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	<title>Center for a Stateless Society » Commentary</title>
	
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		<title>Mr. President, Chelsea Manning Would Like a Word</title>
		<link>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/c4sscommentary/~3/CONJOPDU_n8/35198</link>
		<comments>http://c4ss.org/content/35198#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2015 19:00:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nick Ford]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Commentary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[barack obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chelsea Manning]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Edward Snowden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Juan Mendez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nathan Goodman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[political prisoners]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison abolition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison industrial complex]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[State of the Union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[transphobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[whistleblowing]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://c4ss.org/?p=35198</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As usual, the State of the Union address was a top to bottom massacre of verbiage. Every year the English language struggles to survive an onslaught of what can only be described as total verbal hangover from a year of rhetorical binge drinking. Somehow, some way, one man manages to stand on a platform (while two other...]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>As usual, the <a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/01/20/378680818/transcript-president-obamas-state-of-the-union-address">State of the Union address </a>was a top to bottom massacre of verbiage. Every year the English language struggles to survive an onslaught of what can only be described as total verbal hangover from a year of rhetorical binge drinking. Somehow, some way, one man manages to stand on a platform (while two other guys sit awkwardly behind him clapping every now and then) and sum up a bunch of nonsense over the course of an hour or more.</p>
<p>The results are never pretty and picking out something objectionable is easier than shooting fish in a barrel. But if I had to pick one of the most egregious quotes from Obama it&#8217;s this: &#8220;[W]e defend free speech, and advocate for political prisoners, and condemn the persecution of women, or religious minorities, or people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.&#8221;</p>
<p>Mr. President, do you <em>know</em> who <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning">Chelsea Manning</a> is?</p>
<p>I mean, you <em>seem</em> to know who she is. You&#8217;ve said in the past that Manning is guilty of  <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/04/22/video-of-obama-on-bradley-manning-he-broke-the-law/">&#8220;breaking the law,&#8221;</a>  thus implying that she deserves her sentence of up to 35 years in prison. And you&#8217;ve also commented that the Pentagon assures you that her conditions are <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/03/president-obama-says-hell-take-the-pentagons-word-for-it-treatment-of-bradley-manning-is-appropriate/">&#8220;appropriate and are meeting our basic standards&#8221;</a> when she was put in solitary confinement.</p>
<p>This, despite the fact that, at the time, she was being &#8220;&#8230; confined for 23 hours a day to a single cell, measuring around 72 square feet, equipped only with a bed, toilet and sink.&#8221; And the fact that it was an illegally lengthy <em>pretrial detention </em>didn&#8217;t seem to matter much to Obama either, despite there being pretty good grounds for it being a <a href="http://c4ss.org/content/31980">human rights violation</a>.</p>
<p>As the Center for a Stateless Society&#8217;s Nathan Goodman <a href="http://c4ss.org/content/31980">wrote</a>, &#8220;UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez investigated the conditions under which Manning was held and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/12/bradley-manning-cruel-inhuman-treatment-un" target="_blank">concluded</a> &#8216;that the 11 months under conditions of solitary confinement … constitutes at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture. If the effects in regards to pain and suffering inflicted on Manning were more severe, they could constitute torture.'&#8221;</p>
<p>Given this history of knowing ignorance, how <em>could</em> Obama not know about Chelsea Manning? Obama&#8217;s history of protecting other big political dissidents is also abysmal. Just ask <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden">Edward Snowden</a>, who had to <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Flight_from_the_United_States">flee the country</a></em> to make sure he wasn&#8217;t detained like Chelsea Manning, before he released information to the public that the government found embarrassing. Is that a sign of a free society?</p>
<p>I suspect Obama <em>does </em>know who Chelsea Manning is, but for some reason she doesn&#8217;t <em>count</em> as someone who has been persecuted for her struggles as someone who is transgender &#8212; despite the fact that during her pre-trial hearing Marine Corps Master Sgt. Craig Blenis defended the pretrial detention on the basis of Manning&#8217;s gender dysphoria because <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/05/mannings-sexuality/1749045/">&#8220;that’s not normal, sir.&#8221;</a></p>
<p>So does persecution of transgender people only count when governments aren&#8217;t the persecutors? Is Chelsea Manning not a victim of persecution much like the <a href="http://transequality.org/Resources/NCTE_Blueprint_for_Equality2012_Prison_Reform.pdf">inordinate number</a> of other trans people locked in prison? And what is Manning if <em>not</em> a political prisoner who has been locked away for up to <em>35</em> years because she helped an undefined enemy in some nebulous and apparently <a href="http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/08/01/the-government-cant-prove-bradley-manning-hurt-anyone-but-joe-klein-knows/">impossible to argue for</a> way?</p>
<p>At the heart of this is Obama&#8217;s ability to both recognize and obfuscate. Sure he <em>knows</em> about Chelsea Manning, but the question is whether or not he <em>cares. W</em>ith statements like the one he made in his address, we can see the answer before us quite clearly.</p>
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		<title>The FBI is Great at Disrupting (Its Own) “Terror Plots”</title>
		<link>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/c4sscommentary/~3/yC1ReSlm5DA/35190</link>
		<comments>http://c4ss.org/content/35190#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 21 Jan 2015 19:00:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kevin Carson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Commentary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[entrapment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FBI]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hierarchy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[matrix reality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[monopoly]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sting operation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united states]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[war]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://c4ss.org/?p=35190</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[On January 14 the US Department of Justice announced that the Joint Terrorism Task Force had disrupted the latest &#8220;domestic terrorism plot&#8221; &#8212; this time by &#8220;a Cincinnati-area man &#8230; to attack the U.S. Capital and kill government officials.&#8221; House Speaker  John Boehner immediately cited the disrupted plot as evidence that Congress should think carefully before refusing...]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>On January 14 the US Department of Justice announced that the Joint Terrorism Task Force had disrupted the latest &#8220;domestic terrorism plot&#8221; &#8212; this time by &#8220;a Cincinnati-area man &#8230; to attack the U.S. Capital and kill government officials.&#8221; House Speaker  John Boehner immediately cited the disrupted plot as evidence that Congress should think carefully before refusing to renew the NSA&#8217;s bulk data collection powers. Only it turns out the feds had at least as much to do with hatching the plot as did the alleged plotter, Christopher Cornell.</p>
<p>The FBI investigator became aware of Cornell&#8217;s pro-ISIS comments on Twitter thanks to a tip-off from an unnamed informant who “began cooperating with the FBI in order to obtain favorable treatment with respect to his criminal exposure on an unrelated case.” The informant, on FBI orders, arranged two meetings with Cornell where they discussed attacks on the capital, after which the FBI arrested him to &#8220;prevent&#8221; the attacks. In other words, it identified Cornell as a suspect entirely on the basis of his expression of radical political opinions, with the help of a jailhouse snitch who rolled over in response to prosecutorial blackmail. And the actual &#8220;plot&#8221; was worked out only in subsequently arranged meetings in which one party &#8212; working for the FBI &#8212; may well have been leading Cornell. It wasn&#8217;t for nothing that ecological activist Judi Bari said &#8220;the first person to mention bringing dynamite is probably a fed.&#8221;</p>
<p>In this the Cornell case has a lot in common with a great many other so-called &#8220;domestic terrorism plots&#8221; federal law enforcement has &#8220;disrupted,&#8221; going back to the Lackawanna Six. A good example is the so-called &#8220;plot&#8221; of the Newburgh Four, who supposedly plotted to blow up synagogues and attack a military base. The judge commented that the government &#8220;came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles,&#8221; in the process making a terrorist out of a man &#8220;whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope&#8221; (&#8220;<a href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/21/us-terrorism-prosecutions-often-illusion">US: Terrorism Prosecutions Often An Illusion</a>,&#8221; <em>Human Rights Watch</em>, July 21, 2014).</p>
<p>This reminds me of a story I read &#8212; from <em>Dilbert</em> cartoonist Scott Adams, I think &#8212; about a software company that offered programmers a bonus for every bug they detected in code. Predictably, creating bugs to &#8220;detect&#8221; became a major source of revenue for employees. H.L. Mencken once remarked on government&#8217;s tendency &#8220;to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.&#8221;</p>
<p>We see this in the dismaying, <em>Starship Troopers</em>-like media narrative involving any and all armed government personnel in uniform. Last weekend&#8217;s highest U.S. box office receipts came not from <em>Selma</em> (the story of oppressed people organizing to fight for their freedom) but from <em>American Sniper</em>. The latter movie glorifies a vile wretch who gloated over all the &#8220;savages&#8221; (his word for any male age 16 to 60) he murdered in Iraq, on the grounds that he was saving American troops from being shot at. Never mind that the people in Iraq were shooting back at an invading army in their own country. Domestically, we see the same phenomenon with shows like <em>COPS</em>, and local news coverage of police in paramilitary gear (breathlessly referred to as &#8220;the authorities&#8221; by nitwit reporters) storming alleged &#8220;meth labs.&#8221;</p>
<p>And remember, the very concept of a &#8220;sting operation&#8221; (also known as &#8220;entrapment&#8221;) invokes the principle that some human beings are superior to the law. The first professional police forces were justified on the grounds that they were simply being paid to exercise the same posse comitatus powers of &#8220;citizen&#8217;s arrest&#8221; possessed by any other member of society. By that standard, if it&#8217;s illegal for an ordinary citizen to solicit or instigate illegal activity, it should be illegal for anyone &#8212; including uniformed state officials.</p>
<p>But most importantly, this is an example of how the state mostly &#8220;solves&#8221; problems of its own making &#8212; and has an incentive to keep creating more problems to justify giving it the power and resources to &#8220;solve&#8221; them.</p>
<p>Translations of this article:</p>
<ul>
<li>Spanish, <a href="http://c4ss.org/content/35220">El FBI es excelente para frustrar (sus propios) &#8220;complots terroristas&#8221;</a></li>
</ul>
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		<title>“Terror” as Victim Rhetoric</title>
		<link>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/c4sscommentary/~3/jCrwHxXhkWU/35159</link>
		<comments>http://c4ss.org/content/35159#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Jan 2015 19:00:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ryan Calhoun]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Commentary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Charlie Hebdo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Europe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[France]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[terror]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[war]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://c4ss.org/?p=35159</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The entire purpose of the language of terrorism is to cloak the sentiments of war in a victim rhetoric. You see, France isn&#8217;t &#8220;at war,&#8221; they&#8217;re merely responding to &#8220;terror&#8221; attacks. Those wretched, vile gunmen are not warriors or soldiers, they&#8217;re madmen, lone wolf terrorists. The attack on Charlie Hebdo&#8216;s office on January 7 might otherwise be...]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The entire purpose of the language of terrorism is to cloak the sentiments of war in a victim rhetoric. You see, France isn&#8217;t &#8220;at war,&#8221; they&#8217;re merely responding to &#8220;terror&#8221; attacks. Those wretched, vile gunmen are not warriors or soldiers, they&#8217;re madmen, lone wolf terrorists.</p>
<p>The attack on <em>Charlie Hebdo</em>&#8216;s office on January 7 might otherwise be considered an invasion, an attack from outside forces France has declared war on. But war is far too brutish for the 21st century, where of course violence is on an inevitable downturn and world peace is just around the corner if not for a few meddling terror cells.</p>
<p>Calling such events &#8220;terrorism&#8221; is just a way of defamiliarizing people with the concept of war. No matter what, an attack on any western nation&#8217;s soil is terror, wholly undeserved, never the result of an ongoing worldwide conflict but merely the work of crazed individuals.</p>
<p>Delude yourself no longer with these politically correct terms. There&#8217;s a war, many western nations are involved in it, and attacks on your home turf are a result of it. Maybe the neocons would be a little less annoying if they stopped trying to dress this up as something else. Maybe people would be more hesitant to simply pick a side and declare the other side nothing more than barbarous lunatics if we actually talked honestly. It would at least do us all the service of clearing up people&#8217;s intentions and allow those around us to judge the situation more accurately.</p>
<p>All acts of war involve terror. The horror of war is not a byproduct, it is the intention. One cannot divorce terror from war anymore than one can divorce pleasure from sex. Treating an entire side of a conflict as the mere triggering of emotions among a geopolitical constituency reinforces that society’s self-righteousness and blinds them to the environment of terror present constantly throughout middle eastern nations that the west has established.</p>
<p>Perhaps this victim rhetoric has been generated by western militaries and media mouthpieces because they know the painful truth: Islamic terrorists are simply more efficient in provoking a feeling of helplessness. While the psychological effects of the west’s war of terror on the Arab world (and beyond) cannot be overstated, it is not difficult to notice just how much more reactive and frightened westerners get when these attacks occur, because they have been sheltered from the results of war for so long.</p>
<p>This is not to say their panic is not without justification. It is perfectly normal to become fearful and aggressive when you realize that no public space is safe, that a group of extremists could, at any moment, decide to make you a target of their violent political agenda. But since theirs is an act of terror and ours an act of defensive war, or more sickeningly twisted, a humanitarian intervention, we as a civilization do not have to come face to face in our discourse on this most horrifying of realities.</p>
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		<title>The Queering of America</title>
		<link>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/c4sscommentary/~3/1u2KpX0OGGo/35132</link>
		<comments>http://c4ss.org/content/35132#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2015 19:00:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joel Schlosberg]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Commentary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[same-sex marriage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Supreme Court]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united states]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://c4ss.org/?p=35132</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The US Supreme Court’s announcement on January 16 that it will decide the constitutionality of state-level bans on same-sex marriage has elicited the predictable whining about judicial activism. The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins pleads “there is nothing in the Constitution that empowers the courts to silence the people and impose a nationwide redefinition of...]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The US Supreme Court’s <a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/011615zr_f2q3.pdf">announcement</a> on January 16 that it will decide the constitutionality of state-level bans on same-sex marriage has elicited the predictable whining about judicial activism. The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins <a href="http://www.frc.org/newsroom/at-last-time-for-the-supreme-court-to-uphold-the-freedom-of-the-people-to-uphold-natural-marriage">pleads</a> “there is nothing in the Constitution that empowers the courts to silence the people and impose a nationwide redefinition of marriage,” neglecting to specify where in the Constitution the government is granted the power to get involved in defining marriage to begin with.</p>
<p>In fact, the trajectory of the rise of gay rights was foreshadowed by the <a href="http://i.cbc.ca/1.2084659.1381982684!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/original_300/greening-cover.jpg">opening words</a> of Charles A. Reich’s <em>The Greening of America</em>: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act.” As <em>Reason</em>’s Jesse Walker <a href="“Contrary%20to the rhetoric you still hear from some of the idea's opponents,">explains</a>: “Contrary to the rhetoric you still hear from some of the idea&#8217;s opponents, gay marriage was not cooked up in some D.C. laboratory and imposed on America by social engineers. It was built from the bottom up, and it was alive at a time when the typical social engineer thought homosexuality was a disease.”</p>
<p>Indeed, the political response to burgeoning social acceptance of gays and lesbians has been so belated, so compromised by realpolitik, so evasively “evolving,” that it is hard for Democratic partisans to take credit. Author S.T. Joshi, surveying liberal progress that supposedly “will render the notion of small government a quaint eccentricity of the distant past,” <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=VM5NG0sxb9kC&amp;pg=PA17&amp;lpg=PA17&amp;dq=%E2%80%9CIt+is+a+singular+irony+that,+even+though+Republican%22&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=AfiDoaC7T_&amp;sig=HWjhvIzc7wg1UbKHzJhdkgPw7lU&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=NsK6VP6COoyuggSQ8INg&amp;ved=0CCAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=%E2%80%9CIt%20is%20a%20singular%20irony%20that%2C%20even%20though%20Republican%22&amp;f=false">avows</a> that “it is a singular irony that, even though Republican administrations have been in power for sixteen of the twenty-four years between 1981 and 2005, gay rights have made strides almost as revolutionary as women’s rights had done.” Unmentioned is the &#8220;irony&#8221; of it being that span&#8217;s Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law.</p>
<p>According to Perkins, upholding man-and-woman-only marriage referenda is required if “self-government still matters in a country claiming that ‘We, the People’ rule.” But pioneers of gay liberation offered lessons against not just such crude majoritarianism, but any social necessity of &#8220;rule&#8221; at all. Writer Oscar Wilde, imprisoned under the UK’s Victorian decency laws, <a href="http://praxeology.net/OW-SMS.htm">insisted</a> that “authority and compulsion are out of the question.  All association must be quite voluntary.” Social critic Paul Goodman, fired for open bisexuality in 1940, was just as nonconformist in his political identification, <a href="http://raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu/files/article-pdfs/casey-nelson-blake-raritan-volumn-xxxxii.pdf">described</a> by Casey Nelson Blake as “not a Marxist, not a sober social democrat, not a liberal ‘realist’ &#8212; an anarchist” for whom, in his own words, “A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life.”</p>
<p>Charles A. Reich didn’t quite get it right. The coming revolution’s final act won’t be changing the political structure, but dismantling it.</p>
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		<title>Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Dreams Did You Kill Today?</title>
		<link>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/c4sscommentary/~3/lecsyMLipMc/35103</link>
		<comments>http://c4ss.org/content/35103#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2015 19:00:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joel Schlosberg]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Commentary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hierarchy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[LBJ]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[monopoly]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Voltairine de Cleyre]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The critically acclaimed film Selma&#8216;s conspicuous absence from Academy Award nominations for Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor for David Oyelowo’s portrayal of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. follows its concerted targeting by flunkies of Lyndon B. Johnson outraged by its portrayal of friction between King and the arch-war criminal president. One leading critic,...]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The critically acclaimed film <em>Selma</em>&#8216;s conspicuous absence from Academy Award nominations for Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor for David Oyelowo’s portrayal of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. follows its concerted targeting by flunkies of Lyndon B. Johnson outraged by its portrayal of friction between King and the arch-war criminal president. One leading critic, Joseph A. Califano, Jr., casually states “I was then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s special assistant,” an admission he should be embarrassed to make in public, let alone in a national newspaper.</p>
<p>LBJ Presidential Library director Mark Updegrove, chiding <em>Selma</em> for avoiding the legislative-centric approach of Steven Spielberg’s <em>Lincoln</em>, protests that LBJ has been vouched for by George W. Bush. Bill Moyers calls it “the worst kind of creative license” to hold LBJ responsible for the FBI&#8217;s surveillance of King &#8212; surveillance initially authorized by another liberal icon, Robert F. Kennedy. A more appropriate reaction to the FBI&#8217;s activities portrayed in the film (and to the extensive reportage of its misdeeds in the recent documentary <a href="https://www.1971film.com/"><em>1971</em></a>) would be indignation that the bureau still exists.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, <em>Selma</em>&#8216;s defenders downplay its (and their) criticism of LBJ. We’ve come a long way since Disney animator Ward Kimball&#8217;s anti-Vietnam War protest film <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PZBtWNxlQs">Escalation</a></em> skewered LBJ with phallic symbolism.</p>
<p>But the real issue goes beyond personal loyalty to LBJ, or even a general view of politicians as well-meaning by those fond of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s apocryphal “now make me do it.” <em>Time</em>’s David Kaiser lets the cat out of the bag, fretting that <em>Selma</em> “contributes to a popular but mistaken view of how progress in the United States can occur. The civil rights movement won its greatest triumphs in the 1950s and 1960s by working through the system as well as in the streets.” <em>Forbes</em>&#8216; Mark Hughes notes that “ultimately the real cause of the backlash against <em>Selma</em> [is that] it suggests the black community saved itself.”</p>
<p>Debating the extent to which the civil rights movement prodded politics ignores its direct-action achievements, with on-the-ground victories for desegregation preceding legislation, sometimes by <a href="http://fee.org/freeman/detail/opposing-the-civil-rights-act-means-opposing-civil-rights">years</a>. Indeed, social critic Paul Goodman went so far as to assess the civil rights movement as &#8220;almost classically decentralist and anarchist.”</p>
<p>Moreover, LBJ’s domestic program was elitist and of a piece with Vietnam. King <a href="http://c4ss.org/content/23797">attested</a> that the War on Poverty’s top-down programs “have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Examination bears out Murray Rothbard’s conclusion: “The cruelest myth fostered by the liberals is that the Great Society functions as a great boon and benefit to the poor; in reality, when we cut through the frothy appearances to the cold reality underneath, the poor are the major victims.&#8221;</p>
<p>LBJ’s quip that “the only power I&#8217;ve got is nuclear” wasn’t entirely hyperbolic. Heeding Voltairine de Cleyre’s summation of the history of the anti-slavery movement &#8212; &#8220;as to what the politicians did, it is one long record of &#8216;how-not-to-do-it'&#8221; &#8212; such force is also the only power we won’t need.</p>
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		<title>Free Speech Supporters Should Still Criticise Charlie Hebdo</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 14 Jan 2015 19:00:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Pryor]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Commentary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Charlie Hebdo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[France]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamophobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Italian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[journalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[missing comma]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[terrorism]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[I was first made aware of the horrific attack on Charlie Hebdo employees by my mother. She was watching the rolling news coverage, phone in hand, trying to contact my father who was travelling on the Eurostar at the time. A wave of panic rushed through me; the sense of being far removed from such...]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I was first made aware of the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30710883">horrific attack on <em>Charlie Hebdo</em> employees</a> by my mother. She was watching the rolling news coverage, phone in hand, trying to contact my father who was travelling on the Eurostar at the time. A wave of panic rushed through me; the sense of being far removed from such events evaporated.</p>
<p>My dad was absolutely fine. The same cannot be said for the poor souls who lost their lives that day. As ever, social media’s armchair commentators were on hand to give their take on the events. &#8220;Je suis Charlie&#8221; quickly became a sign of solidarity for free speech advocates, but as &#8220;<a href="https://twitter.com/shashj/status/553246417050144768">revenge&#8221; attacks against the French Muslim community intensified</a>, an oft-ignored darker side to support for free speech manifested.</p>
<p>Admittedly, the necessary groundwork for a market anarchist conception of free speech must not involve government censorship of controversial or offensive statements (credible threats of violence notwithstanding). However, a worrying number of libertarians and liberals conflate their support for this conception of free speech with the condoning of <em>Charlie Hebdo</em>&#8216;s <a href="https://twitter.com/a9ri/status/553567275161092096">arguably</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/svejky/status/553539665773756416">racist</a> &#8220;satire.&#8221; Some utterly refuse to accept this charge of racism, but even those who do often attempt to justify themselves with an argument symptomatic of uncritical liberalism and libertarianism. An inflammatory cartoon depicting racial stereotypes &#8212; and indeed any behaviour specifically targeted to cause offence &#8212; is supposedly necessary to push the boundaries of free speech. It’s symptomatic of a wider phenomenon: ‘trolling’ being portrayed as liberal or libertarian.</p>
<p>Whilst <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-secularism-religion-islam/384413/">Scott Sayre at <em>The Atlantic</em> has highlighted that <em>Hebdo</em> often targets France’s far-right racists</a>, <em><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/01/charlie_hebdo_the_french_satirical_magazine_is_heroic_it_is_also_racist.html">Slate</a></em><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/01/charlie_hebdo_the_french_satirical_magazine_is_heroic_it_is_also_racist.html">’s Jordan Weissmann draws attention to the fact that it also uses racist imagery</a> “in a country where Muslims are a poor and harassed minority, maligned by a growing nationalist movement that has used liberal values like secularism and free speech to cloak garden-variety xenophobia.” The French state exacerbates this hostile environment, having enacted measures such as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering">face covering ban</a> and the <a href="en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_law_on_secularity_and_conspicuous_religious_symbols_in_schools">ban on wearing conspicuous religious symbols in government schools</a>.</p>
<p>The self-sabotaging, warped nature of this argument cannot be overstated. Aside from the hunch that many of its proponents may simply be backwards-rationalising their desire to piss people off, it represents free speech shooting itself in the foot. &#8220;Can say&#8221; does not entail &#8220;ought to say.&#8221; Scott Alexander explains the harm that such shock tactics do to any movement, <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2015/01/peta-ferguson-jihad-doctor-who-rape-and-kitten-pics-toxoplasma-online-rage">referencing PETA&#8217;s drive to promote veganism</a>: &#8220;PETA creates publicity, but at a cost. Everybody&#8217;s talking about PETA, which is sort of like everybody talking about ethical treatment of animals, which is sort of a victory. But most of the talk is, &#8216;I hate them and they make me really angry.&#8217; Some of the talk is even, &#8216;I am going to eat a lot more animals just to make PETA mad.'&#8221;</p>
<p>Supporters of free speech and of <em>Charlie Hebdo</em>&#8216;s content get noticed, but reasonable peoples&#8217; reactions are similar to those against PETA &#8212; “I hate them and they make me really angry.” This is exacerbated by the <a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/ross-clark/2015/01/objecting-to-some-of-the-charlie-hebdo-cartoons-doesnt-make-you-a-terrorist/">various strawmen that such uncritical free speech advocates accuse their critics of</a>. Criticise them and you are &#8220;against free speech&#8221; or &#8220;making excuses for the Hebdo murderers.&#8221; These obvious falsehoods are juvenile and lazy. This kind of support for free speech is damaging perceptions of free speech itself. It also fuels the fire of extremely prevalent Islamophobic attitudes in France. It&#8217;s not the state&#8217;s job to forcibly censor <em>Charlie Hebdo</em>, but we as individuals ought to condemn it nonetheless.</p>
<p><em>Je ne suis pas Charlie.</em></p>
<p>Translations for this article:</p>
<ul>
<li>Italian, <a href="http://c4ss.org/content/35115" target="_blank">Chi Sostiene la Libertà di Parola Dovrebbe Denunciare Charlie Hebdo</a>.</li>
</ul>
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		<title>With Libertarians Like the Koch Brothers, Who Needs the State?</title>
		<link>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/c4sscommentary/~3/3WVGooqmqxo/34943</link>
		<comments>http://c4ss.org/content/34943#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 12 Jan 2015 19:00:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kevin Carson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Commentary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Koch]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economic development]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[eminent domain]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Keystone XL pipeline]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Koch Foundation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[left-libertarian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[libertarian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[What do you call someone who wants to steal your land and subject you to earthquakes? David Koch, who favors these things, calls himself a libertarian. In an interview with Barbara Walters last month on ABC&#8217;s &#8220;This Week,&#8221; he described himself as &#8220;basically a libertarian.&#8221; That label, as Koch sees it, means &#8220;a conservative on...]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>What do you call someone who wants to steal your land and subject you to earthquakes? David Koch, who favors these things, calls himself a libertarian. In an interview with Barbara Walters last month on ABC&#8217;s &#8220;This Week,&#8221; he described himself as &#8220;basically a libertarian.&#8221; That label, as Koch sees it, means &#8220;a conservative on economic matters, and &#8230; a social liberal.&#8221; But what he calls economic conservatism is pretty unlibertarian, if your idea of economic freedom means anything other than big business getting whatever it wants regardless of who it steps on in the process.</p>
<p>This week the Nebraska Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge to the use of eminent domain for the Keystone pipeline, clearing the way to seize private land (including vulnerable aquifers) to complete the pipeline route across the state on its way to Texas. Koch-funded lobbying organizations are heavily behind the Keystone project (among other things, funding attack ads against politicians who oppose the project). Long-distance pipelines, obviously, depend both on state preemption of large tracts of vacant land and preferential grants of access, and on the use of eminent domain to seize land from private owners who decline to sell. And more generally, extractive industries like oil and coal have had a close dependency on privileged access to land preempted by the state or on the actual clearance of existing populations from resource-rich land.</p>
<p>In related news, the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America this week published research attributing a series of 77 earthquakes in Ohio &#8212; including one strong enough to be felt by humans &#8212; to hydraulic fracturing. This follows on research over the past couple of years associating large numbers of earthquakes in Oklahoma and Texas with fracking. The quakes in Ohio all occurred along a faultline due to slippage caused by the fracking process, in which enormous quantities of high-pressure water and chemicals are injected into the ground to fracture shale rock and free up gas for extraction. Just for the record, injecting a million gallons of chemical soup into unstable and permeable rock formations probably isn&#8217;t very good for the groundwater, either.</p>
<p>This is the kind of thing that simply could not have been done under the common law of tort liability as it existed in most states until the 1830s or so. Under traditional common law, you were responsible for anything you did to harm your neighbor, period. But from the early 19th century on, state case law heavily modified liability standards to make them more commerce-friendly &#8212; not only by requiring plaintiffs to meet new burdens of negligence over and above the bare fact of harm, but by treating a whole array of &#8220;standard business or commercial practices&#8221; as safe harbors against negligence. If the original standards were still in effect, those responsible for a fracking or mountaintop removal operation that poisoned the groundwater for all the communities sharing an aquifer, or caused a local cancer spike from pollution, or just plain destroyed the ecosystem of an entire valley, would be assessed full damages by a civil jury and likely not be left with a pot to pee in. And activities like fracking or pipelining that carried non-negligible risks of causing such harm to air and water &#8212; regardless of whether the risks were entailed in &#8220;standard practices&#8221; &#8212; would likely find themselves uninsurable.</p>
<p>In addition to this weakening of common law standards in the state courts, the minimal regulatory standards drafted by the EPA under clean air and water legislation are treated as safe harbors against liability &#8212; &#8220;in compliance with all regulatory standards&#8221; is a legal defense regardless of any actual harm done to surrounding communities. On top of that, we have all sorts of corporatist legislation imposing artificially low liability caps on things like offshore oil spills, pipeline leaks and nuclear meltdowns that make these activities artificially profitable.</p>
<p>So when Charles Koch says he&#8217;s for &#8220;economic freedom,&#8221; what he means is the freedom of fossil fuel extraction, refining and transport companies &#8212; with the full protection of the government &#8212; to rob, poison and otherwise injure without consequences. That kind of &#8220;libertarianism&#8221; we don&#8217;t need.</p>
<p>Translations for this article:</p>
<ul>
<li>Italian, <a href="http://c4ss.org/content/35116" target="_blank">Con Libertari come i Fratelli Koch, chi Ha Bisogno dello Stato?</a></li>
</ul>
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		<title>Education Beyond Capitalism</title>
		<link>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/c4sscommentary/~3/Hw1LB_5T9O8/34920</link>
		<comments>http://c4ss.org/content/34920#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 11 Jan 2015 19:00:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Grant A. Mincy]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Commentary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academic Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Americas College Promise]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Community College]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democratic Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Higher Ed]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Knoxville]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Self Direction]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[On Friday, January 9, US president Barack Obama traveled to Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee. Here, Obama announced plans to make an associate degree as obtainable as a high school diploma. Deemed &#8220;America&#8217;s College Promise,&#8221; the new plan, according to Obama, will bring community college tuition down to zero for students. The plan...]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>On Friday, January 9, US president Barack Obama traveled to Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee. Here, Obama <a title="Transcript: President Obama's remarks at Pellissippi State" href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/state/transcript-president-obamas-remarks-at-pellissippi-state">announced plans</a> to make an associate degree as obtainable as a high school diploma. Deemed &#8220;<a title="FACT SHEET - White House Unveils America’s College Promise Proposal: Tuition-Free Community College for Responsible Students" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/01/09/fact-sheet-white-house-unveils-america-s-college-promise-proposal-tuitio">America&#8217;s College Promise</a>,&#8221; the new plan, according to Obama, will bring community college tuition down to zero for students.</p>
<p>The plan is smart. As <a title="Kn@ppster" href="http://knappster.blogspot.com/">Thomas L. Knapp</a> of <a title="C4SS" href="http://c4ss.org/">C4SS.org</a> notes, community college is cheap in terms of infrastructure &#8212; no need to pay for student housing, large auditoriums or research facilities. The plan is also past due. There is no reason higher education should exist in the cash nexus of an advanced technological society.</p>
<p>Obama commented, &#8220;education helps us be better people.  It helps us be better citizens. You came to college to learn about the world and to engage with new ideas and to discover the things you’re passionate about &#8212; and maybe have a little fun. And to expand your horizons.&#8221; This is of course true.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, this is all he had to say about education.</p>
<p>Obama went on to talk about the economy. He noted time and again that an advanced degree means more money and a chance at the famed middle class. The American economy, we are told, needs the American worker. &#8220;We&#8217;ve got this incredible bounty, the God-given resources that we enjoy in this country. But our greatest resources are people.&#8221; Your labor is what will allow the nation to compete in a global economy.</p>
<p>This is not a proposal for the sake of education, but rather for the health and longevity of the state. Your education, as your labor, is a tool of production for the machine of capitalism.</p>
<p>To the libertarian, however, education is an expression of individualism. If we imagine education without the state, we are left with self-directed learning, initiative, creativity, co-operative/mutual labor and robust competition between academic institutions. Education is re-imagined as a lifelong pursuit of one&#8217;s unique interests. It is not something to be done once for a 9 to 5.</p>
<p>Of course, imagining education without the state also means imagining markets liberated of capitalism. Actually existing capitalism is a system of control; it subordinates human labor. One must (as opposed to voluntarily) rent his or her body and time to capitalists to earn a living. To ensure economic growth we must continually work so we can spend our hard earned dollars.</p>
<p>In <a title="ON THE PHENOMENON OF BULLSHIT JOBS" href="http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/">Strike Magazine</a>, anthropologist <a title="David Graeber" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber">David Graeber</a> notes that advanced technological societies could, right now, achieve a 15-hour work week. This would, according to Graeber, &#8220;free the population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas&#8221; &#8212; the very reason to pursue an education.</p>
<p>Why hasn&#8217;t the 15-hour work week been accomplished? Because free, liberated time renders systems of power useless. The powers state-capitalist institutions hold are not justifiable &#8212; they must keep us busy or we would provide their services, education included, ourselves and dismantle them.</p>
<p>Education, for life, should be easily accessible and free. We have the technology to accomplish this. Take for example the <a title="MOOC" href="https://www.coursera.org/">Massive Open Online Course</a>, or “MOOC” phenomenon. MOOCs are courses offered online, for free, that are open access and boast unlimited participation. They are proof zero-cost, democratic education is attainable.</p>
<p>Liberated of state, and beyond capitalism, education will evolve. Our societies will evolve. We will have more time to invest in learning, community, family and friends. Obama&#8217;s proposal is progressive, but unimaginative &#8212; the burden of state capitalist power remains. We can imagine more. We can be free people, in a free society.</p>
<p>The creative, innovative potential of such a society is astounding. I&#8217;ll see you at school.</p>
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		<title>Education and the “Progressive” Corporate State</title>
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		<pubDate>Sat, 10 Jan 2015 19:00:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kevin Carson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Commentary]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Speaking in Knoxville, Tennessee on January 9 US president Barack Obama unveiled an initiative to provide two years of community college tuition-free, nationwide, to anyone meeting attendance and grade requirements. The idea, inspired by a similar program in Tennessee, aims to make two years of college as universal as high school is now. Obama&#8217;s proposal is in...]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Speaking in Knoxville, Tennessee on January 9 US president Barack Obama unveiled an initiative to provide two years of community college tuition-free, nationwide, to anyone meeting attendance and grade requirements. The idea, inspired by a similar program in Tennessee, aims to make two years of college as universal as high school is now. Obama&#8217;s proposal is in keeping, in more ways than one, with traditions going back to the origins of the American corporate state 150 years ago.</p>
<p>Since the mid-19th century, a few hundred large industrial corporations and banks have dominated the American economy. And the American state, functionally, has been closely intertwined with the interests of those corporations. One of its functions is to subsidize the corporate bottom line and artificially prop up the rate of profit by socializing provision of a growing share of inputs &#8212; among them the cost of reproducing and training human labor power.</p>
<p>The first statewide public school systems were introduced in New England to meet mill owners&#8217; need for a workforce that was docile, obedient and educated to minimal standards; a function supplemented by education in &#8220;100% Americanism&#8221; at the turn of the 20th century, and a home economics curriculum in the &#8217;20s and &#8217;30s aimed at processing students into good mass consumers.</p>
<p>As recounted by New Left historian David Noble in <em>America by Design</em>, federal government aid to land grant colleges coincided with the national railroad and industrial corporations&#8217; growing need for trained mechanical and industrial engineers. This trajectory carries through the GI Bill and to Obama&#8217;s latest proposal.</p>
<p>These institutional developments were accompanied by the rise of a meritocratic legitimizing ideology which replaced earlier American notions of equality and autonomy. Rather than genuine equality based on widespread economic empowerment and self-employment, the new meritocratic ideology treated step hierarchies of wealth, skill and managerial authority as both normal and necessary, but relied on the ideal of universal education to justify the ideology as &#8220;democratic.&#8221; With the widespread availability of secondary, higher and technical education, the theory goes, the individual&#8217;s rise in the managerial-technical hierarchy is limited only by their own willingness to learn and work. This peculiar American religion combines the existence of deep structural inequalities in wealth and power with the moralistic assumption that everyone gets exactly what they deserve.</p>
<p>The official White House happy talk, predictably, takes the corporate state&#8217;s assumptions for granted: &#8220;In our growing global economy, Americans need to have more knowledge and more skills to compete &#8212; by 2020, an estimated 35 percent of job openings will require at least a bachelor&#8217;s degree, and 30 percent will require some college or an associate&#8217;s degree.&#8221; That it&#8217;s the place of the &#8220;growing global economy&#8221; and the corporate HR departments in it to set the &#8220;required&#8221; qualifications for labor, and the place of the state&#8217;s education system to process people to those standards, goes without saying.</p>
<p>Never mind that globalization, concentration of economic power in the hands of a few giant, capital-intensive corporations, and a wage system that separates labor from both ownership and control of work, are none of them natural or inevitable processes. They all result from the deliberate policies of a state in league with capital.</p>
<p>The real irony is that the system of power Obama&#8217;s proposal is designed to serve is doomed to extinction. The revolution in cheap small-scale machine tools means an end to the material rationale for the wage system, and to corporate control of production. Coupled with the rise of open-source or pirated textbooks, free online lectures and syllabi and DIY learning networks, it also means an end to control over access to employment by the unholy alliance of big universities and human resources departments. In an economy where a few months&#8217; wages can purchase a garage factory full of open-source tools and the economy is dominated by commons-based peer production and craft production in self-managed shops, credentialing will be largely stackable and ad hoc, negotiated informally to suit the needs of the groups of people working together.</p>
<p>The days of the educational Cult of Moloch and its human sacrifices are numbered.</p>
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		<title>It’s Only Censorship When They Do It</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 09 Jan 2015 19:00:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Erick Vasconcelos]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Commentary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Charlie Hebdo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[France]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamophobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Italian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[journalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[missing comma]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nationalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Satire]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stateless Embassies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://c4ss.org/?p=34907</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The deplorable attack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, in which terrorists killed 12 and wounded 11, incited several reactions from the public, the sensitized media, and heads of state who hope to extract political gain from the matter. Amidst the generalized panic, Islamophobia has risen once again (due to the religious motivations of the attack) and...]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The deplorable attack on French satirical newspaper <em>Charlie Hebdo</em>, in which terrorists killed 12 and wounded 11, incited several reactions from the public, the sensitized media, and heads of state who hope to extract political gain from the matter. Amidst the generalized panic, Islamophobia has risen once again (due to the religious motivations of the attack) and <em>Charlie Hebdo</em> has been raised to icon status &#8212; contra the newspaper&#8217;s celebrated iconoclasm &#8212; with the #JeSuisCharlie campaign.</p>
<p>The human tragedy here, however, tends to multiply manyfold with its political exploitation by western governments, which have already started agitating their propaganda machines to foster a civilizational clash. French president Francois Hollande states that the attack was an act of &#8220;exceptional barbarism&#8221; against &#8220;a newspaper &#8230; in other words, an organ of free speech.&#8221; According to Hollande, it was an &#8220;act against journalists who had always wanted to show that in France it was possible to defend one’s ideas.&#8221;</p>
<p>US president Barack Obama <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/01/07/charlie-hebdo-massacre-prompts-defense-of-freedom-of-speech" target="_blank">doesn&#8217;t forget</a> to highlight the obvious fact that terrorists, in sharp contrast to the state he represents, &#8220;fear freedom of speech and freedom of the press.&#8221; According to him, terrorists nevertheless will not be able to silence the fundamental idea shared by French and American peoples, &#8220;a universal belief in the freedom of expression.&#8221;</p>
<p>UK prime minister David Cameron <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2900377/Cameron-condemns-barbaric-Paris-gun-attack-vows-Britain-stand-united-France-defence-free-speech.html" target="_blank">reinforces</a> that Britain stands &#8220;united with the French people&#8221; in opposition to terrorists and in defense of free speech. To German chancellor Angela Merkel, the shooting was also an attack against the &#8220;freedom of the press.&#8221; Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, not to be left out, <a href="http://exame.abril.com.br/brasil/noticias/dilma-condena-ataque-terrorista-contra-revista-charlie-hebdo" target="_blank">declared</a> the shooting an &#8220;unacceptable attack against a fundamental value of democratic societies: the freedom of the press.&#8221;</p>
<p>Despite the barbarism and extreme violence of the attack on <em>Charlie Hebdo</em>, it&#8217;s not surprising to find that western governments are absolutely ecstatic with this event, which easily lends itself to their narratives of intrinsic western superiority relative to Muslim backwardness. Maybe they&#8217;ve waited for this all along: Something that makes their &#8220;they hate our freedoms&#8221; rhetoric sound less puerile.</p>
<p>After all, none of the countries so collectively outraged are prime examples of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. <em>Charlie Hebdo</em> itself adopted its current name in the 1970s to sidestep a ban on the newspaper put in place by the French government. France today occupies the unenviable 39th spot in Reporters Without Borders&#8217;s <a href="http://rsf.org/index2014/data/index2014_en.pdf" target="_blank">World Press Freedom Index,</a> which highlights the weak source confidentiality protections in the country and steps the French government took to <a href="http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2013/07/french-censorship-mediapart-and-the-bettencourt-butlers-tapes/" target="_blank">censor</a> corruption-related recordings. The French state&#8217;s <a href="https://opennet.net/blog/2011/06/french-government-plans-extend-internet-censorship" target="_blank">reiterated attacks</a> on the Internet slide into the path of handing over total power to bureaucrats.</p>
<p>The USA, always looking after western freedom, apparently has no problems with suppressing information, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/us/phone-records-of-journalists-of-the-associated-press-seized-by-us.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">seizing journalistic institutions&#8217; phone records</a> without warrant or due process, and arresting whistleblowers and <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/19/us/ferguson-journalists-arrested/" target="_blank">journalists themselves</a>. Not to mention the draconian and frankly ridiculous &#8220;intellectual property&#8221; laws used to silence dissent and maintain the corporate status quo.</p>
<p>We should ask ourselves if the UK&#8217;s <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/12/world/europe/uk-porn-protest/" target="_blank">new pornography censorship laws</a> would allow <a href="http://img.qz.com/2015/01/charliehebdo31.jpg" target="_blank">some of <em>Charlie Hebdo</em>&#8216;s covers</a> to be published. Germany&#8217;s politicians can barely control their happiness in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Germany" target="_blank">censoring</a> the Internet. And if Charlie Hebdo&#8217;s political cartoons appear harmless, what should we say about the extensive <a href="http://www.destructoid.com/censorship-in-germany-how-they-changed-your-fav-games-268854.phtml" target="_blank">modification and mutilation</a> of video games to match German bureaucrats&#8217; sensibilities?</p>
<p>It is true that terrorists hate freedom of speech. But in that they differ little from western countries. They only employ different methods.</p>
<p>Translations for this article:</p>
<ul>
<li>Italian, <a href="http://c4ss.org/content/34958" target="_blank">È Censura Solo Quando la Fanno gli Altri</a>.</li>
<li>Spanish, <a href="http://c4ss.org/content/35093">Solo se le llama censura cuando ellos la implementan</a></li>
</ul>
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