Bulletin N° 771
Jagal, The Act of Killing
(2h
57min)
https://putlockerhds.com/watch/the-act-of-killing
(with English
subtitles)
An interview with documentary filmmaker Joshua
Oppenheimer
(57 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHGbb64YxAk
5 November 2017
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
Many years ago when I had just received my Ph.D.
from the History Department at the University of Wisconsin, a friend in
Southern California congratulated me, then recounted an experience he had had
in Texas, where he had attended graduate school. One of his professors had told
him: the prerequisite for a Ph.D. degree is the ability to engage in consistent
action. He took his students into the countryside and asked them to dig a fence
post hole, and if they were able to dig a deep, straight hole for a post, then
he deemed them capable of writing a Ph.D. thesis.
The same might be said of political ideologues, if
they are capable of non-contradictory thought, then they will acquire
legitimacy and their ideas will be socially recognized. If they are incapable
of this repetitive movement, digging deeper and deeper, following the same
rules of logic; then, like a crooked fence post hole, their ideas will be
useless.
The 21 items below reflect a
quest for understanding that many of us have collectively engaged in during
this period of crisis that has engulfed us all. If the past is any indication,
the ruling class will not relinquish its power over us without a struggle,
after which a new economic system must be constructed, with the help of
everyone, and premised on enlightened self-interest and adherence to clearly
articulated principles, collectively derived in public discussion.
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
Professor emeritus of American
Studies
University Grenoble-Alpes
Director of Research
University of Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced Study of
American Institutions and Social Movements
The University of California-San
Diego
a.
Newly Released Documents Reveal U.S.
Approval of Indonesian Genocide
(18 October 2017)
+
“The Act of Killing”: New Film Shows U.S.-Backed
Indonesian Death Squad Leaders Re-enacting Massacres
(45 min)
https://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/19/the_act_of_killing_new_film
==========
b.
The Look of Silence
(1h 40min)
http://putlockers.fm/watch/RGbELnxY-the-look-of-silence.html
A 2014 internationally co-produced documentary film directed by Joshua Oppenheimer about the Indonesian killings of 1965–66. The
film is a companion piece to Oppenheimer's 2012 documentary The Act of Killing.
It was executive produced by Werner Herzog, Errol
Morris, and Andre Singer. It was nominated for the Academy Award
for Best Documentary Feature at the 88th
Academy Awards.
A middle-aged
Indonesian man, whose brother was brutally murdered in the 1965 purge of
communists, confronts the men who carried out the killings. Out of concern for
his safety, the man is not fully identified in the film and is credited only as
"anonymous," as are many of the film's crew positions. Some shots
consist of the man watching (what seems to be) extra footage from The Act of Killing, which includes video
of the men who killed his brother. He visits some of the killers and their
collaborators—including his uncle—under the pretense of an eye exam. Although
none of the killers expresses any remorse, the daughter of one of them is
clearly shaken when she hears, apparently for the first time, the details of
the killings.
The film was screened
in the official competition at the 71st Venice International Film
Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize, the International Film
Critics Award (FIPRESCI), the Italian online critics award (Mouse d'Oro), the European Film Critics
Award (FEDEORA), as well as the Human Rights Nights Award.[8] Since
then, it has gone on to win multiple awards, including Best World Documentary (Cinephile Prize) at the Busan International Film Festival,
the Grand Prize (DOX Award) at CPH:DOX, the prize
for Best Documentary at the Starz Denver Film
Festival, a Danish Arts Council Award for outstanding achievement in
filmmaking, and the Best Film Award at the One World human rights
documentary film festival.
+
VICE Talks Film: Joshua Oppenheimer
on 'The Look of Silence'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orD_WOrEN5o
(24min)
==========
c.
The Silencing of the Left
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48121.htm
by Chris Hedges and Robert Scheer
The New McCarthyism underway to silence
the left-wing press.
==========
d.
“The Greek
Atheist”
George Carlin on Jews (and against bigoty, i.e. the strategy of ‘divide and rule’)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcK6SulOsVE
(video, 11 min)
==========
e.
Trump's Would-Be Drug
Czar Helped the Drug Profiteers
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=20257
Rep.
Tom Marino has withdrawn his nomination as President Trump's new drug czar
after revelations he pushed through a measure that worsened the U.S. opioid epidemic. White-collar criminologist Bill Black says
Marino and other lawmakers have been bought off by pharmaceutical companies he
says have acted as "illicit, criminal, drug dealers"
==========
f.
'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia | Technology | The
Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia
There
is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing
toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s
ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the
device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the
time.”
But those
concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact upon the political
system that some of Rosenstein’s peers believe can be attributed to the rise of
social media and the attention-based market that drives it.
Drawing a
straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that
digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left
unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.
==========
g.
And This We Call Civilization?
How We
Sold Our Selves Into Slavery
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48112.htm
If you've
ever wanted to know what it's like to sell your soul, just open up a credit
card.
==========
h.
Video: The Vietnam War and the Phoenix Program:
"A Computerized Genocide"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48069.htm
by Michael Maclear and Douglas Valentine
Michael Maclear’s 1975
documentary, Spooks and Cowboys,
Gooks and Grunts (Part 1) is more relevant now than ever. Forty-two
years after its release, it exposes the suppressed, shameful truths that have
corrupted America since the Vietnam War. The documentary makes it perfectly
clear that “we” have always known what was going on – and that “we” have
perfected the means of denying and obfuscating it.Maclear’s
documentary stands in stark contrast to the current Ken Burns documentary, The Vietnam War, which
is nothing more than historical revisionism, sprinkled with massive doses of
cognitive dissonance, served up as healing.
========
i.
Phoenix 2.0 - CIA's Vietnam Terror Unleashed
Upon Afghanistan
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48077.htm
by Moon Of Alabama
Last week the
new head of the CIA Mike Pompeo publicly threatened to
make the CIA a "much more vicious agency". His first step towards
that is to unleash CIA
sponsored killer gangs onto the people of Afghanistan: The C.I.A. is expanding
its covert operations in Afghanistan, sending small teams of highly experienced
officers and contractors alongside Afghan forces to hunt and kill Taliban militants across the country ...
The C.I.A.’s expanded role will augment missions carried out by military units,
meaning more of the United States’ combat role in Afghanistan will be hidden from public view.
This is not
going to be a counter-insurgency campaign, even when some will assert that. A
counter-insurgency campaign requires political, security, economic, and
informational components. It can only be successful in support of a legitimate
authority. The current Afghan government has little legitimacy. It was bribed
together by the U.S. embassy after wide and open election fraud threatened to
devolve into total chaos. In August CIA director Pompeo met the Afghan
president Ashraf Ghani and
likely discussed the new plan. But the now announced campaign has neither a
political nor an economic component. A campaign solely centered on
"security" will end up as a random torture and killing expedition
without the necessary context and with no positive results.
The campaign
will be a boon for the Taliban. While it will likely kill a
some Taliban aligned insurgents here and there, it will also alienate
many more Afghan people. Most of the Taliban fighters are locals. Killing them
creates new local recruits for the insurgency. It will also give it better
population cover for future operations.
A similar
campaign during the Vietnam war was known as Operation Phoenix.
Then some 50,000 South-Vietnamese, all of course 'suspected communists', were
killed by the CIA's roving gangs . . . .
========
j.
Balfour Declaration at 100: Seeds of
Discord
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48138.htm
A hundred years since Britain's infamous declaration, its repercussions are still
felt across the Middle East today.
by Al Jazeera
The Balfour
Declaration was a public promise by the British government
during World War One, announcing support for the establishment of "a
national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. Palestine
was still a part of the Ottoman Empire at the time, with a minority Jewish
population.
The 67-word document, in the form of a letter
from British Foreign Secretary Arthur
Balfour to the prominent British Jewish figure, Lord
Rothschild, dated November 2, 1917, read:
His Majesty's government
view with favour the establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,
And will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object,
it being clearly understood that nothing
shall be done which may prejudice the civil
and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,
or the rights and political status
enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Whatever its real intentions, the
declaration has had a profound impact on the Middle East and
its people; and its effects still resonate across the region today.
The British War Cabinet began to consider the
future of Palestine during World War
One in which it fought the central powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary
and the Ottoman Empire.
========
k.
Former Israeli
Defense Minister: There'll Be No Peace, West Bank Can Hold Millions of More
Settlers
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48067.htm
by Chaim Levinson
Former
Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon expressed support on
Thursday for continued Palestinian autonomy in parts of the West Bank, but not
independence, and said the territory could hold one or two million additional
Jewish settlers. After speaking at a religious girls’ school in Beit Shemesh on Thursday, Ya’alon was asked his views about Israel’s 2005 withdrawal
from the Gaza Strip and about evacuation of Jewish settlements more generally. Ya’alon said that as army chief of staff he had opposed the
withdrawal. “My home is the kibbutz,” he said. “The border is marked by the
furrows of the plow. The border is marked by the children’s house. Where there
is no children’s house, there is no army. If you want to hold territory, you
need for there to be people living there.”
==========
l.
Israel Maintains Robust Arms Sales With
Rogue Regimes
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48063.htm
by
Jonathan Cook
Human rights
activists are stepping up efforts to expose Israel’s long and covert history of
supplying weapons and military training to regimes while they actively commit
massacres, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The issue of
Israel’s trade with rogue regimes has been thrust into the spotlight again
after revelations that it is sending weapons to Myanmar, in defiance of a US
and European arms embargo.
Formerly known
as Burma, Myanmar was condemned last month by the United Nations for conducting what
it called a “textbook ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya,
a Muslim minority. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya
are reported to have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh
in recent weeks, after evidence of the torching of entire villages, massacres
and systematic rapes.
Israel has not
divulged details of its ties to Myanmar’s military government, but public
records show that it has sold the military there armed patrol boats, guns and
surveillance equipment. Myanmar’s special forces have
also been trained by Israelis.
==========
m.
In Shocking Interview, Qatar
Confesses
Secrets Behind
The Syrian War
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48117.htm
by Tyler Durden
A television
interview of a top Qatari official confessing the truth behind the origins of
the war in Syria is going viral across Arabic social media during the same week
a leaked top
secret NSA document was published which confirms that the armed
opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from
the early years of the conflict.
And according to
a well-known
Syria analyst and economic adviser with close contacts in the
Syrian government, the explosive interview constitutes a high level "public admission to collusion and coordination between four
countries to destabilize an independent state, [including] possible support for
Nusra/al-Qaeda." Importantly,
"this admission will help build case for what Damascus sees as an attack
on its security & sovereignty. It will form
basis for compensation claims."
==========
n.
One
Day Tomorrow Won’t
Arrive
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48124.htm
by Paul Craig Roberts
Before the
idiots in Washington get us blown off of the face of the earth, the morons had
better come to terms with the fact that the US military is now second class
compared to the Russian military. For example, the US Navy has been made
obsolete by Russia’s hypersonic maneuvering Zircon missile.
For example, the
speed and trajectory changes of the Russian Sarmat ICBM has nullified Washington’s ABM system.
One Sarmet is sufficient to take out Great Britain,
or France, or Germany, or Texas. It only takes a dozen to wipe out the United
States.
Why don’t you
know this?
For example,
Washington’s enormously expensive F-35 jet fighter is no match whatsoever for
Russian fighters.
For example, US
tanks are no match for Russian tanks.
==========
o.
U.S. Military is the Largest Employer in the World
by Sue Chang
Travel on Uncle
Sam’s dime and have taxpayers pay for your education—these are some of the
perks offered by the U.S. military, and it appears its recruiting strategy is
effective. The U.S. Department of Defense has been named the largest
employer in the world with 3.2 million employees on its
payroll, according to the World Economic Forum. The second largest is China’s
People’s Liberation Army with 2.3 million on its staff roster and third biggest
is Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT, +0.02% with
2.1 million employees. McDonald’s Corp. MCD, +0.64% came
in fourth with 1.9 million workers but the World Economic Forum noted the fast-food
chain would be eliminated from the list if employees at its franchise
restaurants weren't counted.
==========
p.
Where the
extreme right speak candidly about their future plans for America.
Values Voter Summit
https://www.c-span.org/video/?435688-1/steve-bannon-addresses-values-voter-summit
The
Values Voter Summit continued its annual conference in Washington, D.C.
Speakers included former White House chief
strategist Steve Bannon, radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, and
former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka.
Former White House strategist
Steve Bannon declared war on the Republican
establishment at the Family Research Council’s
Values Voter Summit. In one of his more targeted comments, he took some jabs
at Senator Bob Corker (R-TN).
He criticized him for his public feud, "trashing the commander in chief",
in which Senator Corker accused
the president for leading the nation on a path toward World War III. Bannon singled
out Senators Barrasso, Fisher, and Heller for not
defending President Trump.
He also said Senator Corker saw
the writing on the wall and decided not to seek re-election when Judge Moore
won in Alabama.
==========
q.
American
Oligarchs Are Plotting the Biggest Heist in U.S. History
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48118.htm
by Robert Reich
You know the
plot: The bank robbers set off a bomb down the street from the bank, and while
everyone’s distracted they get away with the loot.
In the reality
TV show we’re now suffering through, Donald Trump is the bomb.
The robbers are
the American oligarchs who bankroll the Republican Party, and who are plotting
the biggest heist in American history – a massive tax cut estimated to be up to
5.8 trillion dollars.
Around 80 percent of it
will benefit the richest 1 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center.
Trump is busily
distracting America with his explosive tweets and incendiary tantrums—blasting
Republican senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, NFL players who take the knee,
Dreamers, refugees, immigrants, transgender people, the media, “rocket man,”
Hillary Clinton, Obama, NAFTA, Muslims.
The Trump bomb
is hugely damaging—unleashing hate, threatening democratic institutions,
isolating America in the world.
But none of this
seems to bother Republicans in Congress, except for a handful of Senators who
won’t be running again. That’s because congressional Republicans are
concentrating their efforts on pulling off the giant heist for their rich
patrons.
==========
r.
The Harmful Effects of Antifa
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48065.htm
by Diana Johnstone
An historic
opportunity is being missed. The disastrous 2016 presidential election could
and should have been a wakeup call. A corrupt political system that gave voters
a choice between two terrible candidates is not democracy.
This should have
been the signal to face reality. The U.S. political system is totally rotten,
contemptuous of the people, serving the corporations and lobbies that pay to
keep them in office. The time had come to organize a genuine alternative, an
independent movement to liberate the electoral system from the grip of billionaires,
to demand a transition from a war economy to an economy dedicated to improving
the lives of the people who live here. What is needed is a movement for the
pacification of America, at home and abroad.
==========
s.
Cornel West- How Intellectuals Betrayed
the Poor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12ogwg4-6Ok&feature=youtu.be
==========
t.
Noam
Chomsky & Howard Zinn "Is There Hope in This Desperate Time?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7-G9VrJr_k
(1h
45min)
Speaking at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston,
Massachusetts on September 27, 2004, for a fundraiser sponsored by the street paper,
Spare Change, and the
Homeless Empowerment Project.
==========
u.
Americans Say This Is Lowest Point in US
History
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48145.htm
In new poll, a majority say they can't remember a time when their levels of
stress over healthcare, the economy, and social divisions were higher
by Julia Conley
A majority of
Americans surveyed in a study of stress levels, released on Wednesday, said they
consider the present day to be the lowest point in U.S. history, and indicated
that the future of the nation is a major source of stress in their lives.
Out of 3,440
respondents surveyed in
August by the American Psychological Association, fifty-nine percent said they
can't remember a worse time in the nation's history. The people surveyed
included Americans who had lived through World War II, the Vietnam War, the
September 11 attacks, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Poll-takers
asked respondents to describe the issues that have caused them to feel this
way, and found that 59 percent were most anguished about
"divisiveness" in U.S. society.
Forty-three
percent named healthcare as their top source of stress, amid continued efforts
by the Trump administration and the Republican Party to weaken the Affordable
Care Act (ACA). The poll was taken just after Republicans' efforts to repeal
the law failed, but
President Donald Trump has continued to sabotage the ACA, which helped nearly
20 million Americans gain health coverage.
More than a
third of those polled said the economy was their biggest worry. Trump has been
pushing his tax plan in
recent weeks, which is expected to hold
the most benefits for wealthy Americans.
Another 32
percent said "trust in government" was their biggest concern and 31
percent said hate crimes or crime in general were
their top source of stress regarding the nation.
Women who took
the survey reported higher levels of stress than men, and black and Latino
males had a higher average stress level than their white counterparts. Black
respondents also expressed far less optimism about the path the country is on
than white respondents; 72 percent disagreed that the country could have a
strong future, while only 55 percent of whites disagreed with the sentiment.