Even while not posting here, new posts, updates, documents, and videos will appear on ZA’s pages on Facebook, Twitter, Box.net, and ZATV. You can also follow Anthropologists for Justice and Peace, where the majority of new articles will appear for the next 18 months and which will be the focus of online efforts in that period....It's time for a break: I planned to announce this at the end of May, when my sabbatical begins, a sabbatical in which I have committed myself to an astounding amount of work (I blame it on a workaholic binge that caused blood poisoning). Instead, it seems right to extend the break a bit further, starting from now...I will be around, more as a spectator, but not as a writer or site administrator, which effectively brings this site to a halt...until September of 2012....
If David Cameron had been known for modeling his speeches on old Monty Python films, then he might be praised for his witty and clever genius in devising such a politically and morally fraudulent speech such as the one above. He opens with gushing sentiment about a "new beginning for Libya," hailing freedom from violence even as his jets pound Libyan targets. As always before, the British love to set an example on how politics are to be done, and it was usually with a good whipping followed by tutorials on how to best mimic the master, with powdered wigs, robes, and a broken sense of self....
A video that in many ways corresponds with what I argued in "America's Iranian Twitter Revolution," the video below in part shows how the use of social media to make falsified versions of Libyan reality can go viral--radioactive--producing an intellectually toxic swarm of passive repeaters. Critical questions are like static, they interrupt the clarity of the message: dictator vs. revolutionaries, support the people, implement a no-fly zone right now. But this is so patronizing, it denies "agency"--just like the agency of the consumer who must decide and then boldly act on which colour iPod™ to buy. Have a look at The Guardian's "Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media: Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda."...Also check "‘Post-Qaddafi Libya’: on the Globalist Road," "Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?" "US-trained [and U.S.-based] economist, Libyan rebels’ new finance minister," and "New Libyan rebel leader spent much of past 20 years in suburban Virginia."....
Not the usual media roundup, this report focuses on some of the questions raised in “The Libyan Revolution is Dead,” as part of a broader critique on the foreign military intervention in Libya, one week after it began. In particular, we examine: the political implications of the war in Western nations; the nature of the media spectacle, and how it resembles/differs from wars of the last 20 years; assessing the “successes” of the no-flight zone (NFZ) and what it allegedly prevented; the human rights frame, and the problem of evidence for “crimes;” the strategy behind the foreign military intervention, and the increasingly rapid slippage from one goal to the next; the slow but growing media analysis of “the rebels” in Libya, getting underneath some of the insurgents’ claims, followed by an examination of some of the promotional propaganda designed to sell them to Western audiences; growing critiques of the war, with perspectives from those outside of Western Europe and North America—one might say, from experts on imperialism for having been at its receiving end for many generations; and, finally, the folly of the late humanitarian project, that refuses to recognize its own complicity in creating the object of its destructive desires.
April 3, 2011
by Maximilian Forte
Comments Off