[-empyre-] Notes and a comment -

[Sonja Leboš]

Dear all,
thank you Johannes for inviting me to share my thoughts in this group of
wonderful people from over the globe - what a wonderful opportunity for us
all - I almost can see us sitting together in the future on some place in
Syria or Iraq, revisiting out thoughts on terror and our personal and
professional ways to cope with it.

I re-member, as one puts pieces of meta-imagery of our own mind, images
from one's own experience, the protests in Spain when people in Barcelona
protested against bombing Iraq, but Spanish government opened the air
corridors and let US plains destroy the city to ashes. I re-member reading
that a Muslim community near Detroit largely regretted voting Bush in the
aftermath of that terrible event. You know why they voted Bush? Because he
was anti-gay.

Just a few years after, here we are talking about ISIS terror.History
sarcasm.

As Murat said, the ideas are slow. Yes, and the evil seems working at the
full speed, greedily destroying the planet.

I think of the work of Valie Export, one of the first artists who made
herself a cyborg, using her body as a camera, mapping public space in this
way and creating a new spatial relation between the body and the world.
The idea is slow. We are opposing the evil as we talk, exchange, act in the
public space, and evolve together with the planet.

Coming from Croatia, Balkan, I have a close experience of war. Not like US
citizens, the experience of mediation of the terror via CNN or the body of
one's son being sent in the body bag. I saw it in my own backyard. And I
have one conclusion on the war on Balkan: it was largely a gender war.

The anthropology is, says Auge, the science of the 21st Ct. But we do not
apply it. The question of projecting the Other as the Enemy has been fueled
by greed like it was maybe in the times when Spain and England were killing
people for gold in Americas. The beginning of genocide.

Time is not a linear category. I think about it every single day, feeling
as if the screen of my Mac is just another form of crystal ball of a
medieval witch:)

looking forward dear people to exchange more with you, as I said, with
projection of us all revisiting our thoughts on the ground freed of terror.

Sonja Leboš
sonjaleboš@gmail.com
www.resurbanae.wordpress.com
www.theatreofmemories.org
www.cybercine.org
www.uiii.org

2014-11-25 19:16 GMT+01:00 Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com>:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
> Notes and a comment -
>
> In support of Ana -
>
> http://www.thenation.com/article/190937/why-its-impossible-indict-cop
>
> From Wikipedia -
>
> Overall racial context
>
> According to The Washington Post, the incident sparked unrest in Ferguson
> largely due to questions of racism as a factor in the shooting.[155]
> Protests,[156] vandalism, and other forms of social unrest continued for
> more than a week,[157] with night curfew being imposed and escalated
> violence.[158][159] Several of the stores looted during the unrest are
> Asian American owned, with The Daily Beast writing that Asian Americans
> tend to be "left out" of the race relations discussion.[160]
>
> Also according to The Washington Post, the Ferguson Police Department
> "bears little demographic resemblance" to the mostly African-American
> community, which already harbored "suspicions of the law enforcement
> agency" preceding Brown's shooting, with 48 of the police force's 53
> officers being white,[161] while the population is only one-third white
> and about two-thirds black.[155][162] An annual report last year by the
> office of Missouri's attorney general concluded that Ferguson police were
> "twice as likely to arrest African Americans during traffic stops as they
> were whites".[155] The officer who shot Brown, Darren Wilson, lives in
> Crestwood, Missouri, 18 miles away from Ferguson.[163]
>
> The Los Angeles Times argues that the situation that exploded in Ferguson
> "has been building for decades", and that protesters initially came from
> the town and neighboring towns that have pockets of poverty, the poorest
> of St. Louis, and lists "the growing challenge of the suburbanization of
> poverty" as the catalyst.[164]
>
> Another aspect of this situation might stem from a system that burdens the
> poor and black in Ferguson. Minor traffic offenses are the starting point,
> and the costs spiral up rapidly if the offenders do not pay the fines on
> time or do not appear in court. The income from court fines represented
> the second largest source of revenue for Ferguson in 2013. On October 1,
> 2014, the city of St. Louis cancelled 220,000 arrest warrants - and gave a
> three month delay to the offenders to get a new court date before the
> warrants would be re-issued.[165]
>
> Boko Haram Slashes Throats, Drowns 50 Civilians in Northern Nigeria
> Breitbart News - Nov 24, 2014 Scores of Boko Haram fighters blocked a
> route linking Nigeria with Chad near the fishing village of Doron Baga on
> the shores of Lake Chad on Thursday and killed a group of 48 fish traders
> on their way to Chad to buy fish, according to Abubakar ...
>
> On torture and the U.S.:
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/20/cia-torture-white-
> house_n_6195032.html
>
> Comment -
>
> In backchannel with Johannes, I realized my position unfortunately is one
> of nihilism, combined with anguish; I see no way out of this violence and
> corruption, and actions of potential healing are for the living of course.
> A memorial in Ferguson, and there are, will be, many, will not change the
> tactics of the police, the deeply-embedded, structural, racism that rules
> the United States; mourning the victims of ISIS doesn't change the tactics
> of ISIS - and perhaps that's the real question - what can be done to
> change ISIS itself? And if nothing, you end up where I feel I'm heading,
> to a state of hopelessness. The world is simultaneously digital flows and
> abject, tortured, hungered, flesh, simultaneously living online, and
> moving among so many favelas, so much poverty, pollution, starvation,
> offline, and again this statistic which haunts me - that one in thirty
> children will be homeless, some time in her or his life.
>
> Nihilism isn't a course of action, and it doesn't mean giving up; instead
> it references taking a stance, most likely useless, just to assert that
> one is human, that anguish is still possible. My own work carries failure
> in its heart, it helps some people (I hope) cope with the world - we all
> hope for that - it has no effect on the systemic, however... On the other
> hand, one may well change the attitudes of the police - through education,
> community learning, dialog, and this is (I think) happening in some
> places. (I'd appreciate any bibliography you might be able to supply on
> nihilism and its potential.)
>
> But ISIS - or other groups believing in absolute inerrancy, absolute
> power, absolute truth, absolute annihilation - what is to be done? How to
> reach them? Is anything possible?
>
> - Alan (apologies for meandering)
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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