Welcome to Orwell’s World

Obama's lies over the Afghanistan war remind us of the lessons of Nineteen Eighty-Four

by John Pilger

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies". He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the US has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country."

Ahmad: Shahid Alam on Israeli Exceptionalism

Ahmad: Shahid Alam on Israeli Exceptionalism

Ahrar Ahmad reviews M. Shahid Alam. Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 274 pp., for IC

Initially, the slogan “a land without a people for a people without land” was skillfully employed to encourage Jews to migrate, and to allay Western discomfort. Alas, as Alam points out insistently, this struggle for a Jewish homeland ignored the Arabs already there, who had been there for centuries, and who significantly exceeded the number of Jews who had migrated there during the entire 50 year period. In fact, even in 1948, they constituted almost two-thirds of the population, and occupied almost three-fifths of the land, in the mandate territories. Consequently, what the Zionist logic demanded was to delegitimize, indeed dehumanize, those Palestinians as nothing more than a pesky nuisance that merely complicated their own grand designs and obvious triumphs. The Arabs were dismissed as people unworthy of basic human dignity, devoid of moral agency, and incapable of having nationalist aspirations.

The Psychology of the Self and the Public Realm

The Healing Powers of Facebook

By MIKITA BROTTMAN

And creating impressions, of course, is what Facebook is all about. In many ways, the Facebook profile is a return to the Victorian portrait photograph, which was a way for the middle classes to present a version of themselves suitable to the public sphere. Popular until the 1920s among ladies and gents of a certain class, these daguerreotypes were a way of presenting a stage-managed version of themselves as they hoped to be seen (and measured) by others. In other words, their function was just as consciously performative and voyeuristic as the Facebook profile. Subjects would often be photographed wearing a very special item of clothing that they considered represented their essence—a characteristic fancy hat, for example, or an oriental parasol.

Avatar Obama and the United States of Hype

by: Ángel Luis Lara | La Jornada (Mexico)

French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari write that the meaning of a cultural good always exists in the connections that it establishes with its external image. With this in mind, "Avatar" can be looked upon not only as a movie, but as a metaphor for an entire country: the United States has become the greatest hype on the face of the earth.

"Not a Possibility?"

War on Yemen

By GARY LEUPP

The Obama administration, in the wake of the Underwear Bomber Affair, which it insists on closely linking to Yemen’s homegrown al-Qaeda, is pressuring its uncomfortable ally Saleh to accept more drone attacks, more military aid, more “advisors.” Both Obama and Saleh are walking into the trap, the former because he is the president of an imperialist country competing with other powers for control of the Indian Ocean, and a politician jockeying for position within an environment where neocon hawks retain a shocking degree of power and credibility, the latter because he has few options. Saleh cannot refuse U.S. drone strikes where the Pakistanis have failed to do so. The best he can do is persuade the U.S. to hit his own enemies among the Houthis and the adherents of the Southern Movement and hope al-Qaeda doesn’t flourish as a result of the consequent rage.

White Power USA: The Rise of Right-Wing Militias in America

Democracy Now!

Israel must unpick its ethnic myth

By Tony Judt

"If the Jews of Europe and North America took their distance from Israel (as many have begun to do), the assertion that Israel was “their” state would take on an absurd air. Over time, even Washington might come to see the futility of attaching American foreign policy to the delusions of one small Middle Eastern state."