The strategic value of a "dilemma action" when confronting a repressive regime

In 2000, Ivan Marovic and his friends led a non-violent uprising which successfully toppled Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

In 2011, Marovic came to the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism as a professor where he taught participants from dozens of countries the strategic value of a "dilemma action" when confronting a repressive regime.

Students and professors from the school's Viral Video work group, including Nathan Mpangala, Katie Halper, Daryn Cambridge, Leslie Askew, Kevin Mwachiro and Maria Dayton produced this video. It proves that civil resistance (and reporting about it) can and should be fun!

The artist's hand and artwork that appear on this video are those of Tanzanian political cartoonist Nathan Mpangala, School of Authentic Journalism, class of 2011.

Egypt: How We Did It When the Media Would Not

On February 11, 2011 Egyptians toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak. Blogger and viral video producer Aalam Wassef was one of the many people who worked for years to make it happen. This is first in a series on the daily life of Egypt's revolution. It's a manual on how a civil resistance was built to win.

How China sees the world

By Thanassis Cambanis, Boston Globe

...In a widely read article in the most recent issue of The Washington Quarterly, David Shambaugh, a China expert at George Washington University, describes a rich and tumultuous internal foreign policy debate with at least seven discernible schools of thought.

“Many new voices and actors are now part of an unprecedentedly complex foreign-policy-making process,” Shambaugh writes. “No nation has had such an extensive, animated, and diverse domestic discourse about its roles as a rising major power as China has during the past decade.”

In the 1990s, the dominant factions in China’s policy debate espoused soft power and increasing involvement in global institutions like the United Nations. Today, Shambaugh finds that tougher, more hard-line schools of thought are on top – a consensus he describes as “truculent,” and pushing the nation “to toughen its policies and selectively throw China’s weight around.”

It’s not just America that views this turn in China with concern. In recent years, China has asserted that it has full sovereignty over the entire South China Sea, which many nations claim for use as a waterway, fishing ground, and potential field for natural gas and minerals. Last year, a group of neighboring countries, with America’s support, confronted China at an Association of South East Asian Nations meeting. That row sparked angry outbursts from Chinese officials: “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact,” Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said in an enraged monologue.

At this hard end of the spectrum of Chinese thinking, Shambaugh sees groups he identifies as nativists and realists. Many of them see the international system as a conspiracy to suppress China, and they worry that the Communist Party’s embrace of the global economy could prove its undoing. The realists, whom Shambaugh considers the dominant group today, want China to assert itself aggressively, especially against the powers—including Britain and the United States—that they see as having historically worked against China’s interests.

More moderate schools of thought in China, he says, endorse China acting with more authority but focusing its policy attention on a few key relationships. Some Chinese specialists say Russia or the United States should take priority, while others argue that China should cast its lot with neighbors in Asia, or identify with the developing world.

At the liberal end of the spectrum, “selective multilateralists” and “globalists” buy into the idea that China will have to take on new responsibilities as its power grows, even if that means embracing international norms that limit China’s ability to maneuver on issues like Tibet, Taiwan, and the South China Sea. Some of these thinkers are still suspicious of international entanglements, but want China to be seen as contributing to the global system rather than behaving as a free rider. The most liberal globalists within China would like to see China concede some limits to its sovereignty and fully integrate with international institutions. The influence of these liberal schools, however, appears to have drastically shrunk since a peak in the 1990s...

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Feminism in the 21st century

Book review by Zoe Williams in the Guardian:

"...Structurally, the argument-told-as-memoir is not easy to pull off. A life told in comic episodes will not arrange itself neatly along feminist or any other ideological lines. The exigencies of the argument mean that the chapters have a very different emotional weight, so that the one on abortion is nothing like the thumping heart of the one on menstruation. The prose is columnistic, in that it's quite informal and very conversational; the sensation of having Moran in your house can be uncanny. But essentially, she's a comedian; her cadence is comic, her punctuation is comic, her wordplay is mischievous, and all this before you even touch on her observations. The irresistible pull of self-parody gives each paragraph a gravitational urgency. "I am a virgin and I don't play sport, or move heavy objects, or go anywhere or do anything, and so my body is this vast, sleeping, pale thing. There it is, standing awkwardly in the mirror, looking like it's waiting to receive bad news. It is the bad news." She can be funny in a terse, edgy way: "In those days, the music scene was much like Auschwitz. There were no birds. You couldn't find a woman making music for love nor money." She can be funny in a more expansive, absurdist way: "The problem with the word 'vagina' is that vaginas seem to be just straight-out bad luck. Only a masochist would want one, because only awful things happen to them. Vaginas get torn. Vaginas get 'examined'. Evidence is found in them. Serial killers leave things in them, to taunt Morse . . . No one wants one of those."..."

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'Under US push, Greece blocks aid ships'

The Greek government has been under pressure from Israel to prevent all the ships heading to the Gaza Strip from leaving Greek ports, says a peace activist. 

Interview with Dr. Paul Larudee, co-founder of Free Palestine Movement, Athens.

Syntagma Artists' Team: This Is No Spectacle

Max Keiser speaks to Athens Lawyers Association

http://www.StopSpeculators.gr
http://www.MaxKeiser.com

Other attendees: Mr. George Sourlas, Ex-President of Greek Parliament; Mr. Ioannis Adamopoulous, President of Athens Lawyers Association; Mr. Ioannis Sakas, Prosecutor General at Athens Court; Mr. Ioannis Athanasiou, President of Prosecutors and Judges Association; Mr. Nikos Xidiroglou Giournalist, Panel Coordinator

"I had the good fortune to attend this event in Athens with Max and Stacy a few weeks ago. It was a fantastic event. Speakers also included Kiriakos Tobras, George Noulas, George Sourlas, Ex-President of Greek Parliament; Mr. Ioannis Adamopoulous, President of Athens Lawyers Association; Mr. Ioannis Sakas, Prosecutor General at Athens Court; Mr. Ioannis Athanasiou, President of Prosecutors and Judges Association."

"The crowd was engaging and the atmosphere was charged. Both Mr. Noulas, as well as Dr. Tobras gave exceptional speeches, and it was exciting to be around people committed to moving this country forward in a positive direction. I have said many times that the only way for people in Athens to escape from their sense of helplessness and depression is to engage not only in civil disobedience, but to participate in constructive dialogues, actions and activities. This is the only way to effect positive change in Greece, and it is the only way that the country will be able to movie forward."

The Fourth World War

From Information Clearing House:

Directed by Rick Rowley. With Suheir Hammad

4th World War - taken from a speech by Marcos calling the war against globalization the 4th World War - is a brief, documentary of radical resistance to global capitalism

Despite the titanic struggles of dispossessed peoples around the world, the wealth of nations continues to reside in fewer and fewer hands. The economies of poor countries collapse under vicious IMF policies, and capitalism's global 'clubs' thrive ever and ever upward. Meanwhile, people keep struggling, ultimately downward.

From the front-lines of conflicts in Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Palestine, Korea, 'the North' from Seattle to Genova, and the 'War on Terror' in New York, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
It is the story of men and women around the world who resist being annihilated in this war.

The Fourth World War

Subcomandante Marcos
La Realidad, Chiapas, Mexico

Translated by irlandesa

The following text is an excerpt from a talk given by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos to the International Civil Commission of Human Rights Observation in La Realidad, Chiapas on November 20, 1999. The outline for the talk was published in Letters 5.1 and 5.2 in November of the same year, with the titles "Chiapas: the War: 1, Between the Satellite and the Microscope, the Other's Gaze," and 2, "The Machinery of Ethnocide." Any similarity to the conditions of the current war is purely coincidental. Published in Spanish in La Jornada, Tuesday, October 23, 2001.

The Restructuring of War

As we see it, there are several constants in the so-called world wars, in the First World War, in the Second, and in what we call the Third and Fourth.

One of these constants is the conquest of territories and their reorganization. If you consult a map of the world you can see that there were changes at the end of all of the world wars, not only in the conquest of territories, but in the forms of organization. After the First World War, there was a new world map, after the Second World War, there was another world map.

At the end of what we venture to call the "Third World War," and which others call the Cold War, a conquest of territories and a reorganization took place. It can, broadly speaking, be situated in the late 80's, with the collapse of the socialist camp of the Soviet Union, and, by the early 90's, what we call the Fourth World War can be discerned.

Another constant is the destruction of the enemy. Such was the case with nazism in the second World War, and, in the Third, with all that had been known as the USSR and the socialist camp as an option to the capitalist world.

The third constant is the administration of conquest. At the moment at which the conquest of territories is achieved, it is necessary to administer them, so that the winnings can be disbursed to the force which won. We use the term 'conquest" quite a bit, because we are experts in this. Those States, which previously called themselves national, have always tried to conquer the Indian peoples. Despite those constants, there are a series of variables which change from one world war to another: strategy, the actors, or the parties, the armaments used and, lastly, the tactics. Although the latter change, the former are present and can be applied in order to understand one war and another.

The Third World War, or the Cold War, lasted from 1946 (or, if you wish, from the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945) until 1985-1990. It was a large world war made up of many local wars. As in all the others, at the end there was a conquest of territories which destroyed an enemy. Second act, it moved to the administration of the conquest and the reorganization of territories. The actors in this world war were: one, the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective satellites; two, the majority of the European countries; three, Latin America, Africa, parts of Asia and Oceana. The peripheral countries revolved around the US or the USSR, as it suited them. After the superpowers and the peripherals were the spectators and victims, or, that is, the rest of the world. The two superpowers did not always fight face to face. They often did so through other countries. While the large industrialized nations joined with one of the two blocs, the rest of the countries and of the population appeared as spectators or as victims. What characterized this war was: one, the arms orientation and, two, local wars. In the nuclear war, the two superpowers competed in order to see how many times they could destroy the world. The method of convincing the enemy was to present it with a very large force. At the same time, local wars were taking place everywhere in which the superpowers were involved.

The result, as we all know, was the defeat and destruction of the USSR, and the victory of the US, around which the great majority of countries have now come together. This is when what we call the "Fourth World War" broke out. And here a problem arose. The product of the previous war should have been a unipolar world - one single nation which dominated a world where there were no rivals - but, in order to make itself effective, this unipolar world would have to reach what is known as "globalization." The world must be conceived as a large conquered territory with an enemy destroyed. It was necessary to administer this new world, and, therefore, to globalize it. They turned, then, to information technology, which, in the development of humanity, is as important as the invention of the steam engine. Computers allow one to be anywhere simultaneously. There are no longer any borders or constraints of time or geography. It is thanks to computers that the process of globalization began. Separations, differences, Nation States, all eroded, and the world became what is called, realistically, the global village.

The concept on which globalization is based is what we call "neoliberalism," a new religion which is going to permit this process to be carried out. With this Fourth World War, once again, territories are being conquered, enemies are being destroyed and the conquest of these territories is being administered.

The problem is, what territories are being conquered and reorganized, and who is the enemy? Given that the previous enemy has disappeared, we are saying that humanity is now the enemy. The Fourth World War is destroying humanity as globalization is universalizing the market, and everything human which opposes the logic of the market is an enemy and must be destroyed. In this sense, we are all the enemy to be vanquished: indigenous, non-indigenous, human rights observers, teachers, intellectuals, artists. Anyone who believes themselves to be free and is not.

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