Imagine if a member of Team USA Basketball - let’s say Kobe Bryant – had been traveling to an international tournament only to be seized by a foreign government and held in prison for three years without trial or even hearing the charges for which he was imprisoned. Imagine if Kobe was allowed no visitors from family or friends. Imagine if he was left no recourse but to effectively end any future prospects as a player by terminating his own physical health by going on a hunger strike. Chances are we’d notice, yes? Chances are the story would lead SportsCenter and make newspaper covers across the world. Chances are all the powerful international sports organizations - the IOC, FIFA – would treat the jailing nation as a pariah until Kobe was free. And chances are that even Laker-haters would wear buttons that read, “Free Kobe.”
This is what has happened to Palestinian national soccer team member Mahmoud Sarsak.
"The idea, in a nutshell, is that when a unit orders, condones, or allows dysfunctional behavior (particularly racist, overly brutal, etc.) in the small things, this can metastasize into much larger violence including war crimes." »
Dr. Waitman Beorn, the Iraq vet and Holocaust studies expert who blew the whistle on Marines’ use of a Nazi SS flag in Afghanistan, explains how poor moral judgment can snowball in a military culture.
This is actually the opposite direction of how war and war crimes work. War Crimes proceed from War itself. Racism, as well, proceeds from war itself. To quote myself, RACISM IS PART OF A PSYCHOSIS THAT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY FOR THE STATE TO WAGE WAR. The conclusion of those involved in the Nuremberg trials was that war crimes follow from the grand crime that is war itself. Absolute kudos to Dr. Beorn for exposing the racist, fascist, murderer fuck Marines (Hoo-rah, you dumb shits), but woe be to his scholarship and his experience if he can’t see War Itself as the problem and this sort of racism as not an aberration, but absolutely par. If you want to end war crimes, wishing for a “purer” war is useless. The “poor moral judgement” is war waged by the State in the first place.
Do I make a comment that illustrates how horrible this comment is from the “Yeah, because They Be Tapin” angle? Or the “That’s actually pretty fucking racist on top of Ray Kelly’s racist bullshit” angle? Or maybe just respond with “Yeah fucking right, Mr. fucking Mayor”?
Anti Fascist MMA tournament in Russia, I think.
oh man, my kind of people…
It seems that they started these tourneys to popularize self-defense in the Russian Anarchist and Anti-Fascist/Anti-Racist community after Antifa activist Fedor Filatov was ambushed and stabbed to death by a Neo-Nazi group. This second tournament was held in honor of Leftist activist Ivan Khutorskoi who was shot and killed by ultranationalists.
Off to train with this in mind….
The Islamophobia-Industrial Complex
As the faux-controversy surrounding Park 51 becomes ever less faux in the run up to Saturday’s Quran burning amid the commemorations of the 9/11 attacks, I have yet to see any acknowledgement of the grand scale on which anti-Islamic bigotry has been manufactured, not just in recent months, but over many years. Frank Rich’s piece at the weekend, and the Salon article to which he referred, only partly account for the phenomenon. The truth is that the current hysteria is the outcome of a long process in which the American neoconservative and Christian right has promulgated a most virulent bigotry through a network of think tanks, media commentary and blogging, which extends deep into the European far right.
Click through and read the whole thing, of course, but pay special attention to John’s conclusion:
It may not be the fabled Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. But, from the Washington lecture circuit to the streets of Yorkshire, the Islamophobia-Industrial Complex is long-standing, influential, well-funded and well-organized. It didn’t just happen, and, it would seem, it is not about to go away.
So where does it come from and why isn’t it likely to go away?
This racism is part of a psychosis that is absolutely necessary to war. One component is the hyper-nationalist flag waving that is quite obviously needed for a State to wage war, but the other half of this is the creation of an Other that is not just separate but completely un-human. The State, and those who accept war as an option (particularly modern warfare as it is waged by the State) need this view of an Other/Enemy not only so that the evils of war itself become acceptable, but so that evils even beyond that (inevitable war crimes) become acceptable as well.
For some brief American historical context you could look at the propaganda and cultural racism during any war. During World War I it wasn’t great to be German in America. Germans were fortunate enough to be white and mostly some sort of Christian, but that didn’t stop anti-immigrant propaganda against Italians and Irishmen as portraying them as sub-human and at the height of war it didn’t stop anti-German propaganda either:
During World War II the racist Othering of the Enemy is seen again, particularly in any of the anti-Japanese propaganda from the war produced by the government but also in cultural products like pulps and comic books. The Yellow Peril seen in that sort of propaganda is the most blatantly ugly/racist aspect of Orientalism, which rears its head once again with the current Islamophobia.
Of course this is a toxic madness for any country, but as I said above, it is necessary for the State to abide by some form of this in order for it to wage war. I have wondered, though, What happens to a culture that is steeped in this sort of madness for an absurdly long time? Next year America will have been at war for as long as the Trojan War is supposedly to have gone on. Van Jones points out we’ve been at war for the entire life of his 1st grader son. There are young men and women old enough now to go and die in our ongoing wars and occupations who probably can’t remember a time when we weren’t at war. Racial profiling became par the day after 9-11, and that’s just the tip of the racist/nationalist iceberg. After being in it for so long, should we be surprised at the recent Islamophobic eruptions?
And of course an industry has developed around this continuous aspect of the culture. In a perpetual war it just makes good business sense. John points out exactly that, how an industry has capitalized on this madness and continues to do so. It is not some trick or vast conspiracy, it is the necessary cultural aspects of a war being mobilized for profit (as demanded by the system) by the industries involved in the traffic of ideas. During the Shirley Sherrod story fallout, Ourtropes and Douglas Haddow noted that Rupert Murdoch is less concerned about politics as much as he is about which politics help him expand his empire of capital. And so, as a businessman, why not play the profitable game of encouraging Islamophobia?* Add to the historical context I posit above other elements of current American fear: the economy, encroachments on white privilege, demographic change via immigration, etc… It’s a very profitable time to exploit fear.
So, how does one put a halt to this industry? And how does one put an end to the Islamophobia? One complaint I’ve seen is that the media should pay less attention to these things, but as noted these media elements are part of a larger industry entirely comfortable with turning a profit on hyping this sort of thing (one way or another). Those with power (monetary or political, though these are pretty much one and the same at this point) are happy to keep the focus on race issues rather than the perverted system and its looting of the commons, so don’t look to them.
When people analyze white middle-class anger over immigration many say how it is actually misplaced anxiety over their financial instability. “It’s the economy, stupid!” has become a refrain. In this case, It’s the war, stupid! Islamophobia and the industry that capitalizes on it cannot be stopped until the war is stopped. The war needs both Islamophobia and this industry to keep perpetuating itself. It is a symbiotic relationship. Thus the sick and sad unintentional humor of a President and his Generals deploring the burning of Korans as “a recruitment bonanza for al-Qaeda” when it is his army’s actions and the condition of the country supporting those actions that is the actual factor in not only encouraging al-Qaeda, but also in encouraging the burning of the Koran.
——
*And what I mean here is that it is not just profitable to play up fear in a sense of garnering attention, but also profitable to be in concert with the mechanisms of power who are interested in perpetuating war. Again, a symbiotic relationship of war-fear-power similar (and inextricably related) to the military-industrial complex, thus how fitting of John’s title, “The Islamophobia-Industrial Complex”)
(Source: jhnbrssndn)
Glenn Greenwald, somewhat in response to himself, on our ball-less joke of a President. Greenwald goes on to point out how Bloomberg (who, politically, I despise) had a defense of the project that was proper (particularly in comparison) because it was “unapologetic and emphatic… in defense of the mosque itself “
AZ Spot earlier posted a reasonable and cogent explanation of the issues (and the racism) at play here (orig by Chris Martinez). Read that and then read Obama’s walking back of his statements and try to tell me you aren’t ashamed of him.
curate: The interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of... »
The interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them.”-Paulo Freire, quoting Simone de Beauvoir, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed
We should be teaching these kids that this is the land of opportunity, and, if they work hard, they can achieve their dreams, and not teach them that they’re oppressed.— Arizona’s Superintendent of Public schools Tom Horne defending HB 2281 that bans ethnic studies programs from the Arizona Public Schools.
Pedagogy of the Oppressor: Arizona’s Racism to the Top | CommonDreams.org
The interesting part to me of this “Pedagogy of the Oppressor” is how Tom Horne and those like him (such as the Texas school boards authorizing absurd changes to history text books) seem incapable of taking even the slightest step back and looking at themselves to realize that they are saying American History cannot stand up for itself and that the only way to prove America’s greatness is via fixed (controlled/non-neutral) language and omission.
