“There was a big meeting organized by Arabs living in the United States, soon after the emergence of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) [in 1967]. … Some Arab students invited me to give the keynote address at this conference… I argued that armed struggle was supremely unsuited to the Palestinian condition, that it was a mistake to put such an emphasis on it. … A successful armed struggle proceeds to out-administer the adversary and not to out-fight him. … This out-administration occurs when you identify the primary contradiction of your adversary and expose that contradiction … to the world at large, and more important, to the people of the adversary country itself.

I argued that Israel‘s fundamental contradiction was that it was founded as a symbol of the suffering of humanity … at the expense of another people who were innocent of guilt. It’s this contradiction that you have to bring out. And you don’t bring it out by armed struggle. In fact, you suppress this contradiction by armed struggle. The Israeli Zionist organizations continue to portray the Jews as victims of Arab violence. …

If I hadn’t gone through the Algerian experience, I wouldn’t have reached this conclusion. After seeing what I saw in Algeria, I couldn’t romanticize armed struggle. … The Algerians lost the war militarily, but won it politically. They were successful in isolating France morally. … When I had finished, there was considerable discomfort on the part of the young Arab students. They were shocked, the expert on guerilla warfare, the man from Algeria, the anti-Vietnam War leader is arguing the exact reverse of what we believe in. …

Obviously, you couldn’t morally isolate the regimes of Hitler or Stalin. A strategy of moral isolation assumes that the adversary has based its own legitimacy on moral grounds. … Between 1967 and now, Israel society has in some ways worsened. Likud [and its coalition partners] … are much less susceptible to moral arguments. [In 1967] centrist Zionism’s primary contradiction was its principles of legitimacy were moral and its practices were immoral. And it is that which had to be fully used. Opportunities were lost in the 1970s, once the PLO had become a quasi-state in Lebanon. …

But if you don’t have a leadership, then what do you do? I have spoken to Arafat about this line in great detail probably five or six times. He always took notes, always promised to do things, always did nothing …

It’s hierarchical, but not Leninist. Once we use the word ‘Leninist’ other images come in, such as discipline, austerity, and genuine sacrifice. The PLO took on the slogan of armed struggle, understanding it merely as the use of arms. They took on the slogan of political organization or parallel hierarchy only to distribute patronage. It’s a traditional political Arab organization … Political bosses stay in control by distributing patronage, using gun-toting as a method for legitimation. Their gun-toting stopped once it stopped serving their purpose. …

In 1975 or 1976, several leaders of the PLO … were in New York for a UN session … the PLO delegation to the U.N. called me and Chomsky and asked if we would come to talk to these leaders. … We talked about the importance of … reaching various wings of American civil society. … There was one man there … who understood and agreed with us. The rest justified their positions. Some gave lectures that were essentially ignorant. … I was beyond depression by that time. I had seen enough. They defeated themselves more than the Israelis did. …

In 1980, I had made a second trip to the south of Lebanon, where PLO forces were concentrated … the PLO posture in Lebanon was much too tempting for an organised army of adversaries. I had written to Arafat saying ‘The way you are organized you will not be able to resist for more than five days.’ …

After the PLO had been driven out of Lebanon, … I argued with him that his single biggest need was to develop a clear-cut position … Announce that you have no problem recognizing the state of Israel. but ask which Israel you are being asked to recognize. Is it the Israel of 1948? … Is it the Israel of Israeli imagination? Because Israel is … the only member of the United Nations, that has refused to announce its boundaries …

The violence they were practizing … fundamentally lacked the content of revolutionary violence. … It had no mobilizing content to it. … It was more an expression of a feeling that an expression of a program. … The PLO was not a revolutionary organisation. … [Finally] the PLO went to surrender. The most tragic point about the PLO is that Israel has not accepted its surrender.”

“Israel is a small country, 5.5 million people. The Arabs are many. … Someday, the Arabs will have to organize themselves. Once they have done that, you will see a different history beginning again, and it won’t be a pretty one. In fact, I’m scared of it.”

aus: Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire. Interviews with David Barsamian. Cambridge, Mass.: South End 2000, S.29-35, 98, 57.

Abb.: Pejac in Al-Hussein, a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, StreetArtNews, 21.4.16, im Internet.

03/16

“Terrorism should be defined in terms of the illegal use of violence for the purposes of influencing somebody’s behaviour, inflicting punishment, or taking revenge. … It has been practised on a larger scale, globally, both by governments and by private groups. Private groups fall into various categories. The political terrorist is only one category out of many others. …

For every lost by unofficial terrorism, a thousand have been lost by the official variety. … There was a rise of fascist governments in third-world countries, particularly throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s. All these fascist governments – in Indonesia, Zaire, Iran, South Korea, and elsewhere – were fully supported by one or the other of the superpowers. They have committed a huge amount of terrorist violence, the source of which is the state …

Regarding the political private terrorists … there is … very little inquiry as to what they are about. If I had to identify a few factors explaining the roots of terrorism, I would say first of all the desire to be heard. … It’s normally undertaken by small helpless groupings that feel powerless. The Vietnamese never committed terror. The Algerians did not commit terror of this kind.

Secondly, terrorism is an expression of anger, of feeling helpless, angry, alone. you feel that you have to hit back. …

Another face is a sense of betrayal, which is connected to that tribal ethic of revenge. … Bin Laden … saw America as a friend; then he sees his country being occupied by the United States and feels betrayed …

Victims of violent abuse often become violent people. The only time when Jews produced terrorists in organised fashion was during and after the Holocaust. …

Finally, the absence of revolutionary ideology has been central to the spread of terror in our time. … The Marxists argued that the true revolutionary does not assassinate. … Social problems require social and political mobilization, and thus wars of independence are to be distinguished from terrorist organizations. The revolutionaries didn’t reject violence, but they rejected terror as a viable tactic of revolution. That revolutionary ideology has gone out of the movement. In the 1980s and 1990s, revolutionary ideology receded, giving in to the globalized individual. I’ve spoken in very general terms, but these are among the many forces that are behind modern terrorism.”

aus: Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire. Interviews with David Barsamian. Cambridge, Mass.: South End 2000, S.95-98.

Abb.: Elisabetta Benassi: Casse-pipe, 2016, im Internet.

03/16

“The Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan. … American operatives went about the Muslim world recruiting for the jihad in Afghanistan, because the U.S. saw it as an opportunity to mobilize the Muslim world against communism. That opportunity was exploited by recruiting mujahideen in Algeria, Sudan, Egypt, Yemen, and Palestine. From everywhere they came. They received training from the CIA. They received arms from the CIA. … the notion of jihad as ‘just struggle’ had not existed in the Muslim world since the tenth century until the United States revived it …”

aus: Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire. Interviews with David Barsamian. Cambridge, Mass.: South End 2000, S.44

Abb.: Hamja Ahsan: Documenta fried chicken, Detail, documenta15, 2022.

 

03/16

[DE]

“Six years was a long time to be in jail, but it’s an entire era online. Writing on the internet itself had not changed, but reading — or, at least, getting things read — had altered dramatically. …

Blogs were gold and bloggers were rock stars back in 2008 when I was arrested. … People used to carefully read my posts and leave lots of relevant comments, and even many of those who strongly disagreed with me still came to read. Other blogs linked to mine to discuss what I was saying. I felt like a king. …

The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization — all the links, lines and hierarchies — and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. …

Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.

Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting: Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.

At the same time, these social networks tend to treat native text and pictures — things that are directly posted to them — with a lot more respect than those that reside on outside web pages. One photographer friend explained to me how the images he uploads directly to Facebook receive a large number of likes, which in turn means they appear more on other people’s news feeds. On the other hand, when he posts a link to the same picture somewhere outside Facebook — his now-dusty blog, for instance — the images are much less visible to Facebook itself, and therefore get far fewer likes. …

Apps like Instagram are blind — or almost blind. Their gaze goes nowhere except inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying. …

Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that’s picked for them by complex –and secretive — algorithms. The Stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more. You don’t need numerous tabs. You don’t even need a web browser. You open Twitter or Facebook on your smartphone and dive deep in. The mountain has come to you. Algorithms have picked everything for you. …

Here’s no question to me that the diversity of themes and opinions is less online today than it was in the past. New, different, and challenging ideas get suppressed by today’s social networks because their ranking strategies prioritize the popular and habitual. … But diversity is being reduced in other ways, and for other purposes.

Some of it is visual. Yes, it is true that all my posts on Twitter and Facebook look something similar to a personal blog … But I have very little control over how it looks like; I can’t personalize it much. …

The centralization of information also worries me because it makes it easier for things to disappear. … What if my account on Facebook or Twitter is shut down for any reason? …

Maybe it’s that text itself is disappearing. After all, the first visitors to the web spent their time online reading web magazines. Then came blogs, then Facebook, then Twitter. Now it’s Facebook videos and Instagram and SnapChat that most people spend their time on. There’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at. Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?

The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking. …
In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment. …”

aus: Hossein Derakhshan: The Web We Have to Save. Medium.com, 14.07.2015

Abb.: Pawel Kuczynski: Blinkers, pictorem, im Internet.

07/15

“Locality and togetherness in the sense of community are central key terms in the deep ecological movement … The bioregionalist movement … has consitently advocated a geographical, political, and economic reorganization of nations into bioregions … [In reality, the] idea, that the ecologically right course of action will impose itself as the obvious one at the local but not at larger levels of scale, may seem something short of compelling to anyone who has ever engaged in local politics … The history of environmental politics includes many examples of local communities voting in favor of their own economic interest and against environmental preservation, decisions that have sometimes been overruled by a national community with fewer direct gains to hope for from development or exploitation of local resources. … There is nothing in the idea of localism itself that guarantees its connection with grassroots-democratic and egalitarian politics that many environmentalists envision when they advocate place-based communities.”

aus: Ursula K. Heise: From the Blue Planet to Google Earth. The internet does not exist, e-flux journal. Berlin: Steinberg-Press 2015, S. 68-72.

Abb.: ?, im Internet.

06/15

“What the ‘social’ in today’s ‘social media‘ really means[?]

… It seems that social media solves the organisational problems that the suburban baby-boom generation faced fifty years ago: boredom, isolation, depression, and desire. … The social … is reanimated as a simulacrum of its own ability to create meaningful and lasting social relations.

… Historical subjects, once defined as citizen or members of a class possessing certain rights, have been transformed into subjects with agency, dynamic actors called ‘users’, [or] customers … The social no longer manifests itself primarily as a class, movement or mob … Nowadays, the social manifests itself as a network. …

The institutional part of life is another matter, a realm that quickly falls behind, becoming a parallel universe. It is tempting to remain positive and portray a synthesis … between the formalized power structures inside institutions and the growing influence of informal networks.

But there is little evidence of this … The PR-driven belief that social media will, one day, be integrated, is nothing more than New Age optimism in a time of growing tensions over scarce resources. The social, which used to be the glue for repairing historical damage, can quickly turn into unstable, explosive material.

… The term ‘social’ has effectively been neutralized in its cynical reduction to data porn. …

We will end up in an antisocial future, characterized by the ‘loneliness of the isolated man in the connected crowd. Confined inside the software cages of Facebook, Google, and their clones, users are encouraged to reduce their social life to ‘sharing’ information. … Programmers these days loosely glue everything together with code. Connect persons to data objects to persons. That’s the social today.”

aus: Geert Lovink: What is the Social in Social Media? In: The internet does not exist, e-flux journal. Berlin: Steinberg-Press 2015, S.164-181, Im Internet.

Abb.: Warren Miller, The New Yorker, 15.6.1987.

06/15

“Solutionism takes problems from social and political domains and recalibrates them as issues to be dealt with by technology alone. … Privacy and civil liberties are brushed aside: technological bypasses to political, social, and legal problems present themselves everywhere as progress. Who rules the internet on whose behalf, as ridiculously archaic as the question may sound, is a political and legal issue hijacked by solutionism.”

aus: Metahaven: Captives of the Could. Part III: All Tomorrow’s clouds. In: The internet does not exist, e-flux journal. Berlin: Steinberg-Press 2015, S.251.

06/15

“The activist group NullifyNSA has taken on the task of disabling the NSA by shutting off the water supply to its data centers. the fascinating proposition is a stark reminder that the ability to spy and to store data is ultimately dependent on electricity and cooling. … In Utah, tha new data center is expected to need 1,7 million gallons of water per day to keep operational. … No water = no data center. …

A state like Utah is in a state of near-constant drought. The fact that all these precious resources are being used to spy on the world should be disgusting to nearly everyone. …

We know that a prime motivation in expanding their operations in Utah, Texas, Georgia, Colorado and elsewhere was to ensure that loads of resources like water, electricity, and more, were distributed. That means they know they have an Achilles heel.”

aus: Metahaven: Captives of the Cloud. Part III: All Tomorrow’s clouds. In: The internet does not exist, e-flux journal. Berlin: Steinberg-Press 2015, S.255-257.

06/15

“The exodus from blogging to the extreme use of Facebook[is] a much larger difference than that between blogging and the careful, painstaking writing of Marx‘ Capital. A Facebook comment leaves the reader with no choice but to either like it or leave it. You only receive feedback from people who already like you. The objectors simply go to their own page and issue statements that garner the ‘liking’ of their own fans. … They either join the page of their own sect or support group, ‘liking’ each other’s comments, or forever hold their peace.

The widespread use of Facebook has created the ‘final statement’ that replaces the messy exchange on a blog, which in turn replaced the in-depth thinking that exists in books, effectively recreating the Facebook user as a judge. Whether they like it or not, Facebook users find themselves in the position of a superstar or a prophet, needing to utter profound statements and expecting the cheers of the crowd. As it becomes easier and easier for people to connect, this loop tragically kills conversations and exchanges them for the proclamations of ignorant judges who know nothing of the world but their own personal narratives and verdicts.”

aus: Jon Rich: Facebook: A court of ignorant, cruel judges. In: The internet does not exist, e-flux journal. Berlin: Steinberg-Press 2015, S.160/61.

06/15

“Truthiness betekend dat je niet je hoofd, maar je haart gebruikt … Je gelooft iets omdat je in je hart wéét dat het waar is. … Dit is geen modern fenomeen … Alleen wordt die reflex nog versterkt in de mediawereld waarin we nu leven. … Ideologisch gekleurde media zijn er steeds geweest, maar nieuw is dat beide blokken met de opkomst van de nieuwe media steeds meer geïsoleerd zijn geraakt van elkaar. … Resultaat: verschillende groepen hebben niet meer alleen hun eigen mening over de realiteit, maar steeds meer ook hun eigen realiteit an sich. Objectieve feiten doen er steeds minder toe. … De meningsverschillen gaan niet over: ‘Wat moeten we doen in Irak?’ maar over de feiten zelf …

Een van de problemen is … dat er geen mainstream meer bestáát. The New York Times heeft een oplage van iets meer dan een miljoen en [een] miljoen onlinelezers. Dat klinkt als een boel, maar vergeleken bij de 300 miljoen mensen in het land is dat niets. De journaals van ABC, CBS en NBC – de grote Amerikaanse zenders, dus – trekken elk zes à zeven miljoen kijkers. De talkshow van Bill O’Reilly op Fox News heet populair, maar toch heeft hij maar twee miljoen kijkers. Dat zijn geen media die iedereen gebruikt en vertrouwd. …

Terwijl de oude huizen van vertrouwen afkalven, zijn er steeds meer nichemedia opgedoken die elk hun eigen micropubliek bedienen. … Het typevoorbeeld waren de Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, de groep die Kerry zo terroriseerde in 2004 … De Swift Boatcampagne was gebaseerd op leugens. Keer op keer kwamen journalisten die de claimes tegen Kerry checkten tot de conclusie dat de beschuldigingen vals waren … in de nieuwe mediawereld, waar nieuws niet noodzakelijk door de journalistieke filter heen moet, kun je een heel eind ver komen zonder harde feiten. …

We krijgen steeds meer problemen om beleid te formuleren. De VS hebben geen noemenswaardig klimaatbeleid omdat een groot aantal mensen simpelweg weigeren om de feiten te geloven. Als we niet eens kunnen overeenkomen over wat de realiteit is, wordt het heel moeilijk om doeltreffend aan politiek te doen.”

aus: We kiezen allemaal onze eigen waarheid. Der amerikanische Blogger Farhad Manjoo zitiert durch Tom Vandyck, De Morgen, 9.5.2008

Abb.: Amrizal Salayan: Truth, 2012, indoartnow, im Internet.

05/08