[Nettime-bold] the new big lie for the new great game

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

The apocalypse comes with good reviews, or not at all.


   I have not watched television at all during the
crisis since Sept 11th 2001. I saw enough of the
attack on the WTC to get the picture clearly however.

 I saw Tower 1 collapse on a grainy moniter of CTV 
outside the American consulate after meeting with my 
ex-spouse Janine Marchassault for coffee and a chat
about remarkable coincidences.

I saw enough on the moniter to get the picture. 
The roving reporter said 'Holy Smokes.' 


The implications of this 'event' seemed clear to me
 immediately and without wishing to sound trite,
 given the human tragedy of it all, (and I mean the 
human tragedy of it All, including a generation of 
American military adventure in the name of 'freedom')
 my immediate thoughts were this: 


History has returned in a rather spectacular way, 
as it tends to do. 


Global Capital's self-representation is indeed 
cracked. 


This is the End of the American Century, we may 
within the West, expect external and internal 
reactions replaying in quick succession all of the
 contradicitions of that country (and its lackeys)
 in that century.


The process of Globalization reveals itself in sharp
 definition as uneven dialogue meaning different
 things to different people depending where they are 
@. The permissions to access this dialogue and the 
terms of the dialogue are now in rapid flux. Since 
these global mediations (of knowledge and power) 
are at stake Western media and military will be
 indistinguishable. 


The 'age' of postmodernism becomes highly 
differentiated. The experience of 'the Rest' in 
modernity  (Doreen Massey has stressed how 
what we in the West take to be postmodern 
characteristics have in fact been the general 
experience of people under The West) has 
now become the experience of the West. 
This experience will deepen, such events 
will only become more familiar to the West.

There will be no safety in silence, no protection 
in complicity with ．powers that be・,
no safety or security in believing the new big lies 
of the New Great Game.

Globally Nato will be at war with the United Nations.

Locally, in the West, deeply conservative tendencies 
will be at war with progressive tendencies. Some of
these wars will be infra-personal.


I missed pornographic TV imagery of people crying
 for their lives, dying, falling. To be frank, I do not 
wish to see such imagery. I missed media attempts
to describe and to represent the human dimension. 
I missed all of the televisual work of media - I missed 
the scopophilic humiliation of sitting in an armchair 
or on a sofa while consuming such imagery, 

Instead, I saw a line of stranded Americans at Toronto's 
international airport so long that it ran down the vehicle 
access ramp on to the approach highway. I was going to 
fly to the UK on 12th September, I became stranded among
Western refugees.

I saw American refugees considering the ironies of 
history. They were people from all cultures and 
ethnicities going out of their way to be helpful 
to one another, I did not see or hear any call for revenge. 
I saw people who were glad to be alive, wanted merely 
to go home and be at peace with themselves and with 
the world.

Last night I watched American TV. I was amazed. 
It is frantic. It is failing. It is quite mad. It does not 
speak for anyone but itself. Media and the Military
 is making a last gasp effort to make the war and the 
world appear remote. The New Big Lie.

 Instant nostalgia for global dominance was being 
played out through grainy nighttime video pictures 
of distant explosions. The exorcism of violence to 
a place where it hardly matters, where the war does 
not happen, anyplace will do.

A two page spread of the Toronto Star has photgraphs 
of three Western leaders, Bush, Blair and Chretien, 
with the text of their most recent speeches (white 
male bonding fantasies of mastery and dominance 
played out through their administration of international 
war and murder) and a picture of 'arch-terrorist' 
bin Laden, with quite modest complaint and plucky 
defiance against the quite remarkable coalition of forces 
gathered against him, personally. 

This is all getting very silly. Its a bad novel, a B Movie, 
a really awful multi-media arts event. Power looks 

I read the reactions of intellectuals who appear all too 
mindfulof the implications of current 'events'. 
North Americans less so, but they are catching up 
on the history that has caught up with them.

Yet I see minor points of theory being articulated 
as if the Third World War presents an opportunity 
for particular individuals to advance their careers, 
or for particular positionalities to be advanced as 
if the freedoms that permit their advance are likely 
to survive if we don・t all work together
to stop this war.

Some appear quick to sacrifice whatever identity, 
nationality, religion, ．network of terror・
the US has targeted for retribution in its 
production of war and reproduction of terror.
 George (the Beast) Bush makes it clear, however, 
that Afghanistan ．will not be enough・.


Now more than ever we need our thinkers. Thoughtful 
intelligence does not necessarily mean 'taking a sabattical' 
while stocking up with survivalist supplies. Thoughtful 
and intelligent responses should already be well stocked up 
and should now be delivered. Thinking and criticism as well 
as media are going to have to quicken. We need global 
consensus against the war and we need it to come quickly.

We have witnessed 'events', we have reacted in a number 
of ways to these events, now we need analysis which 
includes clear argument for the cessation of this war. 
We have been getting some of this (see below) in 
Nettime (unusually for what has, at times, been such a 
techno-fascist bbs - Amsterdam has, it has to be said, 
had its finer hours but it may be about to have one of its
finest), lets have more.


Let ．stop the city・ become stop the war.

Stop the war.



  
Lachlan Brown
Toronto





-----Original Message-----
From: gita@yorku.ca
Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2001 13:02:32 -0400
To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
Subject: <nettime> The people in Afghanistan (formerly Afghan women)


> What baffles me is this: If the original posting was meant to point 
> at the American activist groups and their seemingly contradictory 
> stance, why did the subject read "Afghan women"?
> 
> What concerns me is a much more serious angle to this debate:
> 
> Currently, the Northen Alliance in Afghanistan is closing in on 
> Taliban with British and American (and apparently, Russian) aid.  The 
> war we are preaching against is already being waged.  In fact, war 
> has been a constant for over 20 years in Afghanistan.  The Northern 
> Alliance is a network of warlords who were beaten by the Taliban in 
> the civil war that subsumed the country after the defeat of the 
> Soviets.  In this war, all sides, including the diverse forces in the 
> Northern Allinace, have committed attrocities against the civilian 
> Afghanis.  While the prospect of being ruled by the Northen Alliance 
> (or will there be in-fighting among the allies once Taliban are 
> disposed of?) is as grim a future as any as far as peace is concerned 
> (for who is there to stop genocidal impulses against the Taliban and 
> their supporters?), supporting them in their current attack on the 
> Taliban clearly has advantages for the U.S. and British warlords. 
> Much of the sentiments among the Muslim populations and even within 
> secular forces in the region is against increased American and 
> British military presence and their direct attack on Afghanistan. 
> All fundamentalist regimes, including the Islamic Republic of Iran, 
> the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates 
> (including Qatar, which is supportive of Osama Bin Ladin) stand the 
> danger of uncontrolable popular sentiments tiding up against their 
> current governments if it was going to be American and British 
> soldiers entering Afghanistan and they weren't to oppose it.  There 
> have been daily demonstrations on the streets in Pakistan, and today 
> the government of Parviz Musharaf (boycotted as anti-democratic prior 
> to 11/09) had to take a public measure against these sentiments by 
> putting a Muslim leader under house arrest.  While all of these 
> regimes are closely tied (economically and politically) to the U.S. 
> and Britain and other Western corporate regimes or are sucking up for 
> closer connections (like the so-called moderate Khatami government in 
> Iran and General Musharaf's in Pakistan), their survival is at risk 
> if they seem too enthusiasticly pro-Western.  So one of the 
> strategies currently followed is to let the Afghanis fight the 
> Afghanis, and, of course, it's pretty clear who is going to win the 
> war and with whose support.
> 
> In all this, it is the draught-stricken, war-stricken and 
> disenfranchaized majority of Afghanistan's civilian population that 
> do not enter the power equations except as numbers: over 3,000,000 
> Afghani refugees (only a small well-to-do fraction of them residing 
> in the West) prior to 11/09, and an as-yet-unestimated number on the 
> move toward the borders.  One of the factors that has so far 
> prevented U.S. outright attacks on Afghnistan has been the question 
> of the regime that is to succeed the Taliban's.  With the Northen 
> Alliance all built up and ready to fight to take over, not only this 
> problem has been solved, but a the risk of a direct attack that could 
> be prolonged has been lessened.  So while President Bush proclaims 
> his new-found belief in Islam as a peace-loving religion, and the 
> North American mainstream public is busy outpouring their patriotism 
> in tears of mourning and revenge, and most activist groups are busy 
> countering the (now unappologetically open) racism and the direct 
> attacks on civil liberties here at home, the scenario unfolding in 
> Afghanistan goes unnoticed.  The Northen Alliance's track prior and 
> on the way to their retreat to the north has been well documented. 
> There are reports and images of their attrocities on the website of 
> the Revolutionary Alliance of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA, who, by 
> the way, neither profess Islam nor insist on being model American 
> citizens even though they go on Oprah's show to collect support) at 
> http://www.rawa.org.  There is no reason to believe that the Northern 
> Alliance has undergone an ethical evolution and mended its genocidal 
> ways.  Is this the regime that the majority of people in Afghanistan 
> really want to see in power were they to have a say in what happens 
> to them in their land?  Is this what we (this is a rhetorical "we" 
> with shifting boundaries) want to see after the Taliban?  How many 
> deaths and how much destruction can Afghanistan sustain?  How many 
> dead Afghanis can we live with?
> 
> A week ago, I participated in an on-line chat that accompanied a 
> radio call-in show in Canada.  In response to the questions that I 
> posed above, one of the most vocal participants wrote: "Sometimes you 
> have to hold your nose and do what you have to do."  I don't believe 
> in wasting my energy trying to persuade someone who clearly has so 
> little regard and concern for the life of Afghani people.  His view 
> has little to do with strategic pragmatism and more with latent 
> racism.  But, in earnest, I have a question to pose:
> 
> What is(are) our ethical intellectual and/or activist 
> responsibility(ies) in the current situation with respect to the life 
> and fate of the people of Afghanistan AFTER the Taliban?  This is an 
> issue that must enter our public debates, and be prioritized in our 
> strategies of actions.
> 
> Tragically, just as I have come to the end of these lines, the first 
> news of American air attack on Kabul has come in (12:20 Eastern 
> daylight time).  Are the people of Afghanistan the next Iraqies?
> 
> Be well and demand peace.
> 
> Gita
> 
> 
> At 1:20 AM -0400 10/7/01, dan s wang wrote:
> 
> >I can also imagine the Afghan women not wanting to be put on display
> >as 'Exhibit #1: the Victims.' So this is not all about guilt-tripping,
>  <...>
> 
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