Skremmende ting skjer i USA.
Men god jul og forhåpentligvis et
bedre 2002 enn 2001!
Trond Andresen
**********
>The Guardian December 18, 2001
>
>The Taliban of the West
>
> This war is threatening the very freedoms it claims to be defending
>
> by George Monbiot
>
>The pre-Enlightenment has just been beaten by the post-Enlightenment. As the
>last fundamentalist fighters are hunted through the mountains of eastern
>Afghanistan, the world's most comprehensive attempt to defy modernity has
>been atomized. But this is not, as almost everyone claims, a triumph for
>civilization; for the Taliban has been destroyed by a regime which is
>turning its back on the values it claims to defend.
>
>In West Virginia, a 15-year-old girl is fighting the state's supreme court.
>Six weeks ago, Katie Sierra was suspended from Sissonville high school in
>Charleston. She had committed two horrible crimes. The first was to apply to
>found an anarchy club, the second was to come to classes in a T-shirt on
>which she had written "Against Bush, Against Bin Laden" and "When I saw the
>dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of
>national security. God bless America." The headmaster claimed that Katie's
>actions were disrupting other pupils' education. "To my students," he
>explained, "the concept of anarchy is something that is evil and bad." The
>county court upheld her suspension, and at the end of November the state's
>supreme court refused to hear the case she had lodged in defense of free
>speech.
>
>Katie is just one of many young dissenters fighting for the most basic
>political freedoms. A few days before Katie was suspended, AJ Brown, a
>19-year-old woman studying at Durham Tech, North Carolina, answered the door
>to three security agents. They had been informed, they told her, that she
>was in possession of "anti-American material". Someone had seen a poster on
>her wall, campaigning against George Bush's use of the death penalty. They
>asked her whether she also possessed pro-Taliban propaganda.
>
>On October 10, 22-year-old Neil Godfrey was banned from boarding a plane
>traveling from Philadelphia to Phoenix because he was carrying a novel by
>the anarchist writer Edward Abbey. At the beginning of November, Nancy Oden,
>an anti-war activist on her way to a conference, was surrounded at Bangor
>airport in Maine by soldiers with automatic weapons and forbidden to fly on
>the grounds that she was a "security risk". These incidents and others like
>them become significant in the light of two distinct developments.
>
>The first is the formal suspension of certain civil liberties by governments
>backing the war in Afghanistan. The new anti-terror acts approved in Britain
>and the US have, like the reinstatement of the CIA's license to kill, been
>widely reported. The measures introduced by some other allied governments
>are less well known. In the Czech Republic, for example, a new law permits
>the prosecution of people expressing sympathy for the attacks on New York,
>or even of those sympathizing with the sympathizers. Already one Czech
>journalist, Tomas Pecina, a reporter for the Prague-based investigative
>journal Britske Listy, has been arrested and charged for criticizing the use
>of the law, on the grounds that this makes him, too, a supporter of
>terrorism.
>
>The second is the remarkably rapid development of surveillance technology,
>of the kind which has been deployed to such devastating effect in
>Afghanistan. Unmanned spy planes which could follow the Taliban's cars and
>detect the presence of humans behind 100 feet of rock are both awesome and
>terrifying. Technologies like this, combined with CCTV, face-recognition
>software, email and phone surveillance, microbugs, forensic science, the
>monitoring of financial transactions and the pooling of government
>databases, ensure that governments now have the means, if they choose to
>deploy them, of following almost every move we make, every word we utter.
>
>I made this point to a Labour MP a couple of days ago. He explained that it
>was "just ridiculous" to suggest that better technologies could lead to mass
>surveillance in Britain. Our defense against abuses by government was
>guaranteed not only by parliament, but also by the entire social framework
>in which it operated. Civil society would ensure there was no danger of
>these technologies falling into the "wrong hands".
>
>But what we are witnessing in the US is a rapid reversal of the civic
>response which might once have defended the rights and liberties of its
>citizens. Katie Sierra's suspension was proposed by her school and upheld by
>the courts. The agents preventing activists from boarding planes were
>assisted by the airlines. The student accused of poster crime may well have
>been shopped by one of her neighbors. The state is scorching the
>constitution, and much of civil society is reaching for the bellows.
>
>This, I fear, may be just the beginning. The new surveillance technology
>deployed in Afghanistan is merely one component of the US doctrine of
>"full-spectrum dominance". The term covered, at first, only military
>matters: the armed forces sought to achieve complete mastery of land, sea,
>air, airwaves and space. But perhaps because this has been achieved too
>easily, the words have already begun to be used more widely, as commercial,
>fiscal and monetary policy, the composition of foreign governments and the
>activities of dissidents are redefined as matters of security. Another term
>for "full-spectrum dominance" is absolute power.
>
>There are, of course, profound differences between the US and Britain. The
>US sees itself as a wounded nation; many of its people feel desperately
>vulnerable and insecure. But while our cowardly MPs seek only to dissociate
>themselves from the victims being persecuted by Torquemada Blair's
>inquisitors, the lord chancellor's medieval department is preparing to
>dispense with most jury trials, which are arguably now the foremost
>institutional restraint on the excesses of government.
>
>The paradox of the Enlightenment is that the universalist project is
>brokered by individualism. The universality of human rights, in other words,
>can be defended only by the diversity of opinion. Most of the liberties
>which permit us to demand the equitable treatment of the human community -
>privacy, the freedom of speech, belief and movement - imply a dissociation
>from coherent community.
>
>While those who seek to deny our liberties claim to defend individualism, in
>truth they gently engineer a conformity of belief and action, which is
>drifting towards a new fundamentalism. This is an inevitable product of the
>fusion of state and corporate power. Capital, as Adam Smith shows us,
>strives towards monopoly. The states which defend it permit the planning
>laws, tax breaks, externalization and blanket advertising which ensure that
>most of us shop in the same shops, eat in the same restaurants, wear the
>same clothes. The World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF apply the
>same economic and commercial prescription worldwide, enabling the biggest
>corporations to trade under the same conditions everywhere.
>
>Some of those who, in defiance of this dispensation, write their own logos
>on their T-shirts are now being persecuted by the state. The pettiness of
>its attentions, combined with its ability to scrutinize every detail of our
>lives, suggest that we could be about to encounter a new form of political
>control, swollen with success, unchecked by dissent. Nothing has threatened
>the survival of "western values" as much as the triumph of the west.
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