Progressive Calendar 07.-4.11
From: shove001 (shove001umn.edu)
Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2011 02:37:49 -0700 (PDT)
  P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R  07.04.11

1. RNC StP cops   7.04 9am
2. Atheist events 7.04 1pm/5pm/6pm
3. Peace walk     7.04 6pm RiverFalls WI

4. Neil Whitehead - Divine Hunger: The Cannibal War Machine

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From: "TruthToTell" andydriscoll [at] truthtotell.org
Subject: RNC StP cops 7.04 9am
[Please thank Andy for taking up this crucial topic - ed]

Tune in every Monday 9:00am to 10:00am on KFAI
Remember â call and join the conversation â 612-341-0980 â or Tweet
us
@TTTAndyDriscoll  or post on  TruthToTellâs   Facebook page.
Watch us from Studio 5! TruthToTell now live on  Livestream  and later on
Blip.tv  or in  iTunes

TruthToTell, Mon., July 4 @ 9AM:
POLICEOVERREACHING-AND COVERING UP: Dangerous Liaisons - KFAI FM
90.3/106.7/KFAI.org

GUESTS:
MIKE QUINN  â Retired Police Officer and Author of  Walking with the
Devil  (Inside the Code of Silence)
TED DOOLEY  â Plaintiffsâ Attorney for several RNC Activists
MIKE WHELAN  â Civil lawsuit awardee in raid on his St. Paul home by
Officers and Deputies  before the RNC

The fallout from RNC 2008 police abuse continues to ripple through the
courts and common sense â not to mention fundamental Constitutional
underpinnings.

No matter what you want to believe about anarchists and purported violence
and the like, police and media accounts of the threats posed by anti-war
activists have been shown to be little more than exaggeration designed to
instill fear first, among delegates to that yearâs Republican National
Convention delegates, and second, among average Joes and Janes throughout
the state.

Lingering police and FBI paranoia, much of it generated and unleashed by the
Patriot Act and, eventually, two administrationsâ Justice departments,
feeds the use of federal and local law enforcement as powerful resistors to
political dissent. Recently, the Obama Justice Departmentâs FBI has
beefed up its domestic spying and organized resistance to anti-public
policy protesters,
continuing and expanding Bush domestic spying policies and activities.
Support for Palestine gets you arrested or a grand jury subpoena in this
country. Demonstrating against this Presidentâs war policies can get you
arrested and/or a phone tap. Worse, fear-mongering by both the right wing
and the government is eroding support for all First Amendment rights to
free speech
and assembly.

Back in 2008, Homeland Security and its âFusionâ Centers â an amalgam
of  FBI ,  CIA  and  Secret Service  agents buttressed by 3,700 highly
armed â and armored â police officers from who-knows-how-many
jurisdictions, including many from faraway cities plus large contingents of
Minneapolis and St. Paul cops and brown-clad  Ramsey County Sheriff
deputies, deployed all over town, turning St. Paul into an armed encampment.
(Sheriff Bob Fletcher lost his reelection in part on the strength of his
abuses during this event.)

Here is the sum total of property damage inflicted during the five or six
days of the event in downtown St. Paul: two broken windows. Others were
claimed,
including a police car set afire. Number of people arrested: 840, including
journalist Amy Goodman and 40 other journalists. Meanwhile, houses in both
cities were raided on the claim that the antiwar RNC Welcoming Committee
members inside were amassing weapons made from items found in typical
basements and garages, each planning violence against conventioneers and
cops. Number of charges actually prosecuted: 21. Number of convictions in
all courts: 5 or 6. Number of lawsuits filed against cops: dozens.

So sure were both the police and the RNC that such lawsuits would probably
be filed â and won â they bonded themselves against financial losses to
the
tune of $10 million. Much of that money has been recently paid out â
mostly in settlements, not jury awards. One of those awards have gone to
people
whose rights were violated during raids. One of those went to St. Paul
homeowner
Mike Whelan  and a trio of vegans who rented his duplex during the RNC.
Representing Whelan and several other plaintiffs, including open anti-war
activist, Mick Kelly, has been St. Paul Attorney,  Ted Dooley .

But this overreaching by law enforcement, the violence too many cops use
against average citizens, even in the normal course of duties, like traffic
stops â then lying to cover it in reports and protected by other officers
under the unwritten Code of Silence, has reached epidemic levels,
especially in the Minneapolis Department. This culture has fed on itself
and turned otherwise conscientious cops into lying and covering for their
brothers and sisters in blue for over a Century. Chronicling this festering
sore is retired Minneapolis police sergeant, Mike Quinn , whose book,
Walking with the Devil: The Police Code of Silence , is in its second and
revised printing.

TTTâs ANDY DRISCOLL  and  MICHELLE ALIMORADI  talk with Quinn, Dooley and
Whelan (sounds like an Irish law firm) about these very serious breaches of
Constitutional guarantees and what they represent in the treatment of
minorities and political dissenters throughout this area and the United
States as a whole.


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From: Minnesota Atheists <web [at] mnatheists.org>  +
Subject: Atheist events 7.04 1pm/5pm/6pm

Monday, July 4 1:00pm â 2:00pm_  [21]American Atheists Aerial Banners
The skies over Forest Lake, White Bear Lake and Roseville.
The aerial banners will say "God-Less America" or "Atheism is Patriotic"._
 Links:
   21. http://www.meetup.com/minnesota-atheists/events/24147381

If you're planning on going to the Forest Lake celebration, it appears that
most of the festivities will be held at the American Legion - Post 225

If you're planning on going to the White Bear Lake celebration, it appears
that most of the festivities will be held at (or around) Memorial Beach
(11th and Lake Ave.)

If you're planning on going to the Roseville celebration, it appears that
most of the festivities will be held at Central Park at Lexington ( 2540
Lexington Avenue North Roseville, MN)

---

_Monday July 4, 5:00pm-6:30pm_  [24]Atheists for Human Rights Happy Hour
Olâ Mexico restaurant, on Lexington Ave., two blocks north of Larpenteur,
Roseville, MN.
_This event takes place every Monday.  Tables on terrace level by fireplace.
Schedule  July  change,  so  new  attendees should call Paul Craven at
763-788-8918_
 Links:
   24. http://atheistsforhumanrights.org

---

Monday July 4, 6:00pm_  [22]Freethought Toastmasters
Larpenteur Estates Party Room, 1276 Larpenteur Ave. W, St. Paul 55113
This group meets the 1st and 3rd Monday of every month.  Contact George
Kane, [23]nup [at] Minn.net for more information._
 Links:
   22. http://www.crest-o-the-hill.org/6913/Freethought.htm
   23. mailto:nup [at] Minn.net


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From: Nancy Holden <d.n.holden [at] comcast.net>
Subject: Peace walk 7.04 6pm RiverFalls WI

River Falls Peace and Justice Walkers. We meet every Monday from 6-7 pm on
the UWRF campus at Cascade Ave. and 2nd Street, immediately across from
"Journey" House. We walk through the downtown of River Falls. Contact:
d.n.holden [at] comcast.net. Douglas H Holden 1004 Morgan Road River Falls,
Wisconsin 54022


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Divine Hunger
The Cannibal War Machine
By NEIL L. WHITEHEAD
CounterPunch
July 1 - 3, 2011

This is the text of a presentation given to the Conference - Sacred
Empowerment - University of Leeds, June 2011...with special thanks to Lori
Shelbourn.

The modernity of witchcraft and the intertwining of divine or sacred forms
with the exercise of political power are topics recently much discussed by
anthropologists.

So too envisioning violence as means of cultural expression, not simply the
absence of or destruction of meaning, has been central to anthropological
approaches to ethnographic locales increasingly consumed by wars,
especially in South America and Africa.

It is timely then to turn this anthropological lens towards the
Euro-American West, itself involved in a long series of colonial and now
global wars, in order to ask how the Sacred Empowerment of free market
liberal democracy and its global projection is established through
violence, a process no less evident here in Leeds.

Such issues are being raised by historians of the World Wars and by
anthropologists looking at memorialization and monuments as well as
archaeologists who now characterize the super-modern 20th century as one of
increasing devastation of both humans and things leading to the
proliferation of archaeological sites, such as battlefields, industrial
ruins, mass graves, and concentration camps.

A critical anthropology then is not just telling alternative stories but
also unveiling what the supermodern Cannibal War-Machine does not want to
be shown.

So the suggestion here will be that there is a deep historical and systemic
relationship between the modern free-market, liberal democratic world order
and the prosecution of war and other forms of military and police violence.

At the same time the progressive evacuation in the 20th century of the
nation-state as a means of class domination and the advent of a nomadic
pirate class of financial capital, means that the practice of endemic
global war has become indifferent to national territory and so functionally
infinite in its horizons for future conflict.

Modernity & Violence

The mark of the modern is violence. Violence, in both material and
immaterial forms has become a vital sign of the truth and authenticity of
cultural and social meaning. Increasingly it seems that all socially
significant meaning can only be produced through the agon of war.

Wars on drugs, terror, disease, cancer, Aids, poverty, crime, homelessness
constitute the ideological backdrop to more localized battles for justice,
truth, accountability, human rights and so on and onâ

While the idea of âwarâ in such usages is partly metaphor, this should
not be allowed to obscure the centrality of the idea of adversarial contest
and victory to the shaping of our cultural and social priorities and goals.

One consequence of the Renaissance revival of the thought of the Classical
world, and its subsequent codification as Enlightenment, was precisely to
create a cultural epistemology rooted in agonistic relations with the world

The ancient Greeks routinely tortured slaves to extract evidence for legal
trials. They considered truth obtained from slaves by torture to be more
reliable than the freely-given testimony of free men.

Perhaps then our idea of both scientific and spiritual truth, the truth of
the philosophical tradition founded by the ancient Greeks, is caught up in
the agonistic logic of torture, in which truth is conceived of as residing
elsewhere, requiring violence and suffering as necessary for its
production.

Torture

The tortured animal subjects of neuro-scientific experiments, the suffering
of the unemployed, the displaced, the impoverished are all an acceptable
price for progress towards modernity, they are unavoidable casualties in
our wars for freedom, democracy and prosperity, the spiritual mimesis of
which is of course the tortured Christ

Moreover our assumption that there is a linear progress in this death-march
towards the modern also closes off alternative histories, so that our
recollection of the past becomes merely a curiosity that allows us to
marvel at our progress from those savage origins.

The savages then become exemplars of not just ignorance but also
illegitimate violence, violence which does not stem not from Reason and a
desire for Progress, but violence that is atavistic, primitive and
animalistic.

Certainly the practice of violence has always been part of human history
but, as those key Moderns - Shakespeare and Hobbes â both understood,
there came a moment somewhere in the 16th century when we collectively
cried âHavoc!...and let slip the dogs of War.â

Anthropologists would argue not that violence was somehow absent or lesser
until this point but rather that the purposes and meanings of the social
relationships of war and violence were secondary to other kinds of
supervening social relationships and practices.

Ritual and ceremony, kinship and the forms of social exchange, technologies
and logistics all tended to inhibit the orbit of large-scale warfare as a
habitual and persistent form of social relationship

Certainly mighty states and empires were capable of laying waste to local
populations but the Greek war-machine of Alexander, the Roman war-machine
under various Emperors, or the conquests of the Assyrians and Mongols, were
always episodic in character

By contrast, the transcontinental colonialism of Europe in America, Africa,
Australia and Asia relied on war as a continuous means to inaugurate social
relationships with previously unknown populations â

As the conquistador of Orinoco, Fernando de Berrio, wrote to the Spanish
King in 1590 â ââthe natives flee on our arrival and will not come
and trade with us, so I shall make war upon them and by these means draw
them more closely to usâ.â

More widely, the project of modernity was also enabled by the possibility
that war itself could become fabulously profitable and in so doing also
made State-sponsored warfare a means for the Sacred Empowerment of the
colonial and eventually global social order.

Rene Girard was quite right to emphasize that violence and the sacred are
intimately connected but this is not only as the intermittent refreshment
of the status quo through scapegoating that Girard was principally
interested in,

Violence also links to the sacred as a systematic and historically evolved
means for the accumulation of power and wealth through war and violence,
for which the sacrifice of bodies and lives is necessary.

As a result the divinity of kings gave way to the divine status of the
capitalist market whose occult and hidden hand came to rule in place of the
noble, but impoverished, lineages.

Capital accumulation became not only moral but true since wealth is
represented as the result of a victorious engagement in the agon of
entrepreneurial competition. Might is right, greed is good and the cannibal
war-machine perfectly unites those values.

The cannibal war-machine thus consumes persons and ecologies through forms
of commodity production and price speculation that profit from the
systematic creation of social chaos and its re-ordering through the
violence and destruction of high-tech military performance and the enforced
disciplines of emergency or pandemic management and homeland security.

The war machine image here invokes an unnatural force, made by humans but
beyond their control and intimately tied to the profits of economic and
financial production.

But the cannibal war-machine is not a new phenomenon even if it is a
quintessentially modern one â it originates with the colonial creation of
a New World in the Americas. â a new world of unspeakable violence and
vast profit, of merciless genocide and marvelous possessions.

In 1494 it was reported from Haiti that the natives

ââ say that their king talked with the spirit Giocaugama, and that he
prophesied that those who succeeded him would enjoy their rule for but a
short time; because people wearing clothes would arrive, who would dominate
and kill them, and that they will starve to death. At first, the natives
thought that these people had to be the cannibals but they now believe that
these people are actually the Admiral Columbus and the men that he
brings.â

More recently the Dominican writes Junot Diaz pointed out that â..the
Caribbean generally and the island of Hispaniola specifically is the
linchpin, the pivot point where the Old world swung into the New world. If
you want the transformation point, if you want the ground zero where the
Old World died and the New World began, it's thereâ the modern world was
given rise by what began in the Caribbeanâ

The consequence of that arrival, for European and Amerindian alike, was the
advent of a new world, a modernity whose ruins we still inhabit. Perhaps
then, in all its poverty and urban decay, its prophetic reflection of those
states of exception that haunt the contemporary imagination, Haiti is in
fact the most modern country in the world.

For the Columbian discovery was indeed of a ânewâ world, but it was one
in which we were the savages and they were the civilized, in which we were
the cannibals and they the kings, just as had been prophesied.

In this light the aboriginal TaÃnos of Haiti were the very first
âindustrial reserve armyâ, as Marx termed it, the first appearance of
killable bodies, in Agambenâs formulation, they were the first fuel for
the wealth-generating cannibal war-machine.

Las Casasâ famous account of the âDestruction of the Indiesâ thus
precisely registers the culture shock of not just an encounter with the
exotic, but shock at a new world order that was rapidly emerging from the
profits of plunder and extraction of gold, pearl diving and tobacco
growing.

âThe Spaniards, studying and learning nothing, assaulted the Indians like
cruel and starving Tigers, Wolves and Lions, for the space of Forty Years
after their first landing, inhumanely and barbarously they butchered and
harassed the Indians with many kinds of Torments, never before known, or
heard of ââ

The invention of these new and unimagined forms of violence is precisely
the birth of the cannibal war-machine.

This cannibal war-machine thus accrued vast profits through the
accumulation of natural resources, such as gold and silver, as well as
later plantation commodities.

The high rates of profit for these commodities was exactly related to the
unfettered consumption of persons as insurgents and slaves, as well as the
ability to treat human landscapes as wilderness in which no one owned the
ânaturalâ resources â war had become a mode of economic production.

Colonmial impunity from the customary consequences of war and violence
allowed a lethal conjunction of military action, commodity speculation and
social power to emerge at the very foundation of modernity.

As gold sources in the Caribbean declined so the Spanish war-machine
created in the Caribbean moved onto the continent and dreams of ever more
El Dorados meant that the orbit of the new-world war machine expanded
rapidly.

Not surprisingly then the cannibal white-man, symbolizing the unceasing and
rapacious progress of the war-machine, has become a stock figure in the
non-Western imagination.

From the inception of New World, with TaÃno rock inscription or the Aztec
Codex Borgia, we see the body - of devouring-mouths, right through to the
present day and the Palale-undepo drawn by Caribs, or the cannibal
white-man who was said to be the first to enter the Yawong in Guyana where
I did extensive field work.

One might also reference here the organ stealing fat-sucking pishtaco of
the Andes, as well as Karl Marxâs apt characterization of âvampiricâ
capital.

The violent consumption of others is also an overt part of European
self-imagining.

The original illustration for Thomas Hobbesâs Leviathan, that manual for
the workings of the cannibal war-machine, is represented likewise as a
body-politic of violent, dominating, and sacred power, a body itself of
composed of hungry desires.

If the cannibal war-machine of the colonial State was perfected in the New
World, it also came home. Certainly the first stirrings pre-dated the New
World as both the Crusades and The Hundred Years War of the 1337-1453
established new social and cultural codes for violence and war but it was
the hundred years of endemic warfare across Europe, especially in Germany
and France, from the mid-16th to mid 17th century â which exactly
referenced the modernist relationship between spirituality, violence and
the State.

This Sacred Empowerment of European nation states through the sacrificial
slaughter of their own citizens, thus signaled that the relations of
production and destruction in the New World would also be played out in the
Old.

And so the New World War-Machine was also a European Cannibal as first
civil wars and ultimately world wars ensued. Surely, we ask ourselves, the
millions killed in just the last century cannot have died in vain?

To which is answered that the meaning of their suffering and erasure is
found in the relentless pursuit of the Modern project.

The poem Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori was written by Wilfred Owen
in disgust at such a sentiment but it is today quite literally true again,
following the redemptive wars on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
longest wars ever fought by the US military.

War-Machines - Nomads (Tribes), States and the NWO.

My use of the term âwar-machineâ certainly derives from Delueze and
Guattari and they too were closely engaged with how the ânomadsâ, or
âtribesâ at the margins of the burgeoning state systems of Europe and
it colonies, resisted State control.

This has also been the subject of extensive anthropological discussion over
the last 20 years, as with my own volume, War in the Tribal Zone.

Delueze and Guattari write, âIf the nomads formed the war machine, it was
by inventing absolute speed, by being âsynonymousâ with speed. And each
time there is an operation against the State â insubordination, rioting,
guerrilla warfare, or revolution as act â it can be said that a war
machine has revived, that a new nomadic potential has appeared.â

But the war machine for Delueze and Guattari is not solely dedicated to the
production of war. War is simply an occasional by-product of what the war
machine is really about which is for Delueze and Guattari âexteriority to
the State.â

Certainly Delueze and Guattari recognize that the State may appropriate the
war-machine of the nomads and War in the Tribal Zone explicitly focuses on
the mimetic and converging forms of violence in wars of colonial conquest
and ordering.

However, in the 30 years since Delueze and Guattari first wrote of the
war-machine, the State, understood as that cluster of power, wealth and
privilege through which the elite enforces its market disciplines, has
itself has become nomadic, exceptional, and marked by its absence.

In this way the contemporary cannibal war-machine directly reflects the
globalized, digitized and immaterial forms and relations of power, that are
controlled by a de-territorialized pirate class of nomadic off-shore
capital.

This brutal nomadic formation is ultimately exterior to the nation-state
even if the United States still has uses and so it is now the indigenous
governments of Euro-America, as in Greece right now, which are being
stripped down, outsourced and rendered incapable of stopping the cannibal
war machine coming ashore to profitably consume both nation and national
resources.

The cannibal war-machine no longer needs the State â the nomadic war
machine of the global financial elite â the modern pirates of the global
Caribbean â need no territorial ties and so the structural adjustment of
Europe and North America now follows that of the âThird Worldâ in the
1980s.

Unleashing the cannibal war-machine thus reinvigorates capital accumulation
through provoking incessant crises which fuel commodity speculation and the
plunder of natural resources.

Local resistance is reframed as insurgency; local capital is reframed as
criminality and local spirituality becomes superstition.

In this way we will all become part of Marxâs âdisposable industrial
reserve armyâ, with eroding economic resources, dwindling legal status,
no enforceable human rights, we become merely âkillable bodiesâ as
Giorgio Agamben terms it.

The imagination and construction of these killable bodies is at the heart
of the ideology of exception and are the fuel for the cannibal war-machine

Soldiers, policemen, security guards, firefighters no less than insurgents,
terrorists, criminals, narco-traffickers and the urban unemployed are all
disposable and killable from the perspective of the owners of the cannibal
war-machine.

War becomes an infinite possibility for the enactment of an Infinite
Justice, in response to the infinite threats of terror and insurgency,
criminality or civil disobedience â at this point then the war machine
truly eats its ownâ

In turn war itself ceases to be a clash of nation states and becomes the
profligate consumption of high tech weaponry and resources in pursuit of
these intangible and mystical goals, goals which nonetheless are highly
profitable â after all the US Army is the leading consumer of gasoline on
the planet and BP holds one of the largest the supply contracts

The occult and mysterious - if not exactly mystical - goals of the
contemporary war-machine reflect a form of spirituality in which
ontological engagement with the immaterial Sacred has come to be supplanted
by a cultural fetish centered on the auto-consumption of material
Commodities

As we follow our own trail of tears to the Modern the older gods and even
God himself has, as Bruno Latour put it, simply been crossed out.

In our tattered modern world the actions of national militaries have become
nomadic and unpredictable, so that now the question is not âwhat is
warâ but WHEN is war?

Militaries world wide have quite literally adopted the notion of the
âwar-machineâ and are consciously employing the nomadic tactics of
swarming and chaos creation which become a means to assert, through
violence, sporadic forms of murderous and destructive control

This ordering and disordering of social life through violence also invokes,
and is a mimesis of, sorcery and witchcraft.

The occult and hidden nature of high-tech military weapons, such as drones,
attack helicopters and black-ops, create a magical military violence.

Sacred empowerment comes not just through human sacrifice but through the
sorcery of military killing - killing oneâs enemies through secretive and
hidden methods

Unseen high-altitude bombing or drone strikes, covert operations which
shape-shift the identities of killers, and the ability to see in the
darkness of night, are all a mimesis of the imaginative worlds and
subjective experiences manifested in forms of witchcraft, magic, and
assault sorcery

And this mystique is consciously promoted by military and police
world-wide, entering a global cultural imaginary that ceaselessly replays
the violent performances of both military and insurgent, police and
criminal,

Such virtual experiences circulate incessantly through electronic media
whose consumption mesmerizes, stupefies and enchains individual
subjectivities to The Cannibal War Machine.

Conclusion

The logic of the modern world order is thus necessarily violent and
cannibalistic. Persons, places, and things are perpetually consumed through
forms of commodity production and price speculation that profit from the
systematic creation of social chaos and its re-ordering through the
violence and destruction of high-tech military and police performance

At the same time, the cannibal war-machine spiritually redeems liberal
democracy and financial profitability through the structural adjustment of
nationality and locality to the discipline of democratic free-market
conditions.

This is directly achieved through forms of economic and military violence
that obliterate prior collectivity and political organization.

However, the profitability of this process is made occult through a Western
liberal discourse of democratic transparency and terrorist conspiracy.

Rational, Infinite, Justice-seeking violence conjoined to the agonistic
procedures of Science and Research, thus perversely promises pre-Apocalypse
global redemption through faithful adherence to the cult of the Modern.

However, our colonial history of relentless immiseration of local
communities for the last 500 years and a 20th century apotheosis of the
Modern which killed millions, shows us that the Sacred Empowerment of the
Modern is necessarily violent and so perpetually stimulates the Divine
Hunger of The Cannibal War Machine.

Neil L. Whitehead is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology,
University of Wisconsin-Madison.









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  - David Shove             shove001 [at] tc.umn.edu
  rhymes with clove         Progressive Calendar
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