[-empyre-] Shadows in the Dawn

[Johannes Birringer]

dear Alan, and all:

your comment on participant action, and in particular on voting, is of course timely and needs serious reflection, also on the larger spectrum of
what one may now consider necessary, by-all-means-necessary ethical stances and actions. 

Just to mention – I feel it's okay to do here as we earlier heard such lively, interesting reports from other locations (Patrick writing from Dubai, and William from Barcelona) – the voter turn
out in the Netherlands last week for parliamentary elections was considered "massive" >>MASSIVE VOTER TURNOUT IN NETHERLANDS ELECTION THE HIGHEST IN 30 YEARS
--  Roughly 81 percent of eligible voters showed up to cast a ballot in Wednesday's Dutch parliamentary election, according to exit polls conducted by Ipsos for broadcasters NOS and RTL. 
The voter turnout far outpaced the 2012 and 2010 election figures, when about 75 percent arrived at the polls leading to the two Mark Rutte cabinets>>
 [http://nltimes.nl/2017/03/15/massive-voter-turnout-netherlands-election-highest-30-years]

Issues brought up earlier by discussants here included what stance to take to defend civil rights, for example to alleviate anxieties amongst foreign students and visiting scholars and artists, and workers who have come to work
(say, under EU conditions now threatened by Brexit) and entered countries during times of higher mobility, and to help and support refugees who seek shelter or asylum. It was mentioned that teachers encounter fearful students whose parents might be undocumented and who are afraid of losing their support systems, along with students and faculty from the international countries that have been targeted (by US president exec orders) and who might be afraid that if they go to a conference outside of the US  or perhaps return to their homelands they will never be able to enter again....

When Jon sent the info on sanctuary cities, he also (and I agree of course)  mentioned that the notion of "sanctuary can extend beyond the legal and political to the economic, social, and cultural."  
Alan suggested that after speaking to police representatives, it appears " they can't interfere with immigration agents, but they will not aid them. In other words, the federal system takes precedence, but a lot of places will do all they can  do, within legal boundaries, to aid immigrants and refugees."  

That made me wonder whether some agency or group like ICE cares to have police support or aid from a townhall, or whether such agency will just act on their own and proceed?  Now, a "Home Office", as I am beginning to sense in Britain,
does seem to need the compliance and help of institutions such as universities if surveillance and control are to function in their sense of concern gathering evidence that, say, a foreign student on a visa is doing seminar work and showing up regularly to classes. I am not discussing at all any presumptions about terrorist or illegal activities, I am raising the Home Office's presumption that teachers report weekly on the whereabouts of students. When you refuse
you are told there is a compliance law and it's a punishable offense not to report on your students. Have you ever heard of something like this?

So I think I need to turn to Simon more often now, to learn about weirder forms of decomposition, "distributing the essential elements" of theatre, "its languages, in an energetic matrix"....
In the theatre of media, we've found, it does not work, escaping meaning;  in the theatre of war operations, it does not work either, to escape meaning, as I tried to suggest when I quoted Olga Danylyuk yesterday, 
giving testimony that nationalist 'defenders', volunteer battalion commanders, can get away with killing, rape, and torture because they are also considered heroes. The ethos of the commander, that willingness
to die gives you the right to kill is of course perverse, but it also appears to be an ancient, long standing, traditional perversity?  

In such a theatre of operations, betrayal, reporting on others not supporting the national cause, seems to be close at hand; and fear of being betrayed leads to silence. 



Johannes Birringer