Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2004 17:19:30 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: AUT: geopolitics article part 3 - repression and resistance


Movements of repression and movements of resistance
      
      Now let us break it down even further, examining the facts, the possibilities and the explanations. The people involved in the groups blamed for the September 11th attacks, the Bali, Istanbul and Madrid bombings and other such attacks are probably attacking the US and in some cases “the west” for a variety of reasons, such as the US’s support for the Shah in Iran, unconditional US support for Israel, the first Gulf War, threats to Islamic sites in Saudi Arabia and so on.  In terms of foreign policy, it is unlikely that they have in mind bringing down capitalism or a way of life. Indeed, the political Islamists are not alone in disliking America’s role in the world.  American direct and indirect interventions in Chile, Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, the Phillipines, Cuba, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere, support for dictatorships in Indonesia, Greece, Congo-Kinshasa and today in Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and inaction in cases such as the
 Rwanda genocide and the South African apartheid regime have created a basis for global hostility to US power.  However, the challenge posed by political Islam is particularly strong and militant, leading today to direct military confrontations with American forces and attacks on American targets which are almost unknown elsewhere.  So why do groups such as al-Qaeda occupy this unusual historical position?   Perhaps the explanation lies in a peculiar intersection of factors which brought Islamic traditionalism into contact with global capitalism, producing hybrid formations.
      The best that can be said for the US response to the September 11th attacks is that it was shortsighted. Dividing the world into Us and Them, and asking countries to choose sides, only aggravates a conflict rather than solving it, and as a result of the binary divisions produced by this discourse, civil liberties in democratic countries are lessened, and those in already authoritarian regimes even more so.   The US response has, it is now clear, been immensely harmful, culminating in the Iraq quagmire and the Abu Ghraib atrocities.  It is not hard to see that the US strategy of dividing the world into “Us and Them” is a recipe for aggravating rather than resolving conflicts and is a threat to civil liberties and human rights across the world.  So why did it happen? The answer is that when Afghanistan became the target, very few opposed this, because many people felt that Americans were obviously wronged, so had the right to find the responsible parties. Then, a new
 international order was momentarily formed to make such plan work. However, when the question of Iraq came up and with the US relying on justifications phrased in terms of WMD’s, the majority of the world woke up suddenly and understood that, by hook or by crook, by force or by bribery, the US wished to deny everybody access to these weapons and to put itself in the position of global enforcer. The US trusts itself, but trusts no one else. The US state learned that they could go it alone in Afghanistan, so they all but went it alone in Iraq afterwards.
 Furthermore, between the global resistance movements and the ethno-religious movements, it is clear that very little of the periphery is subsumed into the world system in a stable and hegemonic way: ‘rich and poor, hemispherically from N to S, regionally between peripheral and core nationally across class and ethnic boundaries’. This ‘line of flight’ could be best described in terms of parallel lines, as a parallelogram of forces as Graeme Chesters argues21.  Anti-capitalist and other rhizomatic groups have constructed many new forms of political action, and also new forms of communication. 
 In practice what we get when we abstract the ethnoreligious movements or groups, we are left with antiwar groups, anticapitalist/antiglobalisation movements and lifestyle-issue movements (the latter not quite relevant to our discussion and as pointed by Callinicos from campaigns that focus on specific issues and grievances). Namely then, movements of a generally more sociopolitical nature. In contrast to the closure of space, the violence and identity divide found in enthnoreligious discourses these movements seem to rely more on networking, grassroots organising, much less than the hierarchical structures states and their followers have to rely upon. Several metaphors have been used to describe a large number of groups being brought together under a common cause, groups that disperse as easily as they come together: A parallelogram of forces following a swarm logic like ants in an ant colony – the whole of singularities against the World Trade Organisation, the IMF and the World
 Bank, People's Global Action, the World Social Forum and so on.  The ecology of such action indicates a web of horizontal social solidarities to which power might be devolved, or even dissolved. It may be argued that because many people do not believe in power through conventional politics, they are increasingly sympathetic to direct action.
 The movements in question are able to take action without the need for a leader and without the individual having a privileged insight, or being able to conceptualise the characteristics of the whole. There is an emphasis upon participation, antipathy to hierarchy, alternative processes of decision-making such as consensus decision-making and direct democracy, respect for difference and an assertion of unity in diversity. The project which unites these movements is less the capture of the state apparatus and more the construction of an open and transnational public sphere and a rhizomatic extension of struggles which are linked through weak ties. 
      The new movements of resistance have made use of new technologies such as the Internet to organize and to promote their ideas.  Yet despite all these great tools, a large number of media watchdogs, journalists and audiences have protested on the unchallenging nature of mainstream media towards both the decision to go to war and the actual coverage during the war. As a result the internet itself was used not only to mobilise international civil society as explained above, but also to offer an alternative coverage for the conflict. There are actually different lines of development here: the US government’s troublesome if not ‘bombastic’ relationship with the media, American media following mostly the government line with patriotic fervor, Americans turning to non US sources, using the Internet, and the rest of the world discovering the unpredictable and amazing effect of the Internet on coverage, and the potential for first hand witness accounts via e-mails and blogging.
      As far as the US administration is concerned, despite that they made it clear there would be no censorship, it made it very difficult for war correspondents that were not embedded with their troops to get non official stories out: “We will tell you what you can report from the speech afterwards”, an army media organiser told journalists on their first day as embedded correspondents with 1st Fusiliers Battle Group. This ‘difficulty’ exacerbates the notion that the largest single group of war correspondents appear to have been killed by the US Military.
      In a single day on April 8, a US missile hit an Al-Jazeera office, killing a Jordanian journalist and a US tank fired a shell at the Palestine hotel killing two more. Al-Jazeera offices in Basra were shelled on April 2 and a car clearly marked as belonging to the same station was shot at by US soldiers a day before the Palestine Hotel incident. International journalists and press freedom groups have condemned the attacks on the press corps in Iraq. ‘We can only conclude that the US Army deliberately and without warning targeted journalists’22. ‘We believe these attacks violate the Geneva conventions’23. The attacks on journalists “look very much like murder”, Robert Fisk of the London newspaper The Independent reported24. 
      Also, several national and local media figures in the US had their work jeopardised, either explicitly or implicitly because of the critical views they expressed on the war. Veteran war correspondent Peter Arnett was fired by NBC after giving an interview to Iraqi TV, Henry Norr was suspended without pay from the San Francisco Chronicle for using his sick day to get arrested in an anti-war protest and Phil Donahue’s talkshow was cancelled, in what the MSNBC argued would be a ‘difficult face for NBC in a time of war.. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives’25.  This repression is bolstered by the role of national publics which are conditioned to accept nationalist forms of identity.  As Bloom puts it, ‘The mass national public will always react against policies that can be perceived to be a threat to national identity. The mass national public will always react favorably to policies which protect or
 enhance national identity… national chauvinism is commercially successful’26. But the centralization and restriction of information is necessary in order to sustain this dynamic.  ‘The restriction on complete disclosure is precisely to avoid the possible triggering of the national identity dynamic which would take decision making out of the hands of the ‘responsible’ and informed few’27.


		
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