Anarchism in Arabic

I would like to re-post the entirety of As’ad Abu Khalil's translated essay, "I Want a Sect Against Sects", but it is long, so I'm going to only quote my favorite parts, and encourage you to follow the link to read the whole thing.

The reason I read his blog, Angry Arab News Service, other than to get all the news about the Arab world you do not get in most of the english-speaking media, is because he is an anarchist (I believe I've read him explicitly describe himself as such), but not an american anarchist, or a european anarchist, but an arab anarchist. The beliefs are not so different, but the perspective is. This is what anarchism sounds like in arabic:

...I want a sect for myself. None of the sects and doctrines can accommodate me. All restrain me. They disgust me. I don't get along with their leaders or their masses and I do not follow their slogans. I want to establish my own sect, but you're welcome to join. My sect has no rituals, traditions or customs. It's a freedom sect where everyone may define their own path. I want a sect that isn't interested in being ranked among Lebanese sects. One that doesn't boast about being one of the conflicting sects. I want a sect that the Lebanese Ministry of Interior's records do not recognize. My sect doesn't appear in commemorative photographs and doesn't get invited to the presidential palace and you don't see it in embassies. My sect doesn't receive money from the House of Saud or their followers in Lebanon....

...My sect rejects the notion of children's inferiority. It actually respects the child. In my sect children play in mud and neglect their lessons anytime they want. Children in my sect do not take lessons in manners. They learn to rebel at any time they desire. Children in my sect can dress colorfully and enjoy themselves. They do not fall victim to western corporations’ propaganda that harm children's mental and physical wellbeing. In my country children can spill soup, candy and chocolate on their clothes without fear. In my sect children learn from swings and from each other any time they want. Children in my sect do not purchase American products. In my sect children speak Arabic on the playground without shame. Children of my sect do not learn through rote memorization or parrot-like repetition. Children in my sect do not observe Teacher's Day, and they reject Ahmad Shawqi's poem to "venerate" teachers. The relationship between teachers and children in my sect are democratic, not heirarchical. In my sect teachers do not yell or throw chalk or reprimand. Children in my sect can draw with ink on their white shirts if they want to. And chew gum if they want to. And dance in math class if they want to. I want a sect which girls and boys squeeze my heart and present it in a cup to my beloved. My sect airs my heart on a laundry line in front of my beloved's house. My sect records my heartbeats on a CD and places it at my beloved's door. The girls and boys of my sect play on my heart's strings the symphony of eternal love. My sect memorizes all songs of harmony and love....

...My sect isn't docile. It swoops to resistance and revolution when necessary. My sect opposes the Israeli enemy. Its sons and daughters love living life with dignity, not shame. My sect doesn't hold monthly meetings to discuss sectarian provocation and regional and global affairs. My sect doesn't have any elders who pretend respectability before TV cameras. My sect believes in a defense strategy in which the Lebanese government isn't decision maker or that the state's armed personnel stay at home on war day. Those who'd like to fight can join the resistance, not the other way round, unlike Faris Said's irrational defense methods or Duri Sham'oun's theories, which refuses to accept the notion of Israel's defeat in the July war....

...I desire a sect that redefines gender and fundamentally changes methods of child rearing and upbringing. In my sect, parenting is based on cooperation, love and equality. My sect rejects scolding and belittling as methods of instilling obedience and blind loyalty. My sect rejects family laws that monopoloize sexist laws. My sect frees foreign maids in Lebanon and criminalizes their use. My sect frees all sex workers in Lebanon and criminalizes the purchase (not selling) of sex, if we can call that sex; sex implies consent between the parties, and economic need negates freedom of choice and decisionmaking. My sect will make those into centers to spread radical feminism in Lebanon.

My sect rejects capitalism and works to cancel it. My sect agrees with Balzac that behind every fortune lies a crime. It agrees with Proudhon that private property is theft. It agrees with the demands of The Communist Manifesto as a bare minimum. My sect embraces the poor and ridicules the rich and bars them from representing people and controlling them. My sect prohibits palaces in Lebanon and will convert them into shelters for the poor. My sect will demolish statues of the rich and colonialism's puppets and will allow a statue of "the dangerous man." "The dangerous man" is my sect's dear son. My sect will oppose privatization and will nationalize all sectors after ridding the state of sectarian grasp. My sect will consult comrades Khalid Saghiyya and Muhammad Zebib on economics and will ignore everything written by Marwan Iskander. My sect will encourage people to pirate to break or decrease the monopoly of multinational corporations. My sect will refuse the impoverishment of Al-Biqa farmers under the rubric of a deceitful virtue war imported from the United States.

My sect acknowledges a debt to Syrian workers in Lebanon and gives them Lebanese citizenship. They have rebuilt Beirut, unlike one who has impoverished the Lebanese people by plotting against them and against the peoples of neighboring Arab countries. My sect pursues and criminalizes anyone and everyone who harms Syrian workers, and pursues politicians who provoke public opinion against the Syrian people in Lebanon. It also places responsibility on the Syrian regime, which neglects the affairs of Syrian workers in Lebanon. My sect considers Syrian workers in Lebanon a sect per se. It encourages unions in Lebanon to cooperate and unite with a Syrian workers’ union in Lebanon (after expelling the former’s president Ghassan Ghousn, who was installed by the Amal movement for reasons unrelated to workers’ rights in Lebanon)....

...I want a sect that flies and soars and sings before the birds. A sect that wakes with sunset and sleeps with sunrise. I desire a sect that takes on the colors of the rainbow and isn’t afraid to sleep on the clouds. I want a sect that doesn’t follow, doesn’t applaud and doesn’t chant except for freedom, without payments or provocation or commands. I want a sect that drinks and eats from the earth and then returns to it. A sect that understands environmental struggle differently than Akram Shihayib and the green party. My sect’s concept of the environment will be closer to the American Green socialist party, not the Lebanese capitalist green party. My sect’s environmental activism will involve struggle against capitalism and globalization while the “struggle” of the Lebanese green party joins the Lebanese economic system’s capitalist monopoly. My sect understands environmental needs as a struggle against the greed of oil sheikhs and their followers in Lebanese economics and society. My sect starts by prohibiting hunting and barring western corporations that have a long history of destroying the environment. I want a sect that doesn’t subscribe to Lebanese myths of superiority and claims of Lebanese genius. I want a sect that acknowledges the equality of people. Is this too much for you, sons and daughters of Lebanon’s sects? I want a sect that scribbles and merges the red and green on the Lebanese flag. I want a sect that will rewrite Lebanon’s history to discuss a war of independence that failed to achieve independence. My sect will prepare for a war of true independence for Lebanon.

This is my sect. Does anyone want to join?

I'm in.

Purple is for People

My blog is staying it's dark shade of purple.

Here's the deal about Iran:

It's tough to feel about it. I mean it is tough because there are such conflicting feelings for me, I have trouble isolating them for the purpose of explaining them, or forming any sort of theoretical guidance on the basis of these feelings. Not that anyone is asking my opinion, but this is precisely it--there is no lack of feelings, but instead, a wide flow of them, making it difficult to say nothing, and perhaps even more difficult to say something.

It seems that most Western media has turned "green", often literally changing their website colors to the color of Mousavi's supporters. This is an easy position to take, all the more so for people from the part of the world already opposed to Ahmadinejad. Being Western, and being generally, or at least newly-neo Liberal, it is easy to look at the opposition to the non-democracy as a vote for democracy. A voice against a stolen election is a voice for fair elections. No?

But what are we looking at here? At best, a journey from worse to bad. Mousavi does not represent justice necessarily, nor democracy, nor a new or free Iran. He is part of the regime. He has already ruled in Iran as prime minister, during the Iran-Iraq War, over the course of which 500,000 people died. I'm of the opinion that any leader who controls a country in fighting a war is not a leader at all.

Of course, I side with the anti-statists, the anarchists, and the opposition to genocide by states against people. I differ in this opinion from a lot of people, some of whom back America in such choices, in addition to any number of other "democratic" states. I take the strange position that any entity occupied in killing people for the sake of controlling them is bad for humanity. Therefore, as long as this occurs, the people are not free.

So when I see video like this, I become understandably upset.


As the man said, when I see a cop beating a worker, I know what side I'm on. Same thing goes for militia men shooting at people on the ground.

If I had to join a political entity, I would join Médecins du Monde. Started by Bernard Koucher after he left MSF. "The associations provide care to the most vulnerable without regard for sex, age, religion, ethnic origin or political philosophy."

Not to support democracy, not to provide one vote per person. To always support whoever is the most vulnerable. No countries, no gods, no masters. Only humans.

The liberal mind, on the other hand, looks for a body to join. They want a side, or a cause. I've already heard, on NPR's All Things Considered this afternoon, comparisons between Mousavi and Obama. When asked for evidence the election was fraud, the analyst said (I paraphrase) "It is like assuming that Obama would not carry the African-American vote." Wouldn't it be nice if every situation had a good guy and a bad guy, and all it took was to change the color of our Twitter avatar to the correct one?

I'm seeing a new sort of democracy, which I won't call a Twitter democracy. Let's instead call it a trending democracy. Less of the old left/right distinction, and more of the even older "go with the flow" distinction. Americans die, and we hang up a flag. Iranians die, and we hang up a green one. We boil down tragedy to a consensus of blame, and then make sure we show ourselves as against this blame. We, as good people, are against tragedy. For nothing, but against badness. It doesn't matter who it is, as long as s/he opposes this tragedy, and we will follow him/her right into the next one.

I don't know much about this Mousavi. But I do know that even if he won, Iran would still not be a democracy. If they can shut down the media, kill people in the streets, and act as they have, they are not a democracy. And even if Iran was America, the people would still not be free. Each motion forward is only as good as the number of people who are killed because of it. Greater than, less than, and equals to.

Election Night Special

NATIONALISM IS STILL FASCIST

REMAIN ANTI-STATE

Well, yes, still anarcho-syndicalist over here, but thank goodness America didn't just elect a 72-year old bomber pilot and a ninny to the (should be abolished) executive office.

And, I must admit, watching the acceptance speech I did feel a little touch of warmth. It radiated out from the electron-tube and activated the idealism-coils deep within my psyche, and for half a second you might have seen a bit of electro-patriotic glow emit from my cold, dead soul.

Mostly though I attribute that good old nostalgia, remembering back to when I was younger than fifteen, and I still believed that elections, presidents, political platforms, and messages really meant anything more than the old recycled tropes from which they were spun.

I'm glad that people are happy. I hope they remember how happy they are and take a good hard look at that in four years when thinks are mostly the same.

Good to have a black man in the white house though. I voted for McKinney (not that voting has an effect, but I wanted to be one of the thousand-some in Multnomah county that voted for her). Next stop, Green in the White House!

I really would like to see how far this all goes. (Operation Code Name: See if Hope Floats.) The one thing that I can say is that finally the Democrats organized themselves correctly. Can they organize the government correctly? Restructure a sabotaged and broken bureaucracy? Nationalize, and more to the point, democratize or open-source the economy? Appoint Eric Schmidt "Master Technomancer of North America"? We'll see. It's going to take more than just Obama; he also has to dispose all the lackluster Democrats that rode into office on his coat-tails. There's a reason I abhore idealism; eve if there is no monster underneath, there is often a great, big, sad nothing.


We'll see... we'll see....



the picture is nanotubes programmed to assemble in the pattern of the president-elect's visage using nanolithography.

4861636b2074686520506c616e6574

I thought I was post this little story thread since the other day I posted about Jack Valenti and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Daily tech calls it "the first internet riot", which I kind of like, actual substance aside. (that link is the original article, which I largely used as the source material for this post. Intellectual property that!)

Basically what happened is that Digg.com was pressured to remove articles from their service that posted information about the encryption key for HD-DVD and Blue-ray discs that was recently discovered by some clever hackers. Other people had cracked discs separately, but this guy ended up figuring out the primary key, merely through watching what his computer was doing while it was doing it. (A bit more complicated than watching your car running with the hood up, but basically the same idea.)

The primary key, in all of its hacking glory, looks like this:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E8 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 89 C0

That's all! Some hexadecimal values, is all. This is the primary key that makes it "impossible" to rip both formats of high-definition DVD. With this, you can upload as many copies of Walking Tall in HD to the internet as you like. Somebody was paying attention to the product, and figured out how to take it apart. (note: I've changed a couple digits so it actually NOT the code... no need to get myself in any legal troubles. Besides, you can find the actual key just about anywhere now. The point is that it is 32 characters in order.)

However, in 746869732079656172206f66206f757220696e7465726e65742032303037, (hexadecimal for "this year of our internet 2007"), posting these 32 characters through the site garnered a cease-and-desist order for Digg.com from shadowy corporate lawyer figures. The website did what any injunction-fearing website would do, and took the material off-line.

But the users responded, and 50,000 people "digged" it, (whatever that really means) and thought up perhaps childish but I still think amusing ways of replicating those malignant 32 characters in a variety of posts.

So the website--bless them, O gods of Interdome--realized that their users were angry, and caved to the only thing more powerfully than a threat of legal action: a threat of reduced hits and bad press. Now it's back up, and Digg.com is proudly saying "boo" to power.

Not a very big deal, I guess. But, it is yet another poignant example of the ridiculousness of these internet times. The DMCA makes those 32 characters illegal. Almost as stupid as prohibition, or the war on drugs (or other wars against concepts). Sure, those companies now have all their DVDs pirated. But as long as they keep inventing new technology, someone is going to figure out how it works. It's evolution, baby. This happened before with DeCSS, and that was a 1811-digit prime number. And it will happen again. Once it is discovered, there is really no point in making it illegal. Besides, you end up looking life a fool for trying to outlaw a number. You can't make a number illegal, no matter how many laws you write.

This is the new information age version of the bomb-throwing anarchist (our history lesson from yesterday). Is hacking "morally defensible?" I don't know, and frankly I don't care. But the fact is that if you have a world made of information, and some people try to manipulate that information to make money, others are going to throw a wrench in the system. Capitalism can either adapt, like it did to unions, or it can try to stop the mutating force in society with laws, only to look foolish and eventually lose. The adaptation is already happening, because being a successful hacker can often get you a six-figure salary at an internet security company.

But I just like to sit back and watch the ants dance.