John Young on Sat, 12 Feb 2011 22:48:47 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> The second American revolution? |
A commendably hopeful essay. So far the Egyptian initiative has lofted a Mubarak stooge in his place and the elevated overt military control. These are not hopeful yet, and based on past examples of exactly these non-revolutionary, reactionary shifts, not much can be expected beyond paternalism toward the protestors narcotized by celebrity, and if that does not work, sniping and disappearing leaders, then if that doesn't work, set loose goons to rape and kill to provoke violence in return and threatening civil war, assuring continued military control always cloaked in what's best for protection of the nation and its all-too-manipulable people from opportunistic ideologues and outside agitators. That worked in much of South America for a century and still working in China and North Korea, and Venezuela and Cuba and Pakistan and Afghanistan and Jordan and Israel and Great Britain and the United States of America, indeed, there is hardly a true democracy anywhere on earth, instead pseudo democracies abound completely controlled by military cum financial cartels. There is little chance of ensconced and comfortable intellectuals to forego their perks beyond dissimulation and pretentious strut which are quite well funded and celebrated and magnified by the panoply of media everready to vaunt bloviation to lure eyeballs to ads. Al Jazeera is a lucrative business not a public service, and in that it is merely another self-promoting journalistic conceit like CNN, NYT and the others. Dare to challenge an Al Jazeera reporter and experience hysterical recitation of credentials, all based on lurid stories with superficial content -- exactly what comes from every other journalist associated with the most famous of outlets. The blogs no different. Except for the very few who have the guts to cross the line into criminality, not once for effect, but enduringly as the line of acceptable criminality shifts to embrace the celebrated dissidents as participants in quelling the unknowns. It is disheartening to see Obama and others citing the giants of dissent, metronomically, stupidly, and never the unknown dwarfs and those less than photogenic and memnonic dwarfs: the people en masse, undividuated except as cartoons, as if Marxian mob-stooges for a grand stage of intellectual posturing about historical forces and the will of the people with formulaic vapidity fit for vanishing down the memoryless media hole as a momentary inconsequence. Imagine a gathering of Egyptian proportion in DC Mall, some 4-5 million bellowing discontents demanding the shutdown of the 3 branches of government as sinkholes of corruption. Imagine the Pentagon keeping hands off, not using 1 of every hundred dissidents and not a few of their leaders as spies, not recording every face and chant and poster for future targeting, not arranging the complicity media to cover the protest like mere entertainment and warning against crossing the line. Imagine the Egyptian protest is somehow hopefully different from the dutiful Parks Department regulated DC protests, that it will not take a generation or more for a perduable benefit. Imagine your rebellious children, fed up with faux adult concern, are slaughtered and disappeared in the military charnelhouse and holdng pens of protestation while your clubhouse gang muses historical significance. But then Obama is a millionaire, as the giants became as their hard-fought individual efforts became national and global enterprises. So what else is new. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org