24.4.06
Gore Vidal & The Last Empire
¿Por que no enseñan geografía en los colegios gringos?
The Last Defender of the American Republic?
An interview with Gore Vidal
By Marc Cooper
Wednesday, July 3, 2002 - 12:00 am
HE MIGHT BE AMERICA'S LAST small-r republican. Gore Vidal, now 76, has made a lifetime out of critiquing America's imperial impulses and has -- through two dozen novels and hundreds of essays -- argued tempestuously that the U.S. should retreat back to its more Jeffersonian roots, that it should stop meddling in the affairs of other nations and the private affairs of its own citizens. (...)
Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief. The number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947-48 is more than 250. These are major strikes everywhere from Panama to Iran. And it isn't even a complete list. It doesn't include places like Chile, as that was a CIA operation. I was only listing military attacks. (...)
Americans are either not told about these things or are told we attacked them because . . . well . . . Noriega is the center of all world drug traffic and we have to get rid of him. So we kill some Panamanians in the process. Actually we killed quite a few. And we brought in our Air Force. Panama didn't have an air force. But it looked good to have our Air Force there, busy, blowing up buildings. Then we kidnap their leader, Noriega, a former CIA man who worked loyally for the United States. We arrest him. Try him in an American court that has no jurisdiction over him and lock him up -- nobody knows why. And that was supposed to end the drug trade because he had been demonized by The New York Times and the rest of the imperial press. (...)
[The government] plays off [Americans'] relative innocence, or ignorance to be more precise. This is probably why geography has not really been taught since World War II -- to keep people in the dark as to where we are blowing things up. Because Enron wants to blow them up. Or Unocal, the great pipeline company, wants a war going some place. (...)
Now, if I were a Guatemalan and I had the means to drop something on somebody in Washington, or anywhere Americans were, I would be tempted to do it. Especially if I had lost my entire family and seen my country blown to bits because United Fruit didn't want to pay taxes. Now, that's the way we operate. And that's why we got to be so hated.
cualquier parecido con la junta en Colombia no parece ser pura coincidencia
They were suspiciously very ready with the Patriot Act as soon as we were hit. Ready to lift habeas corpus, due process, the attorney-client privilege. They were ready. Which means they have already got their police state. Just take a plane anywhere today and you are in the hands of an arbitrary police state.
Texto completo de la entrevista en L.A. Weekly
The Last Defender of the American Republic?
An interview with Gore Vidal
By Marc Cooper
Wednesday, July 3, 2002 - 12:00 am
HE MIGHT BE AMERICA'S LAST small-r republican. Gore Vidal, now 76, has made a lifetime out of critiquing America's imperial impulses and has -- through two dozen novels and hundreds of essays -- argued tempestuously that the U.S. should retreat back to its more Jeffersonian roots, that it should stop meddling in the affairs of other nations and the private affairs of its own citizens. (...)
Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief. The number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947-48 is more than 250. These are major strikes everywhere from Panama to Iran. And it isn't even a complete list. It doesn't include places like Chile, as that was a CIA operation. I was only listing military attacks. (...)
Americans are either not told about these things or are told we attacked them because . . . well . . . Noriega is the center of all world drug traffic and we have to get rid of him. So we kill some Panamanians in the process. Actually we killed quite a few. And we brought in our Air Force. Panama didn't have an air force. But it looked good to have our Air Force there, busy, blowing up buildings. Then we kidnap their leader, Noriega, a former CIA man who worked loyally for the United States. We arrest him. Try him in an American court that has no jurisdiction over him and lock him up -- nobody knows why. And that was supposed to end the drug trade because he had been demonized by The New York Times and the rest of the imperial press. (...)
[The government] plays off [Americans'] relative innocence, or ignorance to be more precise. This is probably why geography has not really been taught since World War II -- to keep people in the dark as to where we are blowing things up. Because Enron wants to blow them up. Or Unocal, the great pipeline company, wants a war going some place. (...)
Now, if I were a Guatemalan and I had the means to drop something on somebody in Washington, or anywhere Americans were, I would be tempted to do it. Especially if I had lost my entire family and seen my country blown to bits because United Fruit didn't want to pay taxes. Now, that's the way we operate. And that's why we got to be so hated.
cualquier parecido con la junta en Colombia no parece ser pura coincidencia
They were suspiciously very ready with the Patriot Act as soon as we were hit. Ready to lift habeas corpus, due process, the attorney-client privilege. They were ready. Which means they have already got their police state. Just take a plane anywhere today and you are in the hands of an arbitrary police state.
Texto completo de la entrevista en L.A. Weekly
El Enemigo Interno
Gore Vidal claims 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11
America's most controversial novelist calls for an investigation into whether the Bush administration deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks to happen
Sunder Katwala
Sunday October 27, 2002
"...America's most controversial writer Gore Vidal has launched the most scathing attack to date on George W Bush's Presidency, calling for an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda's plans..."
"...Vidal's highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled 'The Enemy Within' - published in the print edition of The Observer today - argues that what he calls a 'Bush junta' used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home..."
..."Vidal argues that the real motive for the Afghanistan war was to control the gateway to Eurasia and Central Asia's energy riches..."
'It is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life. Yet, a year or so ago, who would have thought that most of corporate America had been conspiring with accountants to cook their books since - well, at least the bright dawn of the era of Reagan and deregulation.'
"...Vidal also highlights the role of American and Pakistani intelligence in creating the fundamentalist terrorist threat: 'Apparently, Pakistan did do it - or some of it' but with American support. "From 1979, the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ... the CIA covertly trained and sponsored these warriors.' Lea el texto completo en el Guardian
The Enemy Within
by Gore Vidal
America's most controversial novelist calls for an investigation into whether the Bush administration deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks to happen
Sunder Katwala
Sunday October 27, 2002
"...America's most controversial writer Gore Vidal has launched the most scathing attack to date on George W Bush's Presidency, calling for an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda's plans..."
"...Vidal's highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled 'The Enemy Within' - published in the print edition of The Observer today - argues that what he calls a 'Bush junta' used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home..."
..."Vidal argues that the real motive for the Afghanistan war was to control the gateway to Eurasia and Central Asia's energy riches..."
'It is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life. Yet, a year or so ago, who would have thought that most of corporate America had been conspiring with accountants to cook their books since - well, at least the bright dawn of the era of Reagan and deregulation.'
"...Vidal also highlights the role of American and Pakistani intelligence in creating the fundamentalist terrorist threat: 'Apparently, Pakistan did do it - or some of it' but with American support. "From 1979, the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ... the CIA covertly trained and sponsored these warriors.' Lea el texto completo en el Guardian
The Enemy Within
by Gore Vidal
23.4.06
La Corona
THE EMPIRE OF "THE CITY"
"The City" is an international financial oligarchy and is perhaps the most arbitrary and absolute form of government in the world. This international financial oligarchy uses the allegoric "Crown" as its symbol of power and has its headquarters in the ancient City of London, an area of 677 acres; which strangely in all the vast expanse of the 443,455 acres of Metropolitan London alone is not under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police, but has its own private force of about 2,000 men, while its night population is under 9,000.
This tiny area of a little over one square mile has in it the giant Bank of England, a privately owned institution; which as is further elaborated hereinafter is not subject to regulation by the British Parliament, and is in effect a sovereign world power. Within the City are located also the Stock Exchange and many institutions of world-wide scope.
The Balance of Power
is a creation of this financial oligarchy and its purposes are as follows:
(1) To divide the nations of Europe into two antagonistic camps of nearly equal military weight, so as to retain for Britain itself the power to sway a decision either way.
(2) To make the leading and potentially most dangerous military power the particular prey of British suppression and to have the second strongest power on the other side. To subsidize the "Most Favored Nations" with financial investments, and to permit them to acquire political advantages under the beneficent protection of the Sea-Power, to the disadvantage and at the expense of the nations being suppressed.
(3) To subject the continent of Europe to the "Policy of Encirclement" so as to keep the nations of the continent in poverty and ineffectiveness, and thereby prevent the growth of sufficient commercial expansion and wealth to create a rival sea-power.
(4) To retain that complete control and hegemony over all the seas of the world, which was acquired by defeating the allied fleets of its only real rivals, France and Spain, in 1805; and which is artfully and subtly called "The Freedom of the Seas."
(5) To shift this Balance of Power as required so as to be able to strike down friend or foe in the rapidly shifting scene of world power politics, in that inexorable ideology that demands that everything and anything must be sacrificed where the future welfare and expansion to the eventual destiny of the Empire are affected; that eventual destiny outlined by its proponents as the eventual control of All the lands, and All the peoples, of All the world.
"The City" is an international financial oligarchy and is perhaps the most arbitrary and absolute form of government in the world. This international financial oligarchy uses the allegoric "Crown" as its symbol of power and has its headquarters in the ancient City of London, an area of 677 acres; which strangely in all the vast expanse of the 443,455 acres of Metropolitan London alone is not under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police, but has its own private force of about 2,000 men, while its night population is under 9,000.
This tiny area of a little over one square mile has in it the giant Bank of England, a privately owned institution; which as is further elaborated hereinafter is not subject to regulation by the British Parliament, and is in effect a sovereign world power. Within the City are located also the Stock Exchange and many institutions of world-wide scope.
The Balance of Power
is a creation of this financial oligarchy and its purposes are as follows:
(1) To divide the nations of Europe into two antagonistic camps of nearly equal military weight, so as to retain for Britain itself the power to sway a decision either way.
(2) To make the leading and potentially most dangerous military power the particular prey of British suppression and to have the second strongest power on the other side. To subsidize the "Most Favored Nations" with financial investments, and to permit them to acquire political advantages under the beneficent protection of the Sea-Power, to the disadvantage and at the expense of the nations being suppressed.
(3) To subject the continent of Europe to the "Policy of Encirclement" so as to keep the nations of the continent in poverty and ineffectiveness, and thereby prevent the growth of sufficient commercial expansion and wealth to create a rival sea-power.
(4) To retain that complete control and hegemony over all the seas of the world, which was acquired by defeating the allied fleets of its only real rivals, France and Spain, in 1805; and which is artfully and subtly called "The Freedom of the Seas."
(5) To shift this Balance of Power as required so as to be able to strike down friend or foe in the rapidly shifting scene of world power politics, in that inexorable ideology that demands that everything and anything must be sacrificed where the future welfare and expansion to the eventual destiny of the Empire are affected; that eventual destiny outlined by its proponents as the eventual control of All the lands, and All the peoples, of All the world.
4.4.06
La Violencia de lo Global
La Violencia de lo Global [1]
traducción por Carlos Silva
El terrorismo de hoy no es producto de la historia tradicional del anarquismo, del nihilismo, o del fanatismo. Es, en cambio, el compañero contemporáneo de la globalización. Para identificar sus rasgos principales, es necesario realizar una breve genealogía de la globalización; particularmente, de su relación con lo singular y lo universal.
(...)
La universalización se desvanece debido a la globalización. La globalización de los intercambios pone fin a la universalización de los valores. Esto marca el triunfo del pensamiento único [3] por encima del pensamiento universal. Lo que se globaliza, en primera instancia, es el mercado, la profusión de los intercambios y de toda clase de productos, el flujo perpetuo de dinero. Culturalmente, la globalización da paso a la promiscuidad de signos y valores, a una forma de pornografía fáctica. A decir verdad, la diseminación global de todo y de nada a través de las redes es pornográfica. Ya no hay necesidad alguna de obscenidad sexual. Todo lo que usted tiene es una cópula interactiva global. Y, como resultado de todo esto, ya no hay ninguna diferencia entre lo global y lo universal. Lo universal se ha globalizado, y los derechos humanos circulan exactamente como cualquier otro producto global (petróleo o capital, por ejemplo).
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=386