Re: If People is a concept: might it be populist? Re: <nettime>Mesopotamia's burning

[Louise Desrenards <louise.desrenards@free.fr>]

le 21/04/2003 15:50, Keith Hart à HART_KEITH@compuserve.com a écrit :

> Louise Desrenards wrote:
> 
> WHO ARE YOU?
The question was about Politics only: who are you to decide that American
people would not be into responsibility on their government? Something in
your argument sounded pervert: Bush and American people would look the same
as Iraqi people under Saddam when you told something as : government is
disastrous but people and the technology are magnificent. An you would call
that a democracy, really?

> I thought the question in the subject header was a good one, but didn't see
> a way of answering it in the text.
> 
> As for me, I like aspects of America, France and even the country of my
> birth, perfide Albion. Of the revolutionary trinity, I would say that I
> learned most about freedom from the USA, about solidarity from France and
> abour fairness (equity) from Britain.

You are joking! Please let Britain outside of the questions that I have
approached to talk specially on the superpower and super-army (the last one)
in the world... Don't hide the only cause that I designed in my letter: the
actuality about USA and "the rest of the world": a blackmail with repression
to get in order under the property of resources trading food and security
under one ideology applied to the whole world! her is the old conception on
universality: not from the Lights but as a logic reflection.

Everything obviously designs the assumption on opportunity in Islam for the
American power to have created what the thought an alternative global
dialectic opposition, following the Cold War with the Communist Power in
URSS and East Europe ; and now it looks the same to "the rest of the world".
Strategically we are all as Islamic (even we would not be in fact).

On this way, I wanted to talk specially about US Revolutionary History. The
Chicago Commune, for example, that my parents (perhaps yours too?) were
still celebrating every year on May the first and offering the lily of the
valley in memoriam of the repression. I did not want to speech about the
trade union of the truck-drivers ;-) I wanted to talk about the FBI practice
during the Cold War and the Vietnam war, against the SDS activists and the
BBP... the wellknown tradition about the police in racial acts, and so on.

How many Presidents of State were killed in USA? How many Politics, Martin
Luther King, Malcolm X... It looks like a tradition. How many persons die
from their own violence but how many caused by the Justice? The death
punishment threw all the country (or next all) ‹ part of errors. The
tradition for calling with reward to search criminals (ask for a repressive
collaboration leaned with money) ‹ you see it about the playing cards on the
Iraq government members... ("souvenir de la guerre" but same time: "put
their face in your head so that you will remember any face if you meet
them"). Calling for the cheapest, with the denouncement. How many
communities purely destroyed and exterminated and asking silence about it in
the tails (remember of Michael Cimino long boycott after "Gates of
Heaven")... and now: what is happening in the cinemas milieu?
 
> of these societies seem to need to demonise at least one of the others. If
> pushed, I would demonise Britain, but I think it is more valuable to ask
> what each country contributes to human aspirations for democracy. I would
> take inspiration from de Tocqueville in that respect.

Sorry I 'm stupid to stay outside of the tendance, but I am not a fan of
Tocqueville vision on the democracy.

>I make my life
> between France, America and Britain, plus occasionally some other European
> countries. 

The Valley of Dra probably stays a pure wonder of splendid people villages
and oasis (fortunately the meta-New Age mode coalition army has not yet
crossed over this part of Deserts).
> 
> My home is in Paris (I live near a street named after LaFayette). Some of
> my best friends are French, as they say.

You have miss Pekin before the epidemic.

> I too could point to unresolved
> questions concerning French participation in the Holocaust and the war
> against Algeria, to English brutality in Ireland and Scotland,

your problem :-)))) from my part, any tradition of fight in my family is not
from the side of the Power. I go on the same... as you can see;

> many other places and no-one who has lived in Chicago's South side, as I
> have, needs reminding about American racism. I don't see the point of
> trying to work out which of these three modern imperialisms has been the
> least obnoxious. Equally, I resist being typecast as a British imperialist
> when I work in Jamaica or South Africa. I would not categorize you, just
> for writing this message, as an embittered French intellectual pining for a
> vision of universality that has gone. About the same proportion of French
> people, under a third, support Le Pen and wanted the US to lose the Iraq
> war. 

My idea is that you are so clever, my dear, well informed, so clever and so
large riding pragmatically across the world, that you have lost the little
idea to imagine any surprising reality. But the world does not go like a
sentence even repeating: any metamorphosis is running. Universality today is
an emergent concept of the criticism mass not from the Thinkers (for exemple
during two weeks in all the world against the war in a complete disorder of
the watchwords and an apparent misunderstanding to the same objective: it
was a revelation of the actual masses any case against the US politics
applied to the world from their own). We are in the dualistic times not in
the time of the dialectic oppositions or radical otherness. Otherness
designs the universal opposition. Only the question of the determination of
Power to exterminate really the otherness by violence, and the predictive
opposition determination trick front of it are looking to be valued as
events.

I have not an opinion, only an observation from a point of view of the
running semiotic of the actuality according the evolution from their past.
Only that thing to finish: why all the world would get over its arms but not
USA? Because you believe in God USA?



> they may not be the same people, but I bet there is a strong overlap.
> I hate nationalism in all its forms, even as I admire French national
> culture. > regional variations). If they try to convert the Comedie Francaise
into a
> Macdonalds, you will find me in the picket line protesting.

Mac Donalds does it in a correct historic mode of the urban design in Paris.

> As for the master/slave rhetoric, I recall this passage from Rousseau's
> second discourse (please forgive me for not quoting in the original French,
> but I want to reach the majority of Nettime subscribers):

I was talking of it applying the problematic from men to countries (a little
translation)
> 
>> The establishment of law and private property was the first stage, the
> institution of magistrates the second, and the transformation of legitimate
> into arbitrary power the third and last stage. Thus the status of rich and
> poor was authorised by the first epoch, that of strong and weak by the
> second and by the third that of master and slave, which is the last degree
> of inequality and the stage to which all the others finally lead, until new
> revolutions dissolve the government altogether and bring it back to
> legitimacy. [One-man-rule closes the circle.]

The problem of this vision of the enchained progressive revolutions is the
event of the proletarian dictatorship from Mark and Enghels to Lenin
applying to Russians ; then, it would appear the loss of the State...

That's exactly what happened in USSR falling down the Berlin Wall: but what
was not described in the primitive vision, was consequently the event of the
neo-liberalism as Power and the dictatorship of only one Nation
representative of this exclusive Power... Now the mode of the master and the
slave have transgressed from the men to the territories: men are lost into
this problematic moving from their subject to the objects: territories,
resources, etc... Who lead the managing of the food for all the world? Not
the supra-national organizations, or servant in fact of the country who
leads the market of the food and agriculture one... USA (remember the GATT
an historical date not for the cultural exception but for the agriculture
and the food ; a biggest tribute to US Middle West) and so on... Who leads
or not yet but soon the energy, the water for their numerous American people
and trading marks? and so so so on

You are dreaming about equality: where have you seen that reality in the new
middle east and Gulf? in the world? the growing desert on earth (ecology and
economy systems) front the growing numerous people deprived of their local
economies and productions get more and more difference between the rich and
the poor on the earth: the same on money that on power and freedom ‹ just a
relative concept, I grant it to you, but why not to be able thinking on it?

Have a good trip for your next.

Louise D.




#  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: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net