RELATIVE AUTONOMY: MEDIA, FILM & POLITICS
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Islamist terror comes to Norway

25/7/2011

 
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"Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. The spectators must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic" - Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

Well, OK, not really. But as news of the atrocities committed in Norway broke last week, before Anders Breivik was identified as the culprit, Western journalists initially conjectured that responsibility might lie with Islamist terrorists or even 'anarchists' (a possibility suggested by Bradford University's Professor of Peace Studies, Paul Rogers, on BBC television news). The Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker and, more splenetically, Craig Murray, have both noted the Islamophobic nature of this coverage - although it was for a Guardian blog, no less, that The Observer's Peter Beaumont wrote a detailed article - now completely revised, of course - connecting the attacks to 'Islamist militants'. Sadly, the attribution of domestic terrorism to Islamists is hardly unprecedented (to take just one outstanding example, consider how the 1995 Oklahoma bombing was initially described in the US media as having Middle Eastern connections), but it is deeply cynical, racist and xenophobic.

Meanwhile, cynical and hypocritical politicians who are themselves responsible for mass murder (notably Barack Obama) are earnestly expressing solidarity with the assassin's victims. Nor have these politicians lost any time in exploiting the tragedy to reinforce public faith in democracy. The Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, for example, has been attempting to rally Norwegians around the flag in an expression of national unity, telling mourners in Oslo that 'by taking part' in public grieving, they were 'saying a resounding "yes" to democracy'.

For the ruling class, indeed, Anders Breivik's reactionary beliefs - summarised in his post-modern, cut-and-pasted manifesto - represent, in Laclauian terms, the 'constitutive outside' of liberal democracy. The horror of Breivik's actions prove, we are told, the moral superiority of liberal capitalism over the 'violent' or 'extremist' ideologies that would overturn it. And yet Breivik's violent hostility towards immigrants reflects the consensus of bourgeois political parties everywhere. In light of this, we should insist that Breivik's ideology and actions, in all their barbarous irrationality, represent the apotheosis rather than the antithesis of capitalist social relations.
As Robert Kurz wrote in his 2002 essay 'The Fatal Pressure of Competition', 'the psycho killers are robots of capitalist competition gone haywire: subjects of the crisis, dedicated to the concept of the modern subject, and fully educated in all of its characteristics'.

Moreover, the 'democratic' state will use Breivik's rampage, as it uses all terrorist attacks, to its advantage. Over the last few days, media coverage of the killings has regularly raised the question of whether the Norwegian state may have been 'naive' about the prospect of a terrorist attack in Norway. This is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the public discourse around the killings, for it surely paves the way for ever tighter state restrictions on civil liberties.

The News of the World scandal: recuperating the crisis

9/7/2011

 
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"It’s useless to react to the news of the day; instead we should understand each report as a maneuver in a hostile field of strategies to be decoded, operations designed to provoke a specific reaction"
 - The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

The phone hacking scandal at The News of the World has thrown a spotlight onto a murky culture of collusion and corruption among politicians, the press and the police, whose existence is unlikely to surprise anybody with a rudimentary understanding of those institutions. Nor, sadly, is it surprising that hundreds of News of the Worldworkers will now lose their jobs for the crimes and mistakes of News International managers. News International clearly regards its workers, along with the victims of its hacking, as fair game. In fact, this scandal presents some opportunities for the Murdoch empire. While the News of the World scandal clearly represents an enormous set-back for the Sun King, it will at least allow him to rationalise his newspaper business as the profitability of tabloid newspapers declines. For the non-Murdoch media (such as the BBC, The Guardian and The Daily Mail) and the anti-Murdoch factions of the British state, meanwhile, the scandal is a godsend.

Unsurprisingly, however, the political dimensions of the phone hacking affair have been ignored in the mainstream media, even by self-styled 'investigative' journalists. In a Spectator article entitled 'What the papers won't say', Peter Oborne castigates politicians and the media for failing to link the scandal to Murdoch's ambitions for BSkyB and asks what he sees as a neglected question: 'whether the owner of News International is any longer a "fit and proper" person to occupy such a dominant position in the British media'. Oborne is pushing at an open door here. The question of Murdoch's moral fitness for mega-moguldom certainly is being raised in those parts of the mainstream media not owned by him (such as The Spectator) and it now looks likely that the decision on Murdoch's BSkyB bid will be deferred, at the very least.

If Oborne really wants to ski off-piste, here are a few questions that actually havebeen ignored by the mainstream media. We know, of course, that the story was broken by The Guardian's Nick Davies; but the question remains: why? Which of Murdoch's many enemies 'pressed the button' on phone hacking? And why now? For obvious reasons, definitive answers to such specific questions are hard to come by; but there can be no doubt that there are elements within the British state that are hostile to Murdoch's pro-US agenda and for whom Murdoch's domination of the British media following a BSkyB takeover was not a welcome prospect. To understand the eruption of this scandal as a well-timed intervention in an inter-bourgeois faction fight is not to embrace a 'conspiracy theory', but to understand that the practical co-operation of various state factions is forever prone to breaking down, giving way to what Marx, in the third volume of Capital, called a 'fight of hostile brothers' whose outcome is 'decided by power and craftiness'.

And here's another largely neglected question: since 'respected' media organisations such as the BBC systematically mislead the public (to take only the most egregious current example, the BBC is blacking out news of the popular movements in Spain and Greece), why do we reserve our moral outrage only for the Murdoch press? The News of the World's news gathering practices are appallingly cynical, it is true. But amid all of the moralising about tabloid journalism, it is worth remembering that in terms of their fundamental ideological commitments, the BBC and Murdoch are on the same side. Indeed, left-liberal complaints about the 'corporate' media and 'neoliberalism' (a concept whose conceptual coherence I have questioned here) all too often underestimate the profound and relentless ideological manipulations of the liberal press and the public service broadcasters.

There may be trouble ahead for that toothless tiger the Press Complaints Commission and tighter press regulation is surely on its way. But there is every probability that this scandal will ultimately only reinforce the power of the British state and its propaganda system, as James Heartfield, with characteristic insight, suggests. In a process that recalls the ruling class's recuperation of the MPs' expenses scandal in 2009, the public outrage over the News of the World's malpractice is being exploited for moral capital by the liberal political and media establishments, as they congratulate themselves for fishing a few rotten apples from the barrel. Nick Clegg, for example, has been assuring the public that the ongoing investigations into the scandal constitute an opportunity to strengthen British democracy.

Meanwhile, left-wing figures such as Neil Kinnock and New Statesman's loyal Labour acolyte Mehdi Hasan have been praising the Labour leader Ed Milliband for standing up to the Murdoch empire, despite the painfully obvious fact that Milliband found his conscience, like all of the politicians, only after news of the scandal broke. The ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown, meanwhile, is now claiming that he, too, consistently stood up to the Murdoch empire, resisting News Corporation's attempts to bully him into curtailing the activities of the media regulator Ofcom in 2009. But while Brown's disagreements with Murdoch points to the origin of this scandal in the political divisions within the ruling class, Brown's moral grandstanding will not wash: after all, Brown and his wife attended many News International events in recent years.

Clearly, even if we accept the dominant framing of the News of the World scandal as an unforeseen 'crisis' of journalism and not as a well-planned take-down, it is a crisis that is now being exploited by politicians as they seek to reassure the public of the fundamental soundness of the political and media systems.

In their reactions to the News of the World scandal, liberal academics, too, have tended to frame the phone hacking scandal as an aberration, stressing the need for a robustly ethical journalism that fulfils its proper mandate to question power and promote democratic deliberation. Yet all of this assumes that liberal democracy (or even, as the soft-nationalist platitude has it, 'our democracy') is desirable - and that the primary role of political journalism is to promote it. It also assumes that there can, under capitalism, be such a thing as a 'free press' that 'speaks truth to power' - a notion that has been nicely demolished by the International Communist Tendency.

These normative assumptions about democracy and the crusading role of journalism as a fourth estate may give comfort to those who have been understandably sickened by recent revelations. From a more radical perspective, however, they can be seen as discursive 'strategies of containment' (in Fredric Jameson's phrase) that serve to arrest critical reflection on the contradictions of capitalism and the macro-ideological operations of the news media. We should instead, I would argue, see the corruption revealed in the scandal not as an aberration, but as part and parcel of the ordinary workings of the democratic state. We should also see Murdoch's humbling not as a triumph for democratic transparency or a setback for global 'neoliberalism', as many on the left have done, but as the curbing and entrammelling of one faction of the British state by another. And we should be very clear that the ultimate function of mainstream political journalism - whether it comes from the BBC, The Guardian or News International - is not to question and investigate those in power, but to serve their interests.

Greece: what the TV doesn't show

6/7/2011

 
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Since virtually all news of the tumultuous and historic events taking place in Greece (and Spain) has been blacked out by the mainstream media, I am copying below a text written by a Greek acquaintance.
  • STATE VIOLENCE IN GREECE

    Dear all,

    Many of you may be familiar with the recent developments in Greece: amidst the worst crisis in its recent history, the country is shaken not only by a series of austerity packages presented by the government, but also by the people's reaction against these packages. As many of you may also know, for almost forty days now citizens have been gathering across from the parliament in the central square of the city of Athens (Syntagma Square) to peacefully protest against the government's handling of the crisis and the democratic deficits of the state. The public assembly that takes place every night in the square is indicative of the kind of protest going on.

    Although this protest is peaceful and rapidly gains the sympathy of the general public, during the last month the police forces have violently attempted to empty the square three times. The third, on 28 and 29, during the first 48-hour strike after the fall of the dictatorship (1974), riot police and other special units used vast amounts of tear gas (20 times more than the average usage in Greece in similar situations), flash-grenades and excessive violence against the protesters. On the 29th in particular the police spread the violence all over the city-centre in what looked like a direct assault of the state against its people. The minister for the 'Citizen's Protection' (the political leader of the police) supported the police tactics on the grounds that the peaceful protests were a 'cover' for urban guerillas, which apparently aimed at storming the parliament. Of course he did not give any valid explanation for the fact that the police did not touch the 'masked youth' that in certain cases engaged in battles with the police, but instead attacked the medical unit on Syntagma Square, the metro station, and even cafes in the wider area of the city-centre (the same minister is responsible for issuing an order that prohibits any ship to sail from Greek port towards Gaza, thus not allowing the Freedom Flotilla II to reach its target). Considering the fact that the protests on the square have been peaceful for the last five weeks, the excessive violence employed by the police cannot be seen as anything else than a well-planned state operation to terrorise the citizens who are reclaiming public spaces and the public sphere from a corrupt political and economic system.

    This kind of violence is unacceptable. Also unacceptable is the fact that none of the EU governments has publicly condemned the violent practices of one of its member states. Their silence is a sign of complicity.

    The following links are only a few of the documented examples of excessive and abusive police violence. Please forward them further: mainstream media do not show these images, so we have to circulate them ourselves.

    Philip

    Riot police brutality on the square against unarmed citizens (warning: this video contains images of extreme violence):
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S20_JuaX8gg

    Mounted police raid Monastiraki:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_j0cIIboGA

    Police attack the metro station in Syntagma Square:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5vYgF7oa60

    Unprovoked attack by riot police near Evangelismos metro station (across from Athens Hilton):
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-QAhMJtUI0

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