[-empyre-] WH vs sanctuary cities

Wed Mar 29 00:19:03 AEDT 2017

Dear Brian,

I completely agree with you, but let's take it on its reverse side:
Trumpism might be a way for a certain number of persons to understand that
what happens here - in the US territory or in the City - already happened
there - "out there" or in the banlieue/suburbs." An awareness.

I remember in 2010, in France, during a huge wave of manifestations against
a project of reform concerning the retirement system, discovering a
technique used by the police to control and scatter the manifestation
(helicopters quasi-immobile just above the protesters + splitting of the
demonstration in several lines + creation of a transient camp with "filter
roadblocking" enabling the police to take a picture of every protester
before they leave the camp (a racist practice that always kept the
French-Arabic persons in the transient camp longer than other people),
etc.) that was already used in the banlieues before being used in the City.

I don't know whether or not it's possible to extend the concept of war and
to use it to speak, à la Agamben, to the war of capitalism against
humanity, or to speak of wars in plural (cf the last book of
Lazzarato+Aliez that I did not read, but I heard of it).

But when I read
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/28/trump-begins-tearing-up-obamas-years-of-progress-on-tackling-climate-change
I think that there is a war at stake, because the problem is not any longer
to produce the rules thanks to which neoliberalism can work, but to create
a space without rules thanks to which a destruction can occur without any
limits, to enable a tiny group of persons to enjoy a huge amount of money
in the short term. The walls that Trump wants to build are those that will
enable his administration to destroy the US territory, preventing the US
citizens to escape to Mexico......

Best,

Frederic

2017-03-27 22:59 GMT-05:00 Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift at gmail.com>:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> While I am far from minimizing the harm that this administration can do (a
> form of harm which has many parallels around the world and whose interest
> is maybe not limited to the US), nonetheless the very CNN article being
> quoted in this thread shows how rhetorical these particular threats are:
>
> "On Monday, Sessions reiterated that cities and states hoping to receive
> federal funds or grants must comply with federal law requiring local
> authorities to share citizenship or immigrant status of individuals to the
> Immigration and Naturalization Service if requested. The attorney general
> did not specify which cities or which funds the department may claw back as
> it has threatened.... The government would likely be limited to pulling
> funds that it can prove are related to the policy it is targeting, namely
> immigration enforcement."
>
> The nitty-gritty as I understand it is that they can pull funding related
> to... Homeland Security. Apparently that's the main destination of federal
> funding to cities these days! So to fight against the sanctuary cities, the
> Trump administration can only weaken what so far seems to be its strongest
> constituency, namely law enforcement.
>
> That said, Frédéric's idea of focusing on war is timely. As the putative
> rhetorical powers of the administration are exhausted, it is obvious that
> they will attempt to use brute force. They won't do it - or at least they
> won't do it first - inside the borders of the US, because they do sort of
> have to obey the laws inside the country: meaning they can deport even more
> immigrants than the Obama administration's record deportations, yes, but
> they can't use unprecedented emergency powers unless they can manufacture
> an emergency. This points toward the impending invention of new definitions
> and practices of war, legitimating new states of emergency. I think a new
> definition and practice of war is a logical development of Trumpism. And I
> also think that rather than making up outlandish ideas of what those new
> definitions and practices will be, one might do better to look coolly at
> the record of the two previous administrations to see what they already
> are, and thereby, to identify where the qualitative thresholds can be
> crossed. Trumpism will stand or fall on the capacity of all levels of
> society - not just the top, the bottom, or the middle - to resist the
> escalation of foreign war and the generalization of its laws to the
> domestic sphere.
>
> Here's the sad, but crucially important truth about the capitalist
> democracies: they call it fascism when the "just" laws of foreign wars are
> "unjustly" applied to the domestic sphere.
>
> On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 10:02 PM, Frederic Neyrat <fneyrat at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Concerning the occupation - "many of us feel that this is no longer
>> "our" country or "our" government, but a kind of occupation or
>> doubling/doppelgange"r - let's think about *The Man in the High Castle *(the
>> TV show at least, for I did not read PKD's book).
>>
>> So, on the one side, the High Castle = the WH; on the other side,
>> Sanctuary Cities that the WH tries to turn into Obituary Cities.
>>
>> I don't know what will be the result of this war. But it's a kind of war,
>> right? Maybe Empyre forum could devote a month to that topic: Wars.
>>
>> My best,
>>
>> Frédéric
>>
>> 2017-03-27 20:48 GMT-05:00 Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com>:
>>
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>>
>>> Sanctuary Cities (apologies if I'm just repeating the obvious)
>>>
>>> This may be of interest only to US residents, for which apologies.
>>> It does give some indication of the brutality of a regime which
>>> pays little attention to protest. The result for refugee and
>>> immigrant communities - even for families legally in the country -
>>> has been devastating.
>>>
>>> http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/27/politics/jeff-sessions-trump-s
>>> anctuary-cities/
>>> http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/25/politics/sanctuary-cities-explained/
>>>
>>> (Sending it out because we're in a sanctuary city and state; both are
>>> poor, and, being pessimistic, I'm waiting for the resulting havoc. What's
>>> so strange, uncanny, for so many of us, is the speed with which the tenor
>>> of the US has changed; we've gone from more traditional protests (against
>>> police brutality, military engagement, women's rights, BLM) to protests
>>> based on a different atmosphere - that of overt racist acts, and potential
>>> or real federal attacks on the poor, Blacks, Latinos, the environment etc.
>>> - attacks from the very institutions that are "supposed" to protect us. So
>>> in a very real sense, many of us feel that this is no longer "our" country
>>> or "our" government, but a kind of occupation or doubling/doppelganger, and
>>> that's hard to come to grips with. I'm speaking of course from two
>>> positions - that of being white, middle-class, and "educated," and that of
>>> being Jewish and "senior," and witnessing, for the first time in years,
>>> acts of anti-semitism on the increase, even in Rhode Island (I won't even
>>> describe the destructive ageism I'm dealing with). So I'm privileged on the
>>> whole, not having to deal with what a friend here calls micro- aggressions
>>> against minorities - micro-aggressions that occur constantly, that have
>>> only increased as well. On a plane of sociality/communality, the US is a
>>> foreign country for many of us, located nowhere, going nowhere but towards
>>> a brutal and militarist future, at least for the time-being.)
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>
>>
>>
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>
>
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