"From the Acteal Massacre to the Merida Initiative"
Rafael Landerreche

Translation and footnotes by Kristin Bricker
La Jornada, November 10, 2007

Las Abejas from Chenalhó is an organization that professes non-violent principles. Time and time again they've declared that they don't want revenge for the Acrtal massacre, but that they won't give up their demand for justice so that incidents like that don't happen again.

It couldn't be a better time to review some tragic lessons from the Acteal case, since an agreement with the United States government known officially as the Merida Initiative is being cooked up right now.

Anti-War Protesters Close Down Recruiting Center in Twin Cities
By Zac Farber, http://tinyurl.com/3m5cnv

Eight Macalester students lashed themselves together with PVC pipes
fortified by duct tape and chicken wire while two students used U-shaped
bike locks to fasten their necks to the entrances of army and navy
recruiting centers on Washington Avenue near the University of Minnesota
campus.

Macalester Students for a Democratic Society organized the March 27
event to protest the Iraq war, one week after its fifth anniversary. A
crowd of about 100 people, most of whom voiced support for the
protesters, gathered around the spectacle. Some, who were members of
University of Minnesota's College Republicans, said the Macalester
protesters were infringing on potential recruits' right to join the
military.

South American Anarchists and Anti-Militarists Say NO to War

* The threat of armed conflict involving the governments of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela has mobilized anarchists and anti-militarists across the continent, in words and in action, to repudiate what would be a monstrous aggression by state powers against our peoples. Below there are two documents that call for struggle against this evil.

__Declaration of Latin American antimilitarists: We don’t need another war__

The Poor Man's Air Force

A History of the Car Bomb (Part 1)
By Mike Davis

Buda's Wagon (1920)
tomdispatch.com

You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you!
-- Anarchist warning (1919)

On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets warning: "Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for All of You!" They were signed: "American Anarchist Fighters." The bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they stopped, the wagon -- packed with dynamite and iron slugs -- exploded in a fireball of shrapnel.

"The horse and wagon were blown to bits," writes Paul Avrich, the celebrated historian of American anarchism who uncovered the true story. "Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings twelve stories above the street burst into flames. People fled in terror as a great cloud of dust enveloped the area. In Morgan's offices, Thomas Joyce of the securities department fell dead on his desk amid a rubble of plaster and walls. Outside scores of bodies littered the streets."

Custodians of chaos

Kurt Vonnegut

"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula forgunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

Is Iran Building Nukes?
An Analysis (Part 1)
William O. Beeman and Thomas Stauffer
Pacific News Service, Jun 26, 2003

Editor's Note: The Bush administration is turning up the heat on Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program, but the authors say the evidence just isn't there. Part 1 of a two-part series.

President Bush declared on June 25 that "we will not tolerate" a nuclear armed Iran. His words are empty. The physical evidence for a nuclear weapons program in Iran simply does not exist.

Iran is building a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant in Bushehr with Russian help. The existence of the site is common knowledge. It has been under construction for more than three decades, since before the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979.

The Shock of Violence

By Steffen Boehm
from Sign of the Times

I took your paper to read at home just after the events last Friday in London. I was very shocked with the descriptions, made by eye witnesses, of the way the guy had been shot. So, I read your text with this thought always present. I read it with my body, feeling the discomfort of the 'truth' of your words and, at the same time, the fear of our weakness and the difficulties we have to face in order to exercise the violence of critique in these days. The next day I knew that the murdered guy was a Brazilian – someone 'innocent' in many senses, as well as nameless. Probably for this fact, I realized that part of the discomfort I was feeling had to do with memory. All the statements of the British authorities were related to the need of the new procedures, were the defence of the state of exception. This was the name given by the Brazilian dictators for the suppression of the state of rights, when citizens’ rights were suspended in the name of the need to protect the order and the public against the enemy. I’m clearly shocked because some of the elementary principles of liberal democracy are being eliminated. If liberal democracy is not enough, totalitarianism is always worst. - Maria Ceci Misoczky; edited excerpt of an email sent to Steffen Böhm on 25 July 2005

I’m quoting the above email with a purpose in mind. In my view, it clearly expresses the state of emergency – or the moment of danger, as Walter Benjamin calls it – we find ourselves at this very moment. Maria, a Brazilian educator from Porto Alegre, responded with her email to my paper ‘The Moment of Danger: Benjamin’s Critique of Violence’, which I had submitted to the editors of a book last week. I had written that book chapter in response to my experience of being in Scotland for the anti-G8 protests and the London bombings that took place on 7 July 2005. Since this book chapter will not be published until early 2006, and since it will probably be read by only a handful of people, I would like to take this opportunity to make some of the reflections offered in that chapter available to a wider audience.

Social Text Call for Papers, "The Ends of War"

War is back and seemingly forever. In recent years the pacific neo-liberal rhetoric of globalization has been replaced by the Hobbesian war of all against all. This pervasive metaphorization of war blurs the boundaries between military and civilian, combatant and non-combatant, state and war machine, wartime and peace. But war discourse also operates as a strategy that partitions, separates and compartmentalizes knowledge, offering a highly seductive, militarized grid through which to interpret the world. Though the contemporary scene shows striking parallels with the neo-colonialism, counter-insurgency and "dirty wars" of the Cold War era, the current proliferation of war discourse often masks older continuities and material interests. Like a virus, it seems, war tropes have spread throughout the body politic and global economy.

What are the ends of war? This special issue of Social Text invites contributions that engage this critical question: by challenging teleological narratives of endless conflict; by confronting the seductions of metaphorization and militarization; and by analyzing the historic and material interests that they serve. “The Ends of War” will insist on the contingent and instrumental nature of war discourse and on the need to think beyond its global reach. Contributors are invited to challenge the hegemonic force of war, and contest its tendency to compartmentalize knowledge, divide and rule.

Contributions that link the work of gender or postcolonial studies, area studies, or political economy to analyses of war culture and technology will be particularly welcome. Possible areas of interest might include: the gendered imaginary of war; the Left’s ambivalent relationship to the seductive metaphorization of war; the colonial genealogy of contemporary war discourse; race and the military; buried histories of postmodern war culture in other conflicts; the arms trade and the permanent war economy; the militarization of intellectual life; media consolidation, censorship and the reporting of war; and the economic and environmental impact on the Global South.

Submission deadline: May 1, 2006

Essays of 7,000 to 10,000 words, including endnotes, and following The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, should be emailed as Microsoft Word documents to Livia Tenzer, Managing Editor, Social Text: ltenzer@rci.rutgers.edu. Hard copies may be sent to Social Text, 8 Bishop Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08903.

s0metim3s writes "

From MetaMute

"

New analysis of civilian casualties in Iraq: Report unveils comprehensive details

"A Dossier on Civilian Casualties in Iraq, 2003-2005" is the first detailed account of all non-combatants reported killed or wounded during the first two years of the continuing conflict. The report, published by Iraq Body Count in association with Oxford Research Group, is based on comprehensive analysis of over 10,000 media reports published between March 2003 and March 2005.