George H.W Bush, the 41st president of the United States, died on Friday at the age of 94
While several publications and media figures used his death to glorify his legacy, and sing his praises, saying that he was a patriot, who served his country with honour and distinction in Office and during the Second World War. While the establishment celebrates the life of the former president and
Americans line up to mourn their fallen leader, the facts that are being
reported in the mainstream media are far different than the legacy he
is leaving behind. Others are pointing to his dark human rights record and his responsibility for war crimes. Many millions in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, will have great cause to curse him, now that he has shuffled off this mortal coil.
Let us not forget that as a member of the Reagan administration, he opposed sanctioning
Apartheid South Africa. whilst the Willie Horton ad he used in his Presidential campaign is rightly seen as a
precursor to Donald Trump’s race-baiting politics. And any full accounting of Bush’s legacy has to include his appalling record
on LGBTQ issues. “Bush was as captive to the evangelical right on
social issues—and thus a decidedly Republican president—as was his
predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who cultivated religious conservatives as a
potent political force and bowed to their anti-LGBTQ agenda as the AIDS
epidemic mushroomed in the 1980s,” Michelangelo Signorile writes
in the Huffington Post. On a host of issues—ranging from AIDS funding
to the ban on gays in the military to collecting data on the prevalence
of teen suicide among young gays—Bush sided against the LGBTQ community.
In 1988, Bush was elected president defeating Michael Dukakis of
Massachusetts. Within his first year in office Bush’s approval ratings
began to slip due to his inability to deal with Manuel Noriega, the
Panamanian leader he previously aided while serving as head of the CIA.
Bush responded by deciding to invade Panama, and on December 20,1989 he
deployed 25,000 troops to the tiny nation. Bush justified the
invasion— code named operation just cause— on the grounds of national
security. The president mislead the country by claiming Noriega had threatened the US, a claim which turned out to be untrue. After two weeks the conflict ended, resulting in the deaths of twenty American soldiers and as many as 2,000 Panamanians.
Less than a year after the invasion of Panama, Bush once again found
himself responding to another foreign policy debacle. On August 2, 1990
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein began an invasion of nearby Kuwait. In
response, President Bush and the American media used the testimony of
a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah to
justify US intervention in Kuwait. However, Nayirah was later discovered
to be the daughter of a U.S. ambassador, who was being coaxed by
military psychological operations specialists. Thirteen years before his son George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction to justify his invasion and
occupation of Iraq, George H.W. Bush made his own set of false claims to
justify the aerial bombardment of that same country, the end result being horrific civilian casualties.
Under George H.W. Bush, according to the New York Times,
the United States dropped a staggering 88,500 tons of bombs on Kuwait
and Iraq. Seventy percent of the bombs “missed” their targets, killing
thousands of civilians. The administration
deliberately targeted civilians and essential infrastructure.from electricity-generating
and water-treatment facilities to food-processing plants and flour
mills. This was no accident. As Barton Gellman of the Washington Post reported
in June 1991: “Some targets, especially late in the war, were bombed
primarily to create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to influence the
course of the conflict itself. Planners now say their intent was to
destroy or damage valuable facilities that Baghdad could not repair
without foreign assistance. … Because of these goals, damage to civilian
structures and interests, invariably described by briefers during the
war as ‘collateral’ and unintended, was sometimes neither.”
By January 1992, Beth Osborne Daponte, a demographer with the U.S. Census Bureau, was estimating
that Bush’s Gulf War had caused the deaths of 158,000 Iraqis, including
13,000 immediate civilian deaths and 70,000 deaths from the damage done
to electricity and sewage treatment plants. Daponte’s numbers
contradicted the Bush administration’s, and she was threatened by her
superiors with dismissal for releasing “false information.”
In the aftermath of the Gulf War, Bush also used the United States'
diplomatic clout to lead the United Nations to impose one of the most
devastating sanctions regimes in history. Child mortality rates up to 1996 alone were half a million deaths
and were justified by the Clinton administration's Madeleine Albright
who said, "We think the price is worth it." Millions more Iraqis were
affected by the sanctions that Bush instigated and laid the foundations
for.
Eminent jurists, professional legal organizations, and human rights
monitors around the world have since declared that
President George W. Bush to be a war criminal for his overt and systematic violations of such
international laws as the Geneva and Hague Conventions and such US law as
the War Crimes Act, the Anti-Torture Act, and federal assault laws.Bush’s CIA disappeared countless people to secret detention to be tortured.
After leaving office in 1993, George H.W. Bush retired with his wife
Barbara and built a home in a community near Houston, Texas. Though
retired, the former president would still face controversy.
Last year, during the height of the #MeToo movement, at least five women claimed they were abused by him. In an interview with
Time Magazine, a woman named Roslyn Corrigan claimed Bush sexually
assaulted her in 2003 when she was only 16-years-old. At least five more
women have accused Bush
of sexual assault, including an unnamed Michigan woman who came forward
claiming the former president groped her in 1992 at a campaign event.
Bush leaves this world having evaded being arrested or prosecuted for the crimes that he was responsible for. When media figures try to redeem him, or portray him as
lovable-but-flawed, they ignore the actual record. In fact, Bush never atoned for his actions, on the contrary, he consistently defended his decision-making, and the illegal doctrine he
espoused. George W. Bush intentionally offered false justifications for a war, that destroyed and devastated an entire country, causing thousands of innocent deaths.A war that needn’t have been fought in the first place. Bush set the stage for a mess with which we are still dealing with today.Any way you look at it, Bush left the world worse off than it was. This is his damning tainted legacy.
‘All businesses should be following Airbnb’s example’ – Andy Slaughter
Amnesty International took a Christmas hamper of Israeli
“stolen goods” to the Foreign Office today.
The hamper contained numerous food items – including red wine,
olive oil, honey, mineral water, eggs, dates, peppers, oranges and
avocados – all bearing spoof “Delicious but tainted” branding.
The goods all bore labels alluding to their tainted and illegal nature, with a bottle of wine declaring itself to be “100% stolen”, eggs labelled as from “free-range hens” but “probably rotten”, spring water that is “too good for the locals”, and Israeli settlement honey described as “a blend of honeys originating from stolen Palestinian land”.
The hamper hand-in was designed to draw attention to the fact
that these goods are all currently being produced in Israel’s unlawful
settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.
Each year, hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of goods produced in
the settlements are exported internationally, despite the fact that
most countries around the world have officially condemned the
settlements as illegal under international law. In the UK, imported
settlement goods include oranges, dates, spring water and halva
desserts.
The spoof Christmas hamper is part of Amnesty’s ongoing campaign
calling on all governments around the world to ban the importation of
Israeli settlement goods. All countries have a clear obligation to
ensure respect for international humanitarian law and shouldn’t
recognise or assist the illegal situation that Israel’s settlement
policy has created.
Last week, the online travel company Airbnb announced it would
withdraw some 200 listings for properties located in Israeli settlements
in occupied territories in the West Bank. The company said the move
recognised that the settlements “are at the core of the dispute between
Israelis and Palestinians”.
Amnesty’s tainted goods hamper was handed to Foreign Office
officials along with a 50,000-strong petition from supporters of the
campaign. The hand-in took place with MP Andy Slaughter, a prominent supporter of the ban Israeli settlement goods campaign within Parliament, and Kate Allen, Amnesty UK’s Director, Andy Slaughter said:
“All businesses should be following Airbnb’s example and stop
profiting from illegal trade with settlements. But it is the UK and
other governments that need to enforce a ban. Otherwise they are
complicit in breaching international law and giving comfort to the
occupation and theft of Palestinian land.”
Kate Allen said:
‘All Israeli settlement goods are tainted goods. They’re tainted by
the illegality of the settlements themselves and tainted by the
discrimination and violence that has led to the creation of the
settlements.
More than half a century of occupation
During the course of the 51-year occupation, more than 50,000
Palestinians have had their homes demolished, while some 600,000 Israeli
settlers have moved into illegally-constructed settlements, many
serviced by settler-only roads and guarded by a network of Israeli
military checkpoints. In total, approximately 1,000 square kilometres of
Palestinian land has been expropriated by settlers in the past
half-century – approximately the size of Hong Kong.
On December 1, 1955, 42 year old Rosa Louise Parks, a black American seamstress was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. Her act of civil disobedience, led to black citizens boycotting the bus company for over a year, in what was to become known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was to continue for over a year, setting up the seeds of a social revolution, putting the effort to end
segregation on a fast track.
Rosa became nationally recognized as the “mother of the modern
day civil rights movement” in America. Her act of dignified defiance and courage triggered a wave of protest that reverberated
throughout the United States.
Contrary to some reports, Parks wasn’t physically tired and was able to
leave her seat. She refused, on principle, to surrender her seat because
of her race, which was the law in Montgomery at the time.
She was also a long-time member of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People and washighly respected in her community, and over the years, she had repeatedly disobeyed bus segregation
regulations. Once, she even had been put off a bus for her defiance.
Rosa Louise McCauley spent the first years of her life on a small farm
with her mother, grandparents and brother. She witnessed night rides by
the Ku Klux Klan and listened in fear as lynchings occurred near her
home.
The family moved to Montgomery; Rosa went to school and became a
seamstress. She married barber Raymond Parks in 1932, and the couple
joined the Montgomery NAACP.
When she inspired the bus boycott, Parks had been the secretary of the
local NAACP for twelve years (1943-1956). Parks founded the Montgomery
NAACP Youth Council in the early 1940s.
Later, as secretary of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, she
traveled throughout the state interviewing victims of discrimination and
witnesses to lynchings.
The
NAACP realized it had the right person to work with, as it battled
against the system of segregation in Montgomery. It also worked with
another group of local leaders to stage a one-day boycott of passenger
buses, when Parks went to court.The
group expanded to include other people, chose a name, the Montgomery
Improvement Association, and planned an extended boycott.
But the MIA also needed a public spokesman with leadership qualities to make their fight into a wide-ranging cause.Their pick was a little-known pastor who had recently arrived in Montgomery: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Rosa was briefly jailed and paid a fine, but for many years would continue as an activist in the movement for the rights of exploited people.Facing continued harassment and threats in the wake of the boycott,and ater losing her tailoring job and receiving death threats.
Parks, along with her husband and mother, eventually decided to move to
Detroit, where Parks’ brother resided.
In the years following her retirement, she traveled to lend her
support to civil-rights events and causes and wrote an autobiography,
“Rosa Parks: My Story.”
She remained an active member of the NAACP and became an administrative
aide in the Detroit office of Congressman John Conyers Jr. a
post she held until her 1988 retirement..
The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute Of Self-Development was established
in 1987 to offer job training for black youth.
In 1999, Parks received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the
highest honor a civilian can receive in the United States. The Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) also sponsors an annual Rosa
Parks Freedom Award.
Her husband, brother and mother
all died of cancer between 1977 and 1979.
When she died at age 92 on October 24, 2005, she
became the first woman in the nation’s history to lie in state at the
U.S. Capitol. At
the time, she was only the 30th person accorded that honor. She was the
first woman to receive the honor, and her coffin sat on the catafalque
built for the coffin of Abraham Lincoln.
Parks's legacy lives on. In 2000, a library and museum in Montgomery were dedicated to Rosa Parks. The Rosa Parks Museum https://www.troy.edu/rosaparks/ houses
a replica of the bus that sparked the civil rights activists to boycott
an important mode of transportation. The library and children's wing
not only tell the story of Parks to its hundreds of visitors, but also
those of Nixon, Gray, and Colvin. There is a "time travel" machine that
transports the visitors from the 1800s to the Jim Crowe era and to 1950s
Montgomery.
Let us remember her today, and acknowledge Rosa's act of quiet resistance, that still resonates down the corridors of time. She remains a symbol to all to remain free. It is worth noting that in the same week President Obama honored Rosa Parks’ 100th birthday, Israel
announced two newly segregated bus lines for Palestinian workers
traveling to Israel from the West Bank. The “Palestinian only” buses
were introduced after Israeli settlers complained that fellow
Palestinian passengers posed a “security risk.”The timing of Israel’s announcement set the internet abuzz with
moralizing references to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Jim Crow.
Let us also think what would happen if a Palestinian Rosa Parks chose to sit on a segregated West Bank Bus, Palestinians in the present moment are unable to travel freely in their own country - they even have to have permits to enter Jerusalem.
"Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that
degrades human personality is unjust," Martin Luther King said "All segregation
statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages
the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority
and the segregated a false sense of inferiority."
Like Rosa Parks before her, Palestinians like Ahed Tamimi , among others are struggling against
unjust laws, in their case the injustice of a 50-year military occupation
that denies Palestinians their land, right to travel and
self-determination. Israel maintains an apartheid system of democracy
for Israeli Jews - and discrimination against Israelis of colour -
second-class citizenship for Israeli citizens of Arab descent, and
dispossession and disenfranchisement for Palestinian Arabs in the
territories.
We need more brave souls like Rosa Parks and Ahed Tamimi. It is possible for a single person to engage in an act of resistance against oppression to spark the seeds that can change the world.
Earlier post on the Montgomery Bus Protest can be read here.
#UniversalCredit causes serious financial hardship for claimants.
The government claim Universal Credit (UC) will make things better for
claimants. But where it has already been rolled out it’s been plagued
with problems that are pushing more people into #poverty.
It has caused tens of thousands of people to fall into debt, rent arrears, and to become reliant on food banks.
Despite huge flaws in the system the Tory government continue to push ahead with rolling out UC to more claimants.
Personally I do not believe it can be fixed, or modified it needs to be
stopped and scrapped completely. It is crucial that we carry on
campaigning against its implementation to defend those on the receiving
end of brutal cuts and to push for the complete abolition of these
policies that will hurt those who are already the most disadvantaged in
our society who are merely being treated as collateral damage.
We must
continue to resist these devastating policies, an end to this cruel
austerity measure and give support to all those that currently need it.
Remember no one is immune to becoming ill or losing their jobs.I will be
tomorrow joining a demo in my home town of Cardigan, at 10. 30
outside the Guildhall, it is being introduced in Ceredigion this month.
lets make our voices be heard and tell the
government that we wont simply stand back and let this happen. Many ,
more events will be happening across the country
Show your support — join an action near you.Stop this discredited failing Tory policy.
"The society whose modernisation has reached the stage of integrated spectacle is characterised by the combined effect of 5 principal factors; incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalised secrecy, unanswerable lies and eternal present - the spectator is simply supposed to know nothing and deserves nothing. Those who are watching to see what happens next will never act and such must be the spectator's condition ."
- Guy Debord.
Guy Debord
Guy Debord was born on December 28, 1931, in Paris, France, a writer and director who became a leading figure of the French Situationist International. In his fascinating book first published in June 1967, the Society of the Spectacle , he argued that to succumbing to alienation caused by capitalism we have let our lives become colonised by an immersive experience.
" In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immene accumulation of spectacles," Debord's book begins, "Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation." The political consequence of this separation from shared felt experience is key to understanding both how we experience the world and how we can change it.
This spectacle has replaced social interaction and human needs. While this is superficially satisfying it makes us isolated and lonely individuals. It is still one of the greatest theoretical examinations of our social-cultural conditions describing in pinpoint accuracy the dreadful corporate globalization sweeping the planet, The spectacle accompanies us throughout our lives via news propaganda, advertising and entertainment, and yes social media,alienating us from ourselves and our desires in order to facilitate the accumulation of capital..
For Debord the spectacle presented itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned, It's sole message is :"What appears is good; what is good appears," The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances. its manners of appearing without allowing any reply. Debord , warned us that mass media had replaced religion in offering repressive pseudo-enjoyment of the world. Real life has become subordinated to its mediated appearance. " The medium is the message" declared Marshall McLuhan around the same time. Few appreciated the significance of the statement back then, but now we bear witness to rapid changes in the way we relate to each other and our planet.
The text https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/guy-debord-the-society-of-the-spectacle.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1r_mORBe5b6eH__t7_A8iSz9ppVP2IwVVcmiVuTrqulmA5SZAwDlvSH6Q was a primary influence not only on the near- revolution of May 1968 in Paris, but also on the ethos of London's underground press and certain aspects of punk ideology, The SI developed out of an earlier Left Bank mix of avant garde politics, influenced by Dada, Surrealism and Lettrism, carrying out programmes of provocation, graffiti and anti-party revolutionary outrage. The Situationists were concerned to articulate a 'theory of moments," propagating ideas of pleasure and depicting the personal as intrinsically political ("boredom is always counter revolutionary " sneered one of their mottoes.From 1962, the Situationists increasingly applied their critique not only in culture but to all aspects of capitalist society. Seeking to free us from the power of the spectacle in order to mount a credible challenge to capitalism, the Situationists introduced the tactic of detournement, an attempt to turn the powers of the spectacle against itself.
Guy Debord emerged as the most important figure among their number: he had been involved in the Lettrist International, and had made several films, including Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952) Inspired by the libertarian journal Socialisme on Barbarie, the Situationists rediscovered the history of the anarchist movement, particularly during the period of the First International, and drew inspiration from Spain, Kronstadt, and the Makhnovists. They described the USSR as a capitalist bureaucracy, and advocated workers' councils. But they were not entirely anarchist in orientation and retained elements of Marxism, especially through Henri Lefebvre's critique of the alienation of everyday life.
Debord dissolved the SI (proclaiming its victory over history) in 1972, their impact has been assured. Again today, we need to break with conventions, consensus, break out of our desolate paradigms, and learn to be free.
In 1984, Debord withdrew his films from circulation, because of the negative press and the assassination of his friend and patron Gerard Lebovici. And sadly on November 30th 1994 aged 67, racked by depression, after a life of hard drinking , that had led to a diagnosis of peripheral neuritis, a debilitating and extremely painful condition whereby the body's nerve endings burn away, Debord in the isolated village of Champot high in the Auvergne shot himself with a single bullet to the heart. He remains however one of the most important contemporary thinkers, with a capital place in the history of ideas from the second half pf the second half of the 20th century.
The following film La Societe du Spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) is a black and white 1973 film based on his book. It was Debord's first feature-length film. It uses found footage and detournement in a radical criticism of mass marketing and its role in the alienation of modern society.
The 88 minute film took a year to make and incorporates footage from feature films, industrial films, news footage. advertisements and still photographs. The films include The Battleship Potemkin, October, Chapeav, The New Babylon, The Shanghai Gesture, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Rio Grande, They Died with Their Boots On, Johnny Guitar and Mr Arkadin, as well as other Soviet films.
Events such as the murder of Lee Harvard Oswald (who assassinated U.S, President John F, Kennedy in 1963), the Spanish Civil War of 1936 -1939, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Paris riots in May 1968 are represented, and people such as Mao Zedong, Richard Nixon and the Spanish anarchist Durutti.Throughout the film, there is a voiceover (of Debord) and inter-titles from The Society of the Spectacle but also texts from the 1968 Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne, Machiavelli, Marx, Tocqueville, Emile Pouget, and Soloviev. Without citations, these quotes are hard to decipher, especially with the subtitles (which exist in the French version) but that is part of Debord's goal "to problematizereceipt" (Greil and Sanborn) and force the viewer to be active. In addition , the words of some of the authors are detourned through deliberate misquoting. Since Debord's suicide in 1994, Debord's wife Alice Becker-Ho has been promoting Debord's film. A DVD box set titled Guy Debord: Oeuvres cinematographiques completes came out in 2005 and contains Debord's seven film.
The cover of the film is derived from a photo of Life magazine photographer J.R. Eyerman.
On November 28, 1952, at the Paramount Theatre(Oakland, California), took place the premiere screening of film Bwana Devil, by Arch Oboler, the first full-length, color 3D (aka ' Natural Vision') motion picture. Eyerman took a series of photos of the audience wearing 3D glasses.
Life magazine used one of the photos as the cover of a brochure about the 146-1955 decade. The photo employed by Debord shows the audience in " a virtually trance-lie state of absorption, their faces grim, their lips pursed," however, in the one chosen by Life, " the spectators are laughing, their expressions of hilarity conveying the pleasure of an uproarious active spectatorship "Cheers to Ubuweb http://www.ubu.com/film/debord.html
I'm sure if Debord was alive today, he would almost certainly be extending his analysis of the spectacle to the Internet and social media. He would no doubt be horrified by social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, which monetize our friendships, opinions and emotions. It seems that our
internal thoughts and experience are now commodifiable assets. His viewpoint still bears an uncomfortable truth on our present day lives. One could say that our age is not so much the Society of the Spectacle, as it is the Society of immersion and manipulation, and many simply are so immersed they do not not realize it is happening.
Guy Debord’s is a polemical and prescient indictment of our image-saturated consumer culture. The book examines the “Spectacle,” Debord’s term for the everyday manifestation of capitalist-driven phenomena; advertising, television, film, and celebrity. Debord defines the spectacle as the “autocratic reign of the market economy.” Though the term “massmedia” is often used to describe the spectacle’s form, Debord derides its neutrality. “Rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term ‘media,’” he writes, “and by this they mean to describe a mere instrument, a kind of public service.” Instead, Debord describes the spectacle as capitalism’s instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses. The spectacle takes on many more forms today than it did during Debord’s lifetime. It can be found on every screen that you look at. It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser. It is the lists telling you “10 things you need to know about ‘x.’” The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments. For Debord, this constituted an unacceptable “degradation” of our lives. We all like to think we’re in control of our perceptions and decisions. but every day we are unconsciously being .manipulated. Because we’re human, the very things that make us human in the first place, like empathy, emotion, and exhaustion to name a few, give those who are unscrupulous, desperate, or egotistical an edge when it comes to distorting our thoughts and judgments, especially by governments. And in certain ways the problem is getting worse. Information overload is one reason we’ve grown more vulnerable to manipulation. Research .suggests that we receive five times more information now than we did 30 years ago, and daily we are bombarded. This is the Spectacle that Debord warned us about. Hitler himself said, “By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise.” We must discriminately keep awake and aware. Be careful and beware. Be weary of your thoughts being replaced and dominated by moving images, that dull and passify you, best to stay awake, with your life in your own hands, move away from the spectacle that seeks to control you.
Do we remain passive, carry on being manipulated, relying on the artificiality of the spectacle,or start thinking beyond it's confinement? The future is unwritten
Guy Debord:La Societe du Spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) 1973
Poetry of the Spectacle
Here the SPECTACLE is captured and made to expose itself (if even for a brief moment) by turning its most beloved mystifying commodity, the computer, back onto itself to the benefit of language. It slowly dies a dramatic death of Lettritic convulsions.
SPECTACLE
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived is now merely represented in the distance.
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual description produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized.
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society's unreality. In all its particular manifestations - news, propoganda, advertising, entertainment - the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by the production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.
The spectacle is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we are caught.
The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Itssole message is: "What appears is good, what is good appears." The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.
The first stage of the economy's domination of social life is brought about an evident degradation of being into having - human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from appearing -all "having" must derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.
POETRY
The problem of language is at the heart of all the struggles between the forces striving to abolish the present alienation and those striving to maintain it. It is inseperable from the very terrain of those struggles. We live within language as within polluted air. Despite what humorists think, words do not play. Words work - on behalf of the dominant organization of life. Yet they are not completely automated: unfortunately for the theoreticians of information words are not in themselves "informationist", they contain forces that can upset the most careful calculations. Words coexist with power in relation analogous to that which proletarians have with power. Employed by it almost full time, exploited for every sense and nonsense that can be squeezed out of them, they still remain in some sense fundamentally alien to it.
Under the control of power, language always designates something other than authentic experience. It is precisely for this reason that a total contestation is possible. The organization of language has fallen into such confusion that the communication imposed by power is exposing itsefl as an imposter and a dupery. An embryonic cybernetic power is vainly trying to put out language under the control of the machines it controls, in such a way that information would henceforth be the only possible communication. Even on this terrain resistances are being manifested, electronic music could be seen as an attempt ( obviously limited and ambiguous) to reverse the domination by detourning machines to the benefit of language. But there is a much more general and radical opposition that is denouncing all unilateral "communication," in the old form of art as well as in the modern form of informationism. It calls for a communication that undermines all seperate power. Real communication dissolves the state.
Power lives of stolen goods. It creates nothing, it co- opts. If it determined the meaning of words, there would be no poetry but only useful "information." Opposition would be unable to express itself in language; any refusal would be nonverbal, purely lettristic. What is poetry if not the revolutionary moment of language, inseperable as such from the revolutionary moments of history and the history of personal life?
Society of the Spectacle Pt 1 &2 Here Debord's 1967 text is remade into a contemporary context.
Also includes Marshall McLuhan and John Berger
Made by Aska (check the credits for more)
Sound by the amazing Pippin Kenworthy
Pt 1
Pt 2
Put the mirror to the moment make yourself aware
Facilitate, reconcile, get a new idea
The pulsating spectacle, is not easy to forget
Today randomly ordinarily, perception shifts
When the prism cracks, get yourself a new silhouette
Unharness camarardie, viva situationniste! .
Guy Debord -The Society of the Spectacle, full audiobook
The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People is
observed by the United Nations on 29 November each year, in accordance
with mandates given by the General Assembly in its resolutions 32/40 B
of 2 December 1977, 34/65 D of 12 December 1979, 56/34 of 3 December
2001, and other relevant resolutions.
Special commemorative activities are organized by the Division for
Palestinian Rights of the United Nations Secretariat, in consultation
with the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the
Palestinian People.
The date of 29 November was chosen because of its meaning and
significance to the Palestinian people. On that day in 1947, the General
Assembly adopted resolution 181(II), which
came to be known as the Partition Resolution. That resolution provided
for the establishment in Palestine of a “Jewish State” and an “Arab
State”, with Jerusalem as a corpus separatum under a special
international regime. Of the two States to be created under this
resolution, only one, Israel, has so far come into being.
This United Nations decision unleashed a catastrophe whose
reverberations Palestinians continue to experience until today.
Three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs—who were the majority of
the population of historic Palestine, fled for their lives after
experiencing or learning of massacrs by Zionist paramilitary organizations, or were expelled from their homes during the ensuing Arab-Israeli war of 1948. By the 1949 armistice, the original partition lines had shifted violently so that Israel’s footprint became much larger than envisioned by the roposed partition plan, itt was accorded 55 percent by the plan, but sized and additional 25%of
Palestinian territory. At present, the drastically reduced Palestinian
land continues to be occupied by the Israeli military and Jerusalem is
occupied and divided with Israel controlling and limiting access to
religious sites. Palestinians originally displaced during the Nakba (the
Arabic word for Catastrophe—what the Palestinians call the 1948 war
when they lost their homeland) are still prevented from exercising the
right to return to their homes in what is now Israel. And contrary to
the resolution (and to the Fouth Geneva Convention )
Israel has continued to expropriate additional vast tracts of Palestinian territory
for its own use and especially for the building and transfer of its own
Israeli citizens to illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land.
The Palestinian people, who now number more than 8 million, live
primarily in the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967,
including East Jerusalem, part of which is now administered by the
Palestinian Authority; in Israel; in neighbouring Arab States; and in
refugee camps in the region.
The International Day of Solidarity has traditionally provided an
opportunity for the international community to focus its attention on
the fact that the question of Palestine is still unresolved and that the
Palestinian people is yet to attain its inalienable rights as defined
by the General Assembly, namely, the right to self-determination without
external interference, the right to national independence and
sovereignty, and the right to return to their homes and property from
which they had been displaced.
This year’s International Day of Solidarity with the
Palestinian People takes place at a time of turmoil, trouble
and torment. The decades-long Palestinian struggle for
self-determination, independence and a life of dignity faces
numerous obstacles, including: continued military
occupation of Palestinian territory; ongoing violence and
incitement; continued settlement construction and expansion;
deep uncertainties about the peace process; and
deteriorating humanitarian and economic conditions,
particularly in Gaza. The prolonged Palestinian struggle against dispossession and the
fragmentation of the State of Palestine has resulted in the aggressive
displacement of many Palestinians seeking refuge mainly in the Middle
East. In the past decades, civilians have been denied their dignity and
fundamental rights to free movement, education, healthcare and even the
right to life.They have had their land, livelihood, and lives taken away. They have
been killed for resisting the illegal occupation of their homes and
their country. They have been denied their independence.
With each passing day, the number of Palestinians
in need of humanitarian assistance increases. It has therefore become
clear that the conflict between Palestinian and Israel feeds into the
wider regional dynamics by having a negative effect on peace, economic
development, socio-political progression and security throughout the
entire region.
We should remain concerned and condemn the continued illegal settlement
expansion by Israel which constitute a contravention of international
law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. The ongoing
Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories is a fundamental
obstacle to a return to negotiations and a grave threat to the very
existence of a future Palestinian state as well as a safe and secure
Israel. We should also call for the effective and immediate
implementation of resolution 2334 (2016), which reaffirms that Israeli
illegal settlements have no legal validity.
Many believe that the only way to bring about lasting peace in
the Middle East is to have a two state solution for Palestine and Israel
based on the international recognition and independence of the State of
Palestine, based on the 04 June 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as
its capital, functioning within recognized and secure borders and living
side-by-side in peace with Israel and its other neighbours as endorsed
in the Quartet Roadmap the Madrid Principles, the Arab Peace Initiative
and the relevant UN Security Council resolutions.
So today lets reiterate our solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right
to self-determination, as well as support for a free and
sovereign State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and an end to the illegal occupation of the Palestinians land, .towards building a future of peace,
justice, security and dignity for the Palestinians.
Heartbroken to hear of Harry Leslie Smith's passing at the age of 95. He was a brilliant polemicist and author, an inspiring activist, for social justice and peace a loving father, and much much more. A shining light among the darkness of our times., one of the giants whose shoulders we all stand on. We should all carry his fighting spirit forwards. Rest in Power
The socialist campaigner rose to fame with a speech praising the NHS and
had devoted his last years to visiting refugee hotspots. He was also a supporter of Palestinian rights, and of the right to non-violent resistance in the form of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS)
The Labour campaigner was taken ill in Canada following a fall earlier
this month, and his son John had been keeping followers updated on his
popular Twitter account.
"At 3:39 this morning, my dad Harry Leslie Smith died. I am an orphan," he wrote.
Mr Smith, who was in the RAF during WWII and lived through the
Great Depression, had become a vocal advocate for socialist policies,
arguing neo-liberal forces had degraded the welfare state built during
his lifetime.
Nicknamed the "world's oldest rebel", he rose to prominence after making an impassined speech
in support of the NHS at Labour's 2014 conference, calling his
childhood, before public healthcare, a "barbarous time" and criticising
government austerity.
Mr Smith had devoted the latter years of his
life to visiting refugee hotspots around the world, documenting the
suffering caused by displacement in the hope that his age and following
could create a "rallying cry" for action.
Born in 1923 in
Barnsley, Yorkshire, he grew up in poverty after his coal miner father
became unemployed, watching his sister die at the age of ten, and turned
to writing in later life after working as a carpet trader in Toronto.
He described his book Harry's Last Stand as a "rallying call",
telling the younger generation of the need for a "social safety network"
giving all the right to good housing, further education, healthcare, a
living wage and dignified old age.
"I am not a historian. But at 91 I am history, and I fear its repetition," he said.
Mr
Smith's son tweeted that he would "follow in his footsteps" and
"endeavour to finish his projects", including publishing some of his
father's later writing.
#Istandharry
