The Battle for Hearts and Minds
“It is a mistake to think that we can live ultra-specialized lives and somehow add another ingredient called “community” on top of it all. What is there really to share? Not much that matters, to the extent that we are independent of neighbors and dependent on faceless institutions and distant strangers. Real communities are interdependent.”- Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity:
Difficult perhaps to build-community when your neighbours are being dragged out of their beds and thrown in gaol? As Ahmed Khan says in the latest edition of Variant magazine (‘They all belong to Glasgow’):
“I’ve been doing the solitary protest at Glasgow’s Brand Street immigration removal centre since June 2005, when I was the only one there. There are now groups protesting, especially on a Saturday, although I’m not a member of anything…I’m not here as a political agitator, I’m here from a humanist point of view. The first time I protested I had a placard I found in the street that said, “No to detention” and the police tried to arrest me. See Open Borders here for more on the Brand Street protests.
In the chronicle of abuses that has emerged from the West’s fight against terror, there may be no story more jarring than that of the two young men killed at a United States military detention center in Afghanistan in December 2002. The two Afghans were found dead within days of each other, hanging by their shackled wrists in isolation cells at the prison in Bagram, north of Kabul. An Army investigation showed they were deprived of sleep for days, and struck so often in the legs by guards that a coroner compared the injuries to being run over by a bus.
But more than a year after the Army began a major push to prosecute those responsible for the abuse of the two men and several other prisoners at Bagram, only 27 soldiers and officers against whom Army investigators had recommended criminal charges, 15 have been prosecuted. Five of those have pleaded guilty to assault and other crimes; the stiffest punishment any of them have received has been five months in a military prison. Only one soldier has been convicted at trial; he was not imprisoned at all.
Meanwhile, back on this side of the pond there’s a mixed response to the News of the World video showing British soldiers brutally attacking Iraqi teenagers. The video was shown on TV channels in the Arab world just as ministers and Muslim leaders are trying to dampen the row over the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, and when thousands of British troops are preparing to be deployed to the hostile environment of southern Afghanistan.
It has come at a "bad time", a senior defence source admitted.
The whole thing is a weight on all of our shoulders, pressing down. As Joe Bageant writes in “Welcome to Middle-Class Lockdown...Now Shut Up and Buy Something”
“This leaves those few fleetingly concerned Americans alone to momentarily stew over the condition of the world, fester upon national moral issues like squishing brown desert people under tanks . . . or building offshore gulags so the sight of naked prisoners being tortured in wire cages will not dampen the consumer confidence index. But ultimately somewhere between the seven o’clock showing of Law and Order and the third cocktail, or perhaps after that bracing evening trot around the block in your Land’s End shorts with the dogs, the mind settles down to the more relevant issues such as “Do I need a Blackberry, and if so, should I wait for the next generation of technology?”
Still, what about those cages in Guantanamo? Or global warming? You and I may presently be yammering our asses off in cyberspace (talk about inauthentic!) about such topics, but most Americans, if they dialogue about those things at all, conduct the dialogue with those voices inside our heads, the one that says: Things cannot be as bad as the alarmists say. They cannot be as bad as I often suspect they are. If there really were such a thing as global warming they would be starting to do something about it. And besides, even if it were true, science will find a way to fix it. If there really were genocide going on in so many places far more people would be concerned. At the same time, every commercial and piece of sports hoopla, every celebrity news item leaves us with the impression that if we have time and money for such things, then matters cannot be all that bad, can they? If the earth were heating up we would surely notice it. If our soldiers and government agencies were torturing people around the world it would make the news. If millions were being exterminated, it would be more obvious, would it not? Look around. Nobody seems worried. Look how normal everything is every day. Look at your wife and your own family. No one is worried. Things cannot be that bad."
Meanwhile in another shining example of modern day corporate fascism, it was announced recently that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root had been awarded a $385 million dollar contract by Homeland Security to construct detention and processing facilities in the event of a national emergency. More at Boing Boing.
The language of the preamble to the agreement veils the program with talk of temporary migrant holding centers, but it is made clear that the camps will also be used "as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency."
Discussions of federal concentration camps is no longer the rhetoric of paranoid Internet conspiracy theorists, it is mainstream news. For example listen to Gary Robertson’s at Radio Shiteland blithely discussing (seriously) whether the videos should have been withheld from the public.
Maybe not the best week for Gordon Brown to be launching his CALL-UP FOR STATE SCHOOL CADETS?
3 comments
Good piece. Did you see this?
The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as “water boarding”, intelligence sources have claimed.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2036182,00.html
left by Davey O on 13 February 2006
Yeah Radio Shiteland, luistend to that show this morning and thought about emigrating. Not just the casual right wing populism of the callers ("we should beat up the neds too!") but the half-wit presenter and his production team, absolutely disgusting piece of media-shit
left by Frank on 13 February 2006
Inspiration: this summer sees the 70th anniversary of the setting up of anarcho-syndicalist collectives in Barcelona, the Ritz Hotel becoming Gastronomic Unit Number One and a workers' canteen, and industry and agriculture in the hands of worker-managed co-operatives. OK, thanks to Stalinist intervention and fascist attack, it didn't last very long, but I seriously think that the collectivist road is the only humane and equal way out of the present shit.
Ni Dieu, ni maitre!
left by delescluze on 13 February 2006
