Enter - ShadowHawk

While selling some books on Amazon, I came across an old 90s comic book that my cousin had collected, called ShadowHawk. I opened it and began reading...


It was New York City in the early 90s.

Crime was everywhere.

Police were either lazy or prevented from doing their jobs by the silly court rules and bullshit watchdog services.




Paul Johnstone, the protagonist, was a good kid. He stayed out of trouble even though he lived in Harlem. As a good black kid in a bad black neighborhood, he wanted to do something about the distraught social forces he saw around him. What can he do about it? He became a district attorney.

But one night a group of thugs beats him up, steals all his money, and then injects a syringe with HIV into his arm. That's so fucked up! What's he going to do about it?

In the early 90s people thought HIV was the most contagious disease on the planet. Hence Paul Johnstone looses his job after altercations with co-workers over the condition. The comic's creator, Jim Valentino, spread HIV myths and misconceptions throughout the illustrations. Some issues of ShadowHawk were aimed at dispelling the myth that HIV only affected gays and IV drug users. The 'progressive' point Valentino was making was that it affects "innocent" people too.

Needless to say there were more myths about HIV that needed dispelling, but given the level of hysteria at the time I suppose all Valentino could do was point out the differences between guilty and innocent victims of HIV. But there is another hidden "narrative" I am trying to expose within this comic.

Back to the story: the courts had become an impossible environment to be in; Paul becomes severely depressed. While walking the streets to clear up his mind one night, gang-members jump him and steal all of his shit again. How fucked up can it get for this guy? When has he had enough?

He ends up in the hospital, where a friend from the police force comes to visit him. Christina, who was fired that day for "excessive force", conspires with Paul about justice. They're both fed up with the system, they can't take it anymore. Driven by their desire to see justice prevail, they design a super exo-skeletal system that Paul wears at night when he becomes ... "ShadowHawk"...

"You used to believe in the system.

You can't anymore."

"It has failed you."

"You feel a certain amount of satisfaction as his spine breaks."




"No matter what the courts decide...

You're ShadowHawk.
And you're taking back the night."

Okay, okay, wait a second. What is the difference between superhero and vigilante, really? What is the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist? What's the difference between ShadowHawk and Rudy Guliani?

This was the same time-period in New York City history when a new paradigm for crime intervention grew in support, the "zero-tolerance" policing that exists still today. Civil liberties were suspended and still are as the New York Police Department began a new campaign inspired by the "broken windows policing" theory. This was done under the reign of mayor Rudy Guliani.

In theory, by cracking down on all forms of "criminal" activity, such as j-walking, spitting, graffiti, ordinance code violations, littering, loitering, and the like, you would significantly decrease violent crimes and property crimes. The economic results are generally in support of the thesis and - whether causally-related or not - NYC has seen a decrease in crime since the early-90s. Sociological authors have cast serious doubt on the theory and its merits.

At the same time Rudy Guliani increased the number of police on beat patrol, the number of those working on the civilian complaint board decreased or were replaced by former police officers. Thus, the number of complaints and the number of cases brought against the New York Police Department have seemingly dropped. The police now enjoy superhero vigilante status, and with fewer oppositional forces within the city government, and less criticism.

Such that, when the NYPD see something they do not like in their city today, this is how they respond:

In Oakland last week - a white police officer is caught on tape executing an innocent black man, Oscar Grant. Several video angles of the shooting available on Indybay make it impossible to deny that the police officer in fact shot the man execution style. He was not resisting and was lying flat on his face.

These are the ShadowHawks of today: the spine-breakers who patrol the streets and are above the law. The courts and the system have "failed them", and no matter what judges decide, they are ShadowHawks, and they don't give a damn about "excessive force". They enjoy, through widespread propagandistic media, a blanket of support from bourgeois society.

I have more comics to browse through. Batman is another example of a superhero rogue cop who, when the Joker and his bad guys do not admit the truth, tortures the lunatic criminals until they make a confession - with plenty of parallels to the War on Terror.

One thing the ShadowHawk comic was did brilliantly, however, was disguise a racist and anti-social tendency as something that looked at the time like racial and gender equality. By having crime-fighting ShadowHawk be a black man and by having his brutal sidekick be a woman who worked a traditional male job, it would seem to make criticism more difficult. As if having a Jew play the role of the SS would make Nazi Germany seem any more just. (There always has to be a Nazi analogy.)

Surely we have already seen parallels with this and the Barack Obama presidency.

...Said the shotgun to the head

... the name of a poem by Saul Williams, but also, a real life story.


The Nation Institute recently uncovered some brutal new stories of an older news topic: the hidden race war during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath in New Orleans, when white residents fearing black looters formed citizens' militias that systematically targeted black residents.

In one neighborhood, Algiers Point - a small, white neighborhood surrounded by a black residential area - became an explosive environment. Whites rounded up shotguns, pistols, and rifles, and prowled the neighborhood for "niggers" who looked out of place. Black residents were murdered in the street, after which the white residents stretched the bodies out on the sidewalks to scare away "looters". One vigilante described, "in this neighborhood we take care of our own." According to a government aid group, by 2006 about 2,300 people had still not found after Hurricane Katrina, 3/4 of whom were black. The Nation says probably 11 people were murdered by the Algiers Point militia.

The Algiers Point militia was praised during the time period. Once the National Guard arrived, there was a flag-waving celebration, the murders forgotten, and the motivations never investigated. The article details the accounts of black residents who searched for drop-off and evacuation points and were harassed by the armed gunmen. Some were told to run, and then shot at - regardless of whether they lived in Algiers or not.

Fascism is Cost-Effective, Here is My Evidence

Jonathan Klick, professor of law and economics at Florida State University, had an idea for how to examine a difficult social science question: Do more police officers in fact reduce crime?

Over and over again, myopic economists answer this question by excluding important independent variables, like you are about to see.

In a paper titled "Using Terror Alert Levels to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime" (a copy of the article is available here) Klick and Tabarrok argued that changes in the national terror alert ("green", "yellow", "orange", "red", etc.) corresponded to shifts in crime levels.

"On high-alert days,'' they wrote, ''total crimes decrease by an average of seven crimes per day, or approximately 6.6 percent.''

And, every $1 to add officers would reduce the costs of crime by $4.

By measuring elasticities for auto theft and other street crimes while the terror alert is high as opposed to when it is low, the economists conclude with a straight face that "if we had a 10 percent increase in police, crime would go down by about 4 percent.'' Nationally, ''that means about 700,000 fewer property crimes and 213,000 fewer violent crimes.''

Or in other words, an increased threat of terrorism makes America's streets safer. Only the economists' argument is for carefully designed to talk only about the 'effect of police on crime', not the 'effect of expected terrorism on the person in the street'.

All surface-level discussion of urban social policies emerges from a context of fragmented thinking. Many theoretical accounts in political science, economics, criminal justice, are not validated, or held to rigorous social scientific (more broadly defined) standards. But this does not stop us from implementing flawed policies. Even if terror alerts or the number of police decrease crime on a superficial level like this, it is still highly contestable whether an emergency policed state is the social meaning of order and security.

Professor Klick offered an even more striking suggestion to a NYTimes reporter. ''It wouldn't be unreasonable,'' he said, ''based on our estimates and based on conservative estimates of the costs of crime, to say it would be cost-effective to actually double the number of people working in police forces, which is pretty amazing."

They Call it "Emergency Preparedness"

Earlier generations spent their time ducking and covering, as this video demostrated, in the event of a possible communist act of aggression. But in the Information Age we simply give up our privacy and rely on the government to keep us safe. As an email from my university's Director of Campus Security illuminates, we are encouraged more than ever to be cataloged and mapped by participating in what Foucault critiqued as the new Panopticon -- the participatory panopticon. Here is an excerpt from the campus-wide email:

We will conduct an emergency notification test using the 3n system on Friday, September 19th. Please register immediately to be included in the test.

Thank you for taking this important step in supporting emergency preparedness.

National Notification Network


What is this all about? What are they preparing us for? Essentially, all the students at this university are being encouraged to enter their private information into a database run by a security corporation known as National Notification Network, or "3n". This company is part of a new series of Homeland Security Complex spin-offs that make money off of our collective sense of paranoia. It's only natural to be be skeptical about this. According to the 3n website, their corporation is "the leading global provider of mass notification solutions to Global 2000 corporations, government agencies, healthcare systems, and educational institutions in more than 230 countries worldwide."


"One Call Reaches All"


That is 3n's corporate motto. The company promises to notify the American public at large or specific groups of people of "any changes to the Homeland Security terrorist threat warning level", relays "notices to specific floors, buildings, or entire campuses after major disasters" and has remote roll-calling features -- to use their example, "Press 1 if you are at home; Press 2 if you are at work."

The guardians can keep tabs on the masses more easily and more legally than before, though we are promised that the database is only used in times of national or local emergency. Considered alone the mass notification system may be benign. In the context of everything else it is not. Recount all the unchecked executive orders, all the boundary-crossing authorizations, the limits to civil liberties and increases in government surveillance and scaling capabilities, and it has a much more serious and frightening context.

Interview with G8 Activist Wu Ming

Wu Ming (无名) is an activist from the Seattle-Tacoma area who was at the 34th G8 Summit in Toyako, Japan, a rural resort area on the island of Hokkaido.

Read this year's summit statements for the states' perspective on what had been accomplished this year. Hundreds of NGOs and a greater number of individuals signed the "Challenge to the G8 Governments" which claimed that the states themselves were responsible for the climate crisis, and the debt crisis. Other groups who arrived in Japan made plans to hold their own Summit too, calling it a "People's Summit". Wu Ming tells us what it was like engaging in autonomous actions against the G8, and what the political atmosphere of the G8 was like for activists.

This video is my own brief introduction to the G8 from an activist's perspective, in which I use submitted videos from Spanish and German activists.


Joe La Sac: Have you noticed that the opposition to the G8 has grown over the past eight to ten years, and why do you think that is so?

Wu Ming: It's really hard for me to tell. There are a few reasons for saying that the opposition has grown, however. I can tell you that, from my experience, the vast majority of the protesters who I've met were not involved in any sort of organized resistance to the G8 eight years ago. I, for example, was not even aware of its existence until I became politicized against it around the time that I came to college. (Because I lived in Seattle in 1999 I knew about the WTO, but not the G8.) It seems like many of the people who now "summit hop" or even work on solidarity work at local level, even when they have been activists for ten years or more, haven't been protesting at G8 conferences for more than a couple years.
Of course there are a few exceptions to this, especially among the older activists. And I think one problem with jumping to the conclusion that opposition has grown based on the above observation is that many of the activists of eight or more years ago may have moved on to other things. This is reflected in the relatively young demographic that shows up to protest the G8.

Ultimately, though, it seems to me that there has been a general increase in opposition to the G8 over the past eight to ten years.



JL: Which opposition groups were the most active at the G8 Summit in Hokkaido and what sorts of things did they do?

WM: I spent most of my time working with the anarchist-leaning 'No! G8 Action' group, but a full representation of the range of opposition groups would include various the Japanese communist, socialist, and green parties, progressive NGOs, cultural groups, and local peoples' organizations that made it up to Hokkaido. While there are many ideological and political differences between these groups, they all seem to have a basic tactic in common -- that is, they all march. Truthfully, the anarchists didn't act much different than the Trotskyites and the Liberals when it came to action. I think this is because the police-state had everyone monitored closely and was willing to enforce any and every law, regardless of how arbitrary and constrictive. For example, every single overt political activity that a protest group may chose to do, be it walking three abreast down the street or whatever, must be registered with the police beforehand. This policy is obviously very stifling to autonomous actions and tactics. But not only do the police enforce compliance, it gets to the point that because of the force of the state opposition groups tend to police themselves, prohibiting and even intervening in any unplanned action!

I may suggest one small, but significant difference with the anarchist organizing against the G8: many of us realized very quickly that autonomous actions of 'protest' were going to be radically ineffective (there were 20,000 police and 3,000 protesters) -- both because we would risk a lot of jail-time and because we don't like asking people in power to do anything in particular for us (unlike the NGOs) -- and so were focused on what can be called 'prefigurative politics'. That is, we tried to build the new world in the shell of the old. The camps were the main venues for this. It happened when we planned actions, no matter how inane they may have seemed, and it happened when we did the dishes. From my point of view, experimenting with prefigurative politics was the real point of being in Hokkaido.
Besides that. like I said, I was not active in too many different groups, so besides the lowest-common-denominator protest march, I don't know what everyone 'did'.



JL: It seems to me that there are two basic kinds of protesting at the G8. One group of people says the G8 has noble goals and an admirable mission, like giving aid to Africa and partially writing off debt, but that the G8 needs to held to these promises and goaded to action. Another group is saying that the entire mission and purpose of the G8 is deplorable and that is function in global politics is harmful to democracy and economic development. How do these groups reconcile their differences at the summit, and which groups are more effective? How do you measure this?

WM: Um, I guess you could divide the basic outlooks among protesters into these two groups. However, since we were all so isolated from each other to begin with, we never really had to reconcile these two positions. I suppose I was so far into your second category that I lost sight of the G8 altogether and decided to construct something positive in spite of it. That's what the camps (mentioned above) were there for. As for effectiveness, I was satisfied with the performance of my network of new friends in creating an autonomous, free, and lively space for democratic, anti-fascist living.



JL: Why do they meet some place physically at all, why not just pick up the phone? If the G8 were to stop meeting annually do you think this will help at all?

WM: Sure it would be nice for the G8 to stop meeting. But it's not like any real problems would be solved if the G8 simply stopped having physical meetings. There would still be neoliberal economic policies containing people within police-states economies and there would still be undemocratic political orchestrations at the highest level of government of the world's most powerful nations. You see, the problem is not that the G8 have a tea party every year; the problem is that they are a group of callous technocrat statists who enforce their will on people all over the world.

One can even say that the problems go even deeper: our present world, in many ways, works on a precondition of obedience to illegitimate authority. Once (and only after) we start challenging authority in our daily lives as well as at the world-political level, I believe, we will have some positive change, regardless of who meets in a hotel room with whom.



JL: What was the most important thing you learned by actually being at the G8 Summit in Hokkaido?

WM: I learned that it is important to speak multiple languages if you want to work internationally.



The 35th G8 Summit next July will be held at another tourist center on the island of Sardinia, off the Italian mainland coast. The g8 Summit will not make it to the United States again until 2012.

Revolutionary and Non-Revolutionary Objections to Rawls' Civil Disobedience

John Locke rejected the view that man has no alternative but to obey any state under which he happened to find himself, and all of liberal theory has followed him in this rejection. Locke accused Hobbes of equivocating “state of nature” with “state of war”, and pointed out that the former rarely collapsed into the latter. In their natural state men can at least fight as equals, but no man would stand a chance against the greater force of the state. One premise of the liberal view has been that when the preservation of the state creates worse evils than the war of all against all, the costs of that state are too high. A citizen has no reason to preserve such a state, for there is no greater good which makes it possible to preserve.

Yet liberal theory contends that its systems are the best form of governance, according to John Rawls, and though they are not perfectly just, they are reasonably just. Men who threaten the preservation of these regimes to some degree compel a “war of all against all”, though the state may have allowed many evils to which men may contend does not conform to its moral principles. A state which does not respect citizens who have rights-claims instead gives priority to the preservation of the state itself, and tacitly accepts the Hobbesian point of view about the state of nature. Contrary to liberal theory which says the state is to preserve rights which are to be found in the state of nature, it says the state prevents the war of all against all.

If our state is reasonably just but not perfectly just, we can be sure that the laws of the state do not encompass all those to whom it commands obedience. The whole structure of liberal theory, with its constitutional prescriptions and inalienable rights must therefore depend on the affirmation of a subsequent premise, if it is not to be naïve. Liberal theory must rest on a premise to the effect that the logic of arbitration is not all-encompassing. That is, the logic of state may not meet the consent of all those who are encompassed by it. This premise seems so obvious that the majority of the followers of Locke bothered to make it explicit (Nozick 1974).

John Rawls claims in The Justification for Civil Disobedience (1969) that “even under a just constitution unjust laws may be passed and unjust policies enforced.” This raises the question of civil disobedience and when it is justified. To engage in acts which disobey the logic of state arbitration implies that citizens have rights-claims that arbitration does not necessarily give them, and though Rawls implies there is a sense in which a prima facie case for obedience justifies arbitrary rule by the sovereign, in liberal theory there must be a more fundamental prima facie case to the effect that rights-claims not respected by the sovereign are unjustified.

It is my contention that liberal theory, through its rejection of Hobbes’ argument about the logic of arbitration, opens the possibility of a much wider range of disobedience than liberal theorists have generally recognized. For the writings of many theorists, including John Rawls, liberal theory has demanded too much rather than too little obedience. Most of his justification is indeed spent on justifying various limitations for civil disobedience. Focusing alone on “reasonably just” systems in which equal opportunity is the only object of disobedience, Rawls and the like force the citizen to be almost totally obedient because he or she could never justify revolutionary disobedience in a reasonably just society. In an already “reasonably just” system, institutions must be “significantly unjust” on top of that to even warrant reform according to Rawls. The case for radical disobedience is, in many ways, an attempt to dispute this very aspect of liberal theory and to point out the possibility of a broader range of revolutionary and non-revolutionary disobedience.

The envisioned civil disobedience within a reasonably just society, as Rawls is makes clear, is a system produced by the Original Position (2001). One fundamental objection to his paper is that the context in which he chooses to discuss civil disobedience precludes any interesting discussions about revolutionary and non-revolutionary disobedience in other societies. While the section concerning the justification itself uses the Original Position to conceive of a society where revolutionary and most non-revolutionary forms of disobedience are unjustified, in earlier sections it is clear that Rawls intends to extend this analysis to all constitutional democracies. Whether he contemplates the extension of his justification for civil disobedience to less-reasonably just systems is implied in that. But we should not conclude that the justification extends any further than Rawls’ own system, since, given the conditions under which the reasonably just society originate, we cannot consider all less-than-perfect systems: we can only considering the reasonably just ones.

Many of the scenarios commanding disobedience that we imagine in (our own) less-than-perfect systems are thus unimaginable in Rawls’ society. We therefore should not take his Justification too seriously if we are to apply it to all constitutional democracies, for they are not all reasonably just. Nonetheless it was meant to be used as a justification for civil disobedience in other societies. The non-contextualized version of this text which appears in Schaur and Armstrong’s The Philosophy of Law (1986) lacks any discussion of the thought experiment which precedes it, implying that even well-known publicists in the area of philosophy take Rawls’ justification further than it is allowed. The justification of civil disobedience does not apparently need a preceding discussion of any Original Position or rights granted by a society. It is presumed that we can start from the fact that we live in a reasonably just society.

Yet in the original experiment, we have finally chosen, behind a veil of ignorance, what the moral principles of civil society ought to be when we ourselves are not any member of that society in particular. Speaking from anyone’s point of view, then, civil disobedience is therefore an act “justified by the moral principles which define our conception of civil society and the public good.” This definition, of course, already assumes its own moral principles are just cannot be challenged, and that the only grounds for disobedience are the disconnection between civil life and the moral principles. “Formal consent” to the government is therefore an issue Rawls is unlikely to take up in any discussion of civil disobedience.

In the reasonably just society, which certainly still has problems of its own, the extent to which a disobedient believes that the regime, while imperfect, is better than war of all against all, he has some reason not to endanger its existence. This reason will not, it is true, lead him to reject disobedience in the face of great injustice, but Rawls contends that it will in almost all cases lead him to reject disobedience in the face of many evils, given that it is system is reasonably just. The better the system is, the stronger the obligation to obey and the greater, therefore, I contend, we should expect the improvement brought about by disobedience be if it is to justify the risks it also implies.

In a constitutional and contractual civil society like the one Rawls envisions, the convictions of a disobedient member can only be traced back to the principles that underlie the constitution itself. The source of one’s disobedience is based on rights-claims already established, or derivable, from the basic moral principles. Legitimate civil disobedience, Rawls contends, is merely a “stabilizing device in a constitutional regime” and therefore acts of civil disobedience which threaten the stability of the regime are not justified, even at the cost of the moral principles he hitherto used as his basic justification.

This is a clear barrier to civil disobedience, since we are threatened on one hand with war of all against all—which has little basis in post-Locke liberal theory—and living with uncontested injustice on the other. Concerning what little “legitimate civil disobedience” we are left with at this point, however, there are still many other avenues, short of revolution and revolution itself, that Rawls forbids.

The first barrier Rawls places in front of disobedience is that of addressing the majority. Acts which do not address the “sense of justice” in the majority are not considered “civil” acts, and are merely disobedient. However, we can imagine scenarios where equal opportunities do not obtain, and disobeying the majority to protect the rights of the minority may require secrecy. When the Underground Railroad was constructed to help slave minorities, no one would have thought to make this act of disobedience known to the majority, otherwise it would have undermined its effectiveness. Rawls would have us believe this sort of scenario is not obtainable in the reasonably just system, but this should not stop us from considering the ways in which he is wrong about other constitutional democracies, and even his own.

The second barrier Rawls gives us is violent disobedience. Violence is simply unnecessary in the reasonably just society, but we should not conclude it is unnecessary in less reasonably just societies. Violence can take the form of state property destruction, for example, when burning military draft cards. One can imagine instances where a citizen living under a less reasonably just society might try to sabotage a particular government program, a nuclear weapons development program that threatens to destroy neighboring cities, for example, without challenging the government in other areas. Such an act is not easy to evaluate, for although it is both highly coercive and violent, it challenges only a very limited aspect of state power. Rawls argues that disobedience must not endanger the rights of others, which although perfectly reasonable since they are not the object of disobedience and have equal rights-claims as anyone else, does not answer the more fundamental question of whether violence towards a state counts as the “other” as well.

The third and more problematic barrier for the reasonably just society is that of equal opportunity. While in a just democratic regime opportunities (visible and non-visible) should be equally available to all citizens, inequalities must be to everyone’s advantage. This is Rawls’ Difference Principle, in which inequalities must be to the advantage of those least well-off. Rawls believes this to be one of the moral principles chosen while behind the veil of ignorance. Thus if citizens are equally subject to some kind of structural injustice, Rawls would require that citizens be able to equally participate in disobedience. Yet the “widespread disposition to disobey” would be followed by “widespread disorder”. In that event “there might be serious injury to the just constitution,” Rawls says.

Here we have a scenario where Rawls suggests “special restraint” in order to preserve the integrity of a state whose object it is to preserve the very rights citizens are demanding. Rawls would require that citizens be able to equally participate in disobedience, but since the degree of injustice is equally distributed and thus magnified, however reasonable it may seen to disobey, disobedience would be thwarted by a magnificent spectacle of disorder. The notion of “justice for all” is supplanted by “equality for all” and that has lead Rawls to offer the precarious solution of a “lottery” or a “rationing system” that will allow only a select few to disobey on behalf of others.

This has suggested to me that Rawls admits that the public good may trump the moral principles the society is based upon. The public good, and thus the purpose of the state, in other words, is order—and this is a very Hobbesian point of view. It also strikes me that Rawls accepts a more utilitarian view here than is often recognized. In the event that widespread disorder should be caused by demands for justice, Rawls accepts a utilitarianism of rights view, whereby rights and justice are things to be maximized, but may not be fully maximized if it should cause widespread disorder (Nozick 1974).

Whereas these rights are not respected as “inalienable”, it may be objected that at least some rights are inalienable for Rawls, which is certainly the case. The less-visible rights violations and injustices in Rawls’ society, however, seem the most susceptible to the crude utilitarian calculus. I believe Rawls is wrong, and much of liberal theory is wrong with him, in saying that the public order takes precedent over rights guaranteed by the constitutions of democratic regimes, and it is this contention of Rawls that causes a fundamental tension within the reasonably just society, and which makes radical disobedience necessary, even in the reasonably just society.

A search for the reasons that it has seemed necessary to confine disobedience so thinly—to “clear” cases to use Rawls’ wording—takes us back to the origins of liberal theory. Reasons first given by Hobbes and then adopted by Locke inform much of our contemporary thinking out disobedience. Many modern arguments against disobedience appear to be only somewhat altered restatements of the original Hobbesian ones. Hobbes pointed out that we have reason to obey even am unjust law because we have an interest in the preservation of a system of arbitration through which quarrels among citizens can be settled calmly. Rawls calls this a “normal political action”. Such a system is achievable, Hobbes reasoned, only if each member of society is willing to reject the use of violence in disputes with others and to present them to binding arbitrators of the sovereign. When Rawls states that “there is no danger of anarchy as long as there is a sufficient working agreement in men’s conceptions of political justice and what it requires” I believe he is relying on the Hobbesian argument.

A citizen might prefer to have the state obey his own principles, and Rawls never denies that it is desirable to have it so. He insists, like Hobbes, that guarantees for citizens against the state, though desirable, could never be enforced without collapsing the state. In a game-theoretic approach, Hobbes says that citizens will only reject the use of violence and submit their quarrels to the sovereign if they were absolutely sure that the other citizens would do the same, and Rawls seems to be in agreement.

I would like to add here that even in the best state we can devise, the possibility of justifiable disobedience cannot be categorically disqualified. As long as we have not devised a procedure which guarantees that only laws and institutions which everyone can consent to, the possibility of a justifiable disobedience will exist. Majority decision is not, however, the only basis for democracy, nor is it necessarily the strongest. The strong claim that democracy does make is that it weakens the possibility of justifiable disobedience by providing alternative means of change. And although this makes democracy stronger than other regimes, it is not, of course, wholly participatory, nor is it the only system that provides those alternatives.

Ratemycop

You may have heard of ratemyprof.com, the site that allows students to rate their professors and write positive or negative reviews. Another site, based on the same principle, is called ratemycop.com. It allows anyone to write reviews of police officers, good ones and bad ones, and bring an entirely different layer of police accountability in the hands of everyday citizens. I think tools like these will help provide police departments with the kind of accountability and loosely-networked oversight that is desperately needed. Private citizens generate this sort of content, not the state, which benefits the general population in ways that the state would not have done otherwise.

To every internet libertarian's chagrin, however, ratemycop.com was shutdown earlier this March due to police complaints about the site. However, GoDaddy.com, the hosting service running ratemycop.com, told the owner of the site, Gino Sesto, the reason it was shutdown was that it had exceeded its 3 terabyte bandwidth limit.

But net activism proved once again to be a valuable tool for correcting undemocratic, nontransparent actions like these. After the original article in Wired was published, the net community picked it up, viralized it, slashdotted it, brought it to the fore, and soon the site was up again by March 26th. This is internet "people power" in full effect.

In September, IBM workers decided to stage a worker's strike not in RL (real life) but in SL (Second Life). The Second Life traffic in the IBM complex overloaded the resolution-generating processes of the area and basically shutdown IBM's Second Life center. Thousands of people attended the online rally.

The power of people to connect and network on the internet in new and innovative ways has made it virtually impossible for states to crack down on. Sooner or later, someone will find a hosting service or a venue to bring valuable information to the fore and states are in no position to prevent this from happening.

Just as when Turkey and other governments decided to ban YouTube due to dissent and criticism, it only made the governments look ridiculous and reactionary to the rest of the world, sometimes forcing them to sheepishly re-lift the ban. When GoDaddy.com banned ratemycop.com it only made the website more popular and in greater demand. Essentially, the state's reactionary fear ensured the success of the website. Sesto says police as well as citizens can post comments, and a future version of the site will allow them to authenticate themselves to post rebuttals more prominently. Police chiefs, however, still irate about the concept of citizen oversight, have not ended their attempts to make the website illegal.

The Political Function of the Uprising

Apart from being an outburst of violence and anger, what political function does an uprising serve?

Many important changes take place in liberal democracies through massive protest and through the use of the riot. I studied in Germany over the summer and then I traveled around to dozens of cities. All across the nation, documented actions and uprisings were cited as causes of political change during the reign of the closed society. In Leipzig, for example, weekly violent protests convinced the DDR that they needed to become the kind of open society demonstrators envisioned. Same thing all across Eastern Europe.

Even in our own country, race riots led to the civil rights movement; uprisings have prevented massive evictions of poor communities; draft riots sprouted anti-war movements and anti-war movements ended the occupations; the Rodney King uprising brought racial profiling and police brutality to the fore of political debate for a decade. If you are only embarrassed by changes that are taking place in the present, but you revere changes that took place in the past through the same means, then you have to ask yourself whether you are embarrassed by those means or something else.

The War on Participation

A riot recently broke out in my neck o' the woods at a Dead Prez concert when police attempted to arrest a black man who was initially roughhoused by a group of white trouble-makers. But the concert-goers surrounded the police car, set the prisoner free, and then asserted their power over this unjust police procedure. Soon, riot police arrived and gassed a crowd that vandalized three police cars in anger. The local media have done their part in shaming this event as an anarchist act of rage.

What enrages me is that after someone had reported this on the Tacoma SDS website, an upset Tacoma concert-goer responded furiously that because of the anarchists in Olympia, the Dead Prez group would not be playing in Tacoma.

Apparently this person knows "enough" about SDS to know that we're "anarchists". Imagine that. Well, that is, anarchy poorly defined as Hobbesian chaos and disorder. Not to mention that SDS is not even anarchism charitably defined. Nonetheless he builds in the absolutists' defense of totalitarianism by nodding to (of all political constructs) theoretical Monarchism! Whereas there are multiple layers of misunderstanding built into this reaction, the first at the level of "facts" of the case, the second being a contempt for participatory politics itself, which is one of the greatest sources of change in liberal democratic societies. My position is much more broad than anarchism. It appears as though a defense of participation itself is in need.

If you have no patience for those who participate, those who understand the dynamics of social change, and who dream of utopia, then what do you say about all the revolutionary, visionary, utopianists who came before this generation? We are all the beneficiaries of this long line of utopia-dreamers and revolutionaries. If you want to give credit for your liberties, which revolutionaries will you credit, sir?

If a status-quo monger like this one possesses "all-encompassing hate" for those envisioning greater justice in our society, then sigh, sigh, sigh. There's no reason to appease this kind of criticism because it's rooted in something much more radical than participation itself, and that is, radical apathy. In societies dominated by apatheist ideology, such as the "die, hippie die" mantra of many a South Park episode, those who take principled stances against all forms of imperialism and bigotry are cast aside as "stupid anarchists" for challenging the status quo. This is why the Left must always work so much harder than the rest of society. The rest of society is so inculcated with the ideas of the ruling spectacle, they have come to even hate participation itself.

Oh, youtube...

I have one YouTube account that has over 60 videos. Some of my more politically-charged videos get commented on several times a day. Many of them are recurring viewers. Yet the English-speaking people of YouTube, which is more broadly, the English-speaking people of this planet, are so incredibly and insanely idiotic that I must admit that I have given up hope for them. It is no use responding to each of their comments anymore. With such a high volume of comments, it becomes pointless to debate with each one. After the videos started to gain popularity, I thought it was a great opportunity to educate the falsely ideological masses. But this has proven to be an extremely difficult task. Not to mention conservative bloggers like Michelle Malkin from Fox News have subscribed to the account's feed. Thus whenever she links to any of the videos, thousands of her pusillanimous posters are routed to my content. Most of the outrageous traffic has come from her blog, Hot Air.

In some sense perusing these comments keeps me in touch with the extremely barbaric undertones of American culture. People have said they want to kill the protesters in the videos. People argue that I should be beaten and thrown in jail for making propaganda. It is for this reason that I have extreme contempt for the world of YouTube. Everything has receded into violent idiocy. I try to maintain order in conversing with many of the viewers. But many are virtually incapable of understanding another person's perspective. This has been so basic for me that when I must face the world's lunatics I am overwhelmed by what appears to be Sisyphean task.

Perhaps now is the appropriate time to throw down the towel. That heavy ball is too much to juggle up an infinitely steep hill. In fact, it's greater than just a steep hill. It's wall of ignorance that cannot be surmounted.

From the Northwest to the Northeast

In 2003, Rachel Corrie from Olympia, WA was killed while sitting in front of a Palestinian home as an Israeli bulldozer crushed her. She had become a kind of martyr for the Olympia community, and her death became a media spectacle in the US. But soon her tactics were being used against the US military in Olympia as they shipped military equipment to the Middle East.

People from the city sat in front of trucks, blocked gates, and tried to convince port authorities not to ship the equipment. This tactic was soon dubbed Port Militarization Resistance. By 2007 the military said using the Port of Olympia was too costly, and they began using other ports such as my own city's port in Tacoma, WA. But for 12 days of protest, using the Port of Tacoma cost the military $.5 million for security and tear gas, so they moved elsewhere. Since then other cities began using similar tactics. Oakland, California, for example.

There is a Port Militarization Resistance action in Manhattan and Staten Island today. This is important news for us on the West Coast because it means that those at "the center of civilization" (i.e. New York City) are taking a stand against imperialism by using some of the same tactics as we have used in the Northwest, by targeting the shipment of military equipment and drawing attention to the militarization of their communities. The largest part of their protest has taken place one block West of Times Square, near the beating heart of American media, which is also where the loading docks are.

Narus, the Telecommunicative Panopticon

The digital panopticon is already deeply embedded in our society. A close look at what has been happening in the telecommunications industry reveals the extent to which our global hegemonic intelligence community is embedded in networks everywhere. We live in a digital looking glass, a narus box, a telecommunicative panopticon. Jeremy Bentham wrote of the panopticonic prison system in the 19th Century, and we are fulfilling the aims of a kind of prison-society today, one that is visible from everywhere, especially by our own governments.

In 2006, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) filed a class action suit against AT&T and its holding companies which have been collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in a massive and warrantless surveillance program that illegally tracks the domestic and foreign communications and communication records of millions of Americans. The AT&T office on Folsom Street in San Fransisco is the location which had moved this case forward, the specific point of dispute in Hepting v AT&T. Yet overall EFF estimates that the NSA intercepts and data-mines at least 10% of all internet traffic in the United States. EFF found that there were 477 such locations, like the one in San Fransisco, in 2006 alone.

AT&T is not the only internet service provider in the telecom industry that collaborates with the NSA. MCI and Sprint, who control most of the international telecommunications, have also been implicated. And the spread of the apparatus is aided by recent mergers: AT&T was recently acquired by SBC Communications, which has since adopted the AT&T name as its corporate moniker. MCI, formerly known as WorldCom, was recently acquired by Verizon. Sprint recently merged with Nextel. The tentacles of the NSA digital spy apparatus would seemingly have a nearly unlimited influence over the telecom industry, given the collaboration, and the rate of acquisition. Hepting v AT&T is still unresolved.

Several legislations have made this massive apparatus possible. The longstanding Title 18 of the US Code provides the panopticonic backbone. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, enacted in 1994, paved the way for an expansion of massive surveillance, and amended title 18 to this end. The next obvious piece in this game is the USA Patriot Act, which magnified its exuberance throughout the code, amending things like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, granting electronic surveillance without the obtainment of court orders. This in turn changes the entire context and practice of the 1st and 4th amendments to the Constitution. There are no limitations to illegal search and seizure in the digital domain--the court calls this post-Patriot expansion of executive powers "legal interception". President Bush says the looking glass society protects the country. Yet it is clear the programs are part of a domestic spying apparatus, slowly built up during the Cold War years, and now being turned on its own people.


The diagram on the left is a detailed plan of how the NSA splits and intercepts all the data at the AT&T Folsom Street facility. Each packet is sniffed and its content examined through massive computing capabilities through technologies like the Narus box. This high-end security equipment is provided by Narus carrier-class security systems, profiting from the US War on Terror. The term "narus" is in fact Latin for "to know", and this is exactly what all these legislations allow the federal government and its epistemic communities to do--increase search-ability, increase visibility, magnify projectability, and ultimately control and silence behavior.

The average person doesn't have a concept of the massive data-mining capabilities of the federal government. Data-mining is the systematic search and discovery of specific information through general access to all information. In order to data-mine DARPA and the NSA need general access to all information. This is what Narus technologies provides.

Another feature of data-mining is that there is no individualized suspicion upon analysis. The NSA and DARPA mine data without discretion. Everyone is a suspect, all payloads are suspicious upon going into the mine. As I have outlined in an earlier blog, there is a legal precedent in our country that says general searches and general warrants are unjust, as was part of the reason for the American Revolution. A digital panopticon is perhaps the most extreme kinds of scenario that John Wilkes Booth envisioned. If our revolutionaries were concerned with whole neighborhoods being searched, their "papers" confiscated, think of how invasive it would have seemed to them to have all private networks subject to illegal search and seizure.

The exuberation of these institutions is not benign. Our technology is not wholly benign. For decades it has been developed for governmental purposes--if it were only for social networking we perhaps would have nothing to fear. The government has the ability to prosecute and silence. Social communities do not. I'm putting a plug in for counter-institutions like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, since it is important in our age that we are aware of and contributing to counter epistemic communities who help keep our knowledge free and our networked societies free.

The Banality of Evil

A new Nazi photo album has just resurfaced from an old attic in Germany. The interesting thing is that the photos look as if "normal people" were in them. The American museum who collected the photos said that they therefore must be placed in the context of other photos which appear to show the evil of the Nazi regime.


The photos were originally collected by an SS officer named Karl Hoecker, who was stationed at Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Many of the photos depict him as a normal person undertaking normal tasks, like training his dog, or entertaining and laughing with the Nazi women who worked at Auschwitz.

Historians and museums are still compiling documents and knowledge about the Holocaust, and preserving its integrity. That part is clear. However, why these photos took so long to surface, is another question. These pictures, and others like it, would obviously give credence to the idea that these Nazi soldiers were "human" after all. The collector of the photographs, interviewed on NPR, seemed particularly worried that, while Nazis are indeed human, that they would be viewed as too human, all too human. And this is a problem for the cultural condemnation of a people. Nazi Germany was rightly condemned. Looney Toons cartoons affirm this. If humanizing images of Germans were shown in tandem with dehumanizing images, this could have seriously affected the state propaganda. This sort of Lyotardian monopoly on knowledge is a tool of propagandists who, for decades, would liked to have silenced knowledge of human life under an enemy regime.

In fact, this is exactly what Hannah Arendt has said about how evil regimes like the Nazi party give rise to a "banality of evil". That is, the Holocaust and other evils of history, are not carried out by sociopaths and fanatics, but they are carried out by people performing their duties and their obligations to their governments. All of the people in these photos have accepted the premises of their state and therefore acted under the view that their actions and their duties were normal, and to be accepted. This is the same sort of reply we hear from neoconservatives today. Soldiers in Iraq are simply doing their duties. This is fundamentally why this answer, this appeal to "duty", never fulfills and never answers the question or the criticism.

The State of Exception

However simplistic and obvious it is to mention, we must acknowledge that the state of exception -- any state which accepts a stance of foreign policy exceptionalism -- is dangerous and violent in places of operation and in terms of its modeling affect on other states. The Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben uses the phrase "state of exception" to describe regimes like Nazi Germany and the United States under the George W. Bush Administration. The concept of an 'American Exceptionalism' is not new, yet the Italian perspective of Agamben is interesting, (and hence has cultural history with fascism and thus states of exception).

When specifically speaking about the Patriot Act, Agamben writes,

“What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW’s as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of people charged with a crime according to American laws.”

Many of the individuals captured in Afghanistan were taken to be held at Guantanamo Bay without trial. To this day individuals at Guantanamo have been treated outside of the Geneva Conventions and outside legal jurisdiction. It is solely a military operation, an therefore an Executive Office operation, accomplished without proper oversight through the suppression of knowledge.

Agamben's analysis is something like this. Political power over others acquired through the state of exception, places one government or one branch of government as an all powerful domain, operating outside of the legal code. During times of this extension of power, certain forms of knowledge are privileged and accepted as true and certain voices are heard as valued, while of course, many others are not. Thus opposition is systematically silenced, like a snuffed-out micronarrative. This oppressive distinction holds great importance in relation to the production of knowledge. The process of both acquiring knowledge, and suppressing certain knowledge, is a violent act within a time of crisis, and hence the fulfillment of The Postmodern Condition.

Ataturk Mausoleum as Text

“Listen very carefully,” our Turkish guide, Bejazit, told us as we approached a massive neo-Hittite temple structure where the body of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is buried, “beyond this point no pictures are allowed. Follow closely behind me and I will explain what is happening, but please do not take pictures.” If the Antikabir as it is called in Ankara were the only tribute to Ataturk it would be less pretentious to have built a thunder-god temple in his memory. Except in every city throughout Anatolia enormous simulacra depict the face of this one man who led the Turkish War of Independence (1919--1923) . Outside, a man on a marble stone-cleaning machine continuously buffered the flat floors of the temple. Inside, we were under constant observation by the hundred-or-so soldiers staffed there. For fear of living in a Turkish prison cell for the next two years I kept my camera safely in its bag.

The temple itself, from the outside, is an architectural pastiche of modern Turkish motifs and ancient Hittite-styled cut-stone buildings and ceremonial grounds. Outside we took pictures of each other smirking and standing just as solemnly and rectilinearly as the guards who stood along the temple’s many rows of tall, thick pillars. In conversational Turkish it is common to ask people you meet where they are from (Nerede yaşiyorsunuz?) before you ask their name or their impression of the weather. As if completely disinterested, no one asked this question at the temple, unlike the inquisitive shopkeepers in Istanbul or Cappadocia. Their faces reflected their strong national ethic and concentration on service-work—such as guarding the nation’s most important shrine: its founder’s mausoleum. The Turkish Armed Forces views itself as a kind of Atlas, a god carrying the nation’s hard burdens on its shoulders.

Making our way to the entrance of the museum, one of the German student program directors, Karin, turned to me and said quietly, “This is fascist architecture.” The symmetry, the size, the purpose: all of it testified to its fascist similarities (pictured left). It was as though the goal was to make the individual feel very little self importance. We continued to comment about the size and austerity of the structure, speculating about what Hitler or Stalin's reactions might have been had they visited. “Hitler would have loved this place,” Karin whispered, “except he would have made it more elaborate, perhaps by adding a bowl with fire in the center or something like that.” Karin admitted to me at this moment that in her youth she had grown up under the Communist Dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceaşescu. The Ataturk museum was almost too painful.

Kemalist architecture is an odd mixture of fascist, social realism and modern architecture. It also has no futuristic projection, and therefore it expresses little concern for progressive or futurist dimensions, unlike socialist popular art which is noticeably obsessed with the future (as depicted with peasants locking arms and singing, for example). In fact Kemalist principles were strongly reinstated by the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) after the government made a sharp turn in the direction of socialism in the 60s. Another important feature of Kemalism is its self-importance by means of showing how strong its empires had been in the past while simultaneously being anti-Ottoman, its most recent predecessor. Nietzsche once said that every generation rebels against its fathers and make friends with its grandfathers. This certainly seems true for Kemalism, which artistically aligns itself with the thousands year-old Hittite Empire and whose capital city, Hattusa, was not far from Ankara. The new art draws its content primarily from its passionate submersion in “the essence of the national being” and it is turned inward and against the future. Along the walls of the temple in Ankara one can see images of Hittite peoples and animals performing ceremonious acts directed towards the centerpiece, where Ataturk is resting. Kemalism is therefore strongly nostalgic but not insofar as it distinguishes itself from the pre-republican empire-building projects.

For example, as a state-builder, Ataturk took great measures to distance himself from the sultanate and the Ottomans, (e.g. by moving the capital city away from Istanbul, the seat of the Ottomans.) Yet everywhere there is a cacophonic mixture of fragments of the former and present regimes: where once there was a statue or head of the emperors and sultans, now everywhere there is a statue or head of the Great Reformer, Ataturk. Just as every tragedy recurs as farce, so all the former Ottoman symbols have been transformed into their ironic opposites—the symbols of the secular state.

The museum displays similar items to those at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul—national jewels, swords, treasures, important artifacts of Turkish identity. As I made my way deeper into the nationalist labyrinth, however, voices from the lugubrious chorus-singing jerked me into a trance-like state. The museum seemed more like propagandistic montage to me at this point. The deafening mortar-fire soundtrack shook the leisurely mausoleum-goers and gave an added dimension of romanticism and revisionism. Unlike other museums which housed dead artifacts, these artifacts were pulsing with the Turkish revolutionary zeitgeist. I became conscious of myself as a historical person, as someone embedded in a particular time and a particular place in history. I began to see things around me with a renewed sense of importance. My reaction to this encoded ideology was very inward at the time, but it seemed in general we were all stuck in some kind of mystical Kemalist knowledge system, with a particular social reality that could not be penetrated by external truths; such as the principles of Western liberal democracy.

The first hallway had large murals along the sides that simulated a battlefield, and the further we went the walkways were transformed into theatrical stages where bullet shells rested, manikin soldiers crouched behind walls, and trenches opened around us, exposing us to the seediness of war and violence. The speaker system blared the thundering of intense machine-gun fire and explosive charges from every direction. Never had I seen anything so elaborate and nationalist like this in my life. Our group frenetically paced around the images before us until being led into a larger hallway replete with realist portraits of the important military commanders. Their uniforms were green, their hats tall, and their faces shone in the light as if angels had given them glory. I withdrew from the group a bit. It was like witnessing a live military performance, except their faces hung on the wall in neat phantasmagoric rows having been dead for several decades or more. It was a living performance no less. Bejazit told the other students stories of officers who were several minutes behind the revolutionary schedule and therefore would shoot themselves in the head. No story seemed too tall to be believed in these walls.

After comparing art styles online, it seems the golden murals on the walls were imitations of Stalinist social-realist art (pictured right)—except that the Kemalists added three-dimensional heads of fatherly Ataturk which jutted out like a knife in an apple. These images culminated at the end of another long hallway with a monumental, triumphant portrait several meters in height of Mustafa Kemal mounted on his horse, pointing the way to victory. (Which is why he was named Ghazi—“the victorious”). I suddenly learned without apparent reason that I had been fooling myself for the entire trip up to this point. Naturally, everything they tell about in newspapers and magazines can happen in real life, but not in the same way. I felt the Western press had been naïve or perhaps dishonest about Turkey’s militaristic underbelly. I gazed into Ataturk’s Clint Eastwood eyes and felt betrayed by his nation, that his life had become a temple, and his tomb a place for secular worship. Secular blasphemy in Turkey is in fact a punishable offense. The controversy over Article 301, the Armenian genocide, the Susurluk Incident, the Dink murder, etc. pushed me in a more radical direction after I decided it was impossible to flirt with the deeply statist agenda in Turkey. How far does the rabbit hole of individual liberties go? Several past Prime Ministers, including the current PM, Erdogan, complained about a secret military command chain (JITEM) and have called this the “deep state” agenda.

All this dusty, out-dated rhetoric and presentation was simply to prepare oneself spiritually for the mausoleum itself. The deafening sound of mortar fire gone, now the happy, revolutionary singing of children filled the echoing hallways. Information tablets on the walls told the story of Ataturk’s political reforms, his benevolent policies towards women, his education reforms and so on. At one information checkpoint, a speaker system played some of Ataturk’s favorite folk songs. In my experience they were real-live Turkish children singing these songs. I was reading a small info-text on land disputes with Turkey’s neighbors when I heard behind me a mother and her two children singing out loud and, astonished, I made gestures towards them with my hands. Since I knew no words in Turkish that expressed my ideas, I wanted to convey that I was impressed they knew the songs so well, although “impressed” is not what I truly had in mind. They understood my motions and began singing louder and with more folkloric gusto. I left them shortly after that, overwhelmed, and because I was unsure about how I ought to respond to their pride without, as 301 says, insulting their Turkishness.

At last I came around a corner and was surprised to find, not a coffin, not an embalmed body like at the Kremlin, but rather a massive stone door weighing something like 40 tons behind which the body of Ataturk is resting. A rotating camera view-finder at my waist continuously moved around the room and zoomed in-and-out at the flat memorial inside the stone structure. I waited and watched until it became too repetitive. I was standing several dozen meters below the center of the Hittite Temple at the top of the hill, smothered in marble, peering into the eye of a camera lens. Ataturk was a narcissistic man with a conflated sense of self-concept. It makes sense that the eye of a camera is a kind of never-ending reflection of him. Not only is he ubiquitous throughout the country, but in the postmodern age he is on television every hour of the day. Perhaps, I thought, the Turkish government will broadcast the mausoleum on a special government television channel.

At this point I half-expected to find a hidden passage somewhere beneath a carpet which lead directly into the mausoleum. Yet the guards were standing near to me and I was alone. I tried to imagine what their thoughts were like, and this contributed to my heightened sense of adventure at the time. At any rate I pushed forward and discovered many fetishistic items of Ataturk’s, such as his (stuffed) dog standing in the living quarters, a life-size model of Ataturk sitting at his desk, and a small portion of his own library which gave me the impression Ataturk was a man who had mastered many things in his lifetime. For example, some of the books had English titles regarding military field training, weapons systems, education policy, legal policy and development. The general Pan-Turkic trend has been to depict Ataturk in mythic proportions, including his body size, which was quite smaller than the manikins would have us believe. This ideology can be attributed mostly to his immediate successors who wished to hold the spirit of revolutionism and Kemalist reform. But the War of Independence was not, as it seems, a creation of Ataturk but a national populist movement headed by a coalition of army officers, religious leaders, and intellectuals. Indeed, many more people should be given credit for the independence, and there was also some discussion among the group as to whether more credit should have been given to the German commander who initiated the military movement in Turkey before Ataturk more or less hi-jacked the movement from him.

The mausoleum experience was an artistic transposition of reality. The key symbols of Kemalistic art are undeniably militarism, masculinity, glory (horses, godlike poses) and the Turkish-Islamic synthesis. Sitting in my chair here in Freiburg, I feel as though it would be possible to write a thesis, or perhaps a psychobiography, of Ataturk as a kind of Oedipal father. Although this is an antiquated strategy of seduction, I have come to believe the Turks have a kind of antiquated political consciousness, and that this sort of thesis would be quite possible and very believable in a psychoanalytic style.

'Deep State' Elements in Turkey's Extra-Political Processes

Last week in Istanbul's Taksim Square--a liberal-minded district for shopping, nightclubbing and shisha smoking--I saw a group of 60 PKK members (the Kurdish Workers Party which is considered a terrorist organization by the US and Turkey) performing an independence demonstration. With a police presence larger than the demonstration itself, I was reminded of my own involvement in the Tacoma Port Protests in May this year. And last May Day protest in Istanbul, more than 900 people were battered and arrested by the paternalist Turkish police state at Taksim Square. Yet the police chiefs are members of the elite vanguard, who are allegedly against the nomination of AKP candidate Abdullah Gul as well. So they have something in common with the protesters. Why are they unnecessarily violent toward them? The EU Commissioners I spoke to later in Ankara said excessive police "torture" is a one of many reasons Turkey does not fulfill the Copenhagen criteria for EU membership. This year was not only the 30-year anniversary of a massacre in Taksim which killed 40 people (carried out by high-level anti-democratic elements within the Turkish military intelligence community), but also a large protest against Abdullah Gul sponsored by the professors and elite community. Of course, no one seems to mind that Gul is already the Deputy Prime Minister of Foreign Affairs and has been for seven years. So perhaps this was a "last straw" of sorts.

Nevertheless an elite force in Turkish military and academic circles, the "Deep State" as it is called, have been accused of deeply tragic blunders in the past years. Most recently for conspiring in the assassination of Hrant Dink, the Armenian news editor who spoke out against the genocide against the Armenians in 1919. Even the AKP Prime Minister Erdogan has admitted the existence of the "deep state", but he is certainly not the first. In 1974 the Prime Minister of the time, Bulent Ecevit, had complained about the existence of the deep state apparatus which he described as the "counter guerrilla" force.

But the deep state is not just the Turkish Armed Forces, the academia, the intelligence community, or the judiciary. The Zaman newspaper fingers the Gendarmerie Intelligence and Anti-Terror unit (JITEM) as a habitat of deep state personnel. As if it were a single organization like the CIA or MOSSAD. But it really has no structure. It is all of these forces together, forming a cross-bureaucratic state apparatus that obtains full support from the military. According to Ecevit the deep state was a military establishment outside the TSK chain of command. Evren first heard of the deep state from Ecevit and as the top commander he wanted to abolish the establishment, but couldn't. The military vanguard is constitutionally protected. And whatever structures they have institutionalized, however corrupt, is without oversight. Another former president, Demirel, said in 2005 that the

"deep state is the state itself. It is the military. The military that established the state always fears the collapse of the state. The people sometimes misuse the rights provided. When it is given the right to stage of rally, it may go and break windows, confront the police. The need for the deep state is a result of the deficiency of governance of the country. The deep state is not active now. It is not active as long as the state is not brought to the verge of collapse. They are not a separate state, but when they intervene in the administration of the state, they become the deep state."

Yet the deep state is not simply a military element, as I pointed out. It has a very loose structure. Many believe a part of this deep statism was revealed in the notorious 1996 crash of a Mercedez--the Susurluk Incident. Ten years ago the question all Turks asked was, what do these four people have in common: an Istanbul police chief, the leader of the National Action Party's (MHP) violent youth organization, a mafia hit-woman, and a devout Kurd-nationalist and True Path Party (DYP) member of parliament? The case was further troubled by the discovery of silencer pistols, incriminating documents, thousands of US dollars, special diplomatic credentials, fake IDs, and and fake passports. The nation watched in horror as the corruption of politics unfolded from deeper and deeper within the state.

Deep State politics can be traced back to Ataturk's own reforms in the 1930s, where it was initially covered in light but accessible bureaucracy. Now it has burrowed its way to the center and built an un-transparent defense of its existence. One of the six pillars of Kemalism is in fact "statism", and the military is looked to by millions of Turks to prevent the corruption of the state by giving TSK a special status the politicians cannot revoke. There is no "deep democracy" in Turkey, all there is is a state capitalism.

The first step toward real reform of Turkey would first dissolve the military apparatus and to recognize the ethnic groups and break down any unnecessary paths to their independence. The EU Commission will not mention any meaningful reforms like this, however, and chances of Turkey joining the EU any time soon are extremely slim.

33rd G8 Summit in Rostock, Germany

I am currently in the Southern-most part of Germany, Baden-Wurtemburg province. The annual, informal G8 Summit and the protests will be in the Northern-most part of Germany, in a small town called Rostock. All the heads of state will meet in an exclusive seaside resort called Heiligendamm. All of Germany has been activated by the summit, however. There are protest notifications all around the City of Freiburg, where I am staying. The graffiti on the walls read, "Fight the Police State", and "Stand Against Police Brutality. Fight Back!" Others say, "STOP G8" and "FIGHT G8". Unlike American graffiti, German graffiti is very political.

The agenda for this year's G8 Summit--set by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel--is "investment, innovation and sustainability". But also, like last year, Africa (which was not then and probably wont be now, solved) is a priority. Climate change is also on everybody's mind, especially since George Bush made some comments this week about "his" new climate change plan. "The United States takes this issue seriously," Bush said Friday morning just a few days before the G8 Summit was to begin, today. It seemed like just last year Bush "didn't believe" in Global Warming. This is all part of his plan to reject the G8´s Climate Change proposals, however, before he even hears them. Meanwhile, a thousand people have already been injured in the protests, and the Summit has not even officially begun. The whole ordeal is a humongous orgy of statism and anti-statism. Two polar opposites. The world Alter-Globalization movement (or rather, anti Washington Consensus movement) is growing. G8 Summits are unsuccessful in general. The meetings are terribly informal, and cost states billions of dollars to provide the security and the location for these meetings. With the introduction of a world database on terrorist suspects introduced in 2005, it begins to look more like a sort of world-wide Patriot Act
and the encroachment of civil liberties.

Germany has already spent 13 million in Euros to pay for this extravagant meeting, which could just as easily take place digitally.

"Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely"

Early on, Lord Acton developed the central theme of his life. This was the idea of conscience. The most important garauntee of freedom is that every individual has an educated conscience. He called liberty the reign of conscience. True freedom can exist in the world when every individual is free to exercise that conscience, and that conscience has been educated in a free fashion.

Papal infallibility is the exact opposite of that. If the Pope is infallible then you cannot question his authority. Lord Acton was a devout Catholic. Through his study of history, he said this is absolutely contrary to the teachings of the church. If you look through Church history, there has been a very powerful role played by church councils. Like Socrates, Acton got deeply involved in the Papal politics, but he was defeated, even though he met bishops and high churchmen who has said they opposed Papal infallibility, but they went along with the crowd when he needed them. In other words, they denied their conscience and did what was expedient. Acton was nearly excommunicated.

What I'm going to say next came to a surprise to me when I first found out. Acton supported the American South during the Civil War. He loved the United States, and was one of the first Englishmen to realize that the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers were political literature worthy of comparing to Plato and Socrates. In Britain people assumed that America was a democracy, exhibiting all the worse characteristics of the Athenian Democracy. It was a radical democracy with no checks on the will of the people. Acton said that America was a balanced Constitution, and the supreme balance was the rights of the States. It is indeed a Confederation of States, and in the power of the states will always lie a check upon a centralized radical democracy. For a centralized radical democracy will be imperialistic abroad and despotic at home.

Lord Acton never had a university degree. He read Plutarch and the classics. He developed a keen sense for 19th century progressive history, which focused upon the use of original documents. He wanted to have an active role in the Catholic Church, and bring the Church into the 19th Century. In his series of magazines he denounced the church for supporting autocratic governments instead of democratic ones. It was in one of these magazines, then, that I believe he wrote his famous dictum, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."