Glorious Revolutions Series

READ: The Whole Series To Present In Its "Glory" (reverse order)

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I still remember when the Wall fell. November 9, 1989. If you were alive, you remember.
A newscaster on the television, his image warped and tattered by static around the edges, was talking about the end of nuclear threat. It was a revolution of culture, some said. Then President Reagan appeared, and took credit for the fall of Communism.
Revolutions leave an indelible stamp on those lived through them. But how did a falling wall end the Cold War, let alone stanch the tide of violent revolution? This is the kind of rhetoric we are fed. We’re given the pieces to this puzzle, but never told what image they’re supposed to make.
If it wasn’t already painfully obvious in 1986, it certainly is now. No one should have thought that violent uprising was a thing of the past. The legacy of globalization has generally been more revolutions, not fewer. It’s as if, with every generation, we forget the lessons learned by those that came before. This “nightmare of history,” to refer to Joyce’s famous quote, calls to mind several essential questions. Are revolutionaries incapable of hearing the ghosts of the past? Is this forgetting itself the nature of revolutions? Finally, how can we keep others from using our own hopes and ideas against us? These questions are hard to answer, and any analysis is likely to sound irrelevant to those that have lived through the mute horror of violent conflict.
Still, we must wrestle with this legacy if we are to have any hope of freeing ourselves from it. The cycle of loss and vengeance itself is a crucible for revolutionary ideology.

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Where are the Trayvon Martin Riots?

    It's August now, four months since George Zimmerman was acquitted in April, and hardly anything is on fire. A couple whites have been beaten and robbed. A couple of hispanics. Time has passed, and the media has moved on. So this article is coming a little late, but that's kind of the point.

    I live on Chicago's west side, in a neighborhood that boasts two or three empty lots to a block. Some of these lots are fairly new, the only solution the city can find when an abandoned building becomes infested with squatters. Most of them, though, date back to April, 1968. When I take the train downtown, the first train station I pass is a charred skeleton, a stop that has remained unused since it was burned down by rioters. That was also in 1968.

World’s 100 richest could end global poverty 4 times over

World’s 100 richest could end global poverty 4 times over

“The richest 1 percent has increased its income by 60 percent in the last 20 years with the financial crisis accelerating rather than slowing the process,” while the income of the top 0.01 percent has seen even greater growth, a new Oxfam report said.

What sense does wealth have in the long run, if we think of ourselves as a species in an enormous cosmos, rather than Americans and Saudi Arabians, or rich and poor? 

Crazy talk, for sure. "Us" and "them." If we don't recognize ourselves as brothers and sisters, we're going to be done for. Nature is far more brutal and unstable on the long run than this little calm blip in history would make us think.

"There are not yet obvious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, and this makes us wonder whether civilizations like ours rush inevitably into self-destruction. I dream about it . . . and sometimes they are bad dreams."

The words of Carl Sagan in this episode (a stern Kermit the frog) still ring true, despite the fears of that time being slightly different than now. It doesn't matter the nature of the eventual disaster, simply that they are inevitable, and yet we seem to live within a system that is designed to keep us estranged, and to deprive the basic necessities of life to some while others are able to .

The underlying dream of Communism is not a bad one, before it is turned to fascism. Is it human nature that makes such a utopean plans impossible? This requires looking at the myth of human nature and the myth of power. 

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Where The Buffalo Roam.... The Lakota, the Buffalo Field Campaign, and the Return of the White Buffalo

[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

“Only when the last tree has died,
 the last river been poisoned,
 and the last fish been caught
 will we realize we cannot eat money. ” -Cree Indian proverb 

"They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept one; they promised not to take our land, and they did." - Mahpiua Luta "Red Cloud" Oglala Lakota

You can feel the poisoned earth, bottled up and ready to explode. There is no questioning it. You can feel the anger of every poisoned tree, flower, wolf, and bison. You can feel the strangled roots of Mother Gaia rising up through the cracks in the concrete. We have raped her, stripped her of her resources, and broken and bound her with our barriers and walls and fences. We have sullied and tarnished her with toxic wastes and carbon emissions. We dump the excrement of our civilization into her rivers. We have tarnished her wildlife with our city streets and our pavement. Slowly, but surely, the woodlands turn to concrete. In the name of Progress, we destroy our own back yards. We have sold our children's children out forever. There may be no "seven generations from now," anymore. We are on the eve of destruction, and it has been brought on by our own hands.

Before the meat that you eat is slaughtered, the animals that end up as your dinner are squeezed into a compact and overcrowded area of demolished forest, herded together and packed in wall to wall. They are fed on the excrement and remains of other animals, and they are made sickly and feeble. They are shot with man-made growth hormones and chemicals, toxins that no human should consume. They are thoroughly poisoned, a decision that is overseen and supervised by our Commander In Chief, who in his infinite wisdom has seen it fit to appoint the former vice president of Monsanto to the position of senior advisor to the commissioner of the FDA. And now, media mogul and founder of CNN Ted Turner has struck a deal with the Montana department of wildlife: In return for providing a ranch on which to "quarantine" Yellowstone buffalo, Ted will be paid in bison to stock his "Ted's Montana Grill" restaurant chain. Cha ching.

We are told that we are free. 

We are not free. We are those cattle. We are being fattened for the slaughter.

Human Demonology: The Betrayal of Sabu

LulzSec are the Daily Mail readers' wet dream and were probably dreamt up and promoted by like/right-minded journalists in the service of the Stazi State. -Guardian Comment 29 June 2011 6:09AM

By P. Emerson Williams

Last year was marked by a seeming endless thread of DDOS attacks and new video declarations, tying in or not, intersecting or not with boots on the ground protesting across the cities of the West. Common wisdom among anti-authoritarian types was that the establishment was too big and lumbering to ever catch up with or even understand any of this. (Also see: the "piracy" issue.) Large financial institutions, big media and government looked form the outside to be playing whack-a-mole, running defence against the actions of Anonymous and Wikileaks.

Recent acts of Anonymous, or more specifically Lulzsec include the interception and release of an FBI conference call, and a dump of five million emails exchanged between emplyees of intelligence firm Stratfor, the publication of which by WikiLeaks made headlines. Not the massive coverage the Cablegate release garnered, but after the loss of the Bank of America documents in a manner suspicious to all but the most credulous, this is understandable. The fact that these emails were supplied by Lulzsec did make the ears of conspiracy spotter prick up. This cooperation between Anonymous and Wikileaks fit the narrative that has both parties being part of a massive psyop.

Human Demonology: The Megapocalypse of Kim DotCom

By P. Emerson Williams
An operation planned by a large international team of law enforcement working over the course of years and carried out with helicopters and machine guns in a military style raid. Taking refuge in a safe room, reportedly found "near a semi-automatic shotgun", a larger than life villain is dragged out and taken into custody. No, the target is not a drug kingpin, nor a deposed dictator (hence the safe room - sewage drains are reserved final hiding places for deposed dictators and jihadist masterminds), not a banker responsible for tearing the world economy apart, nor a corrupt Western politician on the leash of said bankers.

Much hay has been made of Kim Dotcom's expansive mansion, expensive toys and cheesy movie villain antics. For those wondering why Megaupload was the target this fact alone should make it clear. They needed someone who would not invoke sympathy, and in this respect, they chose well. A huge congratulations to our owners for selecting and directing a story in a manner that would qualify them to take the raw footage shot for a reality TV show and create a narrative. If spying on citizens and enforcing laws not yet passed loses its luster, they should have no problem getting a job with Wife Swap or Deadliest Catch. (I had to resort to google for show titles...)

Here's a nice, concise way to weave a yarn:

• One Maserati
• One Rolls-Royce
• One Lamborghini
• Three Samsung 83" Tvs
• Two Sharp 108" Tvs
• One "Predator statue" 
• 60 Dell servers

An unspecified number of:

• Motor bikes
• Jet skis
• Artwork 

The takedown of megaupload is framed in the mold of major drug busts to which we have become used when presented with such a laundry list. More ingeniusly, in a fresh new year following the annum of the birth of the Occupy movement, the preceding list brings to mind the lists of bonuses, net worth and ostentatious belongings of hedge fund managers and bank executives. Our master's meme-schemers had all of us in their thoughts in the planning stages. If this is all a coincidence, why would the presence of a full-size inflatable replica of a Russian T-72 tank on Goldfinger's, uh, I mean Mr. DotCom's property be relevant to the story? What does the widespread discussion of his license plates with "POLICE," "MAFIA," "V," "STONED," "CEO," "HACKER," GOOD," "EVIL," and "GUILTY" tell us about what the law enforcement side of the story wants us to think? Like Joseph Kennedy, DotCom amassed what to the great majority of us is a vast fortune (a $200 million company isn't enough to impress our owners) through insider trading, shady schemes and outright fraud before founding the "Mega Conspiracy".

Sur-Representation: Revolution & Repetition

Sur-Representation: Revolution & Repetition

“Philosophical writing [must] continually confront the question of representation.” [1] – Walter Benjamin, Ursprung der Deutsche Trauerspiel

The question of representation must indeed be confronted and the impossibility of making do without representation entirely. For, even in the least representative poetic evocation there remains the fact that even Wortsalat has as its building block words that in principle do represent objects. Moreover, the logic of total escape or opposition presupposes the binary logic of mutually exclusive alternatives, which we now know in light of quantum mechanics and subsequent developments in physics to be entirely superseded. Except in human language and quite possibly the forms of human thought. Perhaps there is way to think and to write that can resist the reduction of the infinite richness of experience that all representational-conceptual thought has as its price. A revolutionary possibility whereby experience might break through, within representations themselves, whereby experience would be, to borrow one of Blanchot's formulations, “affirmed in a negation that, while opening a void and stopping time, also point[s] toward the future... a transgression: an innocent transgression.”[2]  Such a possibility for thought and language makes representations of experience transgress their own limits, and the surplus over representation, its sur-representational excess, would no longer represent or signify, but mark an instance of the exemplary. Of course these instances in the course of a “treatise” on time will be ephemeral, and representative discourse remains as an instrument of thinking, but they indicate and articulate that which is to come. It is to make use of “representation as digression.”[3]

Kairos II: La Révolution Post-historique

Oh no! It's Da Bomb!

         Arnold Gehlen, in ¨The Roll of Living Standards in Today´s Society¨ (1952) and Hendrik de Man (Paul´s uncle), in Vermassung und Kulturverfall (1952), present another “end of history” scenario emphasizing das Posthistoire [1], the-post historical period; that period into which we entered after the Second World War (and of modernity, see exhibits: a) the unprecedented scale of the war, b) Auschwitz, and c) the Bomb), and made possible by the post-war economic and technological acceleration, which ensured that all could enjoy a high standard of living as compared to before (this parallels Kojève´s footnoted suggestion that the classless society was in fact American consumer capitalist society). 

 

Hiroshima, Post-Bomb

The mathematician A. A. Cournot had envisioned, as it was about a century before the phrase post-histoire was coined; then, Cournot wanted to designate the position that emerges when any human invention or innovation has been so perfected that every further morphological change appears closed off...the conclusion that our culture has filled its “archetypal” sense and is thus has entered a phase of meaninglessness; the alternative was then, viewed biologically, death or mutation...Post-histoire is not concerned with the lethargy of a culture in which its vital powers have been extinguished, rather with the entry to a phase of world-events occurring overall outside of the framework of History because they lack any noticeable historical connection between causes and effects. [2]

Kairos I: Exemplary Acts of Revolutionary Potentiality

Kairoticism: Exemplary Acts, the Whatever-Messiah & Revolutionary Post-History

There is no revolution without exemplary acts... moments when revolutionary potentiality was not only present but was affirmed in a negation that, while opening a void and stopping time, also pointed toward the future... 

- Maurice Blanchot, May 1968

Part 1. Exemplary Acts

Writing in Paris during his intellectual and political engagement with the tumultuous events of the student revolts of May 1968 –  a revolution successful at best in part – Maurice Blanchot, in Comité (a single issue publication) defines the “'exemplary act' [as being] such because it goes beyond itself while coming from very far away, superseding itself and in an instant, with a shattering suddenness, exploding its limits.”[1] Two exemplary acts will serve as our approach to the problematic of the eminently temporal conditions of possibility for revolution, to a concept and experience of time as kairos. First, an event of May '68 itself:

Daniel Cohn-Bendit

The highest violence was no doubt in an instant of non - violence,when, to reject the ban (the banning of (Daniel) Cohn-Bendit was the pathetic “exemplary act” of the powers that be), thousands of workers and students – revolutionaries in an absolute sense – stamped their feet and chanted: “We are all German Jews.” Never has this been said anywhere, never at any moment: inaugural speech, opening and overthrowing the frontiers, opening and disrupting the future.[2]

Krampus Sacred Clowns And Protesters Take Wisconsin

This Is Happening Now:


By James CurcioThe Krampus enter at 1:56, if you're wondering. But on a larger scale, I think it's patently obvious that this is the kind of movement which can easily peter out and be written of as performance art, or it can be an opportunity for all of us to "come out" of the closet, say no to the Plutocratic demands, no to the myth that we are separate and estranged, that we must compete with one another, that we must identify with one "team," one "nation," one "race," and kill or take from all the others, that mutual benefit isn't the only virtue. Charlie Sheen might be a egomaniac and any number of other things, who knows, I don't know him personally. But when he said "I'm a rockstar from mars," and, you know, I'm sick of pretending otherwise, that, in my own way, I could completely relate to. 
These protests could be a spark to tinder, or it could just be, as I said, performance art, a protest that lets people feel like they're accomplishing something while those who imagine they have the real power just sit and wait it out. And sure, all movements transform into something else. 
I know what the cynics have to say. I'm usually one of them. No cynic like a former idealist. All forces peter out. Beyond cynicism, which can actually be a potent force, lies apathy, which does nothing but roll over to whatever has to force to take your sweet (or not so sweet) ass. Hunter S Thompson watched the high-water mark of the 60s movement, and watched those hippies turn into corporate officers themselves. So what? If that's what they were all along, more power to them. If they were caving to social pressures around them, and not being true to what they were, then they made their own hell, and the hell that many of us are forced to contend with today. What's it going to be? 
Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

The Sacred Clowns Bring Krampus To Wisconson Protests

Here's some breaking news, as rare as that is on this site. A friend and what I'd call kindred spirit who is featured prominently in the upcoming Immanence of Myth is getting involved in the demonstrations in a way that shows exactly what I'd like to see far more of in the days to come.
Here's from the news:

DATELINE: Madison, Wisconsin, USA. February 25

Sacred clowns came down on Wisconsin state capitol. Protesters unwittingly revived an ancient European sacred clowntradition previously thought extinct in North America. KRAMPUS!, also known as the "henchmen of Saint Nick," were thought to be non-existent in all but a few remote Tyrolian villages, but it seems their population is actually growing "under the radar" in the American midwest spurred on by labor unrest in the face of government corruption there.
And it isn't even Christmas!

"Rudy Rauben their new media manager in Madison. Look soon for http://www.sacredclown.org Where fascism lurks... so will we... but for the people!"

If you don't know anything about Krampus, check out this post I pounded out this past Christmas.
If you're in Wisconsin, I suggest you join forces immediately. The time is now. If not, why the hell not join forces with them through that URL above when it becomes active, or even start organizing Krampus and sacred clown/trickster "crawls" in your local cities? (And by that, I don't mean just march down to the bar. But as for what I do mean... I leave that up to you, and the spirit that overtakes you if you open yourself up to it.) Zombies are so passe, and these tired Unites States of Apathy need a wakeup call the likes of which the Krampus can provide a great deal more than shambling brain-hungry zombies.

I'd like to provide one passing thought on the Krampus. Aside from the Swiss Alps origin of this variant of the myth, which I touch on in the post above, there are some interesting and rather unusual connections with Pan, Dionysus, and the Roman Lupercalia. As this post is being quickly dashed off based on the time-sensitive nature of the activities in question, I leave it to you to connect those dots, though I'm sure I or one of the other contributors to this site will provide some thoughts on those in days to come.





Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.