I Have Never Loved You More: Obama and the Left

Written by Paolo Mossetti, 24.09.2013
Memories.
 
On May 4, 2009, a few months before Barack Obama won his Nobel Peace Prize, a B-1 supersonic bomber dropped a 2,000 pound missile on the tiny peasant village of Granai, in Southern Afghanistan. About 140 people, mostly women and children, were torn to shreds and scattered in a range of hundreds of feet.
 
The Pentagon first tried to cover up what happened. But echoes of the massacre began to circulate among the foreign press, and the Army accused the Taliban of having used civilians as shields. The Afghan people reacted: a caravansary with the bodies of the victims stacked up on carts made its way to Kabul, with thousands of demonstrators shouting against the US occupants. The Pentagon then admitted that a few dozens of combatants and a few innocent people were killed. Finally, after a few weeks, almost no one outside of Afghanistan was still talking about Granai.
 

The Joys of Being Wrong

Written by Toby Austin Locke, 18.09.2013
To some eyes this may read as a disclaimer, an attempt to remove all responsibility from that which is written or said, an abscondment from intellectual and ethical accountability; and perhaps to some extent, and from certain perspectives, it is.  Disclaimers are certainly popular in contemporary conditions, where various courthouses and bureaucracies of rationality and reason continually threaten to impose their legislation upon those who would transgress the limits of acceptability and correctness.  It is more or less an expectation that the personas of certain digital social spaces should explicitly state from where our statements and views come, lest the wrong body should be held to account by one of the many legislative frameworks which define the limits of what may and may not be said and by whom. In a situation where language becomes inscribed in an open and potentially continual space, we are consistently forced to find means of making ourselves imperceptible, of seeking anonymity, of becoming secrets. And all too often this becoming-secret flees into the dominant modes of representation and logic, those of brands, of capital, of identity, of Occupy and Anonymous. Tiqqun too flees into the territory of becoming-brand, of falling to the spectacle. 
 

The Holy Southern Empire: a proposal for Southern European anarcho-papism

Written by Federico Campagna, 16.09.2013
Cura hominum potuit tantam componere Romam,
quantam non potuit solvere cura deum.
Hildebertus, Carmina Minora, no.36
 
 
Beyond the Latin Empire
 
A few months ago, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben published a short article on the opportunity to rethink the EU along its cultural traditions, rather than its economic dogmas. Agamben based his article on the work of the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojeve, who presented the case for the political union of France, Italy and Spain in a culturally homogeneous Latin Empire which was to be politically and economically lead by France, and opposed to the Anglo-German block.
 
Despite the violent public reaction that followed Agamben’s piece, I would claim that, if Agamben is to be judge guilty of something, it is not of having been too provocative, but not enough.
 

Zakira/Memory

Written by Nathan Witt, 11.09.2013
This text comes at the time of great worry for the neighbouring countries of Syria as the violence threatens to spill over further and that there is a consensus to let Syria sort its problems out itself without foreign intervention. It is important to consider the fact that this following text exists as a result of illegal activity in neighbouring Israel that has continued since the second world war to present day and that any military intervention against Syria only serves Israel’s interests, either as a diversion for the continual expansion and even advancement further into the West Bank, or for any additional advancement that borders Syria, either for water or land, or for testing out military capabilities.  I find it genuinely hard to see if Israel has any concern for its civilian population given its behaviour in international and regional affairs over the last 65 years and the State’s refusal to desist in both the advancement of settlements or further attacks and incursions into the West Bank, Gaza, Southern Lebanon, Jordan River or Golan Heights. An allied attack by the US, France - or Israel - on Syria is going to be catastrophic for the region’s stability. Watching Britain’s offering of televised democracy to pull out of military intervention was a tormenting relief that was almost surreal in both the immediacy of the decision and that the government was actually listening to the public.

However painful it might be, we should oppose the Imperial Order regardless of what the Syrians think

Written by Paolo Mossetti, 04.09.2013
Whenever pro-intervention liberals excoriate me for ignoring what Syrians ask, as long as it furthers my political goals, I say they’re absolutely right. In a certain sense, I am less sympathetic to the Syrian population – especially when it’s the orientalist kind of sympathy – than I am ideologically motivated against USA and the NATO.
 
And why should it be otherwise? Aren’t we struggling against the Industrial-Military complex, against the politics of drones, against a pseudo-feminist Kissinger like Hillary Clinton? This must be first of all our struggle, our own interest, regardless of what other communities think or say. Whatever 'call for justice' invokes the trigger-happy arm of the State, the supersonic precision bombers of the Empire, the death penalty for the offender, we should reject it without any bogus sense of guilt.
 
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