Pixelated Semantics

A schizotypical inventory

Dark distinctions and deconstructions

The SMH is reporting what amounts to an open acknowledgement that the US (and Australian?) government prefers to see dissidents as terrorists:

'The murky connection the US Government makes between some left-wing activist groups and terrorism was illustrated by a US Department of Justice presentation delivered this month at a University of Texas law lecture in Austin. An FBI counter-terrorism official showed 35 slides listing militia, neo-Nazi and Islamist groups.

One slide, under the category of "anarchism", listed groups with which terrorists might associate. The list included Food Not Bombs, which mainly serves vegetarian food to homeless people and, with a question mark next to it, Indymedia, a website featuring articles written by radical journalists and activists.'

The reporter's equivocation ('murky connection') is quite reasonable: as well as the lack of comprehensive evidence that anti-war protesters resort to terror in the name of peace (as our governments do - ask the Afghan and Iraqi civilian dead), the fact that left activists are often apostates and agnostics would make them an extremely unlikely partner of any kind for deeply religious Islamic 'terrorists'. In fact, this supports the belief that Bush's 'war on terror' is also a magnificent pretext for the massive surveillance and repression of any domestic political organisations that are not government-aligned conservatives.

More euphemistically, the Hindustan Times points out that 'the war on terror became the global war on terror and is now the long war': it also quotes from the July 4, 2005 issue of the American Conservative:

'A new Bureau of Reconstruction and Stabilisation in the State Department is charged with organising the reconstruction of countries where the United States has deemed it necessary to intervene in order to make them into market democracies. The bureau has 25 countries under surveillance as possible candidates for Defence Department deconstruction and State Department reconstruction. The bureau's director is recruiting "rapid-reaction forces" of official, non-governmental and corporate business specialists.'

It seems America's 'war on terror' is now a series of 'Defence Department deconstructions'.

The countries targetted for 'deconstruction and reconstruction' are a list derived from those seen to be resisting globalisation, apparently. In fact, a theoretical symbiosis between 'anti-globalisation' and 'terrorism' seems like becoming the next justification for the heavy-handed treatment of activists and dissidents. The Hindustan Times also reports:

According to Thomas P.M. Barnett (The Pentagon's New Map) the world has a "functioning core", which is integrating into the world of globalisation. This includes India, China, Japan, Russia, the EU, North America, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The rest of the world - the entire Islamic world, Africa, parts of Latin America and Central Asia - is a 'non-integrating gap' disconnected from the rest and subject to instabilities. The thesis is that decreasing this disconnectedness and increasing connectivity in the functioning core of globalisation would ensure lasting peace.

This disconnectedness can be cured through deconstruction and reconstruction.'

Barnett is very confident in his analysis (complete with a casual Star Trek analogy):

'...show me where globalization and connectivity are thick and I'll show you people living in peace. Show me where globalization hasn't spread, and I'll show you violence and chaos.

Steffen: So, if you're right and globalization brings peace, why are we experiencing so much blow-back?

Barnett: Because globalization can be a wrenching process. When globalization rolls into traditional societies - and those are the only societies left outside the Core - it has certain profound effects. Globalization is Borg-like in its integration abilities: it remakes you more than you can ever remake it. '

The choice of 'Borg' for the metaphor has two sides: though it speaks with the 'authority' of popular culture, the negative connotations are disturbing ('it remakes you more than you can ever remake it' - so much for individualism.) Unfortunately, the 'violence and chaos' attending attempts at reconstruction as a component of the global economy is a lot more than blowback (Iraq, for example): any attempts to question the legitimacy of American hegemony seem to be increasingly characterised by the State as supportive of terrorism - with the one-eyed stare of the surveillance state turned on it's citizens who are now 'enemies' or 'sympathisers' by the very fact of their dissent. One of Barnett's key points seems to be lost in the machinery of American politics: that 'Globalization comes with rules, not a ruler.'

The IHT reports that last autumn the French institute Ipsos polled 500 people between the ages of 20 and 25 with the question: 'What does globalization mean to you?' 48 percent responded 'fear' and 27 percent said 'hope.' It's an arguable truth that most people are unlikely to accept any solution imposed on them from outside (unless the situation is so life threatening that any intercession is better than none): despite efforts to package it otherwise, to many 'globalisation' is a one-sided solution for the western corporate impasse over future areas of profit, and not a mechanism for peace and prosperity.

Item posted by AutoEditor at 8:46 am ::