humanity

zizek and 'experts'

Submitted by antarchi on October 22, 2010 - 23:35

[In Europe], it’s not only this concrete problem — big companies controlling, through money donations, universities. It’s something more fundamental going on. It’s a well-organized, all-European campaign to turn us scientists, human or natural, into experts. The idea is, we have a problem—let’s say oil spill in Louisiana—oh, we need experts to tell us how to contain it. We have a public disorder, demonstrations; we need psychologists and so on. This is not thinking. What universities should do is not serve as experts to those in power who define the problems. We should redefine and question the problems themselves. Is this the right perception of the problem? Is this really the problem? We should ask much more fundamental questions.

Here, it may surprise you, but I still have sympathy for Obama. But in my view, one of his greatest failures is not Afghanistan. There, the situation is very complex. I don’t know what I would have done. It’s how he reacted to the oil spill. You know why? Because he played this legal, moralistic game, as if the—you know, like, I will kick—we know where—BP, they will make—sorry, but in a tragedy of these proportions, you cannot play this legalistic game who is guilty and so on. You should start asking more general questions. BP is evil, but are we aware that it may have happened also to another company? So the problem is not BP. The problems are much more general—the structure of our economy, why are we living like this, our way of life, and so on and so on. I think that this is the problem today. I’m saying this ironically as a leftist. We have maybe even too much anti-capitalism, but in this overload of anti-capitalism, but always in this legal, moralistic sense: ooh, that company is using child slave labor; ooh, that company is polluting; ooh, that company is—that company, whatever, is exploiting our universities. No, no, the problem is more fundamental. It’s about how the whole system works to make the companies do this.

— Slavoj Zizek

Interview with Democracy Now

Bush, Saddam and the Kuwait invasion

Submitted by antarchi on July 27, 2010 - 02:33

An extract from William Engdahl's Century of War

...Iraq, unlike Khomeini's Iran, emerged from the costly war with an enormous foreign debt burden. In 1988 she owed an estimated $65 billion to various creditors...

The Anglo-American gameplan was to lure Saddam Hussein into a trap he could not resist, in order to provide a pretext for military intervention from the united States and Britain, professedly to secure the safety of world oil supplies. In June 1989, a top-level delegation from an organisation known as the United States-Iraq Business Forum, which included Kissinger Associates' Alan Stoga and senior executives of Bankers' Trust, Mobil Oil, Occidental Petroleum and other large US multinationals, came to Baghdad at the request of Saddam Hussein. He wanted to discuss an Iraqi post war plan to develop his country's agricultural and industrial potential.

Iraq had a five-year $40 billion plan to complete the large Badush Dam irrigation project, which would have enabled her to become self-sufficient in food production; Iraq at that time depended on US Government Commodity Credit Corporation grain imports for as much as $1 billion worth of grain in 1989. In addition, Iraq proposed to the US group major investment in building up its petrochemicals industry, agriculture fertiliser plants, an iron and steel plant, and auto assembly plant, as part of an effort to develop the country. The American businessmen told Saddam he must first restructure his foreign debts, and in return agree to privatise Iraq's national oil resources, or a major portion of it. According to best British and American geophysical calculations, Iraq was perhaps the largest unexplored oil region in the world, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union.

but you were sitting there provoking them to kill

Submitted by antarchi on June 4, 2010 - 01:00

No reply, no reply, no reply... and then suddenly, when I threaten to send a complaint about complaints to the ECU... this:

Dear ...
I understand you feel
I note you felt
let me assure you that you are wrong
we do appreciate that you may disagree
thank you, you are logged.

Yrs
the bbc

Don't Panic

Submitted by antarchi on May 2, 2009 - 11:38

A week of earth-shattering news.

Monday

Someone May Have Swine Flu

Tuesday

Someone May Have Given Swine Flu To Someone Else

Wednesday

Someone Else May Have Given Swine Flu To His Former Lover's Neighbour's Aunt

Thursday

SWINE FLU IN SWINDON!! (CONFIRMED)

Friday

FIRST CASE OF PERSON TO PERSON TRANSFER IN SWINDON

Saturday

FIRST CASE OF SWINE-SWINE TRANSFER IN LITTLE HAVEN

Sunday

SOME SWINE IN LITTLE HAVEN MAY BE A PERSON

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an offshore turkish island

Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 13:21

The upshot [of the violence], clearly planned in advance, was the eviction of Greeks from Turkish areas in Nicosia and other cities, and the seizure of municipal facilities, to create self-contained Turkish enclaves: piecemeal partition, on the ground. Its organisers could be sure of British complaisance. The day before the rampage... the new governor, Labour’s future Lord Caradon, had assured its leaders that the Turkish community would enjoy ‘a specially favoured and specially protected state’ under future British arrangements. A few months later, the colonial secretary was publicly referring to Cyprus as ‘an offshore Turkish island’.

— Perry Anderson

The Divisions of Cyprus

CYPRUS

Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 13:15

For Britain, Cyprus was a Mediterranean stronghold it had not the slightest intention of relinquishing. Indeed, upgrading its strategic role as soon as British garrisons in the Canal Zone were judged insufficiently secure, the High Command in the Middle East was transferred to the island in 1954. A year later, the colonial secretary... told the Commons that possessions like Cyprus could never expect self-determination. Nor, since London refused to allow any legislative assembly in which the four-fifths of the population in favour of Enosis would enjoy a majority, was there any question even of self-government.

Perry Anderson in The Divisions of Cyprus

Most of the quotes on this page are taken from Perry Anderson's excellent article. Britain's behaviour towards the island, as described and documented here, provides some stunning examples of the underhand methods employed by this Great Nation in order to hold onto its ill-gotten colonial gains. Provocation, double-dealing, reckless disregard for anyone except ourselves, and tacit (or otherwise) support for ethnic cleansing were all employed behind a wall of upstanding British values, well-dressed, well-spoken, morally concerned. Gordon Brown can be proud.

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