Tag Archives ⇒ someone

White House smear campaign: Gay and Canadian

July 18, 2003
· Martin Kelley

This would be fun­ny if it weren’t seri­ous. This would be seri­ous if it weren’t pathet­ic. A few days ago ABC News cor­re­spon­dent Jef­frey Kof­man ran a sto­ry about low morale among U.S. troops sta­tioned in Iraq. The next day some­one in the White House tipped off gos­sip king Matt Drudge that Kof­man was open­ly gay and (maybe worse) a Cana­di­an. Lap­dog Drudge com­plied with the head­line “ABC NEWS REPORTER WHO FILED TROOP COMPLAINT STORY IS CANADIAN.” It’s amaz­ing what tid­bits the White House thinks are news­wor­thy. You’d think the mile­stone that U.S. casul­ties in Iraq have sur­passed those of the 1991 War might just get the Pres­i­den­t’s attention.

The Bean Defense

July 15, 2003
· Martin Kelley

Read­ers might remem­ber the field day I had a few weeks ago when US occu­py­ing forces announced they had uncov­ered a cache of beans. They claimed Sad­dam Hus­sein had stock­piled a few hun­dred bags of cas­tor beans to use to make a bio­log­i­cal agent called ricin. In my postUS: Iraqis Planned Oper­a­tion Fart and Stink I point­ed out that the sup­posed weapons worked on the well-documented prin­ci­ple that beans can pro­duce gas and indi­ges­tion – ricin just works espe­cial­ly well and con­cen­trates the effect enough to kill some­one in a par­tic­u­lar­ly messy way.

What I did­n’t do was Google ricin and Iraq. Today I did and found this fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle that I missed at the time. U.S. Sec­re­tary of State Col­in Pow­ell claimed an Iraq/ricin con­nec­tion before the House Inter­na­tion­al Rela­tions Com­mit­tee back in ear­ly February:

“The ricin that is bounc­ing around Europe now orig­i­nat­ed in Iraq — not in the part of Iraq that is under Sad­dam Hus­sein’s con­trol, but his secu­ri­ty forces know all about it,” Pow­ell said.

Euro­pean intel­li­gence sources quick­ly dis­cred­it­ed this claim, point­ing out that it was obvi­ous the Euro­pean ricin was home-made and not Iraqi. The French were “stunned” that Pow­ell would make such a obviously-wrong state­ment, and the British flat­ly stat­ed they were “clear” that that ricin found in Lon­don was­n’t pro­duced in Iraq.

Here we have anoth­er instance of a senior US offi­cial claim­ing an easily-disprovable claim of Iraqi weapons of mass destruc­tion, just weeks after the now-infamous Niger/Iraq forgery appeared in the Pres­i­den­t’s State of the Union address. Pow­ell and oth­ers in the U.S. have trot­ted out the ricin threat repeat­ed­ly yet it’s hard to make a weapon out of the stuff. It’s real­ly only ever been used for a ridicu­lous James Bond-like assas­i­na­tion in 1991, when a Bul­gar­i­an agent is sup­posed to have killed a dis­si­dent in Lon­don using a ricin-filled pel­let fired from an umbrel­la tip (one is remind­ed of Austin Pow­er’s Dr. Evil: “I’m going to place him in an eas­i­ly escapable sit­u­a­tion involv­ing an over­ly elab­o­rate and exot­ic death”). As one site points out The cur­rent wis­dom among bio­log­i­cal defense experts is that ricin is more like­ly to be used as a tool in assas­si­na­tions than as a weapon of mass destruction.

There is a clear pat­tern of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion delib­er­ate­ly mis-interpreting Iraqi threats to make the case for war. These are pur­pose­ful decep­tions with only the thinnest escape clause to wig­gle through when the lies are exposed. Col­in Pow­ell isn’t stu­pid enough to make this kind of repeat­ed mis­take and a year of dis­proven ricin alerts is a mark against the Admin­is­tra­tion’s integrity.

 

Catch Yourself Thinking: A 1997 Tribute to Allen Ginsberg

April 6, 1997
· Martin Kelley

Allen, words go off through emails, phones, whis­pers on trol­leys, sad lost souls wan­der­ing beat neigh­bor­hoods telling the news: you’re dead.

I walk around, tears in eyes, look­ing look­ing for a changed world. See stu­dents in goa­tees, so beat, but they’re smil­ing, they don’t know, don’t care, you’ve been reduced to a fash­ion. But you’re here, in the air we breathe, that smell of lib­er­a­tion, of just stand up and laugh and prank and lis­ten to the soul sex spir­it burst­ing with­in. Smile through the soli­tary puri­tanism that keeps every­one apart.

But where are you remem­bered? Where’s the drum cir­cles? Need­ing some­thing now, I buy the lat­est Wald­man anthol­o­gy in book­store, thir­ti­eth street train sta­tion, full of time mag­a­zine, hus­tler, romance nov­els, lot­tery tick­ets. Cashier looks at book, says some­one else just bought it too. Oh joy, no drum cir­cles but at least oth­er lost souls not know­ing how to share the loss but to remem­ber the immor­tal words, the words now his­to­ry, set for­ev­er in twelve point times to be read as anoth­er Dead White Male poet.

I tell cashier, friend­ly mid­dle aged black woman that he — points to your out-of-focus head in pho­to of Cor­so, the Orlovskys, Ker­ouac — is dead. “Who is it?” “Allen Gins­burg.” “Oh, that’s him, hmm?” I say, I hope, that there’ll be a lot of peo­ple buy­ing these books now, but know yet anoth­er illus­trat­ed his­to­ry of Viet­nam will be their best seller.

Nigh­t­ime now. I can’t help it, I look to the sky to see if there’s a new star in the fir­ma­ment. But over­cast, smog­gy, orange-skied Ger­man­town does­n’t open to the cliché.

I miss you. You taught so much. How to com­bine poet­ry and lib­er­a­tion and pol­i­tics and the search for won­drous love­ly spir­it. Since I first saw you speak — 1988 Rut­gers, Rad­i­cal Stu­dent Con­fer­ence — I’ve become activist non­vi­o­lence pub­lish­er, Quak­er seek­er. You spoke to me, told me I could spin my own life of joy if only I could be open and hum­ble, ready to laugh, but also ready to take light­en­ing bolts upon my head for stand­ing up in row-after-row movie the­ater Amer­i­ca, watch us per­form, give us six bucks America.

In new book you say pre­scrip­tion for this Amer­i­ca is:

more art, med­i­ta­tion, lifestyles of rel­a­tive penury,
avoid­ance of con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion that’s
burn­ing down the planet.

To that I say mere­ly, ‘a‑okay,” let’s get back to work. I love you Allen. Peace be with you.

 

Recov­ered via Archive​.org cache.

The Revolution will be Online

August 6, 1995
· Martin Kelley

This essay was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in 1995.

IT’S HARD TO IGNORE the sor­ry shape of the social change com­mu­ni­ty. The signs of a col­lapsed move­ment are every­where. Orga­ni­za­tions are clos­ing, cut­ting back, lay­ing off staff, and drop­ping the fre­quen­cy of their magazines. 

On top of this, the basic resources we’ve depend­ed on are get­ting scarcer. Paper prices and postage prices are going up. Direct mail solic­i­ta­tions are for many economically-unfeasible now. With every aban­doned mail­ing list, with every dis­con­tin­ued peace fair, we’re los­ing the infra­struc­ture that used to nour­ish the whole movement. 

Here in Philadel­phia, the last few years have seen food coops close, peace orga­ni­za­tions lay off staff, and the book­stores dis­con­tin­ue their polit­i­cal titles. I’ve been meet­ing peo­ple only a half-generation younger than I who aren’t aware of the basic orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ples that the move­ment has built up over the years and who don’t know the mean­ings of Green­ham Com­mon or the Clamshell Alliance

Like many of you, I’m not giv­ing up. We can’t just aban­don our work because it’s becom­ing more dif­fi­cult. We need to strug­gle to find cre­ative ways of get­ting our mes­sage out there and com­mu­ni­cat­ing with oth­ers. What we need is a new media.

The Promise of the Web

The Web’s rev­o­lu­tion is it’s incred­i­bly min­i­mal costs. Fif­teen dol­lars a month gets you a home­page. As an edi­tor at New Soci­ety Pub­lish­ers (1991 – 1996), I’ve always had to wor­ry whether we’d lose mon­ey on a par­tic­u­lar edi­to­r­i­al project, and it some­times seemed a rule of thumb that what excit­ed me would­n’t sell. With the Web, we don’t have to wor­ry if an idea isn’t pop­u­lar because we’re not putting the same lev­el of resources into each publication.

Nev­er before has pub­lish­ing been so cheap. Just about any­one can do it. You don’t need a par­tic­u­lar­ly fast or fan­cy com­put­er to put Web pages online. And you don’t have to wor­ry about dis­tri­b­u­tion: if some­one sets their Web brows­er to your address, they’ll get you “prod­uct” instantly.

All the forces push­ing move­ment pub­lish­ing over the edge of finan­cial insol­ven­cy dis­ap­pear when we go online. Switch­ing to the Web is a mat­ter of keep­ing our words in print. The Web is the lat­est inven­tion to open up the dis­tri­b­u­tion of words by birthing new medias. The print­ing press begat mod­ern book pub­lish­ing just as the pho­to­copi­er begat zine cul­ture. The Web can like­wise spawn a media where words can flour­ish with less cap­i­tal than ever before.

Advertising Each Other

The prob­lem with the Web is not acces­si­bil­i­ty, but rather being heard above the noise. Peo­ple gen­er­al­ly find your web­site in two ways. The first is that they see your web address in your newslet­ter, get on their com­put­ers and look you up; this of course only gets you your own peo­ple. The sec­ond way is through links.

Links take you from one web­site to anoth­er. Web­page design­ers try to get linked from sites of sim­i­lar inter­est to theirs, hop­ing the read­ers of the oth­er site will fol­low the link to their web­page. This bounc­ing from site to site is called surf­ing, and it’s the main way around the web.

Link­ing is a very prim­i­tive art nowa­days. The Non­vi­o­lence Web has inter­nal links that active­ly invite read­ers to explore the whole NV-Web. Every­time some­one comes into the NV-Web through a mem­ber group, they will be inticed to stay and dis­cov­er the oth­er groups. By putting social change groups togeth­er in one place, we can have a much-more dynam­ic cross-referencing. Think of it as the equiv­a­lent of trad­ing mail­ing lists in that we can all share those web surfers who find any one of us.

In the web world as in the real one, coop­er­a­tion helps us all. If you’re an activist group doing work on non­vi­o­lent social change then con­tact us and we’ll put your words online. For free. If you have your own web­site already, then let’s talk about how we can crosslink you with oth­er groups work­ing on non­vi­o­lent social change.

Come explore the Non­vi­o­lence Web and let us get you con­nect­ed. Come join our revolution.

In peace,

Mar­tin Kelley