All posts by Indy

links, politics

>Obomba and The Obameter

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>Will the U.S. tolerate democracy in Islamic countries?
“Missiles fired from suspected US drones killed at least 15 people inside Pakistan today, the first such strikes since Barack Obama became president and a clear sign that the controversial military policy begun by George W Bush has not changed.”
President Obama ‘orders Pakistan drone attacks’ (Times Online)
2 U.S. Airstrikes Offer a Concrete Sign of Obama’s Pakistan Policy (Washington Post)

Here’s an interesting link where PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign. Make sure to keep an eye on this one!
The Obameter: Tracking Barack Obama’s Campaign Promises

culture, movies, politics

>White of the living dead

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When there’s no more room in Hell the dead will walk the Earth

The most boring of colours – black and white – seem to generate a lot of interest when it comes to skin colour. I’m not that interested in the meaning of colours, really, but I like to provoke and question ”established truths” to call for an open debate about sensitive subjects. For example, I may enjoy stereotype jokes just to see the reaction of the politically correct and the easily offended.
As for the colour of the skin, it is – whether you like it or not – an ideology tied to social status and racial thinking (racial paranoia?). Skin colour – the looks of a person – determines how we judge people. That’s just the way the human mind works – we tend to judge the book by its cover. Then we turn to cultural heritage: where does this person come from? We need to put a label on this guy. Nigger? Albino? Spick? Gringo? Whitey? Afro-Saxon? And only then we care to examine how that person is acting and thinking – features that are way more relevant when forming opinions about people. But of course, it’s easier to cluster people and to speak in broader terms. In discussions it’s often necessary, assuming that people understand that there are always exceptions to the rule. Still, it should be obvious that race is not defined by skin colour…
And that is changing rapidly due to globalisation, unrestricted mass immigration, liberalism, whatever… Fact is that white people in America will become a minority in a near future. Among Americans under the age of 18, blacks and Hispanics, East Asians and South Asians who currently are categorized as racial minorities, will by the year of 2023 account for a majority of the U.S. population (of people under the age of 18, that is) according to a recent report by the U.S. Census Bureau. How will we judge people then? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? Fear of a black planet, anyone?
Read more about that discussion here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901/end-of-whiteness
Oskorei discusses the article (in Swedish) from his perspective here.

But what I really wanted to talk about is the way that whiteness is connected to death, emptiness and abscence. You know, blackness has always been associated with evil, bad stuff (the simplifying Judaeo-Christian use of white and black always comes down to good versus evil (which of course is fucked over by Lucifer, since he’s the bringer of Light!)), meaning that this has become the constructed norm. When studying non-dominant groups the sense of oddness and exceptionality of these groups rules how they are represented: odd and different. That’s why this odd representation has become norm. Also, those studies of dominance are often carried out by the dominant: a person who is either ridden with the guilt of being white (most of the times) or is a single-minded racist with a clear goal. Yes, I’m exaggerating, but I hope you get the point and see the problem – a problem that relates to another problem that always arises when discussing sensitive subjects: Which side are you on? People always assume you have to pick between two opposite sides. I think that by doing so you’re clearly limiting yourself.

That’s why it’s interesting to examine when established truths are turned upside down, relentlessly questioned and inverted. The replacement of stereotypes. I found such an example the other week when reading the book Film and Theory and watching Night of the Living Dead (1968), by many considered to be the best horror movie of all times (I do not agree, but to say it was highly influental is almost an understatement. It’s great, but not the best…).

It’s often easy to cluster black people and blackness. Whiteness is harder to put in one category. Look at the movies: The Godfather is not about white people, it’s about Italian Americans. Brief Encounter is not about white people, it’s about the English middle-class. The Color Purple, on the other hand, is clearly about black people before it’s about poor, southern U.S. people.
Now check out Night of the Living Dead: it’s got a black person cast as the hero, not portraying the typical black male stereotype. Duane Jones, starring as Ben, instantly made history since this was the first time a black actor was cast in a lead role in a major motion picture that did not specify the part had to be played by a black actor. ”It never occurred to me that I was hired because I was black. But it did occur to me that because I was black it would give a different historic element to the film”, said Jones when interviewed about the role.
Ben’s blackness in this movie is clearly there to set him apart from the other characters and their norms, the norms of a white-dominated society. The message is that whites are the living dead. All zombies in the movie are white, and all living whites are portayed as ”dead”: check for example the end of the film where an aerial shot ”looks down on a straggling line of people moving forward uncertainly but inexorably, in exactly the same formation as earlier shots of the zombies. It is only with a cut to a ground level shot that we realize this is a line of vigilantes, not zombies” (Film and Theory, p.746). Living and dead whites act pretty much the same, hence the connection whiteness/death. The film ends with the white vigilantes (acting like zombies) killing Ben, the representative of life.

The sequel, Dawn of the Dead (1978), released ten years later, has the same cast: the black hero Peter (Ken Foree) and the white villains. Same thing with the third movie, Day of the Dead (1985), where Terry Alexander stars as the black hero disassociated from both zombies and white male values. Richard Dyer writes in his essay White: ”The point about Ben, Peter and John (the heroes) is that in their different ways they all have control over their bodies, are able to use them to survive, know how to do things with them. The white characters (with the exception of Fran, Sarah and Billy) lose that control while alive, and come back in the monstrously uncontrolled form of zombiness”.



George A. Romero, creator of the Dead trilogy (I’d like to leave out Land of the Dead (2005) and Diary of the Dead (2007) as well as the remakes of the original Dead movies, since I simply haven’t seen them yet) has this to say about blackness and politics in the first film:

We had cast a black actor in the lead of that film, never having been fully aware of the implications of that. In those days, the news was all shot on film, they didn’t use videotape. So, there were film labs in cities the size of Pittsburgh and we had just finished the film. We had an answer print, threw it in the car and drove it to New York to see if anyone would want to show it. And that night in the car we heard on the radio that Martin Luther King had been killed. Now, all of a sudden the whole ending of Night of the Living Dead takes on so much more resonance because of that.
I believe that we received a lot of undue credit, due to the fact that the black guy gets shot at the end of the film. That was written in the script long before the character was ever cast, be it a white actor or black actor. It was only the last few minutes of that film that we wanted it to look like newsreels. We were all ’60s people and we were angry that peace and love didn’t work. And the world looked like it was in a little worse shape: the Vietnam War, the riots in the streets, the frustration, etc. I just wanted the end of that film to look like newsreel footage.
http://www.popentertainment.com/romero.htm

Somehow I find it hard to believe that the facts I just pointed out (there are many more in Dryer’s essay) – themes that reappear in the two following movies – all happened by coincidence.
But you never know…


More thoughts about race and the hypocrisy surrounding the colour of the skin is to be found in the posts I’ve written about Jim Goad:
The redneck speaks
Jim Goad – Till truth do us part

art, MMA, politics

>Jeff Monson charged with graffiti felony

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Jeff Monson, 37, professional MMA fighter, holding a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree in psychology, was charged with First Degree Malicious Mischief on January 14 for spraypainting an anarchy symbol, a peace symbol and the words “no war” and “no poverty” on the Washington State Capitol. This is a Class B felony carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine. The graffiti cost $19,000 to clean up, court papers state. Yeah, right…
What’s the penalty for wife beating again? Sexual abuse? Child pornography? Here’s an example:
Consumption of child pornography can lead to a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison.
Read the full story here.

As for tonights UFC event, UFC 93, I sure hope Dan Henderson will kick Rich “Ace Ventura” Franklin’s ass all over the place. I’d like to see Shogun Hua make Mark Coleman suffer as well. The rest is just a bonus…

art, humour

>MS Paint album cover artwork mayhem

10 Comments

>There’s this hot Swedish forum called Loseup Sepe IV that I’ve been visiting for ages. The creative members once gathered for attack on MS Paint, the suckiest art software on this planet, to interpret some classic album covers, so here’s some mindblowing art for ya! Hope I got the names right…
Clicking on some of the images will give you a larger version.

Overt

spudster

spudster

non hanxion

biff

spudster

mugabe

Josefsson

spudster

renttu

Pava

Overt

Overt

spudster

Linnéa

teenass cavegay

spudster

Cold Seed

metal david

sikas

biff

Pava

sikas

Tapir

Bug-Eyed Earl
Josefsson

politics, religion

>More terrorism, please!

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In fact, a disproportionate response is exactly what terrorists are hoping to elicit as a way to garner sympathy and support for their cause. The current situation in Gaza is a textbook case. Claiming that Israel was not fulfilling its obligations, Hamas declared an end to a cease-fire and militants subsequently fired rockets into Israel. In response, Israel decided first to bomb and then invade Gaza. As this is written about a dozen Israelis, most of them soldiers, have died since the beginning of Israel’s Dec. 27 offensive against Gaza. By comparison, over 900 Palestinians have been killed, with over half of them believed to be civilians, including children. The casualties and resulting humanitarian crisis will be used by Hamas to recruit more Palestinians to take up arms to avenge the deaths of family and friends.
Charles Peña, Antiwar.com

In short, the near future will without a doubt bring more terrorism, more ethnic cleansing, more suffering, more racism, more insecurity in the world. The war on terroris escalating and life goes on towards death in the fast lane…

Hail power! Hail religion! Hail the human race!

links, politics, quotes

>With each grave…

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To listen and watch without hearing or seeing
allows the indifference, the ignorance and complicity to continue
and deepens with each grave our collective shame.

Just some links and quotes
from relevant articles about the war in Gaza.

Jennifer Loewenstein – If Hamas didn’t exist (zmag)
There was a time when Fatah and the PFLP held the day; when few Palestinians wanted anything to do with Islamist policies and politics. Such politics have nothing to do with primitive rockets being fired over the border, or smuggling tunnels and black-market weapons; just as Arafat’s Fatah had little to do with stones and suicide bombings. The associations are coincidental; the creations of a given political environment. They are the result of something entirely different than what the lying politicians and their analysts are telling you.

Rashid Khalidi – What You Don’t Know About Gaza (New York Times)
Nearly everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.

Elaine C. Hagopian – Why Hamas is not the issue – History matters (counterpunch.org)
The picture changes when history matters. Treating Israeli war crimes as historically detached events, unrelated to its Zionist ideology and militaristic strategy to control all of Palestine, becomes more transparent each day.

Glenn Greenwald – Both parties cheerlead still more loudly for Israel’s war (salon.com)
At exactly the time that worldwide horror over this war is at its peak, the Democratic-led Congress steps up to announce to the world: “this is our war, too; we support whatever Israel does absolutely and without reservations.” We thus make Israel’s wars our wars; its enemies our enemies; its intractable disputes our disputes; and the hostility and anger it generates our own. And we embolden Israel to continue further.

Thalif Deen – Aid Groups Dispute Israeli Claims in Gaza (antiwar.com)
As the Israelis try to justify the massive loss of civilian life in Gaza, their arguments and counter-charges continue to be shot down either by the United Nations or by international human rights organizations.

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, adopted on November 10, 1975 by a vote of 72 to 35 (with 32 abstentions), “determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”.



politics

>The New Historians

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While revisionism at 99% percent of the time is connected to neo-Nazism by people without brains, it might be of interest to look at the New Historians, a group of Israeli (yes, Jews…) historians who are rewriting the traditional Israeli version of Israeli history. This is of course very controversial in a Jewish state run by ruthless Zionists… and of course, some of the New Historians have been labelled self-hating Jews, lost their jobs, suffered death threats and been forced to leave the country. That’s the way the story goes when you criticize Israel, question the Holocaust or denounce Zionism.

The New Historians, compromised of some 120 brave scholars, do not represent a unified body of thought, but they firmly believe that the Israel and Arab countries each have their own share of responsibility for the Arab-Israeli conflict. They’ve simply removed the blindfolds.
Here’s how their history differ from the ”official” version of Israeli history:

  • The official version said that Britain tried to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state; the New Historians claimed that it tried to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
  • The official version said that the Palestinians fled their homes of their own free will; the New Historians said that the refugees were chased out or expelled.
  • The official version said that the balance of power was in favor of the Arabs; the New Historians said that Israel had the advantage both in manpower and in arms.
  • The official version said that the Arabs had a coordinated plan to destroy Israel; the New Historians said that the Arabs were divided.
  • The official version said that Arab intransigence prevented peace; the New Historians said that Israel is primarily to blame for the dead end.

Now, any sane person wouldn’t find these claims controversial. It’s pretty much what critics of Israel and Zionism have pointed out for years. However, since traditional Israeli history is clearly abused, primarily using the Holocaust memory to Nazify Arabs, exclude criticism and justify criminal policies, crimes against humanity and the violation of so many rights (alwaysprotected by the United States), using the above claims is devastating to the Zionist cause. Thus, the New Historians are public enemies number one.

In my opinion, the New Historians take on history with honesty. As already stated, they claim that Israel and Arab countries each have their own share of responsibility for the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Ilan Pappe, for example, has said that Palestinians are ”as violent as the Israelis, no more or less, with only one difference: The difference between the violence of the occupier and the violence of those fighting occupation”. Also, the Palestinians don’t have planes or tanks, they use the tools of the weak. The present situation forces Hamas to aggression. Israel must end their occupation and concentrate on including rather than excluding various ideological movements. That way Hamas’ stance will turn from aggressive to constructive. The New Historians seem to agree on this.
Genuine intellectuals should strive to have respect for someone else’s point of view, and this is where the New Historians succeed. They woke up and realised ”there are other people living here, maybe we should examine how they feel about history”.

The educational system in Israel, the media in Israel, the political system in Israel, sends us Jews in Israel a very clear message from our very early days until we die. The message is very clear, and you can see that message in the platforms of all the political parties in Israel. Everybody agrees with it, whether they are on the left, or on the right. […]
The message is that personal life – not collective life, not even political life – personal life of the Jew in Israel would have been much better had there not been Arabs around. […]
I mean, you can understand – maybe not accept but you can understand – how a society treats immigrants. Sometimes they find that these immigrants come to take my job, you know these politics of racism that are the result of immigration. But we are not even talking about immigrants, we are talking about a country that someone else immigrated into, and turned the local people into immigrants, and said that they have no rights there.
Ilan Pappe, The History of Israel reconsidered

Every 30 years (50 years for military matters, 30 for political matters) the Israeli archives declassify secret material, so when Ilan Pappe in the early 1980’s began studies of ”the other side” quite a lot of material about 1948 was released. He saw a picture of 1948 that he was not familiar with. The documents showed a reality different from what he knew. In 1998 the military archives were opened and the New Historians got even more evidence supporting their claims. But the Israeli people turned against them. This what not what they wanted to hear.
It’s the same thing with Holocaust revisionism. People don’t want the truth because it’s devastating to their cause. They respond with death threats, censorship, jail and just about anything but an open debate.

In 1948 the world knew what was happening and still decided not to do anything, thus sending a sickening message to the state of Israel: It’s okay to get rid of the Palestinians. This is why the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues today as we speak. Will the world react this time? It’s been two weeks of relentless killing and the leaders of the world are still not doing what they should.

The creation of Israel in 1948 was a result of the Holocaust, and it resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, a military occupation of Palestine (didn’t the Jews learn anything from the Holocaust? Or maybe they did…). Israel is attempting to divide the West Bank in one part annexed by Israel and another part maintained as a huge concentration camp (like the Gaza Strip). Zionism is clearly an ideology of racism, exclusion and expulsion. Future Palestinians will not forget, and certainly not forgive. The result of this war will be devastating – not only to Arabs and Jews, but to the whole world. Peace though war – everybody know how silly that sounds.
So why does the world allow Israel to do what it does?

This article is based on a great speech – The History of Israel reconsidered – by Ilan Pappe. Go here to read it.

1948 – lest we forget
Swedish review by Nikanor Teratologen of Ilan Pappe’s book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine