To Control Dissent, Lead It....

The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in the first months of this year came out of the blue, catching power centres everywhere by suprise. The remainder of this year has seen a scramble to catch up with events in order to regain and retain control. Centres of power undestand very well that in order to control dissent it is necessary to lead it, and with this reality in mind it is instructional to look at the Tea party movement in the United States as well as the NTC's success in Libya.

In describing themselves as the 'NTC' the new government in Libya insults our intelligence, and we should be rightly asking why they dont just call themselves 'Another TNC Enabler' and be done?

The NATO attack on Libya was an abomination initiated on false pretexts, organised so as to converge with a genuine people's rebellion.

According to the official narrative, NATO's intervention was undertaken in order to prevent a bloodbath; with Gadaffi said to be murdering the citizens of Benghazi; some reports suggesting that 6000 people had already been killed. The assertions of a looming slaughter originated in the Geneva offices of the 'Libyan Human Rights Group', represented by Dr Sliman Bouchuiguir. The accusations were listed in a letter sent from Dr Bouchuiguir's office, and signed by a group of dissidents and seventy NGO's, and delivered to heads of state worldwide.

The reports about Benghazi now appear to have been a fabrication, and it is the rebel forces themselves who today are suspected of carrying out massacres of loyalist troops and burying them in mass graves.

For the new Libyan regime to enjoy good relations with the West, we can be certain that our masters will require far more than cooperation in the 'war on terror' and a willingness to 'trade freely' with Western oil companies.

Phyllis Benning of the US based Institute For Policy Studies has pointed out that “....Libya’s oil wealth is massive enough — especially in light of the country’s small population — that Libyans enjoyed national systems of health care, education, and other public services that were relatively good by developing-nation standards.”

Former MI5 employee Annie Machon concurs:

“They’ve had free education, free health, they could study abroad. When they got married they got a certain amount of money. So they were rather the envy of many other citizens of African countries. Now, of course, since NATO’s humanitarian intervention the infrastructure of their country has been bombed back to the Stone Age. They will not have the same quality of life. Women probably will not have the same degree of emancipation under any new transitional government. The national wealth is probably going to be siphoned off by Western corporations. Perhaps the standard of living in Libya might have been slightly higher than it perhaps is now in America and the UK with the recession,”

Trans-National Corporations will demand that Libya's health care, education system and other essential public services such as water be privatised at the earliest opportunity, and the only type of new Libyan administration that will be acceptable is one compliant to this agenda.

Western business interests will exploit the new divisions that the civil war has created to further this agenda.

AFRICOM will eventually oversee this militarisation of commerce from Libya all the way down to the Gulf of Guinea, itself an increasingly important source of oil and gas to the US.

An oil tanker takes three weeks to travel from West Africa to the US. It takes eight weeks to arrive from the Persian Gulf, having negotiated the Straits of Hormuz; a narrow waterway that Iran is able to sever with very little effort, and currently with every justification for wanting to do so.

US foreign policy therefore will increasingly be to look to the East side of the Atlantic Basin for it's energy requirements, and the Gulf of Guinea will become central to future needs.

In one of those ironic twists of history, this is the same part of the world that provided for an earlier energy demand of the United States when it was still a British colony.

That energy was the human muscle of the slave trade, and that period of history is known as the Black Holocaust.

European produced guns were frequently traded for slaves in West Africa, and in the 1750's the going rate was 16 guns for each captured person. Figures show that in these years 283,000 to 399,000 such weapons entered the area annually.

The arms which continue to pour into Africa today then are part of a tradition going back over 250 years.

The NATO supported mayhem in Libya which led to widespread looting throughout the country mirrors exactly what happened in Iraq after it had fallen to the US led invasion forces in 2003. Once again, arms storage depots have been ransacked by mobs, but this time the consequences are likely to be even more calamitous than what transpired in Iraq. Among the weapons recently 'liberated' are 20,000 surface to air missiles, prompting Human Rights Watch emergencies director in Libya Peter Bouckaert, to comment: "We are talking about some 20,000 surface-to-air missiles in all of Libya, and I've seen cars packed with them. They could turn all of North Africa into a no-fly zone."

In addition to its overseas adventures, Empire is using the strategy of 'divide and rule' at home also, and in this instance the scapegoats will likely continue to be Muslims, people of colour, the unemployed, the working poor and economic refugees. Most of us in fact. This should be a major issue for any genuine populist movement to take on board, but there has been no evidence of any momentum in this direction from the Tea Party; the reality being that their rallies have by and large been displays of reactionary and frequently illogical sentiments. Tea Party people are very angry, and they have much to be angry about, but their focus has been exclusively anti government, with zero attention paid to the role of the corporations.

We are however reminded of the observation of John Dewey's that “..as long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.”
If Obama has taught us anything it is that John Dewey's words have never been more relevant, and until the system itself is changed then only the terminally naïve can continue to believe that replacing one figurehead with another is going to make any substantial difference to US foreign or domestic policies.

The 2010 G20 summit in Toronto concluded with a declaration that living standards in the US and Europe need to be reduced by 25% to 33% over the coming ten years. We can assume that this 'structural adjustment' will not be across the board: last year for example the number of millionaires in the US rose by 16%. This then is what a 'jobless recovery' looks like.

Totalitarianism is being achieved in the US by stealth, and the Tea Party was created to control the rebellious dissent certain to occur anywhere a nation finds its economy 'structurally adjusting' in a radically downwards direction.
These past two years have until recently been marked by a striking absence of any genuine popular dialogue, and filling the gap caused by its absence is a narrative which until recently people seemed willing to accept unquestioningly. That this narrative has been rigidly controlled by those who clearly do not have the interests of the people of the US at heart is indicative of a deeply dysfunctional system. Now that the elites of the trans-national corporations and financial institutions alone decide the peoples fate, it would appear that those who have worked so relentlessly in degrading democracy are ready and willing to push the country still further towards totalitarianism.

The fight back in the US however has begun in earnest. It began with the Maddison Wisconsin occupation of the State Capitol, and is now manifesting itself in the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement centred around Zucotti Park in New York. In just four weeks it has grown from being a small group of fifteen or so people into what is now becoming a global phenomena of historic proportions.

Back at the begining of 2009 when Obama became President, his message of change had resonated strongly among people, but in retrospect it was merely another slogan. When it became clear to all that any changes were going to be for the worse, the word was that Obama was waiting for the popular movement to emerge that would 'hold his feet to the fire'. That popular movement is clearly with us now, and if Obama can't feel the heat on his toes, then somebody needs to check his pulse. Whether he is in any position to reach out and respond remains to be seen.

Meanwhile a US marine showed up in Zucotti park the other day wearing his full dress blues and carrying a sign which read: "This is the second war I've been called to fight in, but it's the first time I've known who my enemy is." 

Michael Perry Monday October 31. 

Liberating A People From Their Resources.

                                   

US occupation forces in Iraq presently perform their duties free of any concern that criminal activity by them might be held accountable in an Iraqi court of law. The fact that the US administration has been unable to wring any continuation of 'immunity' concessions from Iraq's parliament after this year's end is therefore widely attributed as the deciding factor in the US decision this week to withdraw its troops from Iraq at the end of 2011.

The realities are more complex.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, reality here at home always plunges into an even deeper than normal recession, and so this year TV fans will inevitably be served a fare of pictures of victorious US troops returning to their families and loved ones having completed their mission of freeing Iraq from the dictatorship of Saddam's regime. The Status of Forces Agreement between Iraq and the US, signed by President George Bush in 2006 calling for all US troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2012, will be seen to have been honoured.

That the troops leave an Iraq much of which is now a shattered and ruined wasteland will be the concern of only a minority of us in the West, and most will accept a Hollywood version of what in reality is an epic crime; the war of aggression, carried out 'in our name'.

This week meanwhile, with the death of Gaddafi and the defeat of his resistance, we may well have witnessed the real deciding factor for the Iraq pull out. It is perhaps no coincidence that the one event hastily followed the announcement of the other.

The ultimate 'success' of the 'humanitarian' NATO bombing campaign in Libya, combined with the deployment of a rag tag army of Western intelligence assets on the ground, aiding, abbetting and directing thousands of citizens hungry for change in their country offers the new template of conquest for a nation's resources.

NATO, in short, is now 'New Alternatives To Occupation', and the lessons of Iraq have been learned.

Libya has been secured for the benefit of the financial institutions and the transnational corporations without the need for military occupation. The importance of this cannot be overstated.

Yugoslavia, also once the beneficiary of a NATO 'humanitarian' bombing campaign, stands as an example of what 'humanitarian' intervention has been capable of achieving; and reflecting on the destiny of Yugoslavia, it is worth considering whether Libya will still exist in five or ten years time.

This is the prospect now facing many nation states. We should not forget that according to retired US general Wesley Clark, Iraq was to be just the beginning of a five year programme which would see seven countries attacked; namely Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finally Iran.

Listening recently to an Iraqi man explaining to me how Iraq now exists only in the hearts and memories of it's people, I was reminded of the words of ex US ambassador Joseph Wilson, speaking in November 2003:

"This war was never about WMD. It was never about terrorism. The so called front on terror didn't exist until we created it, and it wasn't about liberation of the poor Iraqi people...it is all about redrawing the political map of the Middle East. What I mean by that is returning the Arab world to its pre-Ottomon stage, so that Israel is surrounded by demographic entities that are no larger than it is and would spend all their time fighting each other and are unable to provide a monolithic block against Israel. It looks to me like they are all geared up to do something with Syria, perhaps Iran."

This is a deadly confluence of mutual interests that we are witnessing: an agenda shared by Israel and global monopoly capital.

Given everything that has happened since Joseph Wilson and Wesley Clark spoke out, it is hard not to conclude that the agenda is now well on the way to being 'mission accomplished', and anyone who opposes it is obviously still 'with the terrorists'.

For sentient people everywhere who also possess a conscience there is much to consider, and much to be alarmed about by this new turn of events.

Michael Perry October 23.

Mission Statement.

Our work attempts to address the question of how we might retain our common humanity and our collective memory to set as a light and a defence against the looming darkness.

In his 'Beyond Vietnam' speech delivered at the Riverside Baptist Church in April 1967, Dr Martin King Jnr talked of his conversations with those who he described as the 'desperate', 'rejected' and 'angry' young men living in the Northern ghettos of the United States.

“I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve it's problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first speaking clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today; my own government. For the sake of hundreds and thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

Exactly one year to the day of delivering his sermon, Dr King was silenced by an assassins bullet.

The final year of his life was an isolated and desperately lonely one following his decision to take a stand against a war which he now clearly linked with the issue of poverty: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.... there comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

If the speech had left a nation feeling deeply uncomfortable with itself, it had shaken the establishment more so, and thus a prophet's voice was silenced.

As Martin King was bearing witness to the carnage raging in Vietnam, MIT Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky was doing the same in his first book, 'American Power and the New Mandarins', published also in 1967. Writing from a place that he has since described as the “Athens of America”, Professor Chomsky spoke of the prevailing “brutal apathy”, and a “moral degeneracy on such a scale that talk about the 'normal channels' of political action and protest becomes meaningless or hypocritical. We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the US is dissent or denazification. The question is a debatable one. Reasonable people may differ. The fact that the question is even debatable is a terrifying thing. To me it seems that what is needed is a kind of denazification. What is more, there is no powerful outside force that can call us to account – the change will have to come from within”.

While continuing to consider what our responsibilities might be in recognising our crimes, he writes that while we regret them deeply, we must not “be paralysed by this recognition. Anger, outrage, confessions of overwhelming guilt may be good therapy; they can also become a barrier to effective action, which can always be made to seem immeasurable with the enormity of the crime. Nothing is easier than to adopt a new form of self indulgence, no less debilitating than the old apathy. The danger is substantial. It is hardly a novel insight that confession of guilt can be institutionalised as a technique for evading what must be done. It is even possible to achieve a feeling of satisfaction by contemplating one's evil nature.''

Today there can be little doubt whether we are staring full into the face of the spiritual death that Dr King warned of, and as a people we are being sorely tested. Our perpetual wars have driven us into a deep economic and moral bankruptcy, and we find ourselves at the end of a ten year orgy of ignoring reality; and as a consequence, of baiting and banishing the voices of truth and reason of our own times whilst rewarding and compensating those who ought rightfully to be serving lengthy prison sentences. There are though no 'outside forces' that can bring us to account, and effective action remains our individual and collective responsibility.

When considering the question of whether change is actually possible, we should first remember that change is not only possible but inevitable. The urgent question for us today is what sort of change we demand, and the challenge now for each of us is to examine our role as contributors to the process, and to make those necessary adjustments according to our own conclusions and conscience. In doing so there exists the possibility of contributing towards a common good. Does an artist have the power to change things? Does a preacher or a professor or a plumber? Arundhati Roy suggests a way forward:

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness -- and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling -- their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: we be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

Let there be a celebration of all the prophets who dare to speak truth to kings.

May Ayres and Michael Perry

October 2011.

God's Wars. May Ayres Ceramic Pictures. 1

God's Wars.
http://www.mayayres.com 

Exhibition Guide.

Vestibule.

We Did Not Know. (What Nobody Could Deny)

The title of this piece was once a common saying in Argentina, alluding to the murderous repression carried out by the military junta upon those poor and working people attempting to organise during the 1970's and 80's. It is attributed to the Mothers of the Disappeared who gathered weekly in the Plaza de Mayo to silently display pictures of their abducted sons and daughters.

The Ford Falcon motor car on the column was known and feared as the 'Death Mobile' at the time because it was favoured by the death squads for kidnapping people off the streets.

Father Roy Bourgoise who is depicted on this piece is the founding member of The School of Americas Watch. He continues to call for the shutting down of the 'School of the Americas' and has been imprisoned countless times for his activism.

Proconsul. (School of the Americas.)

The seated figure is John Negroponte, who enjoys the distinction of having served as US ambassador to Honduras in the 1980's and again as US ambassador to Iraq following the 2003 invasion. The columns themselves depict victims of empire, mostly unnamed and unknown, but including archbishop Oscar Romero, who was head of the Catholic church in El Salvador until his assassination in 1980. The Catholic church in Latin America at the time had incurred Washington's wrath for the sin of resurrecting the doctrine of Jesus Christ, namely the 'preferential option for the poor'. International demand for export crops had reduced the region's subsistence farmers to landless rural serfs or economic refugees, drifting into the urban slums.

Romero's first task upon taking office was to attend to the funerals of those gunned down by troops for protesting a rigged election. Afterwards he decided to sleep at a hospital for the destitute rather than the Episcopal Palace, and ordered his priests to provide sanctuary to those fleeing government forces. These same forces responded by killing Rutilio Grande, a friend of Romero's; and in a defiant violation of a law requiring government sanction, Romero buried his friend without permission and then excommunicated the assassins. He cancelled Sunday services and instead held a Mass which drew over 100,000 people.

Afterwards, leaflets exhorting the reader to “Be a patriot, kill a priest!” began to circulate, and before long four foreign Jesuits were abducted and murdered, their mutilated bodies dumped across the border in neighbouring Guatemala. Romero himself was gunned down at the altar while conducting Mass, and a quarter of a million people attended his funeral, during which forty people died in a stampede after a bomb exploded. The following two years saw 15% of the country's population driven into exile, 35,000 murdered and 2000 more disappeared. 

 

The presentation at the back of the piece is dedicated to John Walker Lindh; the first victim of the US torture programme instituted by the White House in 2001. A US citizen himself, Lindh is now serving a twenty year prison sentence for carrying weapons and serving in the Taliban army. Described by his parents as a deeply spiritual person, Lindh became a Muslim at the age of 16, and travelled to Yemen to learn the classical Arabic of the Quran. His studies led him to Pakistan in 2001 where he enrolled in a Quran memorisation school, and from there he travelled to Afghanistan, joining the Afghan army. At that time the Afghan government, the Taliban, was fighting a bloody civil war against the Russian backed Northern Alliance and was receiving US financial support to sustain itself: the last grant of $46 million being made by the US to the Taliban in May of that year. On September 10 John Walker Lindh was a regular soldier fighting for the US backed Afghan government, but on September 11 he became a 'Taliban terrorist', and more notoriously, the 'American Taliban.'

Margaret Hassan also appears on one of the columns. Prior to the 2003 assault on Iraq, as the head of the international charity CARE she travelled to London from her home in Baghdad to address the British parliament. Referring to the ongoing and deadly sanctions regime, she told them: “The Iraqi people are already living through a terrible emergency, they do not have the resources to withstand an additional crisis brought about by military action”. Afterwards she returned to Baghdad where she survived the aerial bombing campaign of 'Shock and Awe', only to be kidnapped and murdered the following year. A deeply committed woman who was much loved by the mothers and children of Iraq, her death remains a perplexing mystery, compounded by the fact that even the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi publicly condemned the kidnapping and appealed for her safe return. 

 

Another presence is that of Sister Dianne Ortiz, a North American Nun who was abducted on November 2^nd 1989 by the Guatemalan security forces and then subjected to systematic and repeated torture and rape. On Palm Sunday, March 31 1996 she stood in Lafayette Park across the road from the White House where for the first time she was to speak in public about the most harrowing experiences that she had endured:

“Today I begin my silent vigil for truth in front of the White House- not a silence of complicity, but a silence of commemoration for those who have been tortured, assassinated or disappeared in Guatemala in the last thirty years. Our own United States government has been closely linked to the Guatemalan death squads, and has a great deal of detailed information about those of us who have survived as well as those who have perished. We need and demand this information so that we can heal our wounds, bury our dead, and carry on with our lives.”

She continues campaigning to this day.

Belfry.

Demonic Principals.

The actions of the US Department of Justice under GW Bush that gave the green light to torture are, or ought to be, well known by now. There are four key documents, all freely available on the internet.

First there is Senate Armed Services Committee Report on Torture. A bipartisan report issued by Carl Levin and John McCain, with no dissenting voices, which describes how torture was introduced and implemented in military strategy.

Second is the is the International Committee of the Red Cross Report (ICRC) on Torture which summarises the accounts of what happened to the 14 'high value' detainees imprisoned at the Guantanimo military base in Cuba in 2006. This report was published by Mark Danner in the London Review of Books.

Third are the 4 Department of Justice legal briefs ('torture memos') which basically say “..do what you like, just don't induce major organ failure, or worse, kill them.” They came to light as a result of an American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information Act request. These are the 4 memos that 5 ex-directors of the CIA, Leon Panetta included, have tried to stop being published. US President B H Obama went ahead and permitted them to be published anyway. Very few people took the trouble to read them. They are available on the ACLU website.

Last is the report of the Inspector General of the CIA May 7 2004, available in heavily redacted form. Eric Holder, the incoming Attorney General in the Obama administration, was said to have been sickened when he read the full version. He has reportedly advocated widening the investigation chaired by John Durham which is still in session..

A bill to prevent contractors from doing 'rape by instrumentality' was prepared by US legislators but failed when it met with fierce resistance from the White House. 'There are very strict federal and state statutes against this and we don't want our people to be vulnerable to prosecution.'

US officials implicated in the US torture programme include former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales (counsel to the president and later attorney general), Jay Bybee (head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)), John Rizzo (acting CIA general counsel), David Addington (counsel to the vice president), William J. Haynes II (Department of Defense general counsel), and John Yoo (deputy assistant attorney general in the OLC).

Fallujah.

In July of 2010 amidst the furore arising from the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables release, a report was published which was perhaps of far greater importance than the private conversations of world diplomats. This was the report of an epidemiological study carried out by molecular bio-scientist Chris Busby, co-authored with Malak Hamdan and Entesar Ariabi, which passed largely without comment in Western media outlets.

The report charts a 12 fold increase of cancers in children under the age of 14 living in the city of Fallujah in Iraq, with a 4 fold increase of all other cancers also recorded. The report notes that infant mortality in Fallujah is 4 times greater than in neighbouring Jordan, and 8 times greater than in Kuwait. The report also notes that the types of cancer are similar to those experienced by the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki following their exposure to the ionizing radiation from the two atom bombs that destroyed their cities in 1945.

Fallujah was never under a mushroom cloud, but rather was attacked twice during 2004 with Anglo American ground troops and aerial bombardment and weaponry which included white phosphorous and depleted uranium rounds. The scene of some of the heaviest fighting and fiercest resistance to the occupation of Iraq, some 70% of Fallujah's buildings were destroyed in the attacks.

According to a Sky News report dated Thursday May 29, 2008:

“Fatima Ahmed is three years old. Small and lifeless she barely moves, burdened by two heads on her tiny frame. Her mother says doctors have been unable to diagnose exactly what has caused Fatima's condition. But her father Jassim, when asked who he held responsible for his daughter's condition said: 'It's because of the war – it's flagrant aggression they launched against us. What they dropped on Fallujah God knows.'”