American "Liberal" Hell & "Liberal" Stupidity Much B4 Trump (Under Construction List)

the fable of the WORM & the WOLF (which might pretty well be preposterous) + Late Classic Maya Clown (Mary Miller & Karl Taube, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya) (A/Z montage);

misinformation Wars & Mass Surveillance (important to know!);

'The behavior of Netanyahu is inexcusable' former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Conflict Zone DW/Youtube, 2024);

The Road to Guantanamo (Michael Winterbottom & Matt Whitecross/ Silver Berlin Bear 2006) [the video is not available at Youtube anymore];

Snowden (Oliver Stone, 2016);

A Most Wanted Man (Anton Corbijn, 2014);

Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010);

Inside Job (Charles Ferguson, 2010);

Taking Sides (Stvan Szabo, 2001);

Lektionen in Finsternis (Werner Herzog, 1992);

Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987) [the video was taken out of Youtube];

Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964);

....

"Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs ad digest the food and shovel the shit out."
William S. Burroughs
"And they took me and put me in this room, and I was like, 'wait a minute, it's rubber... I'm in the RUBBER ROOM!"
Richard Lloyd (Please Kill Me)

"Can you imagine what Pat Robertson would do if he had the Pentagon and the CIA under his command?"

Timothy Leary (Chaos & Cyber Culture)

"... le guerrier réduit son semblable en servitude. Il subordonne ainsi la violence à la plus entière réduction de l'humanité à l'ordre des choses... Il en est de la noblesse du guerrier comme d'un sourire de prostituée, dont la vérité est l'intérêt."

Georges Bataille (Théorie de la religion)

"Ich rechne diese angeblich "Ersten" nicht einmal zu den Menschen überhaupt, — sie sind für mich Ausschuß der Menschheit, Ausgeburten von Krankheit und rachsüchtigen Instinkten: sie sind lauter unheilvolle, im Grunde unheilbare Unmenschen, die am Leben Rache nehmen..."

Nietzsche

"The war against Hitler, or rather the mere readiness to make war against him—which would have sufficed—was desired by those friends of peace. But when we see—and how can we not see?—the destruction, ruin, and cor­ruption engendered by even a war waged for humanity, the demoralization, the unleashing of every brutal, selfish, and antisocial instinct..."

"... this non-political and at bottom innocent intellectual was so del­icate a recording instrument that he sensed the rise of impe­rialism and the fascist era of the Occident, in which we are now living and will be living for a long time, in spite of the military victory over fascism..."

Thomas Mann (Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Recent History/translation by Richard and Clara Winston)

"Uno dos tres, alzo la patita."

Mauricio Rosencof

"No segundo semestre de 1980, aconteceu um evento oficial no Hotel Glória, no Rio de Janeiro, promovido pela International Policie Association, que serviu de bombo para outra reunião, essa clandestina, que fez parte do contexto da Operação Condor... Decidiu-se radicalizar os ataques à bomba em vários países da América do Sul que tinham governos militares, para que tais ações fossem atribuídas à esquerda, a exemplo do que tinha ocorrido na Argélia."

Cláudio Gerra (Memórias de uma guerra suja)

"In the United States, the hardening of attitudes, the tightening of the grip of demeaning generalization and triumphalist cliché, the dominance of crude power allied with simplistic contempt for dissenters and 'others' has found a fitting correlative in the looting, pillaging, and destruction of Iraq's libraries and museums. What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that 'we' might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow..."

"It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected U.S. officials (they've been called chicken hawks, since none of them ever served in the military) was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true itent, hastened, and reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars. The major influences on George W. Bush's Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Adjami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks think about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and centuries-old Islamic decline that only American power could reverse."

"In Arab and Muslim countries the situation is scarcely better. As Roula Khalaf argues, in an excellent Financial Times essay (September 4, 2002), the region has slipped into an easy anti-Americanism that shows little understanding of what the United States is really like as a society. Because the governments are relatively powerless to affect U.S. policy towards them, they turn their energies to repressing and keeping down their own populations, which results in resentment, anger, and helpless imprecations that do nothing to open up societies... The gradual disappearance of the extraordinary tradition of Islamic ijtihad has been one of the major cultural disasters of our time, with the result that critical thinking and individual wrestling with the problems of the modern world have simply dropped out of sight. Orthodoxy and dogma rule instead."

Edward W. Said (Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition of Orientalism) 

"Ce ne fut pas l'Orient de Decamps ni même de Delacroix qui commença de hanter mon imagination quand le baron m'eut quitté, mais le vieil Orient de ces Mille et une Nuits que j'avais tant aimées, et me perdant peu à peu dans le lacis de ces rues noires, je pensais au calife Haroun Al Raschid en quête d'aventures dans les quartiers perdus de Bagdad."

Marcel Proust (le narrateur)

"Nous ne parlons même pas des guerres, de moins récentes et de plus récentes, où l'on peut attendre pour l'éternité que la morale ou le droit international (qu'on les viole ouvertement ou qu'on s'en réclame hypocritement) déterminent avec la moindre rigueur une responsabilité ou une culpabilité pour des centaines de milliers de victimes sacrifiées et on ne sait même pas à qui ni à quoi, victimes innombrables dont chaque singularité est chaque fois infiniment singulière, tout autre étant tout autre, qu'il s'agisse de victimes de l'État irakien ou des victimes de la coalition mondiale qui l'accusait de ne pas respecter le droit."

Jacques Derrida (Donner la mort)

"Tu veux dire que les kamikazes sont les moulins à vent, et les politiques, des don quichottes modernes? Q'on fait la guerre à un ennemi introuvable, qu'on s'en prend aux effets au lieu d'affronter les causes, qu'on balance des 'répliques policières', comme le chevalier de la Manche lançait sa Rossinante, au lieu de faire les réformes sociales nécessaires? On serait mieux inspirés de changer le vent plutôt que de juger des moulins affolés. Si le même vent persiste, il rendra fous tous le moulins de la Terre..."

Sylvia Leclercq

"Todas las armas valen —murmuró—. Es la definición de esta época, del siglo XX que viene, señor Gal."

Barón Cañabrava (Mario Vargas Llosa, La guerra del fin del mundo)

Gore Vidal on Liberty (The Real News, 3/7):

"... you cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people through the dreaded media have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person... It is just grotesque!"

Barrett Brown on Julian Assange's Arrest (04/12/2019):

"the people who are out there right now... on the news networks, the cable networks, trying to define what journalism is, are the least equipped to do so... it's because of corporate media, it's because of money, it's because of intelligence control... it's laziness, it's cowardice... it's not a meritocracy in any sense, it may be less so than a lot of industries... there are really incompetent figures that have somehow managed to worm their way into the producer, editorial roles..."

"[Assange] is a flawed figure which is about no more than the U.S. and the world deserve... he was and remains an isolated figure... someone who did not take a good counsel... but he was something and he remains something and it is very important that his rights be respected..."

Daniel Ellsberg on Julian Assange's Arrest (04/11/2019):

"... there's a lot of people who are very critical of his actions in the election of 2016 on various grounds; I'm not happy with the result..."

"... they wanted [Chelsea Manning] to go beyond what she said either falsely, which they would be happy with to incriminate Julian Assange... torture is mainly used for false confessions... she was in solitary confinement for then and half months until public pressure got her at least into the general prison population..." 

"... having induced the British to arrest him forcibly... indicates that they will go the extra mile in violating as I say international norms by violating his immunity and his asylum and then shipping [him] off to U.S..."

"... in my day, his case would've been almost sure to be... dismissed by the Supreme Court on grounds of violating the First Amendment, but that was different Supreme Court..."

"it is a very ominous situation not only for Julian Assange..."

"... I think he has ahead of him for having taken on the world's mightiest empire and exposed its criminal secrets in many cases having to do with torture and assassination..."

"It is a day for journalist in general specially and everybody who values a free press and not only in this country to join ranks here now to expose and resist the wrongful and in this country unconstitutional abuse of our laws to silence journalists..."

John Pilger on Julian Assange's arrest:

"Julian was an accredited beneficiary of the whole notion of asylum; the United Nations working party on the arbitrary detention made that absolutely clear, and it was clear in covenants to which Britain is a signatory; now, if that can be torn up, if a regime as mired in murky corruption as the Lenín Moreno regime in Equador is today, can call in the police in any country to arrest asylum seekers, then think of all the historical examples... I reported from the Soviet Union at the hight of the Cold War... and I watched the KGB and their associates do something similar to dissidents, intimidating them, marching them out of their flats, intimidating their families..."

"... the idea that it is about bail infringement is ridiculous... it's about getting him accross to a Supermax in the United States; it opens up a whole chapter of really diminishing the very principles that came out of the Second World War upon which the universal declaration is based; it shows how fragile they are; do these lesser political beings in London in this government really understand what they are setting in train?"

***New:

- "... this is a column that allows me to express my ongoing astonishment that Donald Trump is president of the United States; my ongoing bewilderment with a world in which an unhinged, know-nothing former reality TV star and property developer, with zero background in foreign affairs or national security, may have just kicked off World War III." Mehdi Hasan, Four Years Ago, Trump Had No Clue Who Iran’s Suleimani Was. Now He May Have Kicked Off WWIII (The Intercept); 

- "Trump is responsible for whatever comes next. But time and again, the worst foreign policy atrocities of his presidency have been enabled by the very politicians who claim to want him removed from office."  Jeremy Scahill, With Suleimani Assassination, Trump Is Doing The Bidding of Washington's Most Vile Cabal (The Intercept);
- "Since May, Manning has been held in a Virginia jail for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Manning has not been charged with or convicted of a crime. And her imprisonment on the grounds of “civil contempt” is explicitly coercive: If she agrees to testify, she can walk free. If she continues to remain silent, she can be held for the 18-month duration... Each day she is caged, Manning is also fined $1,000. If she is released at the end of the current grand jury, she will owe the state nearly $500,000 — an unprecedented punishment for grand jury resistance." Natasha Lenard, Chelsea Manning Spent Most of the Last Decade in Prison. The U.N. Says Her Latest Stint Is Tantamount to Torture (The Intercept);

- ''After all, if you have worked in high-level foreign policy positions in Washington, or at the think thanks and academic institutions that support those policies, or in the corporate media outlets that venerate those who rise to the top of those precincts (and which increasingly hire those security state officials as news analysts), how do you justify to yourself that you’re still a good person even though you arm, prop up, empower and enable the world’s worst monsters, genocides, and tyrannies?" Glenn Greenwald, Trump’s Amoral Saudi Statement Is a Pure Expression of Decades-Old “U.S. Values” and Foreign Policy Orthodoxies (The Intercept);

- The remarkable tale of the corporate lobbyist sworn in as a temporary U.S. senator (The Intercept);

- It's time for America to reckon with the staggering death toll of the post-9/11 wars (The Intercept);
- A Forgotten American’s 14-Year Nightmare in Iraq (The Intercept);

See also:
- Instead of revolution: démontage;
- right truths to slay the enemy;
- Facebook, community, nudity;
- Facebookers, Pokemongoers & Francophonie;
- Environmental Issue (Brazil);
- Who Wants to Be the World's 5th Largest Economy?
- Banality of Evil in Brazil;
- Brazil after Rousseff's Impeachment;
- List of Infamous Brazilian Esquerdofrênicos;
- Humanitarian Rhetoric;
- Inside Job;
- El estudiante, political movie;
************************************************************

the fable of the WORM & the WOLF (which might pretty well be preposterous):

Unfortunately, it looks like the move of Equator's president does nothing but prove the everlasting calling for insignificance and subservience of the Latin American "elite" (sic). After all, grotesque stupidity is the essential feature of the Latin American "new" right, elected with a tacit collusion of the mainstream media (that is, in Brazil, Globo, Bandeirantes, etc. which keep giving unrestricted support to aggressive neo-"liberal" unchecked policies besides being critical of the most caricatural traits of a Bolsonaro):  

'Moreno’s move against Assange has proved controversial in Ecuador. The previous president, Rafael Correa, has accused his one-time political ally of “a crime humanity will never forget” and described Moreno as “the greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history”.'

'In what may have been part of a campaign to weaken Moreno, WikiLeaks was linked to an anonymous website that claimed Moreno’s brother had created an offshore company...'

'[Moreno] insisted the decision to cooperate with the British and remove Assange from the embassy was a sovereign decision of his government and was not forced upon him by any external power.'

'He also asserted he had been given guarantees about Assange’s possible extradition to the US. “For us the maximum right to protect is the right to life,” he said. “For this reason, we consulted the government of the United Kingdom on the possibility of Assange’s extradition to third countries where he could suffer torture, ill-treatment or the death penalty. The United Kingdom extended written guarantees that if extradition is eventually requested he will not be extradited to any country where it may suffer such treatment,”' "Assange tried to use embassy as 'centre for spying', says Ecuador's Moreno" (Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, 04/14/2019);

***Just as Important:

'... it was curious to hear Diane Abbott, when answering questions about Labour’s enthusiastic objection to Assange’s possible extradition to the US to face charges of involvement in a computer-hacking conspiracy, say those sexual assault charges were “never brought”. The allegations were made, she generously conceded, but the charges were never brought.'
'It really doesn’t have to be this way. It is entirely possible to believe two things at the same time, that Assange should not face extradition to the US but that we should perhaps take a look at why he jumped bail and was in hiding for seven years. More than 70 MPs and peers have now written to Sajid Javid and Abbott, urging them to focus attention on the earlier Swedish investigations.'
'There is a tendency by some on the left to have a hierarchy of worthy causes. At the top is all the big banner stuff; the US, imperialism, neocolonialism, foreign policy. Further downstream are social justice and economic redistribution. And all the way at the bottom of the waterfall are those who don’t fit quite as neatly on one side or the other of the ideological odyssey between good and evil. Women have pesky gender issues that break the solidarity with men, and if we are to protect the workers, how do all the immigrants fit in to that?'
'Assange’s threatened victimisation by the US would be a worrying precedent and a reason not to extradite him, but that does not mean that sexual assault allegations should be brushed aside, "Why is the left blinkered to claims about Assange and sexual assault?" (Nesrine Malik, The Guardian, 04/15/2019);

***A more Equitable Perspective:

'States that commit crimes in foreign lands depend on at least passive acquiescence. This is achieved in a number of ways. One is the “othering” of the victims: the stripping away of their humanity, because if you imagined them to be people like your own children or your neighbours, their suffering and deaths would be intolerable. This is what the attempted extradition of Julian Assange to the US is about.'
'Back in 2010, the then US soldier Chelsea Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified documents relating to US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, US state department cables, and inmates imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. Assange’s alleged role consists of helping Manning crack an encrypted password to gain access to the US defense department computer network. It is Manning who is the true hero of this story: last month, she was arrested for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks, placed in solitary confinement for four weeks, and now remains imprisoned. We must demand her freedom.'
'These leaks revealed some of the horrors of the post-9/11 wars. One showed a US aircrew laughing after slaughtering a dozen innocent people, including two Iraqi employees of Reuters, after dishonestly alleging to have encountered a firefight. Other files revealed how US-led forces killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, their deaths otherwise airbrushed out of existence. Another cable, which exposed corruption and scandals in the court of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, the western-backed then-dictator of Tunisia, helped fuel protests, which toppled him.'
'... Assange must answer the accusation in Sweden without the threat of extradition to the US,' "Whatever you think of Julian Assange, his extradition to the US must be opposed" (Owen Jones, The Guardian, 04/12/2019)

***Ultimate piece on Snowden and his ring (written by a woman):

"[In five years since Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance], we’ve learned much more about how Big Tech was not only sharing data with the NSA but collecting vast troves of information about us for its own purposes. And we’ve started to see the strategic ends to which Big Data can be put. In that sense, we’re only beginning to comprehend the full significance of Snowden’s disclosures... This is not to say that we know more today about Snowden’s motivations or aims than we did in 2013. The question of whether or not Snowden was a Russian asset all along has been raised and debated... [NSA's PRISM, whose documents were leaked by Snowden and disclosed by Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman] secured cooperation between the Internet companies and the NSA at the point when an individual suspected of involvement in terrorism had been targeted and the NSA wished to retrieve that suspect’s messages from the companies’ servers. Many Americans will still feel that this program constituted an unwarranted breach of privacy, but what PRISM does not do is vindicate the idea of a “deep state” operating entirely independently of the rule of law. Although this might seem like a fine distinction to some, it is an extremely significant one. But the narrative of deep-state lawlessness was too appealing... Assange’s allies, Milne included, have made clear that their allegiance doesn’t lie with liberal democracies and their values. They have taken sides with authoritarianism in their fight against the hypocrisy of liberal democracies... Assange, a former libertarian, has called Russia under Putin “a bulwark against Western imperialism”... For his part, Greenwald has repeatedly, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, decried as Russophobia the findings that Putin ordered interference in the 2016 US presidential election—even appearing on Fox News to do so. The very term “Russophobia” obfuscates the distinction between Vladimir Putin’s regime and Russia; the two clearly can’t be identified with one another... The distinction between left and right, he argues, will increasingly be replaced by the opposition between people who are pro-establishment and anti-establishment. But being anti-establishment is not a politics. It defends no clear set of values or principles. And it permits prevarication about the essential choice between criticizing and helping to reform liberal democracy from within or assisting in its demise. It encourages its partisans to take sides with a smaller, authoritarian state in order to check the power of the one whose establishment it opposes... In their book Red Web: The Kremlin’s War on the Internet, the Russian investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan recounted the experiences of human rights activists who were summoned via an email purportedly from Snowden himself, to a meeting with him at Moscow airport when he surfaced there with Sarah Harrison, to find they were joining the heads of various pro-Kremlin “human rights” groups, Vladimir Lukin, the Putin-appointed Human Rights Commissioner of Russia, and the lawyers Anatoly Kucherena and Henri Reznik. It was clear to the independent activists that Kucherena had organized the meeting... So whether we trust [Snowden] matters. It matters whether we view him as a bad actor, or as a well-intentioned whistleblower who has shown bad judgment, or as someone who has allowed himself to become an unwitting pawn of the Russians... In a 2016 lecture by video-link at Fusion’s Real Future Fair, Snowden discouraged his audience from pursuing the legal and political remedies that liberal democracies offer... If there’s one thing Greenwald, Assange, and their followers got right, it’s that the United States became a tremendous economic and military power over the last seven decades. When it blunders in its foreign or domestic policy, the US has the capacity to do swift and unparalleled damage. The question then is whether this awesome power is better wielded by a liberal-democratic state in an arguably hypocritical way but with some restraint, or by an authoritarian one in a nakedly avowed way and with no restraint. In the five years since Snowden’s revelations, we have seen changes, particularly the election of Donald Trump with his undisguised admiration for strongmen, that compel us to imagine a possible authoritarian future for the United States," "Edward Snowden Reconsidered" (Tamsin Shaw, The New York Review of Books, 09/13/2018);

***What should have been the ultimate piece on Glenn Greenwald (& still much more on Assange): 

"What’s astonishing about their ascent to heroism is the breadth of their support. The embrace of the antiwar left and the libertarian right was to be expected. But effusions of praise for the leakers can also be found throughout the liberal establishment... Contrary to [Snowden's] claims, he seems to have become an anti-secrecy activist only after the White House was won by a liberal Democrat who, in most ways, represented everything that a right-wing Ron Paul admirer would have detested... In several cases over a five-year span, Greenwald represented Matthew Hale, the head of the Illinois-based white-supremacist World Church of the Creator, which attracted a small core of violently inclined adherents... Greenwald’s other clients included the neo-Nazi National Alliance, who were implicated in an especially horrible crime. Two white supremacists on Long Island had picked up a pair of unsuspecting Mexican day laborers, lured them into an abandoned warehouse, and then clubbed them with a crowbar and stabbed them repeatedly. The day laborers managed to escape, and when they recovered from their injuries, they sued the National Alliance and other hate groups, alleging that they had inspired the attackers. Greenwald described the suit as a dangerous attempt to suppress free speech by making holders of “unconventional” views liable for the actions of others... most of [Greenwald's] writings, his critique of America abroad was congenial both to the isolationist paleo-Right and to post–New Left anti-imperialists... Along those lines, Greenwald found common ground with the upper echelons of right-wing free-market libertarianism... When bloggers confronted Greenwald about his associations with libertarians, the darling of the netroots and MSNBC left angrily batted the claims away as distortions. He need not have reacted so forcefully. Accused of working for Cato, for example, he might simply have said that he believed in addressing any organization that wanted to hear from him and left it at that. Instead, Greenwald attacked his critics as “McCarthyite” purveyors of “falsehoods, fabrications, and lies”... In 2010, Greenwald began attacking the Obama administration from the left on a variety of domestic issues, attacking Wall Street corruption, opposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and decrying inequality. Yet even as he insisted on his left liberalism, he remained a steadfast promoter of Ron Paul—“far and away the most anti-war, anti-Surveillance-State, anti-crony-capitalism, and anti-drug-war presidential candidate in either party.” (After Paul’s son, then senatorial candidate Rand Paul, questioned the Civil Rights Act, Greenwald agreed with criticism that the remark was “wacky,” but insisted that the real “crazies” in American politics were mainstream Democrats and Republicans.)... During his political pilgrimage, Greenwald became consumed: For him, the national security apparatus is not just an important issue; it is the great burning issue of our time... In the wake of the WikiLeaks frenzy, Assange often tried to clarify where he stood politically. His simultaneous embrace of leftist icons such as Noam Chomsky and right-wing libertarians seemed to indicate that he was open to ideas from either end of the political spectrum, so long as they were directed against authoritarianism. Finally, in 2013, Assange proclaimed, “The only hope as far as electoral politics presently ... is the libertarian section of the Republican Party”... Yet even that declaration was misleading. In practice, Assange has a history of working closely with forces far more radical than the Republican Liberty Caucus. Late in 2012, Assange announced the formation of the WikiLeaks Party in Australia. It had been expected that WikiLeaks would ultimately throw its support to the Green Party—especially after the party’s National Council voted in favor of such a move. Instead, WikiLeaks aligned with a collection of far-right parties. One was the nativist Australia First, whose most prominent figure was a former neo-Nazi previously convicted of coordinating a shotgun attack on the home of an Australian representative of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Members of the WikiLeaks Party blamed the flap on an “administrative error”; mass resignations from the party’s leadership followed. Those who quit cited a lack of transparency in the party’s operations, and some pointed to remarks Assange had made blasting a Green Party proposal to reform Australia’s harsh treatment of asylum seekers... Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange have largely set the terms in the debate over transparency and privacy in America. But the value of some of their revelations does not mean that they deserve the prestige and influence that has been accorded to them," "Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought" (Sean Wilentz, The New Republic, 19/01/2014);