{politics} – Page 59 – { feuilleton }

The Trap by Adam Curtis

Adam Curtis, producer of brilliant documentary series such as Pandora’s Box, The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares, has a new series starting on BBC 2 next week. The Guardian profiled him and his work today. The Power of Nightmares is available to download here.

Cry freedom
In the cold war paranoia made sense, but a bold new documentary argues that the west has become trapped in a false idea of what it means to be human. By Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian, Saturday March 3, 2007

IN THE MID-1950s, with the cold war growing chillier, paranoia seeped through the corridors of the Rand Corporation, the fabled military thinktank in California. After all, to the hotshot young analysts paid to devise America’s strategy in the nuclear standoff with Moscow, paranoia seemed to make perfect sense. If you assumed that you couldn’t trust your enemy—and you assumed that your enemy felt the same about you—then whatever noises you made about disarmament, you’d always stockpile weapons, because you’d assume your enemy was doing the same. Nobody would dare attack, and an edgy stability would result. Act with trust and co-operation, on the other hand, and you risked a situation where both sides would claim to be willing to disarm, but then only you actually did so, spelling instability, then doom.

This was what the thinktank’s logicians called the “prisoner’s dilemma”, and the more ambitious among them—inspired by John Nash, the mathematical genius and Rand Corporation scholar portrayed by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind—had high hopes for their newborn theory. Could it be, they wondered, that stability in everyday human relations was achieved by the same kind of self-centred suspicion and distrust? To test their ideas, they recruited the nearest everyday humans they could find: the Rand Corporation’s secretaries. In experiments, they posed various dilemmas for pairs of secretaries, in which they could co-operate or betray each other. (A typical question involved the purchase of a Buick; one imagines women in knee-length dresses, gamely tolerating questions from clipboard-wielding men in horn-rimmed glasses and short-sleeved shirts.) The theory predicted they’d choose betrayal, because they couldn’t trust the other one not to. Every single time, however, they chose to co-operate.

Perhaps if the analysts had paid more attention to their secretaries, the history of the past half-century would have proved very different. Instead, according to a new documentary series beginning on BBC2 next weekend, the paranoid theories hatched during the cold war would come to inspire a peculiar, cold-hearted idea of personal freedom—one that helps explain everything from the rise of Prozac and Viagra to Labour’s obsession with healthcare targets, from the military crusades of George Bush and the rise of the Iraqi insurgency to the rampant diagnosis of attention deficit disorder in children.

Continue reading “The Trap by Adam Curtis”

Dead monuments

Anyone who’s seen a Soviet film from 1947 onwards will recognise the logo of the Mosfilm studio which featured a model of Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman monument. This 24-metre tall steel-plate statue proved surplus to requirements after the collapse of the old order, like so many monuments of that period. English Russia has a series of moody photographs of the structure lying in pieces whilst being dismantled.

Poor Vera, who died in 1953, must have thought her work would last a very long time; these pictures are a poignant reminder of the ephemeral nature, not only of art, but of whole ideologies. They’re also reminiscent of the deliberately degraded sculptures made by Igor Mitoraj (below) which trade for their effect on exactly this disjunction between delusions of permanence and the ravages of history.

And on these Flickr pages you can see one of Mitoraj’s influences from a ravaged past, the fragments of the Colossal Statue of Constantine in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Stalker meme
• The art of Igor Mitoraj
• Enormous structures II: Tatlin’s Tower
• Solaris

Kropotkin in TIME

Kropotkin in TIME.
Open-source anarchism.

31 days in Iraq

“If you look at what’s transpired in Iraq, Chris, we’ve made enormous progress.”
US Vice President Dick Cheney, Fox News interview, January 14th, 2007.

A visual depiction of the continuing human cost of the Iraq war,
by Adriana Lins de Albuquerque and Alicia Cheng. From the NYT.

In January more than 1,900 people—soldiers, security officers and civilians—were killed in the insurgency in Iraq, up from 800 in January 2006. Many corpses showed signs of torture, meaning the victims were probably killed by religious and tribal death squads. This map, based on data from the American, British and Iraqi governments and from news reports, shows the dates, locations and circumstances of deaths for the first month of the year. Given the vast size of Iraq and the communications difficulties inherent in war, the information may be incomplete. Nonetheless, it is our effort to visually depict the continuing human cost of the Iraq war.

Adriana Lins de Albuquerque is a doctoral student in political science at Columbia.
Alicia Cheng is a graphic designer at mgmt. design in Brooklyn.

Update: Seems like The Independent was taken with this as well.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Liberty 2006

Noxious administrations

President Nixon by Gerald Scarfe (1972).

“Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for—but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.” Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004.

Hunter S Thompson wasn’t the only Nixon critic to regret the passing of his old enemy with the advent of the current regime. Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein was saying pretty much the same thing in 2004; two years on, his opprobrium is a lot more severe.

Carl Bernstein: Bush Administration Has Done ‘Far Greater Damage’ Than Nixon

Editor & Publisher
Published: January 24, 2007 4:00 PM ET updated Thursday

NEW YORK In an online chat at washingtonpost.com on Wednesday afternoon, Carl Bernstein, the famed Watergate reporter at that paper and now writing articles for Vanity Fair, took several hard shots at the current Bush administration—almost every time he was asked about the Nixon era. It came just as news of the death of former Watergate ringleader E. Howard Hunt was circulating widely.

After a long explanation of how the American system “worked,” eventually, with Watergate, Bernstein said:

“In the case George W. Bush, the American system has obviously failed—tragically—about which we can talk more in a minute. But imagine the difference in our worldview today, had the institutions—particularly of government—done their job to ensure that a mendacious and dangerous president (as has since been proven many times over, beyond mere assertion) be restrained in a war that has killed thousands of American soldiers, brought turmoil to the lives of millions, and constrained the goodwill towards the United States in much of the world.”

Later, asked if the Nixon administration was unique in hiring disreputable characters, he replied: “Until the Bush-43 administration, I had believed that the Nixon presidency was sui generis in modern American history in terms of your question…

“In terms of small-bore (but dangerous) characters like Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy with their schemes, I doubt that any presidency approaches the criminality of the Nixon White House. But the Watergate conspiracy—to undermine the constitution and use illegal methods to hurt Nixon’s political opponents and even undermine the electoral system—was supervised by those at the very top.

“In the current administration we have seen from the President down—especially Vice President Cheney, Attorney General Gonzales, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld—a willingness to ignore the great constitutional history of the United States—to suspend, really, many of the constitutional guarantees that have made us a nation apart, with real freedoms unknown elsewhere, unrestricted by short-term political objectives of our leaders.

“Then there are the Geneva conventions: Who would have dreamed that, in our lifetime, our leaders would permit their flagrant abuse, would authorize torture, ‘renditions’ to foreign-torture chambers, suspension of habeus corpus, illegal surveillance of our own citizens….

“But perhaps worst, has been the lying and mendacity of the president and his men and women—in the reasons they cited for going to war, their conduct of the war, their attempts to smear their political opponents.

“Nixon and his men lied and abused the constitution to horrible effect, but they were stopped.

“The Bush Administration—especially its top officials named above and others familiar to most Americans—was not stopped, and has done far greater damage. As a (Republican) bumper-sticker of the day proclaimed, ‘Nobody died at Watergate.’ If only we could say that about the era of George W. Bush, and that our elected representatives in Congress and our judiciary had been courageous enough to do their duty and hold the President and his aides accountable.”

Bernstein was also asked about the CIA leak case and the leaking of Valerie Plame’s name, which he called “a truly Nixonian event, a happenstance not atypical of the take-no-prisoners politics of the Bush presidency. But it pales in comparison to the larger questions of the Constitution, of life and death, of the Geneva conventions, of the expectation that our leaders—from Condoleeza Rice to Dick Cheney, to the attorney(s) general to Paul Wolfowitz and on down and up the line speak truthfully to the American people and the Congress. They have consistently failed to do so.”