MIKE INGLES

I watched some of Joe Scarborough this morning. He is doing what his handlers expect of him, he is trying to deflect responsibility of the mass-murder of children to video-game manufactures and Quentin Tarantino, citing studies done at this university and that university, dredging up all the nonsense discussed, ad nauseam, during other times of mass-murder in our country.  

It’s a watershed moment for us.

If the deaths of these children is not enough to stir true emotion (and a little guilt) in our hearts, and rescue the sanity of us acting in unison towards a common goal, then there is little chance that our society can “long endure.” Perhaps, Joe is right. Maybe we have been, collectively, so desensitized by movies and a culture of violence, that changing gun laws by itself will not solve the problem. But what he and his ilk fail to acknowledge is that stopping the proliferation of weapons is a necessary first step. The reason that we cannot resolve the problem is that clever lobbyist and Machiavellian gun-makers have financed not only favorable gun-laws, but financed media—magazines, television, radio—that warns people that the government is their enemy and officials want to disarm them and take away rights—inalienable rights—therefore they must hoard weapons to get ready for the next holocaust, and pay dues to the NRA to help finance a next generation of protectionist propaganda.

“Let me remind you that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”

Still watching Joe and his gang of numbnuts: They are reporting a poll that found that only 60% of us support banning assault weapons. So, 40% of us are so very infected with fear and hate and suspicions that they literally see this world through a different lens than I. It’s generational. Since Barry Goldwater uttered those famous words in 1964, that crazed minority in our country has proliferated, has grown disproportionally.  As it grew, we liberals laughed at them, not taking them seriously. Their sickness is contagious; they cannot recognize that the bullet-ridden bodies of 20 six-year-old children are cause-and-effect of their distorted beliefs.  Still a minority, they vote in Republican primaries where crazy thought processes gather form and are spewed back to a populace eager to read articles where their fears are manifested in glossy magazines and radio shows and Fox News. We all understand that, because of this, the minority moves ever further to the right, taking positions that are more and more extreme. Most are poorly educated folk and can be easily swayed by clever people supporting a false position. Much like Hitler and his media convinced the German rank-in-file that they had a serious problem with an industrious people; these folks are convinced that government is their industrious enemy [and] that the government is the cause of their problems.

Maybe not enough children have died. Perhaps, it will take some other catastrophe for us to come together. Deep inside, I know that those 40% are alien to me. They might as well be fungi from Mars. How do you negotiate with fungi? How do you establish laws with folks who aren’t living on the same planet?

I can’t see a peaceful end to this on-going debate. The next time some nut grabs an assault weapons and starts shooting up a mall or a theater or a school, I’ll die a little bit. And, those NRA folks will shake their heads and say—it’s a damned shame. But they won’t mean it. Not really. What they really think is that Quentin Tarantino caused all this, and silently clean their weapons.

MIKE INGLES fires his daily rational torpedoes from his den in Ohio.

It is entirely to his credit that Clennon has made this statement, and spoken out against Bigelow’s film, which has received almost universal, shameful praise from the US media and its so-called “film critics.”

Voices of protest have been raised in Hollywood against Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, an account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, which endorses the actions of the Central Intelligence Agency, the US military and the systematic use of torture.

In a statement published January 9 in Truthout (“And the Academy Award for the Promotion of Torture Goes to …”), actor David Clennon explains, “I’m a member of Hollywood’s Motion Picture Academy. At the risk of being expelled for disclosing my intentions, I will not be voting for Zero Dark Thirty—in any Academy Awards category.”

Clennon goes on, “Everyone who contributes skill and energy to a motion picture—including actors—shares responsibility for the impressions the picture makes and the ideas it expresses. … So Jessica Chastain won’t get my vote for Best Actress. With her beauty and her tough-but-vulnerable posturing, she almost succeeds in making extreme brutality look weirdly heroic.”

The Emmy-award winning actor (best known for his role on television’s thirtysomething) writes, “If, in fact, torture is a crime (a mortal sin, if you will)—a signal of a nation’s descent into depravity—then it doesn’t matter whether it ‘works’ or not. Zero Dark Thirty condones torture. … If the deeply racist Birth of a Nation was released today, would we vote to honor it? Would we give an award to [German filmmaker] Leni Riefenstahl’s brilliant pro-Nazi documentary, Triumph of the Will?”

It is entirely to his credit that Clennon (left) has made this statement, and spoken out against Bigelow’s film, which has received almost universal, shameful praise from the US media and its so-called “film critics.”

According to CBS’s Los Angeles affiliate station, veteran actors Martin Sheen and Ed Asner have also appealed “to other actors to vote their conscience on whether to reward the movie [Zero Dark Thirty] with a win on Oscar night.”

Sony Chairman Amy Pascal issued a defensive statement in support of her studio’s film, asserting, “Zero Dark Thirty does not advocate torture. To not include that part of history would have been irresponsible and inaccurate. We fully support Kathryn Bigelow and [screenwriter] Mark Boal and stand behind this extraordinary movie.”

Only a multi-millionaire Hollywood film executive, who thinks she can make up reality as she goes along, could have added this preposterous and hypocritical comment: “We are outraged that any responsible member of the Academy would use their voting status in AMPAS as a platform to advance their own political agenda. … To punish an Artist’s right of expression is abhorrent. This community, more than any other, should know how reprehensible that is.”

One feels safe in suggesting that if a new version of the Hollywood anticommunist blacklist were to be launched tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of studio chiefs would sign up without a moment’s hesitation.

Clennon’s public statement and related events no doubt indicate revulsion against Bigelow’s film within sections of the industry. That she was left out of the Academy Awards best director nominations, announced last week, was an indication of some degree of opposition. Bigelow was hailed as the first woman to win an Oscar for best director for The Hurt Locker in 2010. At the time, entirely false claims were made as to that work’s “anti-war” credentials.

This time around, with even less to go on, various liberal and “left” figures insist that Bigelow is being subjected to unfair attacks.

Scott Mendelson, for example, on the Huffington Post website, writes that Bigelow has “been called a warmonger, an apologist, and yes, a Nazi. … All because Bigelow and Boal didn’t spoon-feed their opinions to the audience in a way that made for easy digestion. They didn’t have a fictionalized scene where a character explicitly explains to the audience how they got each piece of vital information over the eight years during which the film takes place. They trusted the audience to make the connections.”

Filmmaker Michael Moore has chimed in, disgracefully, with support for Bigelow as part of a wider and equally disgraceful defense of the Obama administration. On Twitter January 9, Moore asserted, “I’m sorry, but anyone who claims that Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture either hasn’t seen the movie or wasn’t paying attention.

“Zero Dark 30 makes it clear: 7 yrs of torture under [George W.] Bush doesn’t find Osama bin Laden. [Barack] Obama elected, torture stops, guess what? WE FIND BIN LADEN.”

Moore’s statement fully accepts the so-called “war on terror,” which his own Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) associated with the American elite’s drive for global domination. His miserable comments help explain how and why the official anti-war movement has folded up its tent and gone away under Obama.

Moore went on to say, “Also, this is a MOVIE. It is a work of art & tells a great story. ‘Depiction does not imply endorsement,’ says the director & she’s right.”

He was paraphrasing Bigelow’s comment at the New York Film Critics Award ceremony earlier this month: “I thankfully want to say that I’m standing in a room of people who understand that depiction is not endorsement.”

It is difficult to conceive of a more dishonest or self-deluded comment. Mendelson, Moore and Bigelow, first of all, leave out one minor detail: Zero Dark Thirty (which borrows its very title from the US military) was developed and made with the fullest cooperation of the military, the CIA and the highest echelons of the American government. Is it likely that the latter would have facilitated a work that offered criticism of their activities?

As we reported last May, Bigelow and screenwriter Boal, a former “embedded reporter” in Iraq in 2004, were given “top-level access” to those involved in the bin Laden killing. They were even offered the opportunity, which they jumped at, to meet with a member of the US Navy Seal death squad involved in the assassination.

Right-wing media watchdog Judicial Watch, for its own purposes, obtained hundreds of pages of emails and transcripts of conversations, including a July 14, 2011 meeting attended by Bigelow, Boal, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers and other Defense Department officials. The transcript reveals that Boal had previously held discussions with top administration officials, including Obama’s Chief Counterterrorism Advisor John O. Brennan and Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough. Brennan, the man in charge of the murderous drone program, has recently been nominated as CIA director.

The transcripts and emails reveal Bigelow and Boal as accomplices of these top murderers in the US military and intelligence apparatus.

In an email to Vickers on June 9, 2011, for example, Pentagon media official Robert Mehal spoke glowingly of Boal, who had promised not to reveal any military secrets, adding “that he [Boal] was proud of not giving anything away in Hurt Locker.” Furthermore, the screenwriter had explained that he wanted “to highlight the great cooperation/coordination between CIA/DoD [Department of Defense] and the extensive Intel work (decade) that culminated in the OP.” Boal told Mehal that assassinating bin Laden was a “gutsy decision” by Obama.

When Vickers, at the July 14, 2011 meeting, told Bigelow and Boal that the military would make available to them “a guy … who was involved from the beginning as a planner, a SEAL Team 6 Operator and Commander,” Boal responded, “That’s dynamite,” and Bigelow put in, “That’s incredible.” At the end of the conversation, Bigelow told Vickers, “So wonderful meeting you.”

Bigelow, supported by Moore and others, claims Zero Dark Thirty is neutral in relation to the events it depicts. “The film doesn’t have an agenda and it doesn’t judge,” she told the media. “I wanted a boots-on-the-ground experience.”

This is spurious. Zero Dark Thirty tells its “great story” from the point of view of the CIA and its torturers. Its supposed objectivity is a self-conscious aesthetic stance. Bigelow has long been fascinated with violence and brutality and those bold enough to carry it out, without regard for commonplace concerns. (For example, this bit of sophomoric dialogue from anti-hero Bodhi [Patrick Swayze] in Bigelow’s 1991 Point Break: “See, we exist on a higher plane, you and I. We make our own rules. Why be a servant of the law … when you can be its master?”)

We noted in regard to The Hurt Locker that the film “glories in and glamorizes violence, which the filmmaker associates with ‘heightened emotional responses.’ All of this, including its element of half-baked Nietzscheanism, is quite unhealthy and even sinister, but corresponds to definite moods within sections of what passes for a ‘radical’ intelligentsia in the US.” The Hurt Locker, we pointed out, “merely pauses now and then to meditate on the heavy price American soldiers pay for slaughtering Iraqi insurgents and citizens. As long as they pull long faces and show signs of fatigue and stress, US forces, as far as Bigelow is apparently concerned, can go right on killing and wreaking havoc.”

The same can be said, in spades, for the new film, with its pro-imperialist storyline and fascistic overtones.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Walsh is wsws.org’s senior art & cinema critic. He is one of the best and most incisive political film critics in the US and probably in the entire anglophone world.

The moral ambiguity of Homeland or Argo is a fitting tribute to the reality of US Middle East policy

Rachel Shabi
The Guardian, Monday 14 January 2013

America’s Middle East policy has been enthusiastically endorsed. Not at the UN or Arab League, however, but by the powerbrokers of Hollywood. At the Golden Globes, there were gongs for a heroically bearded CIA spook saving hostages and American face in Iran (the film Argo); a heroically struggling agent tracking down Bin Laden (Zero Dark Thirty) and heroically flawed CIA operatives protecting America from mindless, perpetual terror (TV series Homeland).

The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don’t shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can’t get enough of them. Perhaps it’s because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don’t know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.

When I saw Argo in London with a Turkish friend, we were the only ones not clapping at the end. Instead, we were wondering why every Iranian in this horribly superior film was so angry and shouty. It was a tense, meticulously styled depiction of America’s giant, perpetual, wailing question mark over the Middle East: “Why do they hate us?” Iranians are so irked by the historically flimsy retelling of the hostage crisis that their government has commissioned its own version in response.

Zero Dark Thirty, another blanked-out, glossed-up portrayal of US policy, seems to imply that America’s use of torture – sorry, “enhanced interrogation” – is legitimate because it led to the capture of Osama bin Laden (something that John McCain and others have pointed out is not even true). Adding insult to moral bankruptcy, the movie has been cast as a feminist film, because it has a smart female lead. This is cinematic fraud: a device used to extort our approval.

Homeland was no better. It is the story of an American marine taken captive by a top al-Qaida terrorist who turns out, wouldn’t you know, to be Palestinian. Tortured while detained (though I’m guessing this would be bad torture, not the good kind used in Zero Dark Thirty), the marine turns to Islam and, coincidentally, to terror. Meanwhile, all the Arab and Muslim characters in Homeland – however successful, integrated, clever, whatever – are all somehow signed up to the global terror network. As Laila Al-Arian, a journalist and co-author of Collateral Damage: America’s War against Iraqi Civilians, puts it: “Viewers are left to believe that Muslims/Arabs participate in terrorist networks like Americans send holiday cards.” She describes this celebrated Golden Globe winner as “TV’s most Islamophobic show”.

When challenged, the creators of these travesties respond with pat dismissal: the director Kathryn Bigelow pointed out that Zero Dark Thirty is “just a movie”. Ben Affleck has spoken touchingly of his concern that Argo might be politicised.

But why would these renditions of US policy be seen in the Middle East as anything other than attempts to seize the moral high ground? It’s all supposed to be a massive stride forward in the portrayal of complexity, made to challenge American audience preconceptions – and a far cry from the bad old days depicted in Reel Bad Arabs, a documentary that shows how Hollywood caricatures Arabs as “belly dancers, billionaire sheikhs and bombers”, according to one reviewer.

But such slick, award-winning cinema isn’t about nuance, it’s just self-serving moral ambiguity – and in this sense it is a fitting cultural reflection of actual US policy in the Middle East.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel Shabi has written extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Middle East. Her award-winning book, Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands, was published in 2009. She received the Anna Lindh Journalism Award for reporting across cultures in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize the same year. She tweets @rachshabi

By Chris Hedges
Cross-posted from Truthdig

Illustration by Mr. Fish

Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth — intellectually and emotionally — and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth — as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury — as well as unrivaled military and economic power — for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down, the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada…

“They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’

“We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today — about 2 billion — is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”

“If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later. If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”

Wright, who in his dystopian novel, “A Scientific Romance,” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.

Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book, “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around.

If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations;  if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.

“The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever,” Wright said…

“It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have over-run the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.”
And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we — like past societies in distress — will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.

“Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away,” Wright said…

“There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the  Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable–the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun–would disappear.”
Wright says we all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring…

“It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we are letting oil and gas exploration rip when we know that expanding the carbon economy is suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.”
According to Wright…

“If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The New York Times and other important venues. Noteworthy, his work currently does NOT generally appear in such venues.

by Stephen Lendman

Media scoundrels stopped short of truth and full disclosure. The Wall Street Journal headlined “An Internet Activist Commits Suicide.”  New York’s medical examiner announced death by “hang(ing) himself in his Brooklyn apartment.”  Lingering suspicions remain. Why would someone with so much to give end it all this way? He was one of the Internet generation’s best and brightest.

He advocated online freedom. Selflessly he sought a better open world. Information should be freely available, he believed. A legion of followers supported him globally. Alive he symbolized a vital struggle to pursue. Death may elevate him to martyr status but removes a key figure important to keep alive.

The New York Times headlined “Internet Activist, a Creator of RSS, Is Dead at 26, Apparently a Suicide.”

He was an Internet folk hero. He supported online freedom and copyright reform. He advocated free and open web files. He championed a vital cause. He worked tirelessly for what’s right. Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle called him “steadfast in his dedication to building a better and open world. He is among the best spirits of the Internet generation.”

Who’ll replace him now that he’s gone? He called locking up the public domain sinful. He selflessly strove to prevent it.

In July 2011, he was arrested. At the time, he was downloading old scholarly articles. He was charged with violating federal hacking laws. MIT gave him a guest account to do it.

He developed RSS and co-founded Reddit. It’s a social news site.

He was found dead weeks before he was scheduled to stand trial. He was targeted for doing the right thing. He didn’t steal or profit. He shared. His activism was more than words.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) defends online freedom, free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights. It “champion(s) the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.”

On January 12, it headlined “Farewell to Aaron Swartz, an extraordinary hacker and activist.” It called him “a close friend and collaborator.” Tragedy ended his life.

Vital questions remain unanswered. Supporters demand answers. So do family members.They blame prosecutors for what happened. Their statement following his death said the following:

“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.”

Swartz did as much or more than anyone to make the Internet a thriving open knowledge ecosystem. He strove to keep it that way. He challenged repressive Internet laws.

He founded Demand Progress. It “works to win progressive policy changes for ordinary people through organizing and grassroots lobbying,” he said.

It prioritizes “civil liberties, civil rights, and government reform.” It ran online campaigns for justice. It advocated in the public interest. It challenged policies harming it.

He mobilized over a million online activists. His other projects included RSS specification, web.py, tor2web, the Open Library, and the Chrome port of HTTPS Everywhere. He launched Creative Commons. He co-founded Reddit. He and others made it successful. His Raw Thought blog discussed “politics and parody.” He had much to say worth hearing.

In 2011, he used the MIT campus network. He downloaded millions of journal articles. He used the JSTOR database. Authorities claimed he changed his laptop’s IP and Mac addresses. They said he did it to circumvent JSTOR/MIT blocks.

He was charged with “unauthorized (computer) access” under the Computer and Abuse Act. He did the equivalent of checking out too many library books at the same time.

Obama prosecutors claim doing so is criminal. They’ve waged war on Internet freedom. They want Net Neutrality and free expression abolished. They want fascist laws replacing them.

They usurped diktat power. They spurn rule of law principles and other democratic values. They enforce police state authority. They prioritize what no civil society should tolerate.

They claimed Aaron intended to distribute material on peer-to-peer networks. He never did. It hardly mattered. Documents he secured were returned. No harm. No foul. Federal authorities charged him anyway.

In July 2011, a Massachusetts grand jury indicted him. He was arraigned in Boston US District Court. He pled not guilty to all charges. He was freed on a $100,000 unsecured bond.

If convicted, he faced up to 35 years imprisonment and a $1 million dollar fine. He wanted scientific/scholarly articles liberated. They belong in the public domain. He wanted everyone given access. It’s their right, he believed.

He wanted a single giant dataset established. He did it before. He wasn’t charged. Why now?

“While his methods were provocative,” said EFF, his goal was “freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it.”

EFF calls it a cause everyone should support. Aaron was politically active. He fought for what’s right. Followers supported him globally.

In the “physical world,” at worst he’d have faced minor charges, said EFF. They’re “akin to trespassing as part of political protests.”

Doing it online changed things. He faced possible long-term incarceration. For years, EFF fought this type injustice.

Academic/political activist Lawrence Lessig called Aaron’s death just cause for reforming computer crime laws. Overzealous prosecutors are bullies. They overreach and cause harm.

EFF mourned his passing, saying:

“Aaron, we will sorely miss your friendship, and your help in building a better world.” Many others feel the same way.

Did Aaron take his own life or was he killed? Moti Nissani is Wayne State University Department of Biology Professor Emeritus. “Who Killed Aaron Swartz,” he asked?

He quoted Bob Marley saying: “How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?” He listed reasons why Obama administration scoundrels wanted him dead.

His death “was preceded by a vicious, totally unjustified, campaign of surveillance, harassment, vilification, and intimidation.”

CIA/FBI/Mossad/MI5 assassins expertly “mak(e) murder look like suicide.” Numerous “enemies of the state” die under suspicious circumstances. Media scoundrels don’t explain.

US authorities “had excellent reasons to kill” Aaron. He was legendary in his own right like John Lennon, MLK, Malcolm X and others. He threatened status quo dominance. He denounced Obama’s kill list and anti-Iranian cyber attacks.

Powerful government and business figures deplored him. In 2009, FBI elements investigated him. Charges didn’t follow.

Despite extreme pressure, he pressed on. He defied prosecutorial authority. In October 2009, he posted his FBI file online. Doing do “probably signed his own lynch warrant,” said Nissani.

Two days before his death, JSTOR, his alleged victim, declined to press charges. It went further. It “announced that the archives of more than 1,200 of its journals would be available to the public free.”

Aaron had just cause to celebrate. “Are we to believe” he hanged himself instead?

Government officials and corporate bosses “had plenty of reasons” to want him dead. He challenged their totalitarian agenda. “He was creative, idealistic and unbendable.”

“He was young and admired by many.” Did “invisible government” elements kill him?

“They did so either indirectly through constant harassment….or, most likely, directly by hanging him and” blaming him for their crime.

“All this raises a dilemma for those of us possessing both conscience and a functioning brain.” How much longer will we stand by and do nothing?

How long will we tolerate what demands condemnation? When will we defend our own interests?

Freedom is too precious to lose. Preserving it depends on us. No one will do it for us. It’s not possible any other way. It never was. It never will be.

Aaron’s Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto

His own words say it best.

“Information is power,” he said. “But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.”

“The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.”

“Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.”

“There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.”

“But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.”

“That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them?”

“Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.”

” ‘I agree,’ many say, but what can we do?’ The companies hold the copyrights. They make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal – there’s nothing we can do to stop them. But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.”

“Those with access to these resources – students, librarians, scientists – you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out.”

“But you need not – indeed, morally, you cannot – keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.”

“Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.”

“But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral – it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.”

“Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it – their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.”

“There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.”

“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive.”

“We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerrilla Open Access.”

“With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge – we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?”

Does Aaron’s manifesto sound like someone planning suicide?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour
http://www.dailycensored.com/aaron-swartzs-suspicious-death/

_________

ADDENDUM

Official Statement from the Family and Partner of Aaron Swartz
By Craig Newman on January 12, 2013

Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.

Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.

ADDENDUM II

Open access activist dead at 26
Family charges US with role in Aaron Swartz suicide
By Kevin Reed
15 January 2013
Aaron Swartz, the Internet pioneer, open access crusader and social justice activist, was found dead on Friday, January 11, in Brooklyn, New York from an apparent suicide. Although precise details of his death at age 26 are still emerging, it is clear that Swartz was the victim of a malicious and vindictive prosecution by federal authorities.

In July 2011, Swartz was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access in 2010 to the paid subscription service JSTOR over the network of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The authorities said he illegally downloaded 4.8 million scholarly scientific and literary articles and was planning to distribute the copyrighted content for free on file-sharing web sites.

Swartz was facing federal wire and computer fraud charges that carried potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines. He was also charged by the District of Middlesex for breaking and entering for illegally going into an MIT utility closet.

Swartz and his defense counsel maintained a steadfast position of not guilty throughout the last two years, with the legal battle unfolding right up to the last day of his life. According to his lead defense attorney, Elliot Peters, Swartz had recently rejected a plea deal from the office of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz that would have avoided a trial but put him behind bars for six months in exchange for a guilty plea on 13 federal crimes.

According to a statement by the New York Medical Examiner’s office, Swartz hanged himself on Friday evening in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn apartment. The New York Times reported that an uncle, Michael Wolf, confirmed that Swartz died of an apparent suicide and that a friend had discovered his body.

Mr. Wolf said his nephew, who had battled depression and suicidal thoughts in the past and even written of it, “looked at the world and had a certain logic in his brain, and the world didn’t necessarily fit in with that logic, and that was sometimes difficult.”

In a public statement the Swartz family said, “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.” They added that, while JSTOR had declined to press charges against Aaron, “Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.”

Swartz was 14 years old when he co-authored RSS (Really Simple Syndication) that allows readers to subscribe to online news and information sources. He was also founder of Infogami that was merged into the popular social news site Reddit, which ranks member-posted items based on reader recommendations.

Aaron left Reddit in 2006, after publisher Condé Nast acquired it, and dedicated himself to free access to online information and opposition to Internet censorship. Soon afterward, he co-founded Demand Progress, a group that promotes online campaigns against social injustice.

In 2008, he published “The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” which opposed private ownership of information and advocated the free sharing of scientific journals. Swartz’s manifesto declared, “There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.”

As part of this campaign, Swartz wrote a program for downloading the content of a database of federal judicial documents called PACER, nearly 20 million pages at a time, for free. The government shut down the free program and investigated, but did not prosecute. Authorities, however, reacted much differently in 2011 after the JSTOR downloads at MIT.

While Aaron Swartz’s emotional condition may have played a role in his suicide, his tragic death is the direct product of the repressive actions of the US Justice Department.

Over the course of the past year, it became apparent that the US Attorney was hell-bent on making an example of Swartz. He was being aggressively prosecuted out of all proportion to the alleged crime and its impact.

While not a single government official or top financial executive has been charged, much less prosecuted, for high crimes associated with the illegal wars of the past decade and the financial crash of 2008, the Obama administration’s Justice Department was determined to punish an individual for attempting to make information accessible to the general public and ended up hounding him to his death.

Along with his activities in the information access world, Swartz represents the growing layers of society that are disgusted by the corruption, lying and theft of ruling circles in the US and around the world.

Last year, he criticized the Obama administration’s assassination program, writing:

“Every week or so, more than 100 members of the US national security team gather via secure video teleconference run by the Pentagon and go over the biographies of suspects in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, and ‘nominate’ those who should be targeted in the attacks.”

Like Julian Assange and PFC Bradley Manning, Aaron Swartz’s campaign for free access to information and, above all, his willingness to stand up to intimidation, were seen as intolerable by the state.