Simon Chesterman, Reforming the United Nations: Legitimacy, Effectiveness and Power After Iraq,
fredag 16 december 2011
måndag 12 december 2011
Erich Fromm, Psychoanalytic Characterology and its Application to the Understanding of Culture,
http://www.erich-fromm.de/biophil/en/images/stories/pdf-Dateien/1949c-e.pdf
Kevin Danaher, Power to the People, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/apr/29/greenpolitics.mayday/print
Juliet Schor, Selected Publications, http://www.julietschor.org/academics/selected-publications/
Walden Bello’s Zspace, http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/waldenbello
George Carlin - We Like War, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDkhzHQO7jY&feature=related
Noam Chomsky, The Pentagon Papers and U.S. Imperialism in South East Asia, http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1972----.htm
Spanish Civil War Documentary (1st chapter. 2nd and 3rd available on youtube), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TRDxGL66eQ
Margaret E. McGuinnes, Peace v. Justice: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Modern Origins of the Debate, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.support.mah.se/doi/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2011.00982.x/pdf
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Cold War Americanism: Business, Pageantry, and Antiunionism in Weirton, West Virginia, http://truty.org/PDFs/Media/Fones-Wolf-ColdWarAmericanism.pdf
Randolph Bourne, The State, http://mises.org/books/State_Bourne.pdf
Randolph Bourne, The war and the intellectuals, http://www.randolphbourne.columbia.edu/war_and_the_intellectuals.pdf
Otto Rank answers Freud on Anxiety, 1926, http://www.ottorank.com/essays/rank-answers-freud-on-anxiety
Taking the Risk Out of Democracy - Alex Carey 1/5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?hl=en&v=w6T0hRUV4uY&gl=US
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Kidney Kin: Inside the Transatlantic Transplant Trade, http://hir.harvard.edu/print/underground-markets/kidney-kin
Eroding Justice, Psychiatry’s Corruption of Law, http://www.mental-health-abuse.org/files/Booklets/Eroding%20Justice.pdf
tisdag 1 november 2011
There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change—and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future. (Noam Chomsky)
The Norwegian court trying Anders Behring Breivik’s case has decided to impose solitary confinement on him for a lengthy period. This is a miscarriage of justice, because solitary confinement is torture, absolutely banned by the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. There is no moral justification for further dehumanizing those who are already dehumanized. Denying the perp, most likely a very traumatized person refusing to acknowledge his victimhood (thereby warding it off and thus neutralizing a much needed protection against sadism—Alice Miller), such a basic right will only play into the hands of the ultra-nationalists. Besides, there is no evidence whatsoever that strong punishment leads to decreased recividism rates. In fact, it increases it. But the problem is that this insight is not servicable to power. And the new victims of the repeat offenders are most likely, as is to be expected, typically ordinary citizens for the most part, but that is servicable to power, since the common folk are always fair game, even domestically. All this is a gift from above to the Islamophobic ultra-nationalists, but a severe blow to democracy
fredag 28 oktober 2011
Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, A Report of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, 1989,
http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/congress/1989_cr/s890516-drugs.htm
Congressional Reports On Drug Corruption And The Federal Government, http://www.druglibrary.org/SCHAFFER/govpubs/drugcorr.htm
Loretta Napoleoni, 10 Things You Don´t Know About Terrorism, http://www.progress.org/2004/napo03.htm
Marc A Triebwasser, How Corporations Influence the Government, http://www.polisci.ccsu.edu/trieb/InfluGov.html
David Ruppe, “Nuclear Weapons: RAND Report Says Accidental Launch Threat Growing,” Global Security Newswire, 22 May 2003, http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/newswires/2003_5_22.html
Air Force Space Command, Strategic Master Plan FY04 and Beyond, February 9, 2000, Executive Summary, www.thememoryhole.org/mil/space-commandplan-fy2004.pdf
As We May Think, by Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, http://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/think.pdf
Noam Chomsky, excerpts from The Culture of Terrorism, http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Culture%20of%20Terrorism.html
What political, economic and doctrinal managers have in common is a profound contempt for democratic freedom. Any freedom worth its salt has to be predicated on stakeholders self-managing their affairs transparently, with full accountability, and without hierarchies (in other words, wage labor would be abolished to make way for free creative labor, the overriding principle being that of worker self-managed production for human needs, with the economic system naturally subordinated to human rights and needs). Democracy is predicated on the wide dispersal of power and wealth, where state, corporate and church power are dissolved (hence with no governing, employing and mollifying class), with no repressive police force and virtually no prison system, with no national boundaries, with free education at every level, and with free or very affordable health care and housing for all. In brief, the profit motive would be done away with under libertarian arrangements, since it evidently entails too much mean-spiritedness. Is this a dream? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But if it is, it is definitely one worth pursuing, for the love of life
Noam Chomsky, Is the World Too Big to Fail?: The Contours of Global Order, http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2607/noam_chomsky_is_the_world_too/
Arab League calls for Gaza no-fly zone, By Tobias Buck in Jerusalem and Reuters in Cairo, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/79638590-6386-11e0-bd7f-00144feab49a.html#axzz1Ma8B4VYF
Ward Churchill. Produced by On the Earth Productions, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo3nY4GcMFk
Dean Baker’s Zspace, http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/deanbaker
Murray Bookchin, To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936, http://equalityautonomy.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/bookchin-to-remember-spain-the-anarchist-and-syndicalist-revolution-of-1936.pdf
Noam Chomsky, Domestic Terrorism: Notes on the State System of Oppression, http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199909--.htm
Noam Chomsky, International Terrorism: Image and Reality, http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.htm
Noam Chomsky, Institutional Violence, http://www.greenworldcenter.org/democchomsk.html
Clifford Longley, The religious roots of American imperialism, Global Dialogue Vol. 5, N. 1-2, Winter/Spring 2003—American Empire?, http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=214
Anton Pannekoek, Thesis on the Fight of the Working Class Against Capitalism (Pannekoek was an anti-Bolshevik Marxist theoretician), http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1947/theses-fight.htm
Ward Churchill, The Crucible of American Indian Identity: Native Tradition versus Colonial Imposition in Postconquest North America, http://www.weyanoke.org/pdf/wc-CrucibleOfAmericanIndianIdentity.pdf
Dianna Melrose, Nicaragua: The threat of a good example, Oxfam, 1985, http://www.scribd.com/doc/52830452/Nicaragua-The-threat-of-a-good-example
Human Nature: Justice versus Power, Noam Chomsky debates with Michel Foucault, 1971, http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm
fredag 30 september 2011
J. Philmore, “The Libertarian Case for Slavery: A Note on Nozick,” The Philosophical Forum, Vol. XIV, No. 1, Fall 1982, p. 51 at pp. 43-58, http://www.ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Econ&Pol-Econ/Philmore-1982.scan.pdf
Archive of articles by the late great Tanya Reinhart, http://dissidentvoice.org/Reinhart-Archive.htm
Johan Galtung, On the Coming Decline and Fall of US Empire, January 28, 2004, http://www.transnational.org/SAJT/forum/meet/2004/Galtung_USempireFall.html.
William Preston, Jr. and Ellen Ray, Disinformation and Mass Deception: Democracy as a Cover Story, http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?226398-Disinformation-and-Mass-Deception-Democracy-as-a-Cover-Story
“There is no more fundamental distinction between men, psychologically and morally, than the one between those who love death and those who love life, between the necrophilous and the biophilous.” (Erich Fromm) For Marx the “struggle between capital and labor…was the fight between aliveness and deadness, the present versus the past, people versus things, being versus having. For Marx the question was: Who should rule whom – should life rule the dead, or the dead rule life?” (cited in Fromm, To Have or To Be?) Put differently, “Being refers to life and to the present; having, to death and to the past” (Fromm, On Being Human). The roots of the having structure are “one’s sense of powerlessness, one’s fear of life, one’s fear of the uncertain, [and] one’s distrust of people.” (Fromm, The Art of Being)
The early libertarian Marx delienated the difference between having and being as two fundamentally opposite principles in the following terms: the science of capitalistic economy is “a truly moral science, the most moral science of all. Self-denial, the denial of life and of all human needs, is its principal doctrine. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume – your capital. The less you are, the less you give expression to your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the more you store up of your estranged life. Everything which the political economist takes from you in terms of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth, and everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you: it can eat, drink, go dancing, go to the theatre, it can appropriate art, learning, historical curiosities, political power, it can travel, it is capable of doing all those things for you; it can buy everything; it is genuine wealth, genuine ability. But for all that, it only likes to create itself, to buy itself, for after all everything else is its servant. And when I have the master I have the servant, and I have no need of his servant. So all passions and all activity are lost in greed. The worker is only permitted to have enough for him to live, and he is only permitted to live in order to have.” (The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, www.scribd.com)
Islamophobes claim that “most Muslims are stuck in the Dark Ages.” Even if they’re right, wouldn’t it be instructive to ask why? So, who’s been subsidizing their wholesale oppression in North Africa, Southeast, Central and West Asia in order to rob their rich natural resources? We have. Who’s been targeting them since 9-11 extra-judicially, domestically and internationally? We have. Who’s been terrorizing civilian Muslims far out of proportion to the few extremists who’ve been terrorizing our civilians (this shouldn’t be construed as an attempt to minimize the unrepresentative extremists’ terrorist crimes, since the loss of even one life is a big deal)? We have. Who bloodthirstily recruited, armed, trained and financed the most fanatical jihadist killers during the 1980s to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan? The CIA and its chosen clients. Who’s been villifying and demonizing Muslims in a cultural context in order to concoct and embellish enemy images for the purpose of kleptocratically feeding America’s permanent, overly blotted war machine, with devastating consequences for the South? Our “progressive” media, “liberal” scholarship and entertainment industries, initially aided by vulgar propagandists like Bernard Lewis and later Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama. Conclusion: we’re living in the Dark Ages at least as much as “most Muslims” might be, given the shocking barbarities that we carry out in the name of freedom, human rights and democracy, while deluding ourselves with all kinds of self-serving myths to rationalize our shameless imperialistic exploits. Western cultural racism and world-class hypocrisy are never in short supply
The West has terrorized the South for centuries (unmentionable in respectable circles) under the guise of “defense,” a “a war on terror,” a “war on drugs,” “counter-insurgency” and “humanitarian intervention” (the number of victims is colossal!), partly motivated by racism but more importantly by the need to protect the fifth freedom: “The central—and not very surprising—conclusion that emerges from the documnentary and historical record is that US international and security policy, rooted in the structures of power in the domestic society, has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call ‘the fifth freedom,’ understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.” (Noam Chomsky) The struggle for justice will be a travesty if this crucial issue is not explicitly addressed and redressed. The surviving victims (and the family members of the non-surviving ones) of Western state terrorism, aggression and economic strangulation must be fully compensated and rehabilitated; the physical and non-physical infrastructure destroyed by such ultra-criminal policies and actions must be rebuilt by the South (not the West) but fully financed by the West with no strings attached; third world indebtedness (a joke in terrible taste!) must be completely cancelled (since the debts are odious). In brief, massive reperations must be made to the South, with no conditionalities whatsoever attached. (N.B. Those who gloat over the great wealth disparities between the West and the South shamelessly ignore the fact that Western (blood) profit and affluence are absolutely tied to slavery, to a history of extreme exploitation and oppression. Nor has this stopped, or is ever likely to short of species extinction, as long as we accept the basic assumption that our leaders have the right to own—hence dominate and brutalize—the world courtesy of corporate West)
William Rivers Pitt, The Things We Don’t Talk About, http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/062305X.shtml
Mike Ferner, “Why War? War, Incorporated,” Counterpunch, July 17, 2002, http://www.counterpunch.org/ferner0717.html
Mark Weisbrot, Dean Baker, David Rosnik, The scorecard on globalization 1980-2005; 25 years of diminished progress. Center for Economic and Policy Research, September 2005, http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/globalization_2001_07_11.pdf
Norman Finkelstein, Myths, Old and New (Debate on the 1948 Exodus), http://www.palestine-studies.org/enakba/debates/Finklestein,%20Myths%20Old%20and%20New.pdf
Sharon Beder, The Corporate Assault on Democracy, http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/pdf%20files/pdf%20vol4/The%20Corporate%20Assault%20on%20Democracy.pdf
Marcos Arruda, “Neoliberal financial globalization: Capitalism’s Grave Illness,” Transnational Institute, October 2001, http://www.tni.org/print/62996
Fiona Dove, “The Responsibility to Protect,” Views from a Panel Debate, Development Dialogue November 2009, http://www.tni.org/sites/www.tni.org/files/download/DD-R2P.pdf
Charles Tilly, Violence, Terror, and Politics as Usual, http://www.bostonreview.net/RR27.3/tilly.html
William E. Forbath, “The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and the Law in the Gilded Age,” Wisconsin Law Review, 1985, pp. 767-817, https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&doctype=cite&docid=1985+Wis.+L.+Rev.+767&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&key=0e8d4a6c10421ab8027194283f3b3251
Laurence Shoup, “Shaping the Postwar World: the Council of Foreign Relations and the United States War Aims during World War II,” The Insurgent Sociologist, 1975, Vol. 5, pp. 7-52, http://crs.sagepub.com/content/5/3/7.citation
The wealthy and the comfortable wonder as before at the grumblings of the needy and are measuring the eye of the needle, which the camels of old had some difficulty in squeezing through [Mark 10: 17], to see what chance there is for their passage. They are not so confident of the ‘good time’ hereafter as they are of the condition of their bank account now. I am on the other side—and would give the under fellow a show in this life. It is a shame to put him off to the next world. (Justice Stephen J. Field)
If intellectuals derogated rather than served leadership and established institutions, refusing to toe the line so obediently and also refusing to whip a pacifist country into war fever while contortedly framing ideas for those in positions of executive power, they’d lose their privileges in no time, which most aren’t willing to do. So it’s really a waste of time trying to “convert” them to “our” side. What we ought to do is assist the underprivileged masses to uncover political reality and help them perceive social reality more systematically (since they know the basic facts thereof only too well), in the hope that they’ll rise against oppression when they feel sufficiently emboldened to do so (based on a solid understanding of the wholly artificial hence reversible nature of their poverty and powerlessness). The latter cannot happen as long as they attribute their traditional miseries to divine will and cosmic forces (the church is only too happy to perpetuate such superstition or myth, since it has its own agenda, which has absolutely nothing to do with God except in name). So we have to choose sides. Do we join the intellectuals who immolate humanity every day in the service of necrophilous power and blood profit? Or do we get on the right side of history in order to change it before it slaughters us, as it will sooner or later do due to its vindictive nature? There’s no middle ground
lördag 17 september 2011
Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution, http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/mutaidcontents.html
Bertrand Russell, Proposed roads to freedom, http://www.templeofearth.com/books/propsedroadstofreedom.pdf
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 2, The Contras, Cocaine,
and Covert Operations, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/nsaebb2.htm
and Covert Operations, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/nsaebb2.htm
Bamako Film puts the World Bank on Trial and Wins, http://artthreat.net/2007/04/bamako-film-puts-the-world-bank-on-trial-and-wins/
Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare by Tayac n, http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/guerilla.htm
1963 KUBARK manual, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/01-01.htm
Dean Baker, THE CONSERVATIVE NANNY STATE: How the Wealthy Use the Government
to Stay Rich and Get Richer, http://deanbaker.net/images/stories/documents/cnswebbook.pdf
måndag 8 augusti 2011
Michael Bakunin, God and the State, http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/godandstate/godandstate_ch1.html
Erich Fromm, The social philosophy of “will therapy,” http://www.erich-fromm.de/data/pdf/1939a-e.pdf
Noam Chomsky, World Order and its Rules, U.S. contempt for the framework of world order is so extreme there is little left to discuss, October 1999, http://www.zcommunications.org/contents/19954/print
Project Paperclip: Nazis in America, by John W. Whitehead, 5/2/2005, http://www.rutherford.org/articles_db/commentary.asp?record_id=337
Michael Kidron, A Permanent Arms Economy (Spring 1967), http://www.marxists.org/archive/kidron/works/1967/xx/permarms.htm
The Elkhorn Manifesto, What do Hemp and Hitler have in common? World War II, that’s what. An Open Letter to All Americans, by R. William Davis, http://www.worldaudit.org/The%20Elkhorn%20Manifesto%20-%20R_%20William%20Davis.htm
Joel Beinin and Lisa Hajjar, Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Primer, http://www.stanford.edu/group/scai/images/Palestine-Israel_Primer_MERIP.pdf
Chomsky, Consent without Consent, http://www.iea.usp.br/iea/english/journal/otherarticles/chomskydemocracy.pdf
Alan Milchman, D.F. Flemming on “The Origins of the Cold War,” http://mises.org/journals/lar/pdfs/1_1/1_1_4.pdf
Karen Armstrong, Unholy Strictures, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/aug/11/terrorism.politicsphilosophyandsociety
How Do We Grow?” Challenge, Vol. 48, No. 3, May/June 2005, pp. 50-83, http://www.ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Dev-Theory/Challenge-final-scan.pdf
It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one common right of humanity, and the other divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ (Abraham Lincoln)
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. … corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. (Abraham Lincoln)
[N]ationalism and state worship [are] the symptoms of a regression to incestuous fixation. Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world based on human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness, will he have found a new, human form of rootedness, will he have transformed his world into a truly human home. (Erich Fromm)
Every child’s ideas of what is evil are formed according to the parents’ defense mechanisms: “evil” can be anything that makes the parents more insecure,” like disobedience. (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good, p. 138)
Someone who has learned at his or her peril to obey unwritten laws and renounce feelings at a tender age will obey the written laws all the more readily, lacking any inner resistance. But since no one can live entirely without feelings, such a person will join groups that sanction or even encourage the forbidden feelings, which he or she will finally be allowed to live out within a collective framework.
Every ideology offers its adherents the opportunity to discharge their pent-up affect collectively while retaining the idealized primary object, which is transferred to new leader figures or to the group in order to make up for the lack of a satisfying symbiosis with the mother. (Ibid., p. 86)
“A child cannot acknowledge the negative side of his or her father, and yet these are stored somewhere in the child’s psyche, for the adult will then be attracted by precisely these negative, disavowed sides in the father substitutes he or she encounters…”
When a father speaks to his child, it is the way he speaks that counts, not what he says. “The more he builds himself up, the more he will be admired, especially by a child raised according to the principles of ‘poisonous pedagogy.’ When a strict, inaccessible, and distant father condescends to speak with his child, this is certainly a festive occasion, and to earn this honor no sacrifice of self is too great. A properly raised child will never be able to detect it if this father—this big and mighty man—should happen to be power-hungry, dishonorable, or basically insecure. And so it goes; such a child can never gain any insight into this kind of situation because his or her ability to perceive has been blocked by the early enforcement of obedience and the suppression of feelings…
[W]hen a man comes along and talks like one’s own father and acts like him, even adults will forget their democratic rights or will not make use of them. They will submit to this man, will acclaim him, allow themselves to be manipulated by him, and put their trust in him, finally surrendering totally to him without even being aware of their enslavement. One is not normally aware of something that is a continuation of one’s own childhood. For those who become as dependent on someone as they once were as small children on their parents, there is no escape. A child cannot run away, and the citizen of a totalitarian regime [or of country in which state-supported private tyranny reigns supreme] cannot free himself or herself. The only outlet one has is in raising one’s own children. Thus, the citizens who were captives of the Third Reich had to rear their children to be captives as well, if they were to feel any trace of their own power.
But these children, who now are parents themselves, did have other possibilities. Many of them have recognized the dangers of pedagogical ideology, and with a great deal of courage and effort they are searching for new paths for themselves and their children.” (Ibid., pp. 72, 73, 74)
torsdag 21 juli 2011
Erich Fromm, Automaton Conformity, http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2009/12/erich-fromm-automaton-conformity.html
E.S. Herman, War criminals (economics division), the dirty twenty, http://www.zcommunications.org/war-criminals-economics-division-the-dirty-twenty-by-edward-herman
Jane Addams, Charity and Social Justice, http://tigger.uic.edu/depts/hist/hull-maxwell/vicinity/nws1/documents/addams.jane/addams-charity.pdf
Doctrinal managers should more accurately be called brain snatchers, because they have refined the art of propaganda to such an extent as to effectively control people’s thoughts (and, by extension, their behavior as well, as intended), in order to undermine democratic thoughts and habits, with far-reaching consequences. But the bottom line is that a hierarchically organized society is an undemocratic society no matter how free and fair elections are, because in a genuine democracy power and wealth are widely dispersed, not concentrated. This has nothing to do with Communism (recall that the Bolshevik system was hierarchical and excessively authoritarian, hence deeply undemocratic). It is above all a moral imperative.
There was a time when the very mention of women’s rights, concern for the environment, civil and political rights for former slaves and the working class, some measure of health protection, etc., were frowned upon and ridiculed as utopian. Yet today they are partial realities in some parts of the world. Frown and ridicule as the complacently ignorant and the voluptuous may, social, economic and cultural rights should be fought for relentlessly, as part of the struggle to extend the limited rights that have been won but are eroding in the aforementioned areas
Those who decide to become dissidents must have a tremendous amount of patience and resolve, because it often takes a long time for people to understand and appreciate the moral and intellectual basis for dissidence. Emotional appeals are likely to backfire or be short-lived. Sticking to coherent facts, sharp analysis and moral considerations are the best weapons that can be employed to keep the spirit of resistance alive, not least because defenders of the status quo do not have a leg to stand on morally and intellectually
lördag 25 juni 2011
Ivan Illich, To hell with good intentions! http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/haas/files/Illich.pdf
Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page, Who Influences U.S. Foreign Policy? http://www.polisci.ufl.edu/usfpinstitute/2010/documents/readings/jacobs_page2005.pdf
Ellerman, The market mechanism of appropriation, http://www.ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Econ&Pol-Econ/Market-Mech-Reprint.pdf
Ellerman, “Three Themes about Democratic Enterprises: Capital Structure, Education, and Spin-Offs,” http://www.ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/The-Firm/Three%20Themes%20about%20Democratic%20Enterprises.pdf
Ellerman, “ESOPs & CO-OPs: Worker Capitalism & Worker Democracy,” http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1050&context=lrr
David Ellerman, “Translatio versus Concessio: Retrieving the Debate about Contracts of Alienation with an Application to Today’s Employment Contract,” Politics & Society, Vol. 33 No. 3, September 2005, pp. 449-480, http://www.ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Econ&Pol-Econ/translatio-v-concessio-P-and-S-final.pdf
Daniel Guerin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, http://www.ols11.com/dprine/Books/ANARCHISM/Anarchism%20From%20Theory%20to%20Practice%20-%20Daniel%20Guerin.pdf
tisdag 7 juni 2011
Can SETI Succeed?: Carl Sagan and Ernst Mayr Debate, http://www.astro.umass.edu/~mhanner/Lecture_Notes/Sagan-Mayr.pdf
David Ellerman, Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy, Cambridge (MA): Blackwell, 1992, http://www.ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Books/P&C-Book-Scanned.pdf
There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change—and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future. (Noam Chomsky)
The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realise with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organisation by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the European family. Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin which Germany began, by a peace which, if it is carried into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have restored, the delicate, complicated organisation, already shaken and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live... Where we spent millions before the war, we have now learnt that we can spend hundreds of millions and apparently not suffer for it. (John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919; emphasis added)
tisdag 24 maj 2011
Michael Desch, America's Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy, International Security, vol. 32, no. 3, Winter 2007/8, http://www.mitpressjournals.org.support.mah.se/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/isec.2008.32.3.7
Fourth Session, April 26, 1963, Panel: Fundamental challenges to legal doctrines affecting international coercion: aggression, self-defense, non-intervention, self-determination, neutrality, http://www.asil.org/files/henkinproc1963.pdf
Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan The Federal Reserve's semiannual monetary policy report before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, U.S. Senate, February 26, 1997, http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/hh/1997/february/testimony.htm
Sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It’s unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what’s happening in the world. In fact, it’s undesirable – if they see too much of reality them may set themselves to change it. (Noam Chomsky)
fredag 15 april 2011
Pepe Escobar, The Roving Eye, There's no business like war business, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MC30Ak01.html
Pepe Escobar, The US-Saudi Libya Deal, Asia Times,
The Myth of the Specialized Military Contractor,
Maryellen R. Kelley and Todd A. Watkins, Technology Review,
April 1995, v. 98 (3) pp. 52-8, http://www.lehigh.edu/~taw4/TR.html
lördag 26 mars 2011
lördag 19 februari 2011
lördag 22 januari 2011
Happiness is so nonsynonymous with joy or pleasure that it is not infrequently sought and felt in grief and deprivation. It depends not nearly so much on the things to which one ascribes it as on the ability and tendency of the soul to transform its outer condition into its inner destination, to seize its own particular circumstances with a sort of yearning desire and to cling to it… The deeper and more humane the psychic constitution, the more easily does melancholy well up in it and suffuse it… What is usually called happiness, therefore, or peace, is mostly only a living on those levels which never touch upon the depths of humanity. The happiness which is truly desirable can only be the culmination of that profound mood when we feel true inner being in its intimate connection with all that is great in the world, so that all sensation of opposition and strife disappears. And this can be true only of brief moments. But whoever is surrounded by the element of pain, grief, and melancholy in its unclouded purity, he feels at home in it and feels a sense of well-being. For, unnoticed, there increase in him the powers of inward humanity. He embraces nature more intimately, penetrates it more powerfully, and in moderation and renunciation leads a rich and infinite life which he would exchange for no other… Everything profound by its very nature has feelings of grief and pain at its core. But ordinary people do not sense it. They rise up in arrogance against trouble and grief instead of seeking them out to be their faithful companions. (Wilhelm von Humboldt, Humanist Without Portfolio, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963, pp. 310-11)
fredag 21 januari 2011
The only human relations that have value are those that are rooted in mutual freedom, where there is no domination and no slavery, no tie except affection, no economic or conventional necessity to preserve the external show when the inner life is dead. One of the most horrible things about commercialism is the way in which it poisons the relations of men and women. The evils of prostitution are generally recognized, but, great as they are, the effect of economic conditions on marriage seems to me even worse. There is not infrequently, in marriage, a suggestion of purchase, of acquiring a woman on condition of keeping her in a certain standard of material comfort. Often and often, a marriage hardly differs from prostitution except by being harder to escape from. The whole basis of these evils is economic. Economic causes make marriage a matter of bargain and contract, in which affection is quite secondary, and its absence constitutes no recognized reason for liberation. Marriage should be a free, spontaneous meeting of mutual instinct, filled with happiness not unmixed with a feeling akin to awe: it should involve that degree of respect of each for the other that makes even the most trifling interference with liberty an utter impossibility, and a common life enforced by one against the will of the other an unthinkable thing of deep horror. It is not so that marriage is conceived by lawyers who make settlements, or by priests who give the name of “sacrament” to an institution which pretends to find something sanctifiable in the brutal lusts or drunken cruelties of a legal husband. It is not in a spirit of freedom that marriage is conceived by most men and women at present: the law makes it an opportunity for indulgence of the desire to interfere, where each submits to some loss of his or her own liberty, for the pleasure of curtailing the liberty of the other. And the atmosphere of private property makes it more difficult than it otherwise would be for any better ideal to take root. It is not so that human relations will be conceived when the evil heritage of economic slavery has ceased to mold our instincts. Husbands and wives, parents and children, will be only held together by affection: where that has died, it will be recognized that nothing worth preserving is left. Because affection will be free, men and women will not find in private life an outlet and stimulus to the love of domineering, but all that is creative in their love will have the freer scope. Reverence for whatever makes the soul in those who are loved will be less rare than it is now: nowadays, many men love their wives in the way in which they love mutton, as something to devour and destroy. But in the love that goes with reverence there is a joy of quite another order than any to be found by mastery, a joy which satisfies the spirit and not only the instincts; and satisfaction of instinct and spirit at once is necessary to a happy life, or indeed to any existence that is to bring out the best impulses of which a man or woman is capable. (Bertrand Russell, Proposed Roads to Freedom, Rockville (Maryland): Arc Manor, 2008, pp. 122-3)
tisdag 18 januari 2011
Chomsky, If the Nuremberg Laws were Applied...,
Delivered around 1990, http://www.chomsky.info/talks/1990----.htm
Los Angeles Times. Worldwide Study Finds Big Shift in Causes of Death,
September 16, 1996 | THOMAS H. MAUGH II | TIMES MEDICAL WRITER, http://articles.latimes.com/print/1996-09-16/news/mn-44495_1_worldwide-study
September 16, 1996 | THOMAS H. MAUGH II | TIMES MEDICAL WRITER, http://articles.latimes.com/print/1996-09-16/news/mn-44495_1_worldwide-study
Elizabeth Becker, "Kissinger Tapes Describe Crises, War and
Stark Photos of Abuse", New York Times, 27 May 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/politics/27TAPE.html?scp=3&sq=Elizabeth%20Becker&st=cse
PROPAGANDA - General (theory, practice and history), http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/vf01.cfm?folder=715&outfit=pmt
BBC World Service Poll, Wide Dissatisfaction with
Capitalism—Twenty Years after Fall of Berlin Wall, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/nov09/BBC_BerlinWall_Nov09_rpt.pdf
Prenumerera på:
Inlägg (Atom)