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Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter! The Cult of the Stranglers
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Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter!
The Cult of the Stranglers
William Pinch writes a dazzling essay on criminal conspiracies and religious violence, and the state’s uses of “terror”, from the Indian “thugs” to 9/11. Andrew Cockburn describes Wall Street’s triumphant routing of financial reform. Serge Halimi on the deficit bogy, weapon of the rich. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and t-shirts make great presents.
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Today's Stories December 23, 2009 David Price Dean Baker Andy Worthington Neve Gordon Debayni Kar Brian Tokar Dave Zirin December 22, 2009 Paul Craig Roberts Dave Lindorff Ralph Nader David Rosen Laurie Kirby Ron Jacobs Dick J. Reavis Manuel Garcia, Jr. Norman Solomon Rannie Amiri Website of the Day December 21, 2009 Alan Farago Marjorie Cohn Uri Avnery Mike Whitney Mary Lynn Cramer Mark Scaramella Walter Brasch David Michael Green Ingmar Lee Farzana Versey Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day
December 18-20, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Michael Colby Jeremy Scahill Stewart J. Lawrence Mike Whitney Andy Worthington James Ridgeway Saul Landau John Ross Danny Weil Rannie Amiri Franklin Lamb Steve Early Liaquat Ali Khan Fred Gardner D. K. Wilson Missy Beattie Jim Goodman George Wuerthner Charles R. Larson Lorenzo Wolff David Yearsley Ben Sonnenberg Lordura di Napoli: the Best DVDs of the Year Wajahat Ali Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend December 17, 2009 Steven Higgs Barbara Koeppel Dave Lindorff Ramzy Baroud Ron Jacobs Shamus Cooke Christopher Brauchli Binoy Kampmark Norm Kent Patrick Bond Website of the Day December 16, 2009 James Bovard Gregory V. Button Dan Schiller Gareth Porter Farrah Hassen Nicola Nasser Daniel C. Maguire Martha Rosenberg David Macaray Ellen Brown Robert Bryce Website of the Day December 15, 2009 Ellen Cantarow Chris Floyd Anthony DiMaggio Dean Baker Andy Worthington Mike Whitney Jayne Lyn Stahl Jeff Ballinger Raymond Lawrence David Rovics Website of the Day December 14, 2009 Daniel Wolff Bill Quigley Patrick Cockburn Michael Hudson Paul Craig Roberts Rob Stone, MD Dr. Susan Block Pervez Hoodbhoy Mike Whitney Shepherd Bliss Website of the Day
December 11-13, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Carl Ginsburg Joshua Frank / Franklin C. Spinney Anna Vigna Mike Whitney Bill Moyers / Julien Mercille Brian Cloughley Benjamin Dangl Conn Hallinan Christopher Brauchli Fred Gardner David Macaray Limone Tatatjavy Joseph Shansky Belén Fernández Ingmar Lee Ron Jacobs Brenda Norrell Farzana Versey Ramzi Kysia Missy Beattie Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend December 10, 2009 William Blum John Ross Björn Kumm Jonathan Cook Mike Whitney Jayne Lyn Stahl Gareth Porter Rannie Amiri Norman Solomon James Faris Website of the Day Kevin Alexander Gray Joe Bageant Stephen Soldz Anthony DiMaggio David Swanson Dave Zirin Thomas Power Martha Rosenberg Susie Day US Peace Groups Website of the Day December 8, 2009 Andrew Cockburn Mike Whitney Brendan Cooney Stephanie McMillian Ron Jacobs Benjamin Dangl Kevin Mink Dave Lindorff Helen Redmond David Macaray Franklin Lamb December 7, 2009 Margot Kidder Patrick Cockburn Gareth Porter Marshall Auerback Clancy Sigal Jeffrey Blankfort Jonathan Cook Brian McKenna Bouthaina Shaaban Charlotte Laws Harry Browne Website of the Day December 4-6, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Ishmael Reed Paul Craig Roberts Vijay Prashad Muhammad Idrees Ahmad Linn Washington, Jr. Eamonn McCann Rannie Amiri Lebanon: an End to Sectarian Politics? David Rosen Benjamin Dangl Dave Lindorff Dan Meek Geoff Berne Todd Alan Price Frank Green John Halle Brian Tokar Brian M. Downing Jim Goodman Bruce E. Levine Charles R. Larson Kim Nicolini David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend December 3, 2009 Jeff Ballinger Paul Fitzgerald / Elizabeth Gould Christopher Brauchli Laura Flanders Franklin Lamb Mark Weisbrot Gary Leupp Stephen Fleischman Bill Christison December 2, 2009 Paul Craig Roberts Gareth Porter Zoltan Grossman Mike Whitney Ron Jacobs M. Shahid Alam D.K. Wilson Fran Shor Susan Galleymore Jayne Lyn Stahl Website of the Day December 1, 2009 David Price Afshin Rattansi Carlos Benemann Dean Baker Bouthaina Shaaban Rejecting Westocentrism David Rosen Susan Galleymore David Macaray Miriam Pemberton Farzana Versey Website of the Day November 30, 2009 Gary Leupp Mara Ahmed / Mike Whitney Steven Higgs P. Sainath Jonathan Cook Norm Kent Dave Lindorff Normon Solomon David Michael Green How Dare You Clean Up Our Mess? Website of the Day November 27 - 29, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Carl Ginsburg Mike Whitney Franklin Spinney Joshua Frank Saul Landau Heather Gray John Ross David Macaray Franklin Lamb Shamus Cooke David Ker Thomson Martha Rosenberg Ramzy Baroud Ron Ridenour Amanda Mueller James Rothenberg Travis Kelly Don Monkerud Ron Jacobs Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend November 26, 2009 Vijay Prashad Greg Moses Jayne Lyn Stahl Jeff Cohen John Blair Ann Robertson / Farzana Versey Sam Husseini Tom Mountain Website of the Day November 25, 2009 Dave Lindorff Marjorie Cohn Belén Fernández Ralph Nader Rannie Amiri Missy Beattie Rob Stone, MD Health Care Delusions: Better Than Nothing? Norm Kent Binoy Kampmark Handing It to France: the Sporting Trial of Thierry Henry Ron Ridenour Website of the Day November 24, 2009 Mary Lynn Cramer Dean Baker George Ciccariello-Maher Eric Walberg Andy Thayer David Macaray Laura Carlsen Gary Leupp Adam Federman William S. Lind Mission Creep: Counter-Insurgency in Salinas? Website of the Day November 23, 2009 Paul Craig Roberts Jonathan Cook Edward S. Herman / David Peterson Bouthaina Shaaban Helen Redmond Rannie Amiri Dave Lindorff Rev. William E. Alberts Mike Whitney Mark Weisbrot David Michael Green November 20-22, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Gareth Porter Mike Whitney Fred Gardner James J. Brittain Jonathan Cook Alan Farago David Macaray Binoy Kampmark Ben Sonnenberg Ron Jacobs David Yearsley Brenda Norrell Ron Ridenour |
Going NativeHollywood's Human Terrain AvatarsBy DAVID PRICE This week, as James Cameron's 3D cinematic science fiction saga dominates the American box office, and tie-in products permeate fast food franchises and toy stores, it is worth noting an interesting bit of cultural leakage tying our own real militarized state to Cameron's virtual world of Avatar. Avatar is set in a world where the needs of corporate military units align against the interests of indigenous blue humanoids long inhabiting a planet with mineral resources desired by the high tech militarized invaders. The exploitation of native peoples to capture valuable resources is a story obviously older than Hollywood, and much older than the discipline of anthropology itself; though the last century and a half has found anthropologists' field research used in recurrent instances to make indigenous populations vulnerable to exploitation in ways reminiscent of Avatar. Avatar draws on classic sci-fi themes in which individuals break through barriers of exoticness, to accept alien others in their own terms as equals, not as species to be conquered and exploited, and to turn against the exploitive mission of their own culture. These sorts of relationships, where invaders learn about those they'd conquer and come to understand them in ways that shake their loyalties permeate fiction, history and anthropology. Films like Local Hero, Little Big Man, Dersu Uzala, or even the musical The Music Man use themes where outsider exploitive adventurists trying to Fans of Avatar are understandably being moved by the story's romantic anthropological message favoring the rights of people to not have their culture weaponized against them by would be foreign conquerors, occupiers and betrayers. It is worth noting some of the obvious the parallels between these elements in this virtual film world, and those found in our world of real bullets and anthropologists in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2007, the occupying U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan have deployed Human Terrain Teams (HTT), complete with HTT "social scientists" using anthropological-ish methods and theories to ease the conquest and occupation of these lands. HTT has no avatared-humans; just supposed "social scientists" who embed with battalions working to reduce friction so that the military can get on with its mission without interference from local populations. For most anthropologists these HTT programs are an outrageous abuse of anthropology, and earlier this month a lengthy report by a commission of the American Anthropological Association (of which I was a member and report co-author) concluded that the Human Terrain program crossed all sorts of ethical, political and methodological lines, finding that:
The American Anthropological Association's executive board found Human Terrain to be a "mistaken form of anthropology". But even with these harsh findings, the Obama administration's call for increased counterinsurgency will increase demands for such non-anthropological uses of ethnography for pacification. There are other anthropological connections to Avatar. James Cameron used University of Southern California anthropologist, Nancy Lutkehaus, as a consultant on the film. I recently wrote Lutkehaus to see if her role in consulting for Cameron had included adding information on how anthropologists have historically, or presently, aided the suppression of native uprisings; but Lutkehaus wrote me that her consultation had nothing to do with these plot elements, her expertise drew upon her fieldwork in Papua New Guinea to consult with choreographer, Lula Washington, who designed scenes depicting a gorgeous coming-of-age-ritual depicted in the film. Among the more interesting parallels between Avatar and Human Terrain Systems is the way that the video logs that the avatar-ethnographers were required to record were quietly sifted-through by military strategists interested in finding vulnerability to exploit among the local populous. Last week a story in Time magazine quoted Human Terrain Team social scientist in training Ben Wintersteen admitting that in battlefield situations ""there's definitely an intense pressure on the brigade staff to encourage anthropologists to give up the subject..There's no way to know when people are violating ethical guidelines on the field;" and the AAA's recent report found that "Reports from HTTs are circulated to all elements of the military, including intelligence assets, both in the field and stateside." Like the HTT counterparts, the Avatar teams openly talked about trying to win the "hearts, mind, and trust" of the local population (a population that the military derisively called "blue monkeys") that the military was simply interested in moving or killing. And most significantly, the members of the avatar unit had a naive understanding of the sort of role they could conceivably play in directing the sort of military action that would inevitably occur. Sigourney Weaver's character, the chain-smoking, pose striking, tough talking Avatar Terrain Team chief social scientist, Grace Augustine, displayed the same sort of unrealistic understanding of what would be done with her research that appears in the seemingly endless Human Terrain friendly features appearing in newspapers and magazines. Past wars found anthropologists working much more successfully as insurgents, rather than counterinsurgents: in World War II it was Edmund Leach leading an armed insurgent gang in Burma, Charlton Coon training terrorists in North African, Tom Harrisson arming native insurgents in Sarawak. These episodes found anthropologists aligned with the (momentary) interests of the people they studied (but also aligned with the interests of their own nation states), not subjugating them in occupation and suppressing their efforts for liberation as misshapen forms of ethnography like Human Terrain. Anthropologically informed counterinsurgency efforts like the Human Terrain program are fundamentally flawed for several reasons. One measure of the extent that these programs come to understand and empathize with the culture and motivations of the people they study might be the occurrence of militarized ethnographers "going native" in ways parallel to the plot of Avatar. If Human Terrain Teams employed anthropologists who came to live with and freely interact with and empathize with occupied populations, I suppose you would eventually find some rogue anthropologists standing up to their masters in the field. But so far mostly what we find with the Human Terrain "social scientists" is a revolving cadre of well paid misfits with marginal training in the social sciences who do not understand or reject normative anthropological notions of research ethics, who rotate out and come home with misgivings about the program and what they accomplished. On the big screen the transformation of fictional counterinsurgent avatar-anthropologists into insurgents siding with the blue skinned Na'vi endears the avatars to the audience, yet off the screen in our world, this same audience is regularly bombarded by media campaigns designed to endear HTT social scientists embedded with the military to an audience of the American people. The engineered inversions of audience sympathies for anthropologists resisting a military invasion in fiction, and pro-military-anthropologists in nonfiction is easily accomplished because the fictional world of a distant future is not pollinated with the forces of nationalism and jingoistic patriotism that permeate our world; a world where anything aligned with militarism is championed over the understanding of others (for reasons other than conquest). David Price is a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologist. He is the author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, published by Duke University Press, and a contributor to the Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ new book Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual published last month by Prickly Paradigm Press. He can be reached at dprice@stmartin.edu |
Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Yellowstone Drift:
"Powerful and shocking ..
Waiting for
Lightning
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