Palestinian medic shot dead by Israeli forces

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paCnT_ZzbsU&feature=youtu.be

THE NEW NRA PRESIDENT IS A DEEP-STATE THUG

DANNY KATCH

May 31, 2018

The NRA peddles conspiracy theories about shadowy “big government” thugs coming to take its members’ guns away — but its new president is notorious for actually being a deep-state conspirator, writes Danny Katch.

https://socialistworker.org/2018/05/31/the-new-nra-president-is-a-deep-state-thug

WHEN THE National Rifle Association (NRA) selected Oliver North as its president last month, you probably reacted with what has become the baseline emotion of the Trump era: entirely unsurprised shock.

It may seem strange for an organization that claims to stand for the right to arm “good guys” against criminals to choose someone best known for illegally running guns and drugs on three continents. But in reality, North and the NRA are made for each other.

For one thing, he’s perfect for an organization that needs to step up its trolling game. The NRA relies on generating outrage in order to make its members feel under siege so they...buy more guns.

No disrespect to the organization’s current leaders working tirelessly to further the trauma of school-shooting victims by calling them crisis actors and demanding that their teachers be armed, but they needed someone with cable news star power to compete for airtime with the Troll-in-Chief.

By bringing in North for a largely ceremonial position, the NRA hopes to copy the White House’s winning formula: Aging C-list Fox News celebrity? Shameless self-promoting con artist? Check and check!

Oliver North is basically Donald Trump without the draft dodging. He even has his own dodgy charity run jointly with presidential pal Sean Hannity.

North got his debut as the new voice of gun fundamentalism came after the May 18 school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, but he came out firing blanks:

The problem that we got is we are trying like the dickens to treat the symptom without treating the disease. The disease in this case isn’t the Second Amendment. The disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence.

They have been drugged in many cases. Nearly all of these perpetrators are male, and they are young teenagers in most cases. And they have come through a culture where violence is commonplace. All you need to do is turn on the TV, go to a movie. If you look at what has happened to the young people, many of these young boys have been on Ritalin since they were in kindergarten.

Gotta do better than that, Ollie. NRA preachers are supposed to bring the fire and brimstone — like when you labeled protesting Parkland students “terrorists.”

Instead, your “it’s these newfangled TV shows, dagnabbit!” routine sounded like a cranky old man. You probably would have added that these whippersnappers are spoiled by participation trophies — if your new bosses didn’t offer almost 200 trophies at its national shooting “championships.” (At the NRA, everyone who isn’t an animal, a criminal, a socialist, a gangbanger or a terrorist...is a winner!)

Fortunately for the NRA, and tragically for everyone else, Ollie will have plenty more mass shootings in the coming months to work on his game.

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NORTH DREW widespread media scorn for his hypocrisy in calling out violent media without mentioning his own history as a paid shill for the “first-person shooter” video game Call of Duty.

But it would be nice to see more attention paid to the far larger issue that the nation’s largest “gun rights” organization is now being headed — okay, figure-headed — by someone with a long record of gun wrongs.

It’s referred to as the Iran-Contra Scandal or Iran-Contra Affair, but scandaland affair are frustratingly tame words that don’t do justice to North’s crimes, and even feed his self-styled reputation as a bad-boy 1980s action hero who played by his own rules to get the job done.

I can’t think of a single word that does the trick, unfortunately, so let’s go with: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy to Give Killers Machine Guns and Flood the U.S. with Crack.

The “contras” were death squads formed from the ranks of the hated Nicaraguan regime that was overthrown in the 1979 Sandinista revolution. Over the next decade, they would kill 40,000 people and be labeled the “worst human rights violators in all of Latin America” by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs.

Naturally, the Reagan administration hailed them as “freedom fighters” — just like Osama bin Laden’s Mujahideen Islamist insurgents challenging the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan — and armed them to the teeth in the early 1980s.

But by 1984, reports that the CIA had mined Nicaraguan harbors and advised the contras in how to kidnap and kill government officials led Congress to cut off military aid to the contras.

So what did the White House do? It simply went around Congress.

Here’s how it worked: Oliver North collaborated with Israel to supply weapons to Iran — supposedly the arch-enemy of the U.S. and Israel — in exchange for getting Iran’s ally Hezbollah to release hostages in Lebanon. And the proceeds of the weapons sales were used to supply the contras with “munitions and lethal aid.”

The dirty war on the Sandinista government was also financed by running cocaine from Central America into the U.S. — all while Ronald Reagan was launching a “war on drugs” that would lead to millions of low-level users and dealers being locked up, while anti-poverty spending was effectively transferred into expanding police and prisons.

All this is to say that even the most far-fetched racist fantasy about immigrants rights organizations being led by the MS-13 street gang are roughly equivalent to what’s happened at the NRA: an organization that claims to fight for legally responsible gun ownership making Oliver North its leader.

Oh right, that’s another thing. Oliver North has his fingerprints all over the origins of MS-13 — winner of the 2018 right wing boogeyman of the year award — which was formed behind prison walls inside the U.S. by poor Salvadorans caught up in the drug-war dragnet after fleeing North’s dirty war in their home country.

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ALL TOLD, bringing in Oliver North is the latest evidence that the NRA just might be completely full of shit.

This is an organization, remember, that claims to militantly defend individual liberty against “government control.” Amid the post-Parkland outrage, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre warned about shadowy enemies, whose goal “is to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms, so they can eradicate all individual freedoms.”

LaPierre made his name back in the 1990s when he declared that a ban on semi-automatic weapons “gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.”

There are, in fact, government thugs who do just this on a daily basis in poor and nonwhite neighborhoods. They’re called police.

But as the Washington Post’s Radley Balko points out, the NRA is almost always silent about police shootings — and is actually totally cool with local police forces becoming militarized, both in weaponry and in mindset.

Making a former covert operations spook its president is another order of cognitive dissonance for an organization that traffics in conspiracy theories about secret government plans to round up all the true patriots.

And that’s true even if you don’t believe the reporting from Wired about a conspiracy hatched in Reagan’s Federal Emergency Management Agency to use a secret database to round up American dissidents and throw them into detention camps...run by Oliver North.

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HOW CAN the NRA be so mind-blowingly hypocritical?

Shane Bauer pointed out years ago in Mother Jones that the NRA straddles a “delicate line between glorifying law enforcement and fanning fears of big, tyrannical government” because the organization is both a membership-based organization that wants looser gun laws for its dues-payers and a lobbyist for weapons manufacturers that want to promote further militarization (and sales) in police departments.

That’s all true. But it’s also important to see the connecting lines between the NRA’s seemingly contradictory positions. After all, it really isn’t that hard to see a common thread in supporting racist cops and supporting racist “stand your ground” vigilantes.

Racism isn’t the entirety of the NRA’s politics, but rather a key component of its thoroughly warped understanding of tyranny and freedom.

By “big government,” the NRA doesn’t mean the military, police, prisons, immigration Gestapo, spy agencies and other forces of repression that claim the majority of government budgets in the U.S. No, they mean elected lawmakers who (occasionally) try to represent their constituents by passing widely supported bills to regulate guns and gun corporations.

By tyranny, they mean democracy. And by freedom, they mean the inalienable right for their constituency of mostly well-off white men — who, indeed, were the only people who the Founding Fathers intended to have democracy — to do whatever the hell it takes to protect their property.

For years, the NRA has taken this longstanding reactionary outlook and added the gasoline of manufactured outrage necessary to increase sales of expensive guns to people who already own a bunch.

Much of this outrage used to stem from the organization’s self-image as decent, lawful citizens unfairly treated by cultural elites. But all sorts of masks are coming off in the Trump presidency — and by bringing in Oliver North, the NRA is making it clear which side of the freedom/tyranny divide they’re really on.

A Master is a vanishing mediator who gives you back to yourself

http://crisiscritique.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Zizek_Politics.pdf

A true Master is not an agent of discipline and prohibition, his message is not “You cannot!”, also not “You have to…!”, but a releasing »You can!« - what?

Do the impossible, i.e., what appears impossible within the coordinates of the existing constellation – and today, this means something very precise: you can think beyond capitalism and liberal democracy as the ultimate framework of our lives.

A Master is a vanishing mediator who gives you back to yourself, who delivers you to the abyss of your freedom: when we listen to a true leader, we discover what we want (or, rather, what we always-already wanted without knowing it).

A Master is needed because we cannot accede to our freedom directly – for gain this access we have to be pushed from outside since our “natural state” is one of inert hedonism, of what Badiou called “human animal.”

The underlying paradox is here that the more we live as “free individuals with no Master,” the more we are effectively non-free, caught within the existing frame of possibilities – we have to be pushed/ disturbed into freedom by a Master.

Slavoj Žižek, “The Impasses of Today’s Radical Politics,” page 42

Page 42

The authentic Leader enables me actually to choose myself

"The paradox to accept is that in democracy, individuals do tend to remain stuck on the level of 'servicing goods' – often, one does need a Leader in order to 'do the impossible'. The authentic Leader is literally the One who enables me actually to choose myself – my subordination to him is the highest act of freedom."
Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (2001, Verso, London. Page 247)

When we listen to an authentic political leader, we discover what we want

‘Manning is free’

Published by Slavoj Žižek on December 16, 2014

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/16/-sp-dear-chelsea-manning-birthday-messages-from-edward-snowden-terry-gilliam-and-more

Dear Chelsea,

We often hear that today’s radical left is unable to propose a feasible alternative. What you did simply was the alternative. To quote Gandhi, you were the change you wanted to see.

For this, you risked everything, your life included. You didn’t do it for any personal gain like money or fame. What you did was also not part of any large political project. You found yourself in the position of a person who knew too much. And, out of a sense of duty, you simply did what you had to do with this knowledge. If this is not an ethical act in the strict Kantian sense, an act of moral freedom, of doing a duty for duty’s sake, then this term has no meaning whatsoever.

The price you are paying for this is terrifying. One can only imagine to what painful experiences you were submitted during the long months after your arrest, how your body and mind were treated. Even if we discount direct torture, there was isolation, the humiliation of being forced to do private things in front of others. It is a true miracle that, after this ordeal, you didn’t break down but retained your full dignity as well as the surprising ability to report on what you did and what you went through in a calm rational way.

This is why, when I am asked about freedom today, the first answer that comes to my mind is: Manning is free, much more free than all of us who are “free” to choose this or that cake or drink, holiday destination, etc. You confront us with our freedom when we would sometimes prefer to ignore it. As such, you are – if I may risk and use this word – one of our true masters. They are very rare today. A true master is not an agent of discipline and prohibition, their message is not “You cannot!”, also not, “You have to …!”. Their message is a releasing “You can!” – what? Do the impossible, do what appears impossible.

When we listen to an authentic political leader, we discover what we want (or, rather, what we always, already wanted without knowing it). And we become aware that we are not just caught in a hopeless stalemate, that we can do something for what we want. A master is needed because we cannot accede to our freedom directly; we have to be pushed. Therein resides the difference between a true master and, say, a Stalinist leader who pretends to know (better than the people themselves) what people really want (what is really good for them), and is ready to force this on them even against their will.

But an authentic master does not need to be a leader. That’s why one of the few persons to whom I dare to compare you to is Marek Edelman (1919-2009), a Jewish-Polish political and social activist who was the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Before the second world war, he was active in the Jewish Labour Bund; during the war, he co-founded the Jewish Combat Organisation, took part in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising as one of its leaders, and also in the citywide 1944 Warsaw uprising. From the 1970s, he collaborated with the Workers’ Defence Committee; as a member of Solidarity, he took part in the Polish round table talks of 1989. While fighting antisemitism all his life, Edelman publicly defended Palestinian resistance, claiming that the Jewish self-defence for which he had fought was in danger of crossing the line into oppression. Because of this, he never got official Israeli recognition for his heroism. Edelman knew when to act (against Germans), when to make public statements (for Palestinians), when to get engaged in political activity (for Solidarity), and when just to be there. In the wake of the growing antisemitic campaign in 1968, he decided to stay in Poland, comparing himself to the stones of the ruined buildings at the site of the Auschwitz camp: “Someone had to stay here with all those who perished here, after all.” This says it all: what mattered was ultimately his bare and muted presence there, not his declarations – it was the awareness of Edelman’s presence, the fact of his “being there,” which set people free.

And exactly the same holds for you. The very awareness of you, of your deeds and your fate, makes us free. But this freedom is a difficult freedom – it is also an obligation to follow in your steps. Maybe, in this way, we can also make your birthday a little bit happier.

Intense immersion into the social body, in a shared ritualistic performance

from "Britain’s royal wedding had an emancipatory subtext," at:
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/428134-royal-wedding-uk-zizek/






by Slavoj Žižek




[...]







...in an authentic act of representation, people do not simply assert through a representative what they want, they only become aware of what they want through the act of representation.







[...]







We should therefore shamelessly assert intense immersion into the social body, a shared ritualistic performance that would put all good old liberals into shock and awe by its “totalitarian” intensity – something Wagner was aiming at in his great ritualistic scenes at the end of Acts I and III of Parsifal.




Like Parsifal, the great concerts of the German hard-rock band Rammstein (say, the one in the arena of Nimes on July 23, 2005) should also be called, as Wagner called his Parsifal, Bühnenweihfestspiel (“sacred festival performance”) which is the vehicle for the collectivity’s affirmation of itself.




All liberal-individualist prejudices should fall here – yes, each individual should be fully immersed into a crowd, joyfully abandoning their individual critical mind. Meanwhile, passion should obliterate reasoning.




[...]

Žižek: Britain’s royal wedding had an emancipatory subtext

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/428134-royal-wedding-uk-zizek/

Progressives who are inclined to lash out at the monarchy and have fired their vitriol at the new Duke and Duchess of Sussex may be missing the point.

Leftist critics were right about Britain’s recent royal wedding, but for the wrong reason. They conceded how Meghan Markle is a sympathetic figure - a feminist and a mixed-race woman - but they opposed the form of monarchy that was celebrated (if we ignore a few complaints about taxpayers’ money being spent).

What these critics failed to perceive is the emancipatory dimension of this form itself, of the big public ritual which socially links a community. To explain this point, we should go back to Novalis, the key figure of German Romanticism, who is usually perceived as a representative of the conservative turn of Romanticism, but his position is much more paradoxical.

Monarchy is the highest form of republic, “no king can exist without a republic and no republic without a king”. 

Or, to quote Nathan Ross’s resume: “the true measure of a Republic consists of the lived relation of the citizens to the idea of the whole in which they live. The unity that a law creates is merely coercive. /…/ The unifying factor must be a sensual one, a comprehensive human embodiment of the morals that make a common identity possible. For Novalis, the best such mediating factor for the idea of the republic is a monarch. /…/ While the institution might satisfy our intellect, it leaves our imagination cold. A living, breathing human being /…/ provides us with a symbol that we can more intuitively embrace as standing in relation to our own existence. /…/ The concepts of the Republic and monarch are not only reconcilable, but presuppose one another.”

Guessing Game

Novalis’ point is not just some banality such as how social identification should not be merely intellectual (the point also made by Sigmund Freud in his Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis).

Instead, the core of his argument concerns the “performative”dimension of political representation: in an authentic act of representation, people do not simply assert through a representative what they want, they only become aware of what they want through the act of representation.

So, Novalis argues that the role of the king should not be to give people what they think they want, but to elevate and give measure to their desires: “the political, or the force that binds people together, should be a force that gives measure to desires rather than merely appealing to desires.”

There is an important insight given here: politics is not just about pursuing one’s interest. At a more basic level, it is about offering a vision of communal identity which defines the frame of our interests. As for the obvious reproach that such massive rituals were practiced by Hitler (not to mention Stalin), one should never forget that, in organizing the big Nazi performances, Hitler copied (and changed, of course)  Social-Democratic and Communist public events. So, instead of rejecting this idea as proto-Fascist, one should rather look for its Leftist antecedents and associations. 

And one doesn’t have to look far. Just recall the staged performance of "Storming the Winter Palace" in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, on 7 November 1920. Tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, students and artists worked round the clock, living on kasha (the tasteless wheat porridge), tea and frozen apples, and preparing for the performance at the very place where the event "really took place" three years earlier; their work was coordinated by army officers, as well as by the avant-garde artists, musicians and directors, from Malevich to Meyerhold.

Although this was acting and not "reality," the soldiers and sailors were playing themselves - many of them not only actually participated in the event of 1917, but were also simultaneously involved in the real battles of the Civil War that were raging in the near vicinity of Petrograd, a city under siege and suffering from severe shortages of food.

A contemporary commented on the performance: "The future historian will record how, throughout one of the bloodiest and most brutal revolutions, all of Russia was acting"; and the formalist theoretician Viktor Shklovski noted that "some kind of elemental process is taking place where the living fabric of life is being transformed into the theatrical."

This was not a performance of actors for the public, but a performance in which the public itself was the actor.

We should therefore shamelessly assert intense immersion into the social body, a shared ritualistic performance that would put all good old liberals into shock and awe by its “totalitarian” intensity – something Wagner was aiming at in his great ritualistic scenes at the end of Acts I and III of Parsifal.

Like Parsifal, the great concerts of the German hard-rock band Rammstein (say, the one in the arena of Nimes on July 23, 2005) should also be called, as Wagner called his Parsifal, Bühnenweihfestspiel (“sacred festival performance”) which is the vehicle for the collectivity’s affirmation of itself.

All liberal-individualist prejudices should fall here – yes, each individual should be fully immersed into a crowd, joyfully abandoning their individual critical mind. Meanwhile, passion should obliterate reasoning.

Thus, to conclude, and circle back to the marriage of Meghan and Harry: criticize it as much as you want, but don’t forget to look for a radical emancipatory version of what this spectacle achieved.