Here are a few, telegraphic thoughts on this matter, perhaps obvious to people here:
At every chance we have, we should go out and defend Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and anybody else sticking her/his head on this. These are courageous people who are doing the right thing, and we should have their backs. http://www.standwithbrad.org/ I agree with Max, what is surprising is that it's becoming a story in the media. This is good. We need to amplify it. And we need to attack the *whole* ideology on which this national security crap is based, not just disjoint parts of it. It goes like this: We need the government to protect us, because there are bad people out there out to get us. Examples: 9/11, Boston, etc. No! Both 9/11 and Boston are part and parcel of the crap that our society excretes. We have to understand where it comes from: imperialism, capitalism. It is about exploitation, inequality, private ownership of productive wealth, all that. On the political logistics, there's nothing much to say except: Take action, do your political homework, cooperate with others, struggle, join a union, work harder for the one you already belong to, or Occupy group, or anti-war coalition, or environmentalist campaign, or propaganda leftwing party, local or virtual, make your voice heard, share it with as many others as you can. ***Do not foster paranoia, foster action.*** Broader unity, coordination, and all that. How should the NSA thing alter the behavior of people fighting the fight? It should not. It is a class struggle and they are doing their part. The basics are clear. The state is a bunch of people, all of us in fact, trapped in a certain sucky web of social structures. It is out to crush us. But that's the structure. Appeal to people as individuals with souls. To distinguish among them, use this: The greater the personal power in the structure, the greater the responsibility for the structure as a whole. It's a battle of ideas, as Fidel calls it. It's the battle for hearts and minds, as Rumsfeld called it. The state cannot process all that data and get anything straight out of it without *people* with wills, with hearts and minds. And if they must use people, then they are exposed to whistle-blowing, etc. For every Edward Snowden they terrorize, n others will get back at them smarter and just as courageous. The digital machines, robots, algorithms, etc. are all junk without the people wo/manning them. Their problem, extracting meaningful information out of all that data is *fundamentally unsolvable*. It's not only quantity (a problem already) but mainly quality. The state, by definition, will get things warped, distorted, and upside down. Anybody who is in the business of cognition -- that is, every self reflecting human -- knows that junk may help answer the right questions, but does not answer the questions immediately. Humans with minds and hearts are required. So, do not change your behavior in reaction to the amplification by the media of the spy so-called "national security" apparatus. Keep using your phone, chat, Skype, visit the internet, communicate your ideas, etc. In fact, do change your behavior: Do all that, but more, much more. Bury them under all that data. It will mean *nothing*, unless they win our hearts and minds. But they won't, because it makes no sense to us to further empower a state that has already shown to be inimical to us, the people. The only exceptions to this struggling nonchalantly are if/when we get into situations in which the lives of particular individuals are under clear life threat. This will only be truly significant for most of us if/when our struggle expands and threatens them more seriously. Then use common sense to limit the sharing of detailed information to a need-to-know basis. But, again, do not foster paranoia. Foster action. What's Obama's role? He's the head of this all, of course. He's personally made choices to make this more pervasive and out of control. He has to be held responsible. But this is much bigger than him and his minions. This is sure to arise the ire of this list's foam-at-the-mouth ultra-leftist, but I am not at all sure that demanding Obama's impeachment is the proper tactical to do. I won't oppose it, of course, if it gathers strength, but I'm not sure this is the right initiative at this point. Well, he can sue me. I live in an African American neighborhood, and the people I talk to in my immediate neighborhood, need a lot to get to a point where they'll be supporting an initiative demanding Obama's impeachment or resignation. In Turkey, people seem to already be clear that they want Erdogan out. Here I am not sure. The content of agitation depends on the tactics, which depend on the parts of the strategy that can be accomplished on the ground, a concrete call. And I don't have a good sense of where we, the people, are on this. In any event, things are moving. Impressions from those who attended the left forum? I spent my weekend with family in the Catskills, hiking and polluting the atmosphere with a rental brand-new SUV and open camp fires. These vehicles truly feel like amazing engineering to me. The driving feels so smooth and all that. And it takes such a long time to cook without a gas stove. I had my phone on, and its GPS activated all the time. I kept trying to upload and download photos from out there. Very spotty network connection from out there. Hope the NSA helps the providers expand coverage and then sifts through all my 0s and 1s, figures out what I'm *truly* all about, and then let *me* and my *family* know, because we don't seem to have a clue. * * * One other, sad and embarrassing item, before I closed this email: I mentioned Margarito Montes, a Mexican PRT leader, in a recent post to this list. I now regret deeply the negative remark I made about him. I just learned from a friend, followed up by some Googling on my part, that Margarito and his family were assassinated brutally in northern Mexico in late 2009. I met him in the mid 1980s. Then in my 20s, I was working as an undergrad teacher at Chapingo university near Mexico City and doing part-time organizing in peasant or semi-peasant communities in the Texcoco area. At the time, I was very distrustful of Margarito's political approach, though I never viewed him as an enemy (and we did have some real enemies). I don't know the specific circumstances of his assassination, but I always regarded him as a courageous social fighter. RIP. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
