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winter oak
The Acorn – 39
Posted on January 9, 2018 January 10, 2018 by winter oak
"Let's put our resistance on the streets in 2018!"
Fake democracy – neoliberals ramp up information war
So who's behind the attacks on Antifa?
Terrorists, pseudogangs and psyops
The wisdom of being an anarchist
Acorninfo
1. "Let's put our resistance on the streets in 2018!"
Resistance against the global capitalist system and its police-state repression will be coming to the streets of Europe at the start of 2018, with important international demonstrations planned for Switzerland and Germany.
The action, and discussion, in Switzerland this month revolves around the meeting at Davos of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Swiss radicals are calling for anti-capitalist unity against the WEF and the plutofascist system it represents.
They say: "This year's WEF slogan is 'Creating a common future in a broken world'. We agree that the world is not what it should be. But unlike the WEF we see systematic causes for the 'broken world'."
In the run-up to the WEF meeting, which is being held on January 23 and 24, opponents are staging an alternative discussion weekend, on Saturday and Sunday January 20 and 21, looking at the capitalist system and how it might be resisted – how we can collectively "take the future into our hands instead of leaving it to the rulers".
But before that an international protest has been called for Saturday January 13, gathering at 3pm at the Käfigturm off the Waisenhausplatz in the historic centre of the Swiss capital, Bern.
Say the Swiss anti-capitalists: "Capitalism and its policies are close to the abyss and states are prepared to prevent change with high levels of violence. Radical movements seeking to tackle the problems at their roots are being banned and suppressed across the world. Let's put our resistance on the streets!"
Meanwhile, 500 miles to the north, at the other edge of German-speaking Europe, another protest against capitalist totalitarianism is being staged on Saturday March 17.
The demo in Hamburg is in protest at the massive levels of repression unleashed by an increasingly fascistic German state against anti-capitalists protesting against the G20 summit last summer.
While the shocking images of police brutality may have faded from the public's mind, the repression continues, with ongoing police raids, arrests and prosecutions.
On December 5, police carried out 24 raids on leftist and autonomous infrastructure across Germany, seizing laptops, mobile phones, and other means of communication, as outlined in this January 8 article from Crimethinc.
Many are warning that Germany is "sliding into fascism".
The global neoliberal war on internet freedom has been particularly blatant in Germany, with Linksunten Indymedia being shut down by the state amidst fevered mainstream media scaremongering about the "threat" of left-wing "extremists".
State violence against dissidents is becoming ever uglier, as during the recent protests against the far-right AfD.
For all their populist "anti-establishment" posturing, the extreme right in Germany and elsewhere have increasingly been revealed to be an intrinsic part of the authoritarian capitalist system; its shock-troops in fact. Their anti-Muslim rhetoric is closely linked to the racist and imperialist narrative of the pro-US, pro-Zionist establishment, as we reported in Acorn 37.
While police in Berlin police banned American and Israeli flags at a pro-Palestinian march in December, after some flag burning at a previous protest, the same capitalist-fascist robocop army protected AfD fascist-capitalists in Hannover, attacking their opponents with high-powered water cannon in freezing temperatures, leaving many injured.
Says a call for resistance from Berlin's Rigaer 94 squat: "In this battle for capitalist and nationalist ends, the state will always end up demanding fascism. With the same tactics, they try time and time again to delegitimize resistance by branding it criminal, antisocial, and apolitical.
"The time of comfortable protests is long gone. Today, German society has arrived at an extreme it hasn't reached in over 80 years.
"Determined and angry, despite the repression, we will fight against the ruling order!"
2. Fake democracy – neoliberals ramp up information war
It should by now be completely apparent to anyone paying attention that the US-led military-industrial-capitalist complex is a totalitarian system.
Until now, it has largely had the subtlety not to use its power of repression except when it really needs to, so that it can keep intact the crowd-control illusion of "democracy".
Things are rapidly changing, though. Faced with serious cracks in its domination, it is clamping down on dissent in a big way.
The latest trick to disguise and justify its censorship is the "fake news" meme, a cunning plan to conflate invented content with content unwelcome to the political elite.
The birth of "fake news"
As Chris Hedges of the truthdig website states: "The corporate state is unnerved by the media outlets that give a voice to critics of corporate capitalism, the security and surveillance state and imperialism."
The Civic Critic blogsite has produced a handy guide to "fake news" featuring a series of links to articles covering the phenomenon.
It says: "Started in late 2016 as a reference to made-up stories, hoaxes, and Onion-style parodies, 'Fake News' has since been adopted by Donald Trump and his supporters to describe any negative press. Those in many establishment news sources often use 'Fake News' to refer to 'exaggerated, hyper-partisan, and conspiratorial journalism'. Fake News is thus perhaps best understood as a rhetorical weapon in a multi-faceted Information War."
The clamp-down on information has rapidly accelerated at the start of 2018, as the World Socialist Web Site reported on Saturday January 6.
On January 1, for instance, the German government began implementing its new Network Enforcement Law, or "NetzDG", which threatens social media companies with fines of up to €50 million if they do not immediately remove content deemed objectionable by the state.
The UK has adopted a slightly different approach, with minister of state for security Ben Wallace warning internet giants that they could be penalised through taxes if they fail to cooperate with government efforts to fight "terrorism and online extremism".
In France, neoliberal "centrist" president Emmanuel Macron also obligingly leapt into action, announcing plans to counter "fake news" during elections by allowing state judges to block websites or user accounts.
Authoritarian neoliberal Emmanuel Macron
Somewhat letting the cat out of the bag regarding the real political agenda behind the "fake news" meme, he declared: "Thousands of propaganda accounts on social networks are spreading all over the world, in all languages, lies invented to tarnish political officials, personalities, public figures, journalists".
Tarnishing political officials? We can't have that, can we?
Of course, in the back-to-front language of the capitalist elite, the aim of this "strong legislation" is not to impose capitalist rule but to "protect liberal democracies", as Macron put it.
The invention of the term "fake news" to cover online censorship is no more subtle than the pre-existing excuses of "terrorism", "extremism" or "hate-speech". The co-ordinated use of these overlapping labels for the same purposes makes it obvious that there is a definite political agenda at work here.
An article published by Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept on December 30 reported, for example, that Facebook has admitted to deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments.
Greenwald notes: "As is always true of censorship, there is one, and only one, principle driving all of this: power. Facebook will submit to and obey the censorship demands of governments and officials who actually wield power over it, while ignoring those who do not. That's why declared enemies of the US and Israeli governments are vulnerable to censorship measures by Facebook, whereas US and Israeli officials (and their most tyrannical and repressive allies) are not.
"One need merely look at how hate speech laws are used in Europe, or on US college campuses, to see that the censorship victims are often critics of European wars, or activists against Israeli occupation, or advocates for minority rights."
One of the most shocking examples was the 2015 conviction of 12 protesters in France for "hate speech" which consisted merely of wearing T-shirts declaring "Long live Palestine, boycott Israel".
The current attack on free speech is being co-ordinated by the upper echelons of the military-industrial-capitalist system.
The European Commission, for example, announced last year that it was forming a High Level Group "to advise on policy initiatives to counter fake news and the spread of disinformation online".
Another leading player in the international initiative is a new US-based organisation called the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD).
Set up under the excuse of combating what it calls an "unprecedented attack" on United States democracy by Russia, it is described in its Wikipedia entry as a "transatlantic national security advocacy group".
In case you haven't caught the drift as to what this implies, note that the ASD is "chaired and run primarily by former senior United States intelligence and State Department officials". The Washington Post called the membership of the advisory council "a who's who of former senior national security officials".
Still not clear? Well, consider that the ASD is based at The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) and draws its staff from that organisation.
The original Marshall Plan was a $13,000,000,000 American "aid" scheme to Western Europe after the end of the Second World War, amounting to an economic and cultural occupation similar to that of the Soviet Union in the Eastern Block.
Noam Chomsky has described it as having "set the stage for large amounts of private US investment in Europe, establishing the basis for modern transnational corporations".
The GMF carries on the same work. It helps maintain a full-spectrum US neoliberal control of Europe – or rather, in its own sweet language, it "strengthens transatlantic cooperation on regional, national, and global challenges and opportunities in the spirit of the Marshall Plan".
It has dished out millions of Yankee dollars across Europe over the decades. It has also run a US-Europe parliamentary exchange program and the Marshall Memorial Fellowship, which has funded the exchange of more than 3,000 "emerging leaders" across the Atlantic.
Why? Simply to ensure that there is no real democracy in Europe and that all its politicians are obedient poodles to the US and its corporate controllers.
French president Macron is a product of the Marshall Memorial Fellowship scheme.
And German chancellor Angela Merkel celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Marshall Plan in June last year, alongside the odious imperialist warmonger Henry Kissinger.
She praised GMF's work, saying: "For Germany, GMF helps to understand the American spirit. And, GMF helps Americans understand our country. For more than 45 years, GMF has served as a transatlantic exchange, building mutual understanding, providing information, clarifying positions, and identifying commonalties."
Kissinger and Merkel celebrate the ongoing American neoliberal occupation of Europe
The GMF is regarded as a pioneer of American "soft power" in Europe, but its work interfaces smoothly with the US military occupation. In 2004, it organized a major conference in Istanbul in the run-up to the NATO Summit.
It describes its mission as "sustaining, deepening and enlarging the liberal international order" – in other words, US neoliberal hegemony.
And it makes it clear that it is worried about the cracks currently appearing in the empire, stating: "This order is under assault on multiple fronts, both internal and external, and on both sides of the Atlantic: from populist forces in America to Russian interference in Western elections, from anti-EU movements to the backlash against new trade agreements, from the rise of great power revisionism to question marks over the future of US alliance leadership".
As contributions to its own website make clear, the GMF aims to keep Europe firmly under the thumb of the US empire and of the multinational corporations in whose interests it functions.
It reacts with panic to any dent in the pro-American, pro-capitalist cultural and political "consensus" that it and other organisations have been working so hard to impose on the population of Europe since the Second World War.
American cultural values enriching Paris
A recent article by Alina Inayeh of the GMF's Bucharest office cautions: "The transatlantic community, its values, and norms held rich intrinsic value in the early 1990s and provided an engine for change in Eastern Europe in subsequent years.
"But a transatlantic orientation has shifted from a major objective to a series of political, military, and economic transactions. The governments in both Central and Eastern Europe, facing elections throughout 2018 and 2019, will intensify their nationalist paths, and/or further slow their already almost stagnant adoption of transatlantic principles.
"At the same time, security and military cooperation will continue, pushed forward by real security threats and economic interests. But this cooperation will be isolated from transatlantic values, which will be ignored or even flouted."
Extremist hate speech breaks out in Newport, Wales
Rejection of the NATO occupation of Europe, rejection of neoliberal free trade agreements, rejection of capitalism – all of this represents a rejection of what Inayeh coyly terms "the transatlantic community, its values, and norms".
This is why the GMF has launched the "fake news" meme and the ASD. This is why the Americans are ordering their European puppets like Macron and Merkel to take authoritarian action against dissent.
We should be very aware that the neoliberal-fascist elite will stop at nothing to ensure they cling on to total power.
As Hedges warns in his article: "This is a war of ideas. The corporate state cannot compete honestly in this contest. It will do what all despotic regimes do – govern through wholesale surveillance, lies, blacklists, false accusations of treason, heavy-handed censorship and, eventually, violence."
3. So who is behind the attacks on Antifa?
The shock of Donald Trump's presidential election victory has prompted an encouraging upsurge in militant anti-fascism in the USA.
Antifa have been particularly active, and effective, in mobilising against American Nazis and racists who have been emboldened by Trump's ascent and see their toxic ideas as being in the ascendancy.
However, Antifa's success has inevitably prompted a backlash from opponents and as part of this reaction one particular journal has been consistently smearing and attacking them (see here, here and here).
The labels it uses are themselves a big giveaway as to its bias. The Nazis are politely described according to their own self-description, as "white nationalists", while Antifa are termed "anti-fascist extremists".
Notorious US racist Richard Spencer is presented merely as a "white-nationalist leader who organized free-speech rallies on many campuses" and given a direct voice in the report, promising that "he plans to take his movement to more universities in 2018".
Antifa are depicted as a "secret" and "violent" organisation adopting the tactics of the Nazis, with the heavy implication that they are even more of a threat, basically terrorists, and that the authorities ought to clamp down on them fast.
Readers are told: "Federal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as 'antifa' had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as 'domestic terrorist violence'.
Demonising antifa
"By the spring of 2016, the anarchist groups had become so aggressive, including making armed attacks on individuals and small groups of perceived enemies, that federal officials launched a global investigation with the help of the US intelligence community, according to the DHS and FBI assessment.
"The purpose of the investigation, according to the April 2016 assessment: To determine whether the US-based anarchists might start committing terrorist bombings like their counterparts in 'foreign anarchist extremist movements' in Greece, Italy and Mexico, possibly at the Republican and Democratic conventions that summer.
"Several state law enforcement officials said that all of those accelerating factors have come to pass. And recent FBI and DHS reports confirm they are actively monitoring 'conduct deemed potentially suspicious and indicative of terrorist activity' by antifa groups."
There is a detailed debunking of the smears on the It's Going Down website.
What has surprised anti-fascists is that the magazine in question, Politico, is not usually regarded as part of the far right, but rather of the Center, or Centre as we spell it in the UK.
So what is behind Politico's obvious hostility to Antifa? What political agenda lies behind its scaremongering propaganda?
The first clue should come from the fact that Politico is associated with "The Center/Centre". As we said in Acorn 34, this is an insidious term used to define extreme neoliberal capitalism as a norm, as a default position, as a "common sense" non-ideology whose assumptions and aims can never be fundamentally challenged, except by "extremists".
French president Emmanuel Macron is a centrist. So is former UK prime minister Tony Blair. Say no more!
Tony Blair, centrist and war criminal
The second clue relates to the origin of its stories about the US authorities' concerns over the Antifa "threat". Politico tries to get away with implying that they have merely received leaked official documents but, as It's Going Down notes, they themselves take up the official "domestic terrorist" line with great gusto.
Politico seem to be very close to mysterious sources such as "a senior state law enforcement official". When they write of "interviews and confidential law enforcement documents obtained by Politico", how exactly were these documents "obtained"? Via an unauthorised leak or over a cosy lunch?
Politico's concerns about Antifa are very much the concerns of the authorities. There is, for example, much anxiety about several significant "intelligence gaps," including an inability to penetrate the groups' "diffuse and decentralized organizational structure". [Trots please note!]
This stance is perhaps to be expected because research reveals that Politico is very closely linked to a shadowy political network which defines its role as defending the interests of US capitalism and imperialism.
Susan Glasser
Take, for example, its chief international affairs columnist Susan B. Glasser, who was in fact one of Politico's founding editors.
A graduate of Harvard University, Glasser is former editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine and spent four years travelling the former Soviet Union as The Washington Post's Moscow co-bureau chief, covering the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When she's not doing journalism, she is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution which is, as we reported in Acorn 28, a high-profile US "Think Tank", recently accused of having a "cozy relationship" with its corporate donors.
The Brookings Institution gets funding from the likes of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, bankers JPMorgan Chase, David Rubenstein (co-founder of the extremely dodgy Carlyle Group), John L. Thornton (former president of Goldman Sachs) and the state of Qatar. It also enjoys excellent relations with the CIA, whose director John Brennan gave a key speech there in July 2016.
The CIA's John Brennan addresses the Brookings Institution
Glasser was mixing in similar circles in June 2017 when she had the honour of moderating an event called "The Eastern Mediterranean: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Path Ahead – A Conversation with Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades" in Washington, DC.
And the organisers of the meeting? Why, none other than the GMF, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, which will be a familiar name to those of you who have already the article above this one…
Indeed, Politico seems to have long enjoyed a very warm relationship with the GMF, that noble defender of US neoliberal supremacy.
In November 2012, for instance, John Harris, editor-in-chief of Politico in Washington, DC, delivered the keynote address at a reception in Berlin marking the 30th anniversary of GMF's Marshall Memorial Fellowship.
How come? Well, it turns out he not just a good pal of the GMF but a member of its Board of Trustees!
Readers will be pleased to hear that links between Politico and the GMF continue to be strong.
On Wednesday March 22, 2017, the German Marshall Plan's Brussels Forum was staged at the Microsoft Center in the Belgian capital.
Many very worthy liberal and democratic organisations were represented, such as Google, ExxonMobil, Centrica, Chevron, BP, Deloitte, Raytheon and NATO.
It must have been quite a party. US Special Operations Command were there, and the US National Counterterrorism Center. And Israel Broadcasting. And the Mission of Israel to the European Union. And the European Association of Mining Industries
Douglas Carswell, the right-wing British politician and former UKIP MP, was among the participants. Oh, and of course, David Herszenhorn and Ryan Heath from Politico.
Heath's biography reveals a background typical of Politico staff.
Ryan Heath of Politico
He began his illustrious career as a speechwriter for the British civil service, before joining the European Commission. His journalistic integrity means he is regularly sought out as a policy commentator by the likes of the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Deutsche Welle and he has been trusted to report from major events such as the WEF meeting in Davos (see above), G7 summits, and US political conventions.
Again and again, Politico's "journalists" turn out to have taken a similar path through life.
Like Heath, Kristina Kausch has a background with the European Commission, which has provided a two-year fellowship for her to work for the GMF in Brussels. She has been a non-resident associate of the CIA-linked Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and worked for the now-defunct "international development think tank" FRIDE.
Politico contributor Jamie Fly is very well-connected
Politico contributor Jamie Fly has a particularly impressive CV. A senior fellow at the GMF, he also works with its offshoot the ASD.
He served in the Bush administration at the National Security Council, and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He was director for Counterproliferation Strategy at the National Security Council, where his portfolio included the Iranian nuclear program, Syria, missile defense and chemical weapons.
For his work in the Department of Defense, he was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service. He has also worked at the World Bank.
The GMF isn't even very shy about its close links to Politico, publishing a link to this November 2017 article by Glasser which features Laura Rosenberger, director of the ASD and a senior fellow at the GMF.
Rosenberg's bio informs us that she was previously foreign policy advisor for "Hillary for America" and prior to that, she served "in a range of positions at the State Department and the White House's National Security Council".
The GMF was particularly keen to endorse an "excellent" Politico report on the 2017 election victory of Emmanuel Macron, who is after all a leading "centrist" and product of the Marshall Memorial Fellowship scheme.
You could be forgiven for thinking that Politico was the GMF's own in-house publication!
Having examined the nature of Politico's political agenda, we can return to our initial question. Who is behind the smear attacks on Antifa?
Well, fascists of course! Fascists close to the American state who claim to be "centrists" defending liberal democracy against fake news and extremists, but fascists none the less.
4. Terrorists, pseudogangs and psyops
The hypocrisy of states such as the UK when it comes to terrorism is simply breathtaking.
They relentlessly exploit the fear of terrorism to justify everything from foreign wars to erosion of freedom at home, while all the while being happy to use terrorists for their own ends.
A good example of this came from documents just released by the Irish government under their 30-year rule.
These included a 1987 letter from the loyalist terrorist group the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) addressed to the then Irish PM Charles Haughey.
The loyalists claimed their organisation was used by MI5 and MI6, backed up by British Army special forces, from 1972 to 1978 and again in 1985.
"In 1985 we were approached by a MI5 officer attached to the NIO (Northern Ireland Office) and based in Lisburn, Alex Jones was his supposed name," the UVF said. "He asked us to execute you."
The previously secret letter, on UVF headed paper, showed the loyalists told Mr Haughey that the MI5 operative gave details of his cars, photographs of his home, his island, Inishvickillane, and his yacht, Celtic Mist.
Charles Haughey. M15 apparently asked a terrorist group to kill him.
The UVF added: "MI5 were double-crossing us all the time we were working with them. We executed some of our best men believing them to be traitors".
Documents such as these provide important insights into true nature of the UK state, not just in the past but in the present as well – and that is presumably why those lingering in the British archives tend to go missing.
The war in Ireland allowed the UK state to perfect "counterinsurgency" techniques which have subsequently been rolled out across the world.
Central to these were the theories of Brigadier Frank Kitson, as this recent article on the Bella Caledonia website sets out.
Kitson stressed the value of covert operations, the 'turning' of insurgents through 'carrot and stick' measures, and what he called 'countergangs' or 'pseudogangs', which could infiltrate or deceive insurgents.
"In essence, Kitson envisaged the paramilitarisation of the British Army, switching its focus from conventional to unconventional warfare, training troops 'to support civil power' in mock-ups of Belfast streets, adopting the techniques of insurgents, and fighting 'terrorism' with state terror units in a form of gang warfare," says the article.
Terrorists or the British SAS?
He was also a pioneer of psyops (psychological operations) and media manipulation by briefing and spin, and he established close relationships with British journalists in Northern Ireland, turning them into "useful mouthpieces".
The existence of these pseudogangs and psyops, and the way they are deployed by the secret state, is key to understanding the world around us.
Historically, the whole history of NATO's "Gladio" stay-behind/terror network in Western Europe is worth studying – this 1992 BBC documentary film is an excellent introduction.
And there are plenty of writers specialising in exposing these shadowy areas – in the UK notably Nafeez Ahmed, Robin Ramsey and Mark Curtis, whose latest book, an updated version of Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam has just been published.
Resisting the Psychology of Terror
Terrorism and the state – learning from history
Manchester: an explosion of hate and fear
5. The wisdom of being an anarchist
Humankind needs to reconnect with an ancient anarchic wisdom which has been deliberately hidden from us by the dominant industrial capitalist system, says Winter Oak author Paul Cudenec in his first blogpost of 2018.
He explains: "This philosophy has always existed as an underground heresy beneath the surface of dominant society and emerges again and again in renewed forms throughout history".
A key part of this philosophy, he says, is a sense of unity, a sense of our belonging to a greater whole.
"Human beings, because they are living parts of a universal organism, are imbued with the same patterns and structures as the rest of the Universe and, of course, as the rest of the natural world on this planet.
"Significantly, this includes our mental processes. Human thinking, including our philosophies, is a continuation of the complex patterns of the cosmos and of nature and not something outside of them.
"Just as our existence is part of the existence of the Universe, so is our thinking part of the thinking of the Universe. Our thinking is the Universe's thinking and our thinking is nature's thinking – both interpreted through the filter of our particular human existence.
"The structures of the Universe and of nature are contained deep within us and are reflected in the physical reality of our bodies and in the abstract realities of the thinking generated by our physical bodies.
"This would continue to be the case even if every single human being alive today denied that it was so. But the Wisdom maintains that an awareness of this innate structure is essential to an understanding of who we are and how we should live.
"Individuals are all manifestations of the Universe. This Universe needs there to be physical forms of reality so that it can actually exist as a physical entity, rather than as an abstract idea; it needs there to be living physical beings so that it can also be alive and it needs there to be actual physical thinking happening so that it can, itself, think.
"The Universe also needs individual human beings to act on their thinking, so that it too can, through them, act on its (decentralised) thinking. How else can the Universe, the sum of all reality, be present in its own self-forming other than through the actions of its constituent parts?
"Our actions, our lives, are the Universe in the act of self-creation. Our doing something is the Universe establishing its own shape, through us. Nothing we do has already happened, or already been planned. As we do it, it becomes real."
Cudenec is the author of titles such as The Anarchist Revelation, The Stifled Soul of Humankind and The Green One, in which he combines anarchist politics with a metaphysical dimension.
Explaining the thinking behind this approach, Cudenec writes: "A philosophy combining contemporary anarchist insights with the age-old Wisdom I have been outlining is a powerful one, which is why it is deemed so unacceptable, so unthinkable, by modern capitalist-friendly thinking.
"It represents, for me, our best chance of finding the collective mental strength and courage to walk out of this dark industrial capitalist nightmare towards a bright and free future".
For the full article go to network23.org/paulcudenec
6. Acorninfo
Attacks and smears against anarchists by the Brazilian state and corporate media is the theme of an emotive new video on the submedia site. It declares: "Let's not fool ourselves, we're in the middle of a war. A disguised and all-pervasive war. A war between the oppressors and the oppressed; between the rich and everybody else…"
"Democracy encourages a liberal Western concept of the individual, of the individual as this isolated unit with rights that pertain to public participation, which means participation within a centralised and hierarchical sphere of decision-making, rather than this organic being in the world who exists according to communal relationships, according to relationships with the natural environment." So says US anarchist author Peter Gelderloos in an in-depth audio interview which can be heard here.
Consumer culture is creating a psycho-spiritual crisis, writes John F Schumaker in an article on the opendemocracy website. He says: "Without an existential compass, the commercialized mind gravitates toward a 'philosophy of futility', as Noam Chomsky calls it, in which people feel naked of power and significance beyond their conditioned role as pliant consumers. Lacking substance and depth, and adrift from others and themselves, the thin and fragile consumer self is easily fragmented and dispirited… Consumerism and psychic deadness are inexorable bedfellows."
The UK's Anarchist Action Network meeting planned for December had to be postponed because of snow, so it has been rearranged. It will now be held on Sunday January 21, from 1pm to 4pm, at the Cowley Club, 12 London Rd, Brighton, East Sussex BN1 4JA. All anarchists welcome.
"We acknowledge no authority higher than ourselves, and we will continue to act in accordance with the aspirations of our spirits for freedom and dignity. We will continue to fight in defense of Mother Earth, on behalf of future generations and all our relations, consequences be damned." This was the powerful message relayed by Montreal Counter-Information in Quebec following the sentencing on December 18 of two anarchist comrades for their role in a 2015 direct action in which a pipeline was physically shut down. There is a fundraising page to help the activists pay costs.
What are the effects of "screen culture" on human behaviour, intelligence and the environment? How did we get here? Who benefits? What may come next if this culture is left unchecked, to its end trajectory, and is that what we want? A thought-provoking new independent film by Jordan Brown, Stare Into The Lights My Pretties, investigates these questions with an urge to return to the real physical world, to form a critical view of technological escalation driven by rapacious and pervasive corporate interests. It can be seen here.
"We need to make haste. Political censorship is becoming routine across the worldwide web. A free and open internet is to be abolished by the Trump administration. Dissent, once tolerated in the mainstream, has regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal democracy moves towards a form of corporate dictatorship." The timely warning comes from veteran investigative reporter John Pilger in an excellent talk which can be seen online. He says: "This is an historic shift and the media, both mainstream media and social media, must not be allowed to be the facade of this new order and should be subjected to direct action."
Fans of Winnie the Pooh will be delighted to hear that he, Piglet, Eeyore and friends feature in a brand new 21st century vignette of English rural life, in which the Hundred Acre Wood is targeted for fracking, Tigger gets arrested and Pooh invents the lock-on by mistake. Open the first page here.
Acorn quote: "I have used the myth of the goddess Gaia to express the idea that we are an integral part of a single, intelligent life-form which acts like an individual. I have tried to show how it is that we can never separate ourselves from this life-form, despite our delusions of dominance and control, because should we succeed in doing so, we would be committing an irreversible act of mass suicide: as if an arm tried to exist separately from the body".
Kit Pedler, The Quest for Gaia: A Book of Changes
(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)
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The Acorn 38
The Acorn 9
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Posted in Anarchism, The AcornTagged Alliance for Securing Democracy, Anarchist Action Network, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, antifa, Berlin, Bern, Brazil, capitalism, Charles Haughey, consumerism, Crimethinc, Davos, Emmanuel Macron, European Commission, Facebook, fake news, fascism, Fracking, france, Gaia, German Marshall Fund, Germany, Hamburg, imperialism, Ireland, Israel, John Pilger, Kit Pedler, Montreal, NATO, neoliberalism, NetzDG, Paul Cudenec, Peter Gelderloos, police, Politico, protests, resistance, Stare Into the Light My Pretties, Switzerland, terrorism, UK, USA, UVF, WEF, Winnie the Pooh3 Comments
Posted on May 25, 2017 May 25, 2017 by winter oak
Extremists of the neoliberal "centre"
The CIA and the war of ideas
Enemy of the system – the US campaign against Julian Assange
Money, power and mining
1. Manchester: an explosion of hate and fear
The vile bomb attack in Manchester on May 22 has left a noxious smell of racism and fascism in the British political atmosphere in the election run-up.
Prime Minister Theresa May was very quick to ramp up the terror alert status to "critical" and send the army onto the streets in a bid to show just how strong and stable she is.
The gesture has a hint of coup d'état about it. Even pro-establishment Guardian journo Jonathan Freedland had to admit that troops being deployed in the middle of a general election campaign was "new and unsettling terrain for British democracy".
As Gianfranco Sanguinetti noted, in his book On Terrorism and the State, regarding a similar situation in Italy in the late 1970s: "The reasoning currently in vogue is simple: if you love democracy, you have to defend it; to defend it you have to fight its enemies; to fight the enemies of democracy, no sacrifice is too great: the nobility of the end justifies every means; no democracy for the enemies of democracy! Something which was never essentially a democracy has now visibly ceased being so".
But even worse was to come from media commentators who seem eager to pave the way to a grim authoritarian-capitalist future.
The right-wing Muslim-hating newspaper columnist Katie Hopkins sent a tweet in which she called for a "final solution" – this apparent call for genocide is apparently now the subject of a police enquiry.
Incidentally Hopkins, formerly of The Sun and now with Mail Online and LBC, was sponsored through her university education by the British Army's Intelligence Corps.
Allison Pearson of The Daily Telegraph tweeted:"We need a State of Emergency as France has. We need internment of thousands of terror suspects now to protect our children."
What a bright idea, Allison! Round up those enemies of the state at once!
Meanwhile, Brendan O'Neill, editor of Spiked, struck an equally fascistic note when he tweeted: "A nation whose children are attacked must take action", adding that "there is a strong justification for hate right now".
O'Neill, and Spiked in general, has a proud history of amplifying authoritarian capitalist viewpoints under the cloak of a seemingly "radical" background – Spiked used to be called LM, or Living Marxism, and emerged from the very peculiar Revolutionary Communist Party.
As George Monbiot noted, O'Neill's group has travelled "from the most distant fringes of the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate libertarian right" and it has never ceased being divisive and disruptive.
Explains Monbiot: "The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners' strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing factions."
Fake radical Brendan O'Neill addressing Australia's Centre for Independent Studies, which promotes "the rule of law" and "free enterprise"
O'Neill, like Spiked as a whole, has a particular love of industrial capitalism and can barely suppress his hatred for anyone who dares to put the health of the environment above the quest for endless economic growth.
Indeed, he has specifically complained that environment protest "contributes to the increasingly mainstream hostility to economic growth".
And he described eco-activists opposed to the third runway at Heathrow as "plummy-voiced enemies of progress, those most entitled and eco-pompous of millennials".
He has also condemned the"leftish set's warped, myopic anti-Semitism" and "the way in which attacking Israel has become a means of being derogatory about Jews".
His Wikipedia entry describes him "a keynote speaker for the pro-Israel advocacy organisation StandWithUs".
Meanwhile, over in France, the new "centrist" president Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker, has announced that he wants to further extend the country's State of Emergency, for the sixth time since the Paris attacks of November 2015, and bring in unspecified new "anti-terror" laws.
And "anti-terrorism" was said to be high on the agenda of the NATO summit in Brussels this week (see Acorninfo, below) where Macron was meeting with counterparts such as Theresa May and Donald Trump.
Rabid support for industrial capitalism, bitter opposition to environmentalism, anti-Muslim rhetoric, hysterical calls for "action" in response to terror attacks… Funny how so many of these people seem to be reading from the same centralised script…
2. Extremists of the neoliberal "centre"
New French president Emmanuel Macron
One of the most insidious terms on the contemporary European political scene is "centrist".
It is a label claimed by the new French president Emmanuel Macron as well as by former UK prime minister Tony Blair.
And it is insidious because it is used to define extreme neoliberal capitalism as a norm, as a default position, as a "common sense" non-ideology whose assumptions and aims can never be fundamentally challenged, except by "extremists".
Centrists like to make great play of being beyond the "divisive" politics of left and right and yet are always happy to exploit those divisions to cement their own position.
Thus Macron's supporters in France urged left-wingers to vote for him to keep out the extreme-right Front National and condemned defeated left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon for not ordering his supporters to vote for Macron in the second round.
Tony Blair – another warmongering neoliberal "centrist"
Fellow "centrist" Blair saw Macron's election as "a real victory for a more global approach to politics", adding that he represented "a spirit which has echoes in every European country and in the western world in general".
Blair's supporters in the UK like to claim that the "populism" of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn is a mirror image of the right-wing populism of Donald Trump – the centrist line is always to lump all "extremists" together and suggest that if you go far enough round the "political spectrum" in either direction you will end up in the extremist hell of a kind of Nazi-Soviet pact, an anti-American, anti-semitic red-brown alliance that poses a chilling danger to strong and stable democratic values.
From the point of view of the centrist, which is of course well represented in the corporate media, anti-capitalism is peripheral and dangerous, always liable to open a Pandora's box of hateful savagery.
This strategy is, unfortunately, very successful in terms of preventing the emergence of an anti-capitalist worldview that is capable of challenging reality as presented by the centrists.
Another inspiring revolutionary slogan from the mainstream "left"
Too many critics of neoliberalism allow themselves to be contained within the narrow political frameworks constructed by the dominant capitalist system.
Because centrists say that opposition to neoliberal globalisation amounts to a form of nationalism, some leftists are suckered into speaking in terms of "national" sovereignty as a bulwark against global Capital, rather than espousing a radical rejection both of the capitalist system and of the nation-states which maintain and enforce it.
Because centrists are always claiming that their policies are best for "growth" and for "creating jobs", some leftists feel they have to justify their own policies using the same criteria.
Because centrists argue that the only alternative to imposing austerity is for states to borrow yet more money, some so-called left-wingers fall into their trap of proposing more debt to the bankers rather than the abolition of the whole capitalist money-system.
Because it seems obvious that, given the nature of elections and the shaping of public opinion, nobody can win an election on an authentically anti-capitalist platform, those leftists who engage on the electoral level of politics drop all real anti-capitalism from their rhetoric and programmes, and make do with reformism.
But this is a big mistake. They are not tailoring their politics to match the views of the public, but to match the views of the public as presented by the neoliberal centrists!
They are buying into the centrist line that the vast majority of the population are very happy with the way the world is organised and are firmly opposed to any fundamental change.
But what if that is simply not true? What if most people are sick to death of this hollow, money-fixated society and are longing for something else? What if most people are horribly aware of the dull limits of their daily grind, their daily consumption, and dream of a different existence?
What if most people are appalled by the spiralling destruction of the natural world, the police-state surveillance of every nook and cranny of their lives, the hypocritical warmongering propaganda churned out by the system's media?
What if they are just waiting for someone to speak the truth, to say plainly that industrial society is a disaster, that the grey capitalist world of production, exploitation and consumption is a world not worth living in, that there are more important things than money, that things could be so very different, so much better, if only we could smash down the walls of the cells in which have been imprisoned?
Where is the passion? Where is the rage? Where is the desire? Where are the calls to insurrection, to revolution, capable of stirring up a powerful groundswell of contempt for the self-defined centrists and everything they represent?
3. The CIA and the war of ideas
It is not entirely accidental that there is a distinct lack of a coherent and vibrant ideological opposition to capitalism.
For many decades the agents of capitalist power, notably the CIA, have been engaged in what the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci called a "war of ideas" to prevent any such movement arising.
Robin Ramsay of Lobster magazine, a specialist in secretive US interference in UK politics and culture, writes: "Much of the international political landscape of the postwar era in Britain consisted of US-funded or directed political projects – propaganda or psychological warfare projects they would now be called. And this was on top of the formal military-diplomatic-financial structure of NATO, the IMF, World Bank, Gatt, the UN etc."
The pro-US, pro-Israeli, pro-imperialist "left" in Germany
In Germany, there has long been suspicion that American influence might have been behind the emergence of the "antideutsch" strain of leftism which conveniently combined anti-fascism with a fervent admiration for American imperialism and Israeli repression of Palestinians.
And a fascinating recently-released CIA document sheds some light on American capitalist attitudes to the "French Theory" philosophical movement which gave birth to postmodernism, postfeminism, postanarchism and that whole pompous school of pseudo-radical academic thinking which delights in pouring cold water on all notions of overturning capitalist hegemony and creating the other world for which we yearn.
The document, written in 1985, radiates with American self-congratulation that the anti-capitalist ideas which had been so powerful in France in 1968 had now been replaced by a philosophy that was friendly to US corporate and military interests.
It declares: "There is a new climate of intellectual opinion in France – a spirit of anti-Marxism and anti-Sovietism that will make it difficult for anyone to mobilize significant intellectual opposition to US policies.
"Nor will French intellectuals be likely to lend their weight, as they did before, to other West European colleagues who have become hostile to the United States on broad issues like disarmament."
This shift in attitudes, it reports with evident delight, had been "weakening the traditional anti-Americanism of the leftist intellectuals and allowing American culture and even political and economic policies to find new vogue".
The CIA reveal themselves to be very keen on "New Philosopher" Bernard-Henri Lévy, known as BHL in France, whose position of power at the Grasset publishing house was crucial in spreading the US-friendly ideology he was promoting.
BHL – a repeated target of anti-capitalist pie-throwing.
They also single out for ideological praise "the influential structuralist school associated with Claude Levi-Strauss, Foucault, and others".
Of vital importance for the CIA is the destruction of an intellectual climate critical of capitalism and the imposition of a US-style money-orientated culture. They report gleefully: "There is no gainsaying that French youth, who once joined every new intellectual fad, now think of careers in science or business".
The US agents note the rise of "a new wave of genuinely pro-American sentiment, rooted in the vogue of American popular culture, in respect for the American economic vitality of the 1980s, and in admiration for the new image of self-confidence that the United States now projects in the world."
Opening up France to the rich delights of American culture
In a perceptive article on the implications of the CIA document, US philosopher and writer Gabriel Rockhill notes that it "should come as no surprise to those familiar with the CIA's longstanding and ongoing investment in a global cultural war, including support for its most avant-garde forms".
He notes that the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was headquartered in Paris and later discovered to be a CIA front organization during the cultural Cold War, was among the most important patrons in world history, supporting an incredible range of artistic and intellectual activities.
It had offices in 35 countries, published dozens of prestige magazines, was involved in the book industry, organized high-profile international conferences and art exhibits, coordinated performances and concerts, and contributed ample funding to various cultural awards and fellowships, as well as to front organizations like the Farfield Foundation.
Rockhill states: "The intelligence agency understands culture and theory to be crucial weapons in the overall arsenal it deploys to perpetuate US interests around the world."
Former Marxists are particularly useful in channelling their propaganda as they provide "the perfect model for constructing deceptive narratives that amalgamate purported personal political growth with the progressive march of time, as if both individual life and history were simply a matter of 'growing up' and recognizing that profound egalitarian social transformation is a thing of the—personal and historical—past."
Rockhill adds: "This patronizing, omniscient defeatism not only serves to discredit new movements, particularly those driven by the youth, but it also mischaracterizes the relative successes of counter-revolutionary repression as the natural progress of history."
He correctly identifies the key aim of the CIA's overall strategy to dismantle the cultural left in Europe and elsewhere as not being to abolish it entirely, which wasn't regarded as possible, but instead "to move leftist culture away from resolute anti-capitalist and transformative politics toward center-left reformist positions that are less overtly critical of US foreign and domestic policies".
There we have it. It's the centre again. Indeed, the CIA report itself predicts that New Left intellectuals will weigh in heavily in supporting "moderate Socialists who are trying to create a broadbased center-left alliance".
And the important point that Rockhill is making is that the CIA's pro-capitalist contamination goes much deeper than mere party politics and into the heart of the contemporary ways of thinking that are considered by many self-defined radicals to be central to their "alternative" view of the world.
He says: "The CIA's reading of French theory should give us pause to reconsider the radical chic veneer that has accompanied much of its Anglophone reception.
"According to a stagist conception of progressive history (which is usually blind to its implicit teleology), the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida and other cutting-edge French theorists is often intuitively affiliated with a form of profound and sophisticated critique that presumably far surpasses anything found in the socialist, Marxist or anarchist traditions."
But the apparent sophistication of the postmodern position is simply intellectual bait in the CIA trap into which large sections of the so-called "left" have fallen.
As Rockhill writes: "According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA's cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia."
Of course, the one thing the CIA report does not do is to spell out the US agency's clandestine role in bringing about this cultural shift away from genuine anti-capitalism and towards pro-imperialist postleftism, whether in France, Germany, the UK or elsewhere.
But then, they don't really have to. Some of us are still perfectly capable of reading between the lines…
Exposed: fake "left-wingers" who hate the alternative media
4. Enemy of the system – the US campaign against Julian Assange
The shocking way that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been intimidated and smeared by the pro-American neoliberal system has been condemned by investigative journalist John Pilger.
He writes on his website: "For almost seven years, this epic miscarriage of justice has been drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. There are few precedents.
"Deeply personal, petty, vicious and inhuman attacks have been aimed at a man not charged with any crime yet subjected to treatment not even meted out to a defendant facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife."
Prosecutors in Sweden have now announced that they are suspending their investigation of highly dubious rape allegations against Assange, who has been sheltering in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for five years to avoid extradition via Sweden to the USA.
"That the US threat to Assange was a threat to all journalists, and to the principle of free speech, was lost in the sordid and the ambitious. I would call it anti-journalism," writes veteran anti-imperialist Pilger.
"Books were published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and an assumption that attacking Assange was fair game and he was too poor to sue. People have made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive.
"The previous editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, called the WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper published, 'one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years'. Yet no attempt was made to protect the Guardian's provider and source. Instead, the 'scoop' became part of a marketing plan to raise the newspaper's cover price.
"With not a penny going to Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book's authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a 'damaged personality' and 'callous'. They also revealed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables. With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that 'Scotland Yard may get the last laugh'.
"Journalism students might well study this period to understand that the most ubiquitous source of 'fake news' is from within a media self-ordained with a false respectability and an extension of the authority and power it claims to challenge but courts and protects."
And the reason for the unprecedented and co-ordinated judicial-media attacks on Assange, whom some useful idiots on the fake "left" are also happy to condemn? It is simply, Pilger points out, that "WikiLeaks has exposed the way America dominates much of human affairs, including its epic crimes, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq: the wholesale, often homicidal killing of civilians".
Challenging the criminal hegemony of the US-dominated global capitalist mafia remains the number one contemporary political heresy, it seems…
5. Money, power and mining
"All the power's in the hands
Of people rich enough to buy it"
As The Clash once pointed out, the close relationship between money and power is at the corrupt heart of our capitalist society.
Money buys power and money is used by those in power to ensure that money and power remain permanently in the same elite hands at the expense of the rest of the population and of the natural world.
Take, for instance, the experience of residents living close to the UK's largest opencast coalmine at Ffos-y-Fran near Merthyr Tydfil in Wales.
Since 2007, they have been enduring what can only be described as a nightmare, with horrific levels of air and noise pollution, with cancer clusters and disturbingly high rates of childhood asthma.
Resident Alyson Austin told the BBC her family's life had been ruined by the coal dust: "I find it difficult to put the washing out on the clothes line or enjoy my garden. On hot days we can't even open the windows."
Like good citizens, the locals went through all the "usual channels", including a public inquiry, petitions, protests, High Court legal action and even a report from the UN's special rapporteur on hazardous substances and wastes.
But their complaints have been ignored and calls for an investigation into the health implications dismissed.
Five hundred locals attempted to take court action as a group, but their application was refused by the High Court "as they were deemed unable to afford it".
Money always wins. The game is fixed. If you have no money then you have no say in a society where money, and greed for money, is king.
With the democratic process well and truly exhausted – and exposed as a sham – the only way forward was direct action.
Thus, in the early hours of 21 April 2017, under the banner of Earth First! and Reclaim the Power, a bunch of plucky rebels disrupted the mining operations.
At 5am, two of them blocked vehicle access to the mine by using D-locks and an armtube to lock onto the cattle grid at the entrance, while three others climbed down towards the bottom of the vast hole to lock onto the 300 tonne excavators used to extract coal (see video).
No coal mining took place all day.
The response from the system? Guilty of aggravated trespass, they were ordered to pay £10,000 compensation to Miller Argent, the company which is profiting from the misery of the people living alongside its environmentally disastrous mine.
A crowdfunding initiative has been launched to help the brave activists pay off this sum and we would urge people to help out if they can.
In the meantime, we are left with a useful reminder of the fact that the judicial system, in the UK as elsewhere, exists primarily to protect private property and private financial interests. It is designed not only to favour the rich, but to systematically punish the poor for their lack of wealth.
It's a fraud, a scam, which is imposed on us using all the "authorised" violence of a state which has always existed to serve the interests not of ordinary people but of an arrogant ruling class which despises and exploits them in every way possible.
Ten thousand people took to the streets of Brussels on Wednesday May 24 to tell US president Donald Trump, and the imperialist warmongers of NATO, that they were not welcome in the Belgian capital. Said the No to NATO protest call-out: "NATO and its member states participate in illegal wars and military interventions, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Syria, the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. They contribute massively to international instability, fuelling the arms race and militarization. NATO remains committed to humanity's biggest threat: nuclear weapons. NATO is the world's most aggressive war machine. We must leave NATO and NATO must be dissolved."
"By 2050, the US and UK will have evolved into two-class societies where a small elite lives a good life and there is declining well-being for the majority." That is the prediction from Jorgen Randers, an academic and author of 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. He adds: "Western nations are not going to collapse, but the smooth operation and friendly nature of Western society will disappear, because inequity is going to explode." The process seems to be well underway…
A victory has been notched up in the battle to save one of the few museums in the world to be dedicated to the life and works of an anarchist. As we reported in Acorn 33, the Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis Museum at Heerenveen, in the Netherlands, celebrating one of the fathers of Dutch anarchism and libertarian socialism, was faced with closure and a petition was launched to keep it open. This has succeeded in persuading the municipal council of Heerenveen to lift the immediate threat to the museum.
Opponents of plans to frack in North Yorkshire have welcomed confirmation by Barclays that it plans to sell its stake in Third Energy. Barclays owns 97% of Third Energy, which has permission to frack for shale gas at its KM8 well at Kirby Misperton in North Yorkshire. Friends of the Earth described the decision as "a massive blow for the fracking industry" and urged them to keep up pressure on the bank.
Anti-fascists from across the UK are mobilising to oppose the Muslim-hating English Defence League in Liverpool on Saturday June 3. Email London Anti-fascists at ldnantifascists@riseup.net with the subject line COACH2LIVERPOOL to travel from the South of England.
Acorn quote: "Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates within the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there. A body that resonates does so according to its own mode. An insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire – a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations, always taking on more density. To the point that any return to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable".
Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection
Posted in Anarchism, The AcornTagged Allison Pearson, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, Antideutsch, Antonio Gramsci, Belgium, BHL, Brendan O'Neill, capitalism, centrism, CIA, Congress for Cultural Freedom, democracy, Donald Trump, Drill or Drop, Earth First!, Emmanuel Macron, extremism, fascism, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, Ffos-y-Fran, Fracking, france, Gabriel Rockhill, George Monbiot, John Pilger, Julian Assange, Katie Hopkins, Liverpool, Manchester, NATO, Netherlands, police, racism, RCP, Reclaim the Power, Robin Ramsay, Spiked, terrorism, Theresa May, Tony Blair, war of ideas, Wikileaks2 Comments
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The Acorn – 53 December 20, 2019
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Home › Feminism › A Short History of Maligned Women by Mary Sharratt
A Short History of Maligned Women by Mary Sharratt
By Mary Sharratt on June 9, 2018 • ( 30 )
Women who stand out and dare to seize their power have been maligned throughout history. Even today many people are uncomfortable about the very idea of a powerful woman. Witness how Hillary Clinton was demonized in the 2016 presidential campaign. What other U.S. presidential candidate has been called "nasty" by their opponent or had their opponent literally looming over them during a live televised debate? Even women who would never dream of running for political office face every day misogyny and threats of violence for daring to speak out on the internet. It doesn't matter what the woman has to say—the fact that she has spoken out at all has made her a target.
I certainly encountered the "such a nasty woman" phenomenon while researching Alma Schindler Mahler, the protagonist of my new novel Ecstasy. Born in Vienna in 1879, Alma Maria Schindler was an accomplished pianist and aspiring composer who gave up her own music as a condition for her marriage to the great composer, Gustav Mahler. Later, after a marital crisis, she returned to composing and published three collections of her songs. She was married to—or had affairs with—some of the greatest creative geniuses of her time, including Gustav Klimt, Walter Gropius, Oskar Kokoschka, and Franz Werfel. She was also a pioneer in the field we now call artistic management and her networking skills benefited the men she loved. But one would hardly know about her talents and gifts to read the biographies written about her.
Most of the Alma biographies are what Susanne Rode-Breymann, co-editor of the German edition of Alma's diaries, has called "moralizing scandal biographies." They focus almost exclusively on the sensationalist aspects of Alma's life—namely the fact that she dared to rewrite the feminine life script and claim her sexual freedom. Even the more "scholarly" of these tomes tend to read in places like trashy, voyeuristic novels. The biographers use Alma's sexuality as a selling point for their books while standing in stern moral judgement of her and having nothing good to say about Alma as a human being, much less as a composer. This lurid focus on Alma's sexuality, at the expense of all other areas of her life, demeans and degrades her. Alma is reduced to the men she was involved with and how she failed to be the ideal woman for them. Can you even imagine a biographer doing this to a "great man" like Picasso—ignoring his art to condemn him as a terrible husband and serial womanizer?
In my humble opinion, novelists have a much more difficult vocation than biographers. Unlike biographers, I must make Alma compelling and inspire the reader's empathy. I must offer insight as to why Alma made the choices she did. I must show her in her full humanity.
At least I know Alma is in good company. Here is a short history of "nasty women."
Mary Magdalene, 1st century CE
The most influential woman in early Christianity has been distorted beyond recognition as a weeping, humiliated ex-prostitute, despite there being no scriptural evidence to support this depiction. If that were not enough, we have the Da Vinci Code to thank for the most recent flood of new age conspiracy theories surrounding her. All of this obscures Mary's key importance in the canonical Gospels. As one of Jesus's closest disciples, she stood by him at the foot of the cross—after his male disciples fled. Present at his tomb, she was first witness to the resurrection. The risen Christ then bade Mary to tell the others the good news. And so she became Apostle to the Apostles. The noncanonical Gospel of Mary reveals her influence in early Christianity when her importance rivaled that of Peter's. Whether or not she wrote the gospel attributed to her, this document certainly recognizes her authority. However in 590, Pope Gregory I decided to downgrade her by officially proclaiming her a whore. The Catholic Church didn't recant this position until 1969.
Empress Wu Zetian, 624 – 705 CE
The only female emperor in the history of China, Wu rose from humble beginnings as the fourteen-year-old concubine of Emperor Taizong, who was so captivated by her intelligence, he made her his secretary. After his death, Wu should have bowed to social expectation, shaved her head, and disappeared inside a Buddhist nunnery. Instead she married Taizong's son Gaozong and ruled as empress consort, the true power behind her ineffectual husband's throne. After Gaozong's death, Wu ruled as empress dowager and placed first her eldest son and then her second-born son on the throne. When their leadership skills failed to impress her, she forced them to abdicate. From 690 to her death in 705 Wu ruled as emperor in her own name. She founded the Zhou Dynasty, introduced sweeping reforms to benefit her people, and declared herself an incarnation of the Maitreya Buddha. Ever uncomfortable with female leadership, her enemies spread many rumors about her, accusing her of all manner of treachery, including murdering her own baby daughter. After Wu's death, they tried to erase her legacy, but all in vain. She is now remembered as one of the greatest leaders in Chinese history.
Malinche 1501 – 1551
The most hated woman in Mexican history, Malinche was Hernandez Cortés's indigenous lover and chief strategist during his annihilation of Muctezuma's Aztec Empire. Caught between clashing worlds, Malinche was one of twenty women that Tabascan chieftan Potonchan offered Cortés. Regarded initially as nothing more than a sex slave, Malinche soon distinguished herself by her negotiating skills. Fluent in both the Nahuatal languages of the interior and the Mayan languages of the coast, Malinche quickly learned Spanish and became Cortés's main translator and guide. A complex figure, she played a pivotal role in history, bearing Cortés's son Martin, the first mestizo of note, and later marrying the Castillian nobleman, Don Juan Xamarmillo. Has Malinche been unfairly slated? Pre-colonial indigenous Mexicans were not one unified people, but a collection of distinct cultures. To many of these people, the Aztec Empire was the hated enemy because it demanded tribute in the form of human sacrifice from subjugated tribes. What if Malinche, a woman of non-Aztec origin, was not a traitor so much as a warrior within her own context?
Mary I of England 1516 – 1558
The first woman to successfully claim the throne of England was the most reviled British monarch of all time. The fact that she burned 283 Protestants as heretics earned her the moniker "Bloody Mary" and history remembers her as the evil foil to her celebrated sister, "Good Queen Bess." Yet Mary was no bloodier or more brutal than other rulers of her time. As the violence of the Reformation and Counter Reformation swept Europe, countless Catholics and Protestants on the "wrong" side of the sectarian divide were put to death—as were Jews and accused witches. On the plus side, Mary built up the British navy and reformed the militia, paving the way for Elizabeth I's victory against the Spanish Armada. Used first by her father, Henry VIII, and later by her husband, Philip II of Spain, as a political pawn, Mary had no easy life and died in her forties. If anything, Elizabeth I was such an effective leader because she learned from her sister's misfortune—Elizabeth made the radical choice to remain a "Virgin Queen" lest some man try to steal away her sovereignty.
Catherine the Great 1729 – 1796
In the 34 years that she ruled the massive Russian Empire, Catherine the Great was the most powerful woman in the world. Born to a Prussian prince, she married into the Romanov family and became the unhappy wife of the unpopular Tsar Peter III. Catherine soon found herself involved in a coup to unseat her husband and install herself as empress. Eight days after abdicating, her husband was assassinated. Contrary to dark rumors, there's no evidence Catherine was responsible. A highly educated polymath who corresponded with Voltaire and wrote an opera in her spare time, Catherine dragged a country still mired in a medieval mindset into the Enlightenment. Her lovers were many and she made one such paramour the King of Poland. A formidable military leader, she quelled more than a dozen uprisings. But most of her brave deeds have been forgotten—the average person on the street is more likely to know the urban myth that Catherine died having sex with a horse. She actually passed away after suffering a stroke.
Billie Holiday 1915 – 1959
Despite the fact that she never learned to read music and despite her struggles against racism, misogyny, and poverty, Billie Holiday triumphed to become one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. Over fifty years after her death, her voice remains distinctive and unforgettable. Her 1939 song "Strange Fruit," about the lynching of an African American man, was so controversial, it couldn't be played on the radio. A powerful indictment of racism, "Strange Fruit" would become the first protest song of the 20th century. Yet for all her achievements, Holiday's reputation remains steeped in sensationalism, especially regarding the heroin and alcohol abuse that eventually killed her at the age of 44. Why is she primarily remembered for her addiction and not her ground-breaking brilliance? "You don't do the same thing when you talk about Sigmund Freud," contemporary jazz musician Cassandra Wilson has pointed out. "Everyone knows he was a coke addict . . . but we don't talk about that. We talk about him being the father of psychoanalysis."
Ethel Rosenberg 1915 – 1953
In 1953 Ethel Rosenberg and her husband Julius were executed by electric chair for betraying U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Both Rosenbergs protested their innocence up until their deaths. In the 1930s, Ethel had joined the Young Communist League, which did not help her case. While on trial for espionage in 1951, Ethel endured the heartbreak of having her own brother, himself an admitted spy, testify against her. Her refusal to burst into tears in court was interpreted to prove that she was an unwomanly monster who cared more about communism than her two young children. After the Rosenbergs' execution, their sons, Michael and Robert, were adopted by Abel Meeropol, activist and writer of the song, "Strange Fruit." Michael and Robert spent years trying to prove their parents' innocence until they discovered declassified documents which indicated that their father was indeed involved in espionage. But Ethel's role in any conspiracy seemed negligible. Her sons unsuccessfully petitioned President Obama to have their mother exonerated.
Mary Sharratt is on a mission to write women back into history in their full nasty glory. Her novel, Ecstasy, about celebrated bad girl Alma Mahler, was an Amazon Best Book of the Month for April, a Chicago Review of Books Book of the Month, and a New York Post Must Read Book. Visit her website: www.marysharratt.com
‹ Celebrating Pride: Honoring the Spiritualities of Queer Holy Women of Color by Angela Yarber
On Guilt and G-d, the Parent by Ivy Helman. ›
Categories: Feminism, General
Tags: alma mahler, Mary Sharratt, women's history
lampmagician
Great post, Thank you :) <3
Thank you for another wonderful post! Also thank you for all the work you are doing to write womyn back into history! Love your work!
Thank you so much for reading, Teresa!
Love this. Definitely important writing women's stories.
Thank you, Mary, for your important work at a time when most people have little sense about how deeply misogyny impacts their lives. I often hear men say, "I don't hate women…why, I love women." I also hear women say, "He's really a good guy–just doesn't know how to express himself." Just like we need to understand the wide-reaching and toxic effects of systemic racism, we need to get a grip on how systemic misogyny poisons our narratives and thus, our lives. Thank you, again, for speaking/writing so clearly.
Thank you so much for reading and for your wise words, Esther. Yes, misogyny deeply impacts all our lives and we need to talk about this.
goddessfiction
Thank you for this fascinating post, Mary! I'm going to a well-known online bookseller right now to look for your novel.
THANK YOU so much!! I am deeply grateful to every new reader! <3
Another educational post about women I am starved to hear about.
When you wrote about Malinche I was struck by a the dance done on Christmas Eve at the six pueblos here in Northern New Mexico. No explanation is given for these dances; one simply experiences them. But the Malinche is a small Indigenous child around which the entire dance is done. Her consort is also a child who is dressed like a bull who is sacrificed ritually at the end of the dance… this information expands my understanding of what may lie behind the re -enactment.
Sara, that's so fascinating about the Malinche figure in the Christmas Eve dance. Thank you for sharing this rich lore.
How nice that you ae so interested! I find this stuff fascinating!
Thank you for this, Mary. Except for Mary Magdalene I knew most of the other women by name only, and had never heard of Malinche. Love your books!
Thank you for this fascinating compendium and for your work of celebrating and reclaiming forgotten, maligned or misunderstood women. For an unconventional, bad-ass, wild tragicomic view of Mary Magdalen, I recommend The Maeve Chronicles. Yes, by moi. Having read all your novels, I think you would enjoy my take on MM.
Dear Elizabeth, your MAEVE CHRONICLES are the BEST!!! I loved your interview on Mother House of the Goddess during their Mary Magdalene summit last year. <3 Thank you so much for your writing and your activism.
Thank you, Mary. Right on, write on! Just ordered Ecstasy!
I'm eager to read your new novel. There were in fact other empresses of China. The last one was Tzu Hsi (Cixi in the new spelling), also called the Dragon Lady. She immediately preceded Puyi, the last emperor. And I suspect we all know about Elizabeth Cunningham's four novels about the Celtic Magdalen named Maeve. Terrific, well researched novels. And if you watch Angels in America (either version), you'll see how Ethel Rosenberg gets revenge on Roy Cohn, who both prosecuted and persecuted her. (Cohn, one of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's lawyers and a closeted gay man was one of Trump's mentors. Which tells us a lot. But I digress.)
Mary, thanks for writing all your novels and for this post this morning.
Thank you so much for your reading and all your support, Barbara! Interesting to know about Tzu Hsi. I agree that Elizabeth Cunningham's Maeve novels are fabulous! I'll have to watch Angels in America again–I saw it about 10 years ago–and look for the Ethel Rosenberg reference.
Sabra Bowers
Thanks for doing your part to tell herstory. I enjoyed reading your essay.
Thank you so much, Sabra!
Thank you so much for sharing these interesting stories – making history great again ;) No, but in all seriousness…it's really refreshing to see that women have taken their narrative back in some occasions, and it's not been all bad! I hope we can have a society one day that celebrates women as they are, flaws and all, as we do men.
Thanks so much for reading, Tara, and for celebrating strong women!
Great post the myth on Catherine is very disrespectful…A reminder that not all will appreciate good deeds by others.
Thanks so much for reading, Kalama!
Thank you for all this great info. Gonna order Ecstasy for my next read.
Thank you so much for ordering my book! I am so grateful for your readership and support! <3
Just finished reading Ecstasy. Very beautiful and moving!
Thank you so much, Elizabeth!!!! I'm so happy you enjoyed it. If you left a review on Amazon, that would make my day! :) <3


P1386:1, 126:0.1 Of all Jesus' earth-life experiences, the fourteenth and fifteenth years were the most crucial. These two years, after he began to be self-conscious of divinity and destiny, and before he achieved a large measure of communication with his indwelling Adjuster, were the most trying of his eventful life on Urantia. It is this period of two years which should be called the great test, the real temptation. No human youth, in passing through the early confusions and adjustment problems of adolescence, ever experienced a more crucial testing than that which Jesus passed through during his transition from childhood to young manhood.
P1386:2, 126:0.2 This important period in Jesus' youthful development began with the conclusion of the Jerusalem visit and with his return to Nazareth. At first Mary was happy in the thought that she had her boy back once more, that Jesus had returned home to be a dutiful son -- not that he was ever anything else -- and that he would henceforth be more responsive to her plans for his future life. But she was not for long to bask in this sunshine of maternal delusion and unrecognized family pride; very soon she was to be more completely disillusioned. More and more the boy was in the company of his father; less and less did he come to her with his problems, while increasingly both his parents failed to comprehend his frequent alternation between the affairs of this world and the contemplation of his relation to his Father's business. Frankly, they did not understand him, but they did truly love him.
P1386:3, 126:0.3 As he grew older, Jesus' pity and love for the Jewish people deepened, but with the passing years, there developed in his mind a growing righteous resentment of the presence in the Father's temple of the politically appointed priests. Jesus had great respect for the sincere Pharisees and the honest scribes, but he held the hypocritical Pharisees and the dishonest theologians in great contempt; he looked with disdain upon all those religious leaders who were not sincere. When he scrutinized the leadership of Israel, he was sometimes tempted to look with favor on the possibility of his becoming the Messiah of Jewish expectation, but he never yielded to such a temptation.
P1386:4, 126:0.4 The story of his exploits among the wise men of the temple in Jerusalem was gratifying to all Nazareth, especially to his former teachers in the synagogue school. For a time his praise was on everybody's lips. All the village recounted his childhood wisdom and praiseworthy conduct and predicted that he was destined to become a great leader in Israel; at last a really great teacher was to come out of Nazareth in Galilee. And they all looked forward to the time when he would be fifteen years of age so that he might be permitted regularly to read the Scriptures in the synagogue on the Sabbath day.


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Preheat broiler. Toss 3 cups cubed Italian bread with olive oil. Season with seasoned salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Spread out in a single layer in a well oiled 9x13 inch baking dish. Broil until toasted, turning to brown evenly. Set croutons aside to cool.
Spread pine nuts on a baking sheet, place on bottom rack of the oven, and toast under broiler. This should only take a few minutes, so watch carefully to prevent burning. Set aside to cool.
Soak sun-dried tomatoes in hot water for 5 to 10 minutes, or until soft. Drain, and slice.
In a large salad bowl, toss mixed greens with green onions. Top with croutons, sun-dried tomatoes, pine nuts, and feta.


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When making a booking, please provide the following information.
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After baggage claim, there is only one exit. Driver will hold a sign board with lead traveler's name near exit in the arrival hall.
You'll be picked up from your Taipei city hotel at 1:00pm, drive along the northeast coast of Taiwan to the National Scenic Area, popular location with the locals. The northeast coast scenic area is noted for its numerous capes and bays backed by green mountains. Visit Pitou Cape, tall abrasion caves and platforms and other eroded landforms which can be clearly seen on the cape's hanging cliff.
The tour continues to Nanya, a coastline filled with amazing rock formations, a sea-eroded coral shore. The patterned stone is unique in Taiwan and formed through the weathering of the sandstone that lines the shore. The oxidation of iron ore within the stone gives it a beautiful striped pattern.
Travel to the quaint little village of Chiufen Village (Jiufen), once the gold mining center of Taiwan. The gold is gone, but Chiufen (Jiufen) built of closely-packed houses clinging to steep mountainsides, continue to offer enchanting scenery, unique teahouses and fascinating glimpses into the lifestyles of the past.
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Plan your trip ahead of time, and pre-book your professional and reliable private transfer. Transfers operate 24 hours, 7 days a week.
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Located 30km from Taipei, Keelung is one of the hidden treasures of Taiwan. Rich in culture and heritage the town is not something you should miss during your trip. To help you take it all in without getting distracted, we are offering you a tour you will never forget.
A chance to see Keelung as a local, this tour includes a three-hour walking time that is carefully designed to cover all the exciting secrets of Keelung. A cultural adventure like no other, where you get to interact with the locals and learn about the city from those who have spent their entire life there.
The tour includes a small group that is led by a bilingual and knowledgeable guide. This way everyone gets attention and can take in the space as a local would. The perfect way to spend your day in Keelung, as it offers an in-depth and deep tour of the city that will leave you with intimate knowledge about its history and culture.
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This is 2 hours course of chinese cooking class. Minimum 2 persons. We will teach 2 dishes.
These 2 basic dishes are most popular in TAIWAN. We prepare all food , kitchen ware, sauces and all facilities.
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The Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board requires the South San Luis Obispo County Sanitation District (District) to operate under Waste Discharge Requirements (WDR) Order No. R3-2009-0046. WDR Order No. R3-2009-0046 requires the District to implement a Pretreatment Program in its jurisdiction, in order to protect the sanitary sewer system and wastewater treatment plant.
The District adopted Pretreatment Ordinance 1994-1 to comply with WDR Order No. R3-2009-0046 and state and federal laws, such as the Clean Water Act [33 USC § 1251 et. seq.] and Federal General Pretreatment Regulations [40 CFR 403]. Pretreatment Ordinance 1994-1 establishes the District's legal authority to inspect, permit, and monitor industrial users, who have a reasonable potential to impact the Publically Owned Treatment Works (POTW) through accidental or deliberate discharges, and to enact standards and regulations governing industrial discharges to the POTW.
Protect POTW personnel from exposure to hazardous chemicals.
In order to meet these objectives, industrial users must be inspected and permitted. The District inspects industrial facilities prior to issuing a permit and annually after issuing a permit, in order to ensure industrial users remain in compliance.


Even a person who is not interested at all in any political issues can not deny that multiple political events are effecting his or her life everyday. Politics, which can be understood as any process of collective decision-making, is universal in all human societies. Therefore also political commentators, journalists, politicians, activists are universal human characters.
Our understanding of science is deeply shaped by the image of natural sciences, in which deputies are pictured vividly as persons in white lab-coats, using experiments to explain the phenomenon of nature around us. Political Science, as most social sciences, differs in many points from this kind of science. Social phenomenons in general and political events in specific are normally way too complex to be carried out in experiments. Furthermore it is hard to find universal laws in political environments, because basic patterns of political systems and behaviour are changing every day, since we as human learn to adapt to new circumstances.
Nonetheless political science, as a relatively young academic discipline, is nowadays a science which made great progress in explaining events around us with empirical and normative analysis.
The International Association for Political Science Students (IAPSS) is the worldwide representation of students of political science and related studies. IAPSS strives to deliver a sustainable academic contribution to the education of its members, to foster exchange among young political scientists across the globe and to promote social and scientific responsibility.
We do this by offering a multiplicity of events, publications, professionalization and career services as well as lobbying for political science interests on the international level – for more than 10,500 members from over 80 countries, since 1998.


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