Australia unveils tougher anti-terror lawskhaleejtimes.com (Reuters) 8 September 2005Australian police will be able to use electronic tracking devices to keep tabs on terror suspects- detain for up to 48 hours without charge under the new security laws. John Howard said Australia would also make it a crime to incite violence against the community or against Australian soldiers serving overseas or support Australia’s enemies…Howard said the changes were needed to give authorities ”contemporary and necessary weapons” to fight terrorism.“We are, unfortunately, living in an era and time when unusual but necessary measures are needed to cope with an unusual and threatening situation,” Howard told reporters, adding that the changes would not trample on individual rights.“There is nothing in these measures that can be regarded as creating a quasi-police state.” Civil rights advocates condemned the changes …

From a conversation with the writer J.B. Mackinnon:JBM: The clearest example of this is when I was reading through Lyndon Johnson’s justifications for putting an occupying force in the Dominican Republic in 1965. You could take quotes out of LBJ’s mouth and put them in Bush’s mouth prior to the invasion of Iraq and the only difference you would notice would be that Bush was sounding unusually intelligent that day. The quotes are that transferable.There was the idea of “overwhelming force”, which is like an earlier version of “shock and awe”. There were reasons for invading the Dominican Republic that were fabricated out of thin air, or that were only believed by a minority of people who were completely disconnected to what was happening on the ground. In this case, the fear was that the Dominican Republic was going to be the second communist domino after Cuba. It wasn’t a realistic fear in any way.The Dominican Republic is a completely different country and a radically different political culture than Cuba.So you have all of these things, in the 1960’s you had this monomaniacal fear in America about international communism. Now it’s international terrorism.Q: Do you have any lessons or warnings for us today, because of the parallels with forty years ago?JBM: We need to demand much, much more of our political leaders before we follow them into any kind of combat situation. The people of the Dominican Republic know this better than anyone: the repercussions of occupation or war are extraordinary and they go on for decades. It affects all sides: the people who supported the American military, the people who’s revolution was crushed by the American military, both sides are still reeling from that. That’s the essential lesson: we have to demand more from our political leaders. We have to remember that the things we see on TV which are easy to forget about two years later, they are impossible to forget forty years later for the people who lived it.

The Safety Net : Heinrich Bolla dense yet rewarding book.

French commentators are comparing the behaviour of U.S. military leaders in Iraq with that of the fictive figures in Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy of militarism and nuclear age ‘Dr Strangelove or How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb’.

The U.S. war against Iraq has also led to a revival of Kubrick’s film, now being shown in several movie theatres in Paris.

Jean-Marie Colombani, publisher of the daily newspaper ‘Le Monde’, was the one of the first French commentators to compare U.S. President George W. Bush and his closest military aides with ‘Dr. Strangelove’. In a leading article on the Iraq war, Colombani wrote: ”George Bush, viewed from Europe, looks very much like a Dr. Strangelove of our times.”

In his film, released in 1964, Stanley Kubrick depicted a foolish, fascist U.S. military leadership that, by tinkering with nuclear weapons, provokes the ”ultimate war” with the Soviet Union, and pave the way for the destruction of planet earth.
Further, Francois de Bernard, a psychoanalyst and philosopher, argued that since the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency more than two years ago, the U.S. has become ”a republic ruled both theologically and pathologically”.

”Now, the U.S. government, composed of a band of psychopaths, takes all its decisions in the name of God,” De Bernard claims. To prove his thesis, de Bernard analysed the interventions of the U.S. leadership during the Iraqi crisis.

”In these interventions, we can see emerging, without any apparent goal, a paranoid vision of the world, immersed in a delirium of the most reactionary crusades, with imprints of a frightening symbolism,” De Bernard said. ”In this vicious vision of the World all external contestation becomes a crime, and all internal decisions, all internal actions, are sealed by a revengeful divinity.”

a new link from an blog article that really works… its from a site by the De Witt Center for Contemporary Art – and includes a series of discussions on the present global situation. Its got this catchy title – “Under Fire” and is a project that included the online forum (link of index below) and a series of meetings, presentations, and publications.
Check out the index: underfire

Go to this one. Its brilliant – at least I think so ….
yhchang-PERFECT_ARTISTIC

watch it .. with headphones.

Here a sort of relevant statement by the artists: “We have given you something that you have categorised as a certain kind of poetry, or others have categorized as a certain kind of art. That is more than enough for us. We are grateful to you and to everyone else who has stopped by. We have left you less than indifferent. That is also enough for us.
(Some others categorise what we do as a certain kind of pornography. We welcome that commentary, too. Still others say that what we do endangers society. Only in that case will we speak up, if necessary, although we haven’t, thank goodness, come to that yet.)”

The conspiracy thriller as paranoid thriller Manchurian Candidate ….If the conspiracy thriller (or paranoid thriller) is a sort of ‘subgenre’ of the thriller film hot in the 1970s in the US – it came in the wake of all that insanity and power that spawned Vietnam, the bombing raids, the gunning down of Kennedy, and good old Watergate – so we get the clandestine machinations and conspiracies that lay like wounds in the ‘orderly’ fabric of political life.The protagonists of conspiracy thrillers are those (wishfullfilled) journalists / amateur investigators whose ONE MAN investigations unravel some vast conspiracy that ultimately goes “all the way to the top”. (read the serious young man cleans up the world stuff)AND the REVENGE of the rightious narrative of more recent years maybe is the offspring of this genre –

Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni — YES – weirdly engaging scene in the park
Chelsea Girls, Andy Warhol (1966) – maybe
I Thought I Saw Prisoners, Harun Farocki (2000) – powerful
Lost Highway, David Lynch – can’t leave that one out

Just putting together a listing of films that have at least something to do with a culture of fear – and perhaps in some more recent cases either comment directly on paranoia and security – or in others contribute to an overall social unease. My curiosity is NOT just with representations of surveillance in Hollywood film – like the use of (fake) CCTV footage within their narratives, BUT the way their premise is developing a rhetorics of surveillance and paranoia. An obvious reference would be Thomas Y. Levin – his thoughts on contemporary Hollywood and its fascination with imag(in)ing video surveillance. a good reference: Black, J. (2002) The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative, NYTHE FILMS

• Tony Scott – Enemy of the State
• Steven Spielberg – Minority Report
• and the cheezy – Panic Room – David Fincher
• Time Code (2000) Mike Figgis
• Rope (of course) Hitchcock
• The Conversation – (1974) Coppola
• Enemy of the State (1998)
• The Truman Show (1998) – Peter Weir 
• Wag The Dog (1997) Benny Levinson
• Snake Eyes – DePalma (1998?)
• Sliver – (1993) Philip Noyce
• Menace to Society (1 & II) – Hughes (1992??)
• Call Northside 777 (1948) Hathaway
• Manchurian Candidate (original & remake)
• Seven days in May – with good old burt lancaster
• Elephant – fantastic – on the HS shootings
• Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni — YES – weirdly engaging scene in the park
• Chelsea Girls, Andy Warhol (1966) – maybe
• I Thought I Saw Prisoners, Harun Farocki (2000) – powerful
• Lost Highway, David Lynch – can’t leave that one out 

thats all for now folks .. any contributions to the list are MOST welcome