Have been recently thinking about something. nettimers, your input would be deeply apreciated. WHAT DO WE DEFINE TO BE CIVIL LIBERTIES, AND CAN WE BE SELECTIVE IN DEFINITION OF THESE?
In an article, "The Price of the Ticket - The US, Libya and Oil By CONN HALLINAN, " http://www.counterpunch.org/hallinan03252011.html there is going a description about the prisons in Gaddaffi Libya, " ... Civil liberties don't exist, prisons are chock full of political prisoners, and getting whacked if you don't like the leader is an operational hazard. " Now I will take just one small part out, " Civil liberties don't exist," and follows right after that "prisons are chock full of political prisoners, etc. ..." So what does this mean civil liberties don't exist if "prisons are chock full of political prisoners. " How about this "Civil Liberties exist, with “chock full of” ( I am not sure how to define here, help would be welcomed, prim. aut. gORAN) “prisoners,” mainly minorities, i.e., colored people. So regardless of the fact that our prisons are full of' 'poor people" we, in the US, believe that in our world, civil liberties do exist. Questions group No. 1 My question would be, how do we define this state affair? Can we really state that we have civil liberties when our jails are full of people, predominantly poor ones, for we see that our definition of lack of civil liberties is defined in some regard with prisons 'chock full of "political" prisoners.' So, does it mean, yes, we do have "civil" liberties, regardless of the indisputable fact of having prisons “chock full of prisoners,” who are not “political” prisoners, but rather are mainly poor people, people of color. Question group No.2 So Is "civil" liberty defined in some regard with not having prisons full of any type of prisoners or it only applies to not having it full of "political" prisoners only? Now, it seems to me that in the political system of the US the real power is not in political figures and their spoken political ideologies as it would be the case with former or present socialist countries, and or even these theocracies in North Africa, Asia, etc. (here it seems to me that the real power in within these theocratic regimes are somehow based on material/non-material power structures, combination of the mechanisms we see in the former and present socialist countries, at one side, and mechanisms of contemporary free enterprise capitalist countries, especially, the US, on the other side). The real power in all free enterprise capitalists regimes is in concentration of material wealth, and the ideology, rather, dogma that defines that material wealth to be the real power in making and creating any major decisions. Now, bare with me, I am getting there, if we see that the real power is in the concentration of material wealth and its ideology/dogma, free enterprise capitalism that supports that postulates, and then we see that our prisons are "chock full of prisoners" who are there for braking the laws / ideologies / dogmas which are tightly interwoven with the protection against the “abuse” of what is considered to be the real power, the possession and concentration of material wealth, we get to the conclusion that in the US there are no civil liberties because our prisons are chock full of poor fellow citizens who got there for the reasons of abusing the concentration – possession of material wealth, that has been defined as the real structure of the political power. No viable political power available to all, whatever we define it to be, and if we have "prisons chock full of prisoners" who for some reason abused the real political power, then it can be conclude that there are no real civil liberties, just dogmas that protect few, and is argued to be what is not. I would kind of play with a short thought, 'Empty prisons, or more ideally, though not realistic as of this point, no prisons at all, there are real civil liberties, everything else, "no true civil liberties." ' Best, gORAN # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
