. After the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, the anarchist groups were raided by the police, and Ciancabilla was driven from pillar to post, arrested, manhandled, and evicted. All this happened long before the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, but already the Italian anarchists were victims of police persecution. Driven out of Spring Valley, driven in turn out of Chicago, Ciancabilla wound up in San Francisco, where Pietro Gori had lectured in 1895. He was editing a journal there called La Protesta Umana when he suddenly took ill and died in 1904 at the age of 32, one of the most intelligent and capable of the Italian anarchists in America. More needs to be said about Ciancabilla, and I would hope that some graduate student in the audience will take up this subject and produce a study of the man and his influence in the movement.

Two of the most celebrated of the Italian anarchist leaders - and I put the word "leaders" in quotes, because the anarchists recognized no leaders in their movement but only guides and spokesmen -were Errico Malatesta and Luigi Galleani. (A third was Carlo Tresca, about whom Professor Pernicone will tell you this afternoon.) Malatesta, also from a middle-class family, arrived here in 1899. But, again unfortunately for the movement, he remained only a few months. He too took up the editorship of La Questione Sociale, addressed numerous audiences throughout the east, and helped increase the size of the movement. During one of his lectures, in West Hoboken, New Jersey, the representative of a rival faction, or an individual with some private grudge -the motives of this man, Domenico Pazzaglia by name, remain unclear - pulled out a pistol and shot Malatesta in the leg. Malatesta was not severely wounded, and he refused to press charges against his assailant. I might add that the man who subdued Pazzaglia and took away his gun was none other than Gaetano Bresci, the anarchist from Paterson who went to Italy in 1900 to assassinate King Umberto at Monza, and another figure who deserves further study. On leaving America, Malatesta stopped briefly in Cuba before returning to London. A few years later, he went back to his native country, only to be placed under house arrest by Mussolini-but that is another story.

Finally, we come to Luigi Galleani, who was without doubt the most important figure in the Italian anarchist movement in America, winning more converts and inspiring greater devotion than any other single individual. Galleani, as I have said, was born in the extreme north of Italy, near Torino, and, like Merlino and Gori, was trained as a lawyer, although he never practiced law, having transferred his talents and energies to the anarchist cause. Soon after arriving in America, Galleani became involved in a strike at Paterson, not the great strike of 1913 but an earlier one of 1902, in which he made eloquent and fiery speeches to the workers. Arrested for inciting to riot, he managed to escape to Canada, and then, under an assumed name, took refuge for several years in Barre, Vermont, another Italian anarchist stronghold.

The Barre anarchist group, one of the earliest in New England, had been established in 1894. Here we have a case where anarchists in Italy, the Carrara stone and marble cutters, virtually transplanted their movement in the United States, pursuing their same occupations and beliefs as in the old country. It was among these dedicated men and women that Galleani launched his celebrated Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle), one of the best anarchist journals in any language. Galleani edited his magazine on a weekly basis, moving it from Barre to Lynn, Massachusetts, where it continued to appear from 1912 until its suppression by the United States government in 1918.

Galleani was an uncompromising internationalist, who opposed the First World War with all the strength and eloquence at his command. He was, by the way, a great speaker in addition to being a first-rate editor. I would say that he ranks among the half-dozen leading orators of the anarchist movement, along with Johann Most, Emma Goldman, and Sébastien Faure. A moving speaker, he had a lilting voice with a tremolo that held his audience captive. He spoke easily, powerfully, spontaneously, and his bearing was of a kind that made his followers revere him as a kind of patriarch of the movement. But after his paper was shut down by the government, he himself was arrested on charges of obstructing the way effort. "Contro la guerra, contro la pace, per la rivoluzione sociale", was his slogan, "Against the war, against the peace, and for the social revolution" He was deported to Italy in 1918. After Mussolini's accession to power, he was banished to a remote island, where he died in 1931 in his 71 st year. I might add that it was to the Galleani wing of the movement that both Sacco and Vanzetti belonged, something which Robert D'Atillio will speak about in greater detail.

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I have said that nearly all of the Italian anarchists in the United States were working people. It might be useful to tell you a little bit about the kinds of jobs that they had, before moving on to their radical ideas and activities. In New York City they were well represented among the garment and construction workers, and in Paterson among the workers in the great silk factories. We find them among the quarry workers of Barre, the shoemakers of Lynn, the construction and garment workers of Boston, and the cigar workers of Philadelphia. Speaking of cigar workers, there was a whole community of anarchist cigar workers, both Spanish and Italian, in Tampa, Florida, dating back to the 1880s and 1890s. An indication of the type of people they were is that while they were rolling cigars they had a reader sitting on an elevated platform reading anarchist and socialist literature to them, so that their minds would be developed along with their work skills. Going back north, Italian anarchists were very numerous among the miners of southern Pennsylvania and southern Illinois; and in Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit they were heavily represented in a variety of trades, as they were in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Ideologically, the Italian anarchists fell into four categories: Anarchist-Communist, Anarcho-Synclicalist, Anarchist-Individualist, and just plain anarchist, without the hyphen. These categories overlapped; there were no hard- and-fast divisions between them. Vanzetti, for example, considered himself an Anarchist-Communist, which meant that he not only rejected the state but also rejected the private ownership of property in favor of communal ownership. The Anarcho-Syndlicalists, among whom Carlo Tresca was a powerful influence, placed their faith in the trade-union movement, a movement which the Anarchist-Communists generally shunned because they feared that a padrone, a boss, would emerge within the union with special privileges and authority. They detected the kind of "iron law of oligarchy" which a number of European sociologists, notably Robert Michels, were evolving after the turn of the century. The third group were individualist anarchists, who were suspicious of both the communal arrangements of the Anarchist-Communists and the labor organizations of the Anarcho-Syndi calists, and who relied instead on the actions of autonomous individuals. Some of the most interest ing, not to say exotic, Italian anarchist periodicals were published by individualists, such as Nihil and Cogito, Ergo Sion ("I think, therefore I am, " with emphasis always on the "I"), both appearing in San Francisco early in the century, and Eresia (Heresy) in New York some twenty years later. Their chief prophet was the nineteenth-century German philos opher Max Stirner, whose book The Ego and His Own served as their testament.

There was also a fourth group that I think deserves to be mentioned, if only because it is so often neglected. This group consisted of anarchists who refused to attach any prefix or suffix to their name, but who called for anarchism pure and simple. They sometimes called themselves "anarchists without adjectives' " not communist anarchists or syndicalist anarchists or individualist anarchists; and the figure whom they most admired was Malatesta, an out standing personality and thinker who, like Galleani, is crying out for a student to come along and write his biography. (Professor Pernicone, it might be mentioned, is completing a biography of that third great Italian anarchist, Carlo Tresca.) In this very audience, one hopes, someone is already burrowing away in the archives and doing the necessary work.

I have said that many of the Italian anarchists, especially of the Galleani school, tended to shun the trade unions. Because of this, the Italian anarchists did not play a conspicuous role in the organized American labor movement, differing in this respect from the Jewish anarchists, who were so prominent in the textile unions, above all the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Not that the Italian anarchists were absent from these unions, but their role was not a major one because of their suspicion of formal organizations that might harden into hierarchical and authoritarian shape, with their own officials, bureaucrats, and bosses. The Russian anarchists, by contrast, organized a Union of Russian Workers in the United States and Canada which boasted nearly 10,000 members. Avoiding this type of activity, the Italian anarchists contented themselves with participation in strikes and demonstrations. We have mentioned the Paterson strikes of 1902 and 1913, to which we might add the Lawrence strike of 1912; and we know that Sacco and Vanzetti both took part in strikes in Massachusetts, Sacco at Hopedale and Vanzetti at Plymouth.

In forming groups, publishing newspapers, and agitating and striking for better working conditions, the Italian anarchists were creating a kind of alternative society which differed sharply from the capitalist and statist society that they deplored. They had their own clubs, their own beliefs, their own culture; they were building their own world in the midst of a system which they opposed. Rather than wait for the millennium to arrive, they tried to live the anarchist life on a day-to-day basis within the interstices of American capitalism. They formed little enclaves, little nuclei of freedom, which they hoped would spread and multiply and eventually engulf the entire country and the entire world. After ten or twelve hours in the factory or mine, they would come home, eat supper, then go to their anarchist club and begin to churn out their pamphlets and newspapers on makeshift printing presses. Aldino Felicani is just one example of such an anarchist, and the amount of literature in his possession that Norman di Giovanni described to us last night was only a small fraction, large as it was, of the total output of literature produced by these self-educated workingmen, a token of their dedication and idealism. I would estimate, from my own research, that there were in the neighborhood of 500 anarchist newspapers and journals published in the United States between 1880 and 1940, in a dozen or so different languages. Of these, the number of Italian papers-and this would include the numeri unici, the single numbers issued for special occasions-approached 90 or 100 titles, an astonishing figure when you consider that they were produced by ordinary workers in their spare time, mainly on Sunday and in the evening. And in addition to newspapers and journals, a flood of books and pamphlets rolled off the presses, comprising an enormous alternative literature, the literature of anarchism.

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Beyond their publishing ventures, the Italian anarchists engaged in a whole range of social activities. Life was hard for these working-class immigrants, but there were many moments of happiness and laughter. They had their orchestras and theater groups, their picnics and outings, their lectures and entertainments. Hardly a week went by that there was not some traditional social activity, but with a new radical twist. Leafing through one of the old newspapers, I recently came across a picnic at the restaurant of Mrs. Bresci, the widow of Gaetano Bresci. Mrs. Bresci was holding a picnic in her restaurant in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. (The police later drove her out of town, and she drifted westward with her two daughters, who may still be alive in California.) Picnics were very important occasions, not merely to dance and drink wine and have fun, all of which was done, but also to collect money for the anarchist press in order to turn out all those pamphlets and journals that I was talking about. New York and New Jersey anarchists made excursions up the Hudson in rented boats, and when they got up to Bear Mountain, or wherever they were going, they would have a picnic, and out would come the food and the mandolins, and then of course the collection.

Lectures were another frequent activity for the Italian anarchists, and especially the lectures of Galleani, whom they prized above all other speakers. The lectures were held in rented halls and in anarchist clubhouses - of the Gruppo Autonomo of East Boston, for example, or of the Gruppo Diritto all'Esistenza of Paterson or the Gruppo Gaetano Bresci of East Harlem, or perhaps of a Circolo di Studi Sociali, a "circle of social studies:' hundreds of which existed throughout the country. How do we know about these groups? Look at any anarchist paper, and you will see them listed, with the weekly or monthly contributions of their members, 25 cents, fifty cents, a dollar, and it all added up. In fact, it was these very contributions that kept the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee going though seven years of struggle on behalf of the two victims. That's why there was some point to the voice raised in the front row yesterday. Everybody was talking about Felicani -Felicani did this and Felicani did that, and indeed he did do all those things and was a great, a wonderful man, without whom there would have been no defense effort. But the activity of the rank-and-file anarchists in all those mining towns of Pennsylvania, and all the quarters and half-dollars that they sent in which made up the defense fund, should not be forgotten.

The Italian anarchists also had their dramatical societies, a particularly interesting aspect of the "counter-culture' I have been speaking about. Amateur theater groups in the small towns and large cities put on hundreds of plays, some of them by Pietro Gori, such as The First of May. Another play that was frequently performed was called The Martyrs of Chicago and dealt with the Haymarket Affair of the 1880s. There was a Pietro Gori Dramatical Society in New York City that lasted until the 1960s and was dissolved only because of the death and old age of its members.

Anarchist schools formed another part of this alternative culture, schools named after the Spanish educator and martyr Francisco Ferrer, who was shot in the trenches of Montjuich Fortress in October 1909. There were Italian and non-Italian Ferrer Schools in the United States, called Modern Schools, a name which suggests what they were aiming for a school to match the modern, scientific age of the twentieth century, in contrast to the parochial schools, which the anarchists saw as drenched with the spirit of religious dogma and superstition, or the public schools, in which leaders and generals and presidents were glorified. The Modern Schools were schools in which the children were educated in an atmosphere of freedom and spontaneity, in which they would learn about the working-class movement and about revolutions, as well as how to think and live freely. There were at least two Italian anarchist schools that I know about - I'm sure there were more that I don't t know about-one of them in Paterson and the other in Philadelphia. Both were Sunday and evening schools attended by adults and children alike.

Finally, a word about celebrations, another example of how traditional modes of life were transmuted into radical occasions and expressions. Instead of celebrating Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving, the three great holidays for the anarchists were the working-class day on May First, the anniversary of the Paris Commune on March 18th, and the anniversary of the Haymarket executions on November I I th. Every year, in every part of the country, hundreds of meetings were held to commemorate these occasions. In the same connection, one more point might be noted, namely baptisms. One reads of Emma Goldman, for example, making a coast-to-coast lecture in 1899 and stopping in Spring Valley, Illinois, among the Italian and French miners, who bring their babies to her so she can baptize them, not with the names of saints, but with the names of great rebels or of Zola's novel Germinal, which was so popular among the radicals of that period.

This, then, is a brief description of the Italian anarchist movement in the United States. I would like, however, to repeat something that I said at the beginning, that Sacco and Vanzetti were merely two rank-and-file members of this extensive movement. They did everything that the others did. They subscribed to the newspapers -one finds in the columns of La Cronaca Sovversiva their 25-cent and 50-cent contributions. They attended -religiously, one might almost say - the lectures of Luigi Galleani. They passed out the announcements of these lectures and circulated the literature of their movement, the pamphlets, the leaflets, the journals. They attended the concerts and picnics; one need only read Upton Sinclair's remarkable novel Boston, still a valuable source on Sacco and Vanzetti, to see the importance of the "pic-a-nic,' as he spells it in his not entirely successful attempt to convert Italian-American English into the printed word. They also acted in the theater groups. Both Sacco and his wife Rosina took part in anarchist plays, as did their friend Vanzetti. They agitated during strikes, something I've already mentioned. They took part in demonstrations. Vanzetti, when he was arrested, had in his pocket an announcement of a protest meeting which he had drafted, and which, I was happy to see, appears in the exhibition of materials on display upstairs from the Felicani Collection. He also, in prison, wrote articles for the anarchist press, some of which appeared in L'Adunata dei Refrattari, a successor to La Cronaca Sovversiva, which ceased publication as recently as 1971 after fifty years of existence.

To the very end, then, Sacco and Vanzetti remained active anarchists, continuing their work even in prison. Through their articles and letters, through their speeches in court, they were carrying on their agitation, propagating the ideas of their creed. To ignore the anarchist dimension is to ignore the most cherished part of their lives. Let me conclude with a quotation from Malatesta which goes far to explain their tireless endeavors. "The point" Malatesta wrote in A Conversation Between Two Workers, "is not whether we accomplish anarchism today, tomorrow, even within ten centuries, but that we walk towards anarchism today, tomorrow, and always."

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ITALIAN ANARCHISM IN AMERICA: THE HISTROPCIAL BACKGROUND

2009-02-01T02:00:00.000-08:00

HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE SACCO-VANZETTI CASE

Italian Anarchism in America: An Historical Background to the Sacco-Vanzetti Case by Paul Avrich

I'd like to read three quotations from their writings which illustrate this point. First, a quotation from Vanzetti's brief autobiography, The Story of a Proletarian Life:

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