Weekly Review.

international | arts and media | opinion/analysis Sunday June 29, 2003 16:16 by ipsiphi

Thoughts on Thessalonika, WTO, Sacramento, José Vosé, Caoimhe Butterly & the sanctity of Zero.

In which I attempt short ontological and hermenetuic assesment of current events and distortions. (I shall reserve special but unsaid loathing of George Monibiot throughout).

José Vosé was transferred a week ago at dawn to Montepellier prison. He awaits imprisonment or a Presidential Pardon.
If imprisoned he shall as a key figure in the European fight on Genetically modified food be a symbol for the current rejection of a generation's work on transgenetic and genetically modified control.

Let us be quite clear, there still less than two hundred qualified workers in the Biotechnology sector, and thus far this sector is globally concentrated in the US/K geo-political entity.

In Europe E€.
We do not make decisions.

In Thessalonika, much happened, you were told much would.
But no "·decisions·" were made.

In Sacramento during the same time, under a banner "Resistance is Rising" people gathered under a new "ontological" and "crypto-linguistic" banner.

They called themselves " Peace, Global Justice and Democracy Movements" and announce they would "unite" to fight the FOOD CORPS.

Bush the 2nd told €urope where decisions are not made, that €urope must accept for Africa's sake the work of Frankenstein and the mortgage payer.

Thessalonika was as you might google.
there were finally 7 detained. 3-Greece.1-UK.1-Syria.2-Spanish.
and the IMC group so much hassled before took sanctuary by squating the Theology department of the University, in a sense in the anniversary week of Orwell and the father of computers Turing Liebniz the theologian of binary met the internet. :-)

http://andorra.indymedia.org/news/2003/06/84.php
http://barcelona.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=47377&group=webcast

photo of the Theology. worth a look.
http://www.thessaloniki.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=12041


now as if by contrast-

call to Sacramento.
http://www.sacmobilization.org/
description of Sacramento
http://www.corpwatch.org/action/PAA.jsp?articleid=7109
[note {{{{"We will use no violence, physical or verbal, towards any person. We consider speech or acts that are racist, homophobic, or sexist to be violent. We will carry no weapons. We will not bring or use any alcohol or illegal drugs. We will not destroy property. We will respect the rights of others: we want your energy, ideas, and participation regardless of differences of race, ethnic background, sexual orientation, age or previous political affiliations. We invite others to join us who are willing to accept our "guidelines" which we believe best serve the interests of our community, here in Sacramento."}}}}]


Caoimhe Butterly gets TIME award.

http://www.almuajaha.com/feature/display/590/index.php

José the French farmer awaiting either
PRISON or PRESIDENTIAL PARDON
http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=60140&search_text=josé


and the man who abuses to the detriment of the marginalised in "OUR" world, the meaning and resonance of "Liberty, Democracy and Justice" and has appropriated the meaning of "Global Justice":
The writer I shall never spell properly in "our name" is paid by the "finest" of Alternative and Social movements to think.
These thoughts are then I assure you tanked.
you may find his words in The Guardian, BBC, Big Issue, Ireland indymedia, UK indymedia your local bookshop, and on his website. [which is copyrighted].


It may have been almost three years since my personal project of ontology, hermeneutics, spells and charm Reclaim the Genome! began, and much madness perhaps has flown to the Sea.

the message I left:
not everyone will like this but
anyway

!Basta!

Reclaim The Streets has now spread to over a hundred locations in less than a thousand days.
Over a million individuals became aware that they were not alone in their disgust.
Over a hundred million media consumers digested photographs of riot.
Over a thousand RTS attendants have now served or are serving prison sentences.
Over twenty are dead.
Let us consider our slogans and tags, the creed of the assembled.
Why do we possess the ability to see so clearly that the emperor is naked, and yet have not yet offered our rags to clothe the embarrassment before us?
We meet on the street to create new lines of escape.
Our resistance is as global as capitalism
We Celebrate the Play ethic.
We eschew copyright.
If we are serious about changing the world we live in, then we have to develop new and creative ways of projecting our message.
The RTS phenomena happened because of a zeitgeist. The ghost of years to come rattling the chains of malcontent. For every ten people who took part in RTS actions on the streets of the myriad cities worldwide, there have been hundreds more who supported the general aims and beliefs. There have also been hundreds who were dismayed by the results.
& what are those general aims and beliefs?
We possibly believe that a world that declared a taxed and accounted profit over $39,000,000,000,000 in 1999 should be able to guarantee the human rights and dignity of a paltry 6,500,000,000 human beings.
We possibly believe that we are facing imminent Eco-disaster for our planet and species.
We further possibly believe that such a situation is made possible by the direction taken by scientific development, a vector chosen by hyper-capitalist speculation.
We perhaps believe that a world built to the aggrandisement of the shareholder alone regardless of the damage to local communities and environments shall cause the end of our species.
We say that to carry on as such is absurd.
We proclaim the glory of Play as opposed to the 'work ethic' without which we would not have seen 'the great exploitation'.
We some are anti-car, believing it to be a tool of the received order, a mark of ascent to adulthood, a product of 'internalised industrial capitalism' a symbol of reified sexual materialism ; the polluter of our air.
We maybe hope for a radical rethink of the social order or fabric of the societies we live in.
Yet in each location we uphold the shibboleths of selective pasts. Thus London RTS invokes the diggers and levellers, French RTS looks to the Paris commune and Jaurés, U.S. RTS looks to the totemic power of the native amerindians -America america what have you done with your thousand chomskyites? Italian RTS looks to the writings of Dellueze. Irish RTS looks to the 19th century island communes of the blaskets & antique Brehon Law. Everyone refers to the same bibliography- TAZ, Uncommon Sense, Fanon, That book, 1984, Brave New World, etc., etc.,

We move in a time of shadowy words, where the meaning of jargon has not yet solidified into a regular semiotic or hermeneutic structure.
Sure 'tis all teleology!!
I believe that using the words RT as a suffix to many different issues is not only justified but necessary. I further believe it is completely in tune with the hopes of the motivators of this phenomena. Whomever they might have been. How wonderful to read and hear; "We have no membership, no leaders, no subscriptions, our meetings are open. Etc etc
how fatuous, how contemptible, how suspect.
The animals quaked in the barn wondering where Snowey had gone.
Mr Winston Smith tries to read the words of Goldstein but can't.
Websites are maintained, papers are produced, the same faces recite the same juvenile nonsense, calls to riot and "tear down the system!" in different guises, different splits and off shoots. "We hold our meetings every first Thursday in a North London pub, if we get it together, being anarchists its difficult" / dobiamo refarla doppo sarebbe destrutto".
This poses as resistance?
The chanting of Basta! as a mantra is not enough.
Genetic science is one of the areas of modern human development that causes us all particular concern and worry.
The architects of this world work hidden behind inscrutable jargon, feature pages of weekend newspapers and carry on with ample funding from pension funds and government.
There can be no doubt that there exists some distance between the actions of the empowered in their haunted castle on the mountain top probing the bounds of Prometheus and the mob below angry, ignorant and foolish.
There is no Castle Frankenstein. There ought no longer be a mob.
Baron F. was a fictional millionaire monomaniac, not a research and development maintained science graduate trying to feed his children and pay the mortgage.
So we have the embryo of a worldwide network of creative thinkers, trained in their arts and sciences, and aware of their humanity in a sense beyond the mere materialistic. They gather somewhat tenuously under many banners one of the most potentially fertile of which is RTS.
It is they I would appeal to, my peers, my contemporaries, my sisters and brothers in faith to bring together images of humanity 'as we are' sui generis in a celebration of the species.
Science has offered glib words in the past to justify tyranny against nature and humanity.
I have offered to the world my ideas as "psychic-viral material" communicated through text, voice, images and deed. We all can. Many of us have. We all should. We all must show those who do not think they can do such things that they can.
We need no longer hide behind anonymity or proxy.
I have witnessed too many times in my life, people stand opposite each other on the street, one side clothed in colourful rags the other in riot-uniform. I have witnessed too many times the same tired confusion at modernity in both sets of eyes. I have known their thoughts to be the same.
yet as long as our message is framed in such ways, then the other eyes will not turn to ayes.
Why do we as a movement, as a tribe, as a collective that spans ethnicity, nationality, race, religions and humanisms feel so strongly that our world needs 'reclaiming'?
Who are we, and what more can we do in these possibly the last days of our species. I believe they will be the last days if the current marriage of scientific and hyper-capitalist speculation should continue.
Whence have these ideas come? Whither shall they bring us? What and whose is the word?
Multi-national-corp.-hyper-capitalistic new world order
Is not only an un-wieldly succession of syllabic invention and jargon
It is the Hydra of Old.
And we must not forget that we are the offspring of that hydra, we grew up nourished by that beast, our ideas and realities clothed in its fabric.
I have spent much of the last seven hundred days travelling this continental landmass and its archipelago, in sometimes difficult appraisal and consideration of where the various anti-globalist, pro-environment, anti-capitalist (etc.,) movements are going, in an attempt to bring our thoughts into the main stream of global decision making I shall be publishing them this year.
I would summarise three of my experiences here:
In London I met with two young people, a couple in the eyes of themselves if not the local Law, for they have each married others to circumvent their status as refugees, both having been born outside Fortress Europe. They were thus legally employed and paid the minimum wage at an outlet of one of the Multi-Nat-Food-Corps. But their hours are of course extended illegally, The particular MNFC which had contracted their chatteldom, I suspect influences the minimum wage level wherever it goes, which is to say:- everywhere. They work all the hours they can, for they pay exorbitant rent taken from their meagre wages to an unscrupulous landlord speculating on their poverty. I thought that such people belonged with the colourful ragged malcontents. Instead they cowered behind the counter of their employers, frontline victims of the mob. I believe that they and the community they represent, humanity's majority 'un-blessed by 1st world citizenship', deserve the same access to a home that so many enjoy in the select cities of Europe that presently enjoy squatting rights. Yet they pay landlords enough to keep the order maintained, the rents stay unaffordable yet still paid, the mortgages still go on funding the abyss, and these workers receive the wrath of rioters. Consider the irony.
One day later and the insurance companies and the accountants and the shareholders jot not an iota of difference to Globalised Hyper-Capitalism. In the English West country I met with widows of the war dead, "my husband did not fight for this world... but why desecrate his monument?" Why indeed? "I liked what you were talking about, with the vegetables, good war time spirit...." I had been delighted that someone in London had moved forward and embraced something that had been done for so long elsewhere before. Yet why were the readers of Maybe not told that much of the urban soil is poisoned?

(Our contemporaries have investigated such possibilities of communal open cultivation across the continent. The average Euro-City offers poor soil my friends. Though the intention was / is / & shall be laudable, let us revisit it with our applied collective intelligence, we should investigate the possiblities of removing toxicity from the soil, or of bringing clean organic humus to the city).

RTS as a movement and RTS is but a convenient construction, a convenient label for our beliefs, loses potential and needed support by the presence of the mob our constant fellow travelers .
So I further met with some who rioted, asking why did you do this?
Whither did you think such action would bring you?
Would bring us? Would bring me? Shall leave them?
There is a difference between considered direct action and the anger of a mob.
Are we 'manifesting' for ourselves, for our own egos, (for even in anonymity the 'shadowy anarchists' accrue and claim street cred.).
or do we manifest for the dispossessed of this earth?
When we gather in our first world cities and party against capitalism what is it exactly that we are doing?
Are we not all too often guilty of the same sort of empty gestures that we accuse the politicians of making?
Who now is speaking for the meek?
Who now shall inherit this earth?
Who now shall be the peacemakers?
Who are the poor of heart?----- when depression kills more than any other?
Who are the empty of words?
I leave my name, a semiotic tag of orthography, a collection of syllables and letters of the Roman alphabet which serves the function of communicating my identity.
I leave these letters though they can neither be read nor understood by most of my
contemporaries on this Earth.
I leave these ideas, viral material of the psychic-cyber-soul because I need lurk under no shadows. The truth shall set me free.
I invite my contemporaries to join me in a manifestation of humanity.
To mark and elucidate the first reading of an Human Genome, I wish to see displayed for humanity, images of ourselves, with our flaws and disease and suffering and joy and all the miraculous variety that shareholders may be convinced all too soon to remove from our species as unprofitable to the New World Order. I am calling this project 'Reclaim the Genome' it has already begun in Barcelona and will be fully apparent by mid Y2K1, then it shall happen in San Francisco, Paris, Rome, Berlin etc etc, the jaded and familiar list of urban locations we find at the bottom of any designer lifestyle bag. I envisage Reclaim The Genome as a forum for education and artistic expression. We stand at the threshold of a brave new world. One not of our making or design. But we must tell each other whither now we go.
I place this letter with the London RTS web-site and all anglophonic groups who might help. For I wish to see you my contemporaries do likewise. Our wealth should be counted in ideas. And to assure you I do not mean to usurp the street cred you've claimed.
I am not stealing a jolly good name.
I am doing what we all should and a lot of us, particularly you, already, and I acknowledge it as so:
We are:
"Learning from the last time so that we will do it better next time"

Be good and safe and free and blessed and playful!

iosaf

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