View from Nowhere. Is it the press’s job to create a community that transcends borders?
A few years ago, on a plane somewhere between Singapore and Dubai, I read Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983). I was traveling to report on the global market for passports—how the ultrawealthy can legally buy citizenship or residence virtually anywhere they like, even as 10 million stateless people languish, unrecognized by any country. In the process, I was trying to wrap my head around why national identity meant so much to so many, yet so little to my passport-peddling sources. Their world was the very image of Steve Bannon’s globalist nightmare: where you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many passports.
Anderson didn’t address the sale of citizenship, which only took off in earnest in the past decade; he did argue that nations, nationalism, and nationality are about as organic as Cheez Whiz. The idea of a nation, he writes, is a capitalist chimera. It is a collective sense of identity processed, shelf-stabilized, and packaged before being disseminated, for a considerable profit, to a mass audience in the form of printed books, news, and stories. He calls this “print-capitalism.”
Per Anderson, after the printing press was invented, nearly 600 years ago, enterprising booksellers began publishing the Bible in local vernacular languages (as opposed to the elitist Latin), “set[ting] the stage for the modern nation” by allowing ordinary citizens to participate in the same conversations as the upper classes. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the proliferation (and popularity) of daily newspapers further collapsed time and space, creating an “extraordinary mass ceremony” of reading the same things at the same moment.
“An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000–odd fellow Americans,” Anderson wrote. “He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time.” But with the knowledge that others are reading the same news, “he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.”
Should the press be playing a role in shaping not national identities, but transnational ones—a sense that we’re all in it together?
Of course, national presses enabled more explicit efforts by the state itself to shape identity. After the US entered World War I, for instance, President Woodrow Wilson set out to make Americans more patriotic through his US Committee on Public Information. Its efforts included roping influential mainstream journalists into advocating American-style democracy by presenting US involvement in the war in a positive light, or simply by referring to Germans as “Huns.” The committee also monitored papers produced by minorities to make sure they supported the war effort not as Indians, Italians, or Greeks, but as Americans. Five Irish-American papers were banned, and the German-American press, reacting to negative stereotypes, encouraged readers to buy US bonds to support the war effort.
The US media played an analogous role in selling the public on the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But ever since then, in the digital economy, its influence on the national consciousness has waned. Imagined Communities was published seven years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty-two years before Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, and a couple of decades before the internet upended print-capitalism as the world knew it (one of Anderson’s footnotes is telling, if quaint: “We still have no giant multinationals in the world of publishing”).
Since Trump—a self-described nationalist—became a real contender for the US presidency, many news organizations have taken to looking inward: consider the running obsession with the president’s tweets, for instance, or the nonstop White House palace intrigue (which the president invites readily).
Meanwhile, the unprofitability of local and regional papers has contributed to the erosion of civics, which, down the line, makes it easier for billionaires to opt out of old “imagined communities” and join new ones based on class and wealth, not citizenship. And given the challenges humanity faces—climate change, mass migration, corporate hegemony, and our relationships to new technologies—even if national papers did make everyone feel like they shared the same narrative, a renewed sense of national pride would prove impotent in fighting world-historic threats that know no borders.
Should the press, then, be playing an analogous role in shaping not national identities, but transnational ones—a sense that we’re all in it together? If it was so important in shaping national identity, can it do so on a global scale?
Like my passport-buying subjects, I am what Theresa May, the former British prime minister, might call a “citizen of nowhere.” I was born in one place to parents from another, grew up in a third, and have lived and traveled all over. That informs my perspective: I want deeply for there to be a truly cosmopolitan press corps, untethered from national allegiances, regional biases, class divisions, and the remnants of colonial exploitation. I know that’s utopian; the international working class is hardly a lucrative demographic against which publishers can sell ads. But we seem to be living in a time of considerable upheaval and opportunity. Just as the decline of religiously and imperially organized societies paved the way for national alternatives, then perhaps today there is a chance to transcend countries’ boundaries, too.
Does the US media help create a sense of national identity? If nationalism means putting the interests of one nation—and what its citizens are interested in—before more universal concerns, then yes. Most journalists working for American papers, websites, and TV write in English with a national audience (or regional time zone) in mind, which affects how we pitch, source, frame, and illustrate a story—which, in turn, influences our readers, their country’s politics, and, down the line, the world. But a news peg isn’t an ideological form of nationalism so much as a practical or methodological one. The US press feeds off of more pernicious nationalisms, too: Donald Trump’s false theory about Barack Obama being “secretly” Kenyan, disseminated by the likes of Fox and The Daily Caller, comes to mind.
That isn’t to say that global news outlets don’t exist in the US. When coaxing subscribers, the Financial Times, whose front page often includes references to a dozen different countries, openly appeals to their cosmopolitanism. “Be a global citizen. Become an FT Subscriber,” read a recent banner ad, alongside a collage featuring the American, Chinese, Japanese, Australian, and European Union flags (though stories like the recent “beginner’s guide to buying a private island” might tell us something about what kind of global citizen they’re appealing to).
“I don’t think we try to shape anyone’s identity at all,” Gillian Tett, the paper’s managing editor for the US, says. “We recognize two things: that the world is more interconnected today than it’s ever been, and that these connections are complex and quite opaque. We think it’s critical to try to illuminate them.”
For Tett, who has a PhD in social anthropology, money serves as a “neutral, technocratic” starting point through which to understand—and tie together—the world. “Most newspapers today tend to start with an interest in politics or events, and that inevitably leads you to succumb to tribalism, however hard you try [not to],” Tett explains. “If you look at the world through money—how is money going around the world, who’s making and losing it and why?—out of that you lead to political, cultural, foreign-policy stories.”
Tett’s comments again brought to mind Imagined Communities: Anderson notes that, in 18th-century Caracas, newspapers “began essentially as appendages of the market,” providing commercial news about ships coming in, commodity prices, and colonial appointments, as well as a proto–Vows section for the upper crust to hate-read in their carriages. “The newspaper of Caracas quite naturally, and even apolitically, created an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers, to whom these ships, brides, bishops, and prices belonged,” he wrote. “In time, of course, it was only to be expected that political elements would enter in.”
Yesterday’s aristocracy is today’s passport-buying, globe-trotting one percent. The passport brokers I got to know also pitched clients with the very same promise of “global citizenship” (it sounds less louche than “buy a new passport”)—by taking out ads in the Financial Times. Theirs is exactly the kind of neoliberal “globalism” that nationalist politicians like Trump have won elections denouncing (often hypocritically) as wanting “the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much.” Isn’t upper-crust glibness about borders, boundaries, and the value of national citizenship part of what helped give us this reactionary nativism in the first place?
“I suspect what’s been going on with Brexit and maybe Trump and other populist movements [is that] people. . . see ‘global’ as a threat to local communities and businesses rather than something to be welcomed,” Tett says. “But if you’re an FT reader, you see it as benign or descriptive.”
Among the largest news organizations in the world is Reuters, with more than 3,000 journalists and photographers in 120 countries. It is part of Thomson Reuters, a truly global firm. Reuters does not take its mandate lightly: a friend who works there recently sent me a job posting for an editor in Gdynia, which, Google clarified for me, is a city in the Pomeranian Voivodeship of Poland.
Reuters journalists cover everything from club sports to international tax evasion. They’re outsourcing quick hits about corporate earnings to Bangalore, assembling teams on multiple continents to tackle a big investigation, shedding or shuffling staff under corporate reorganizations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “more than half our business is serving financial customers,” Stephen Adler, the editor in chief, tells me. “That has little to do with what country you’re from. It’s about information: a central-bank action in Europe or Japan may be just as important as everything else.”
Institutionally, “it’s really important and useful that we don’t have one national HQ,” Adler adds. “That’s the difference between a global news organization and one with a foreign desk. For us, nothing is foreign.” That approach won Reuters this year’s international Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the mass murder of the Rohingya in Myanmar (two of the reporters were imprisoned as a result, and since freed); it also comes through especially sharply in daily financial stories: comprehensive, if dry, compendiums of who-what-where-when-why that recognize the global impact of national stories, and vice versa. A recent roundup of stock movements included references to the US Fed, China trade talks, Brexit, monetary policy around the world, and the price of gold.
Adler has led the newsroom since 2011, and a lot has changed in the world. (I worked at Reuters between 2011 and 2013, first as Adler’s researcher and later as a reporter; Adler is the chair of CJR’s board.) Shortly after Trump’s election, Adler wrote a memo affirming the organization’s commitment to being fair, honest, and resourceful. He now feels more strongly than ever about judiciously avoiding biases—including national ones. “Our ideology and discipline around putting personal feelings and nationality aside has been really helpful, because when you think about how powerful local feelings are—revolutions, the Arab Spring—we want you writing objectively and dispassionately.”
The delivery of stories in a casual, illustrated, highly readable form is in some ways more crucial to developing an audience than subject matter.
Whether global stories can push communities to develop transnationally in a meaningful way is a harder question to answer; it seems to impugn our collective aptitude for reacting to problems of a global nature in a rational way. Reuters’s decision not to fetishize Trump hasn’t led to a drop-off in US coverage—its reporters have been especially strong on immigration and trade policy, not to mention the effects of the new administration on the global economy—but its stories aren’t exactly clickbait, which means ordinary Americans might not encounter them at the top of their feed. In other words, having a global perspective doesn’t necessarily translate to more eyeballs.
What’s more, Reuters doesn’t solve the audience-class problem: whether readers are getting dispatches in partner newspapers like The New York Times or through the organization’s Eikon terminal, they tend to be the sort of person “who does transnational business, travels a good deal, is connected through work and media, has friends in different places, cares about what’s going on in different places,” Adler says. “That’s a pretty large cohort of people who have reason to care what’s going on in other places.”
There are ways to unite readers without centering coverage on money or the markets. For a generation of readers around the world, the common ground is technology: the internet. “We didn’t pick our audience,” Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed, tells me over the phone. “Our audience picked us.” He defines his readers as a cohort aged 18–35 “who are on the internet and who broadly care about human rights, global politics, and feminism and gay rights in particular.”
To serve them, BuzzFeed recently published a damning investigative report into the World Wildlife Fund’s arming of militias in natural reserves; a (not uncontroversial) series on Trump’s business dealings abroad; early exposés of China’s detention of Uighur citizens; and reports on child abuse in Australia. Climate—“the central challenge for every newsroom in the world”—has been harder to pin down. “We don’t feel anyone has cracked it. But the shift from abstract scientific [stories] to coverage of fires in California, it’s a huge change—it makes it more concrete,” Smith says. (My husband is a reporter for BuzzFeed.)
The delivery of these stories in a casual, illustrated, highly readable form is in some ways more crucial to developing an audience than subject matter. “The global political financial elites have had a common language ever since it was French,” Smith says. “There is now a universal language of internet culture, [and] that. . . is how our stuff translates so well between cultures and audiences.” This isn’t a form of digital Esperanto, Smith insists; the point isn’t to flatten the differences between countries or regions so much as to serve as a “container” in which people from different regions, interest groups, and cultures can consume media through references they all understand.
BuzzFeed might not be setting out to shape its readers’ identities (I certainly can’t claim to feel a special bond with other people who found out they were Phoebes from the quiz “Your Sushi Order Will Reveal Which ‘Friends’ Character You’re Most Like”). An audience defined by its youth and its media consumption habits can be difficult to keep up with: platforms come and go, and young people don’t stay young forever. But if Anderson’s thesis still carries water, there must be something to speaking this language across cultures, space, and time. Call it “Web vernacular.”
In 2013, during one of the many recent and lengthy US government shutdowns, Joshua Keating, a journalist at Slate, began a series, “If It Happened There,” that imagined how the American media would view the shutdown if it were occurring in another country. “The typical signs of state failure aren’t evident on the streets of this sleepy capital city,” Keating opens. “Beret-wearing colonels have not yet taken to the airwaves to declare martial law. . . .But the pleasant autumn weather disguises a government teetering on the brink.”
It goes on; you get the idea. Keating’s series, which was inspired by his having to read “many, many headlines from around the world” while working at Foreign Policy, is a clever journalistic illustration of what sociologists call “methodological nationalism”: the bias that gets inadvertently baked into work and words. In the Middle East, it’s sectarian or ethnic strife; in the Midwest, it’s a trigger-happy cop and a kid in a hoodie.
His send-ups hit a nerve. “It was huge—it was by far the most popular thing I’ve done at Slate,” Keating says. “I don’t think that it was a shocking realization to anyone that this kind of language can be a problem, but sometimes pointing it out can be helpful. If the series did anything, it made people stop and be conscious of how. . . our inherent biases and perspectives will inform how we cover the world.”
Curiously, living under an openly nationalist administration has changed the way America—or at the very least, a significant part of the American press corps—sees itself. The press is a de facto opposition party, not because it tries to be, but because the administration paints it that way. And that gives reporters the experience of working in a place much more hostile than the US without setting foot outside the country.
Keating has “semi-retired” the series as a result of the broad awareness among American reporters that it is, in fact, happening here. “It didn’t feel too novel to say [Trump was] acting like a foreign dictator,” he says. “That was what the real news coverage was doing.”
Keating, who traveled to Somaliland, Kurdistan, and Abkhazia to report his book Invisible Countries (2018), still thinks the fastest and most effective way to form an international perspective is to live abroad. At the same time, not being bound to a strong national identity “can make it hard to understand particular concerns of the people you’re writing about,” he says. It might be obvious, but there is no one perfect way to be internationally minded.
Alan Rusbridger—the former editor of The Guardian who oversaw the paper’s Edward Snowden coverage and is now the principal at Lady Margaret Hall, a college at Oxford University—recognizes the journalistic and even moral merits of approaching news in a non-national way: “I think of journalism as a public service, and I do think there’s a link between journalism at its best and the betterment of individual lives and societies,” he says. But he doesn’t have an easy formula for how to do that, because truly cosmopolitan journalism requires both top-down editorial philosophies—not using certain phrasings or framings that position foreigners as “others”—and bottom-up efforts by individual writers to read widely and be continuously aware of how their work might be read by people thousands of miles away.
Yes, the starting point is a nationally defined press, not a decentralized network, but working jointly helps pool scarce resources and challenge national or local biases.
Rusbridger sees potential in collaborations across newsrooms, countries, and continents. Yes, the starting point is a nationally defined press, not a decentralized network; but working jointly helps pool scarce resources and challenge national or local biases. It also wields power. “One of the reasons we reported Snowden with the Times in New York was to use global protections of human rights and free speech and be able to appeal to a global audience of readers and lawyers,” Rusbridger recalls. “We thought, ‘We’re pretty sure nation-states will come at us over this, and the only way to do it is harness ourselves to the US First Amendment not available to us anywhere else.’”
In employing these tactics, the press positions itself in opposition to the nation-state. The same strategy could be seen behind the rollout of the Panama and Paradise Papers (not to mention the aggressive tax dodging detailed therein). “I think journalists and activists and citizens on the progressive wing of politics are thinking creatively about how global forces can work to their advantage,” Rusbridger says.
But he thinks it all starts locally, with correspondents who have fluency in the language, culture, and politics of the places they cover, people who are members of the communities they write about. That isn’t a traditional foreign-correspondent experience (nor indeed that of UN employees, NGO workers, or other expats). The silver lining of publishing companies’ shrinking budgets might be that cost cutting pushes newsrooms to draw from local talent, rather than send established writers around. What you gain—a cosmopolitanism that works from the bottom up—can help dispel accusations of media elitism. That’s the first step to creating new imagined communities.
Anderson’s work has inspired many an academic, but media executives? Not so much. Rob Wijnberg is an exception: he founded the (now beleaguered) Correspondent in the Netherlands in 2013 with Anderson’s ideas in mind. In fact, when we speak, he brings the name up unprompted.
“You have to transcend this notion that you can understand the world through the national point of view,” he says. “The question is, What replacement do we have for it? Simply saying we have to transcend borders or have an international view isn’t enough, because you have to replace the imagined community you’re leaving behind with another one.”
For Wijnberg, who was a philosophy student before he became a journalist, this meant radically reinventing the very structures of the news business: avoiding covering “current events” just because they happened, and thinking instead of what we might call eventful currents—the political, social, and economic developments that affect us all. It meant decoupling reporting from national news cycles, and getting readers to become paying “members” instead of relying on advertisements.
This, he hoped, would help create a readership not based on wealth, class, nationality, or location, but on borderless, universal concerns. “We try to see our members. . . as part of a group or knowledge community, where the thing they share is the knowledge they have about a specific structural subject matter,” be it climate, inequality, or migration, Wijnberg says. “I think democracy and politics answers more to media than the other way around, so if you change the way media covers the world you change a lot.”
That approach worked well in the Netherlands: his team raised 1.7 million euros in 2013, and grew to include 60,000 members. A few years later, Wijnberg and his colleagues decided to expand into the US, and with the help of NYU’s Jay Rosen, an early supporter, they made it onto Trevor Noah’s Daily Show to pitch their idea.
The Correspondent raised more than $2.5 million from nearly 50,000 members—a great success, by any measure. But in March, things started to get hairy, with the publication abruptly pulling the plug on opening a US newsroom and announcing that staff would edit stories reported from the US from the original Amsterdam office instead. Many of the reasons behind this are mundane: visas, high rent, relocation costs. And reporters would still be reporting from, and on, the States. But supporters felt blindsided, calling the operation a scam.
Today, Wijnberg reflects that he should have controlled the messaging better, and not promised to hire and operate from New York until he was certain that he could. He also wonders why it matters.
“It’s not saying people who think it matters are wrong,” he explains. “But if the whole idea of this kind of geography and why it’s there is a construct, and you’re trying to think about transcending it, the very notion of Where are you based? is secondary. The whole point is not to be based anywhere.”
Still: “The view from everywhere—the natural opposite—is just as real,” Wijnberg concedes. “You can’t be everywhere. You have to be somewhere.”
And that’s the rub: for all of nationalism’s ills, it does instill in its subjects what Anderson calls a “deep, horizontal comradeship” that, while imagined, blossoms thanks to a confluence of forces. It can’t be replicated supranationally overnight. The challenge for a cosmopolitan journalism, then, is to dream up new forms of belonging that look forward, not backward—without discarding the imagined communities we have.
That’s hard; so hard that it more frequently provokes a retrenchment, not an expansion, of solidarity. But it’s not impossible. And our collective futures almost certainly depend on it.
▻https://www.cjr.org/special_report/view-from-nowhere.php
#journalisme #nationalisme #Etat-nation #communauté_nationale #communauté_internationale #frontières #presse #médias
Federal judge rules Uber calling its drivers independent contractors may violate antitrust and harm competition / Boing Boing
►https://boingboing.net/2019/06/21/labor-uber.html
A federal judge has ruled that alleged misclassification of drivers as independent contractors by the ride-hailing service app Uber could harm competition and violate the spirit of America’s antitrust laws.
• Lawsuit says misclassifying workers creates competitive harm
• 30 days to amend complaint with new information
The ruling by Judge Edward Chen of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is not a final decision in the case, but is a “significant warning to ride-hailing companies,” Bloomberg News reports.
“It signals how a 2018 California Supreme Court case and future worker classification laws could open the floodgates to worker misclassification and antitrust claims.”
Uber’s Worker Business Model May Harm Competition, Judge Says
▻https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/ubers-worker-business-model-may-harm-competition-judge-says
Uber’s Worker Business Model May Harm Competition, Judge Says
Posted June 21, 2019
Suit: Misclassifying workers produces competitive harm
Complaint must be amended within 30 days with new information
Uber‘s alleged misclassification of drivers as independent contractors could significantly harm competition and violate the spirit of antitrust laws, a federal judge ruled.
The ruling, although not a final decision in the case, is a significant warning to ride-hailing companies. It signals how a 2018 California Supreme Court case and future worker classification laws could open the floodgates to worker misclassification and antitrust claims.
Judge Edward Chen of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California declined to dismiss all of the claims brought against Uber by Los Angeles-based transportation service Diva Limousine, saying the company established a causal link between Uber’s behavior and real economic harm being felt by competitors.
Driver misclassification could save Uber as much as $500 million annually just in California, according to Diva’s lawyers.
“Diva’s allegations support the inference that Uber could not have undercut market prices to the same degree without misclassifying its drivers to skirt significant costs,” the judge wrote in the June 20 ruling.
Unlike employees, independent contractors aren’t entitled to benefits such as health care, unemployment insurance, minimum wages, and overtime.
An attorney for Diva said he was pleased with the court’s decision and that it was a warning that the company couldn’t skirt California labor laws.
“There’s an acknowledgement here that Uber not only harms its drivers but also that its conduct crosses the line from robust competition to unfair competition,” said attorney Aaron Sheanin of Robins Kaplan LLP. “And that injures its competitiors, including Diva.”
Uber didn’t return a request for comment.
Overall, Uber was only able to get part of Diva’s complaint fully dismissed—specifically, its claims under the state’s Unfair Practices Act. Diva’s claims under the California Unfair Competition Law can proceed once it amends its complaint to address jurisdictional issues and other legal arguments.
Diva’s lawyers have 30 days to refile an updated complaint which is likely to move forward given the judge’s ruling that the claims have merit.
The ruling was based in part from language drawn from the California Supreme Court’s April 2018 ruling in Dynamex Operations West Inc. v. Superior Court. That decision made it harder for California employers to classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees. It also condemns misclassification as a type of unfair competition.
Uber identified Dynamex in regulatory filings as a long-term potential risk factor for its business success.
The case is Diva Limousine, Ltd. v. Uber Technologies, Inc., N.D. Cal., No. 3:18-cv-05546, Order Issued 6/20/19.
]]>Ces femmes qui ont compté dans l’ombre
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2019/06/05/ces-femmes-qui-ont-compte-dans-l-ombre_5471924_1650684.html
On trouve beaucoup d’exemples de travaux scientifiques basés sur le travail de « calculatrices féminines », dont les noms apparaissent au mieux dans les remerciements.
L’un de mes articles scientifiques préférés a été écrit par Edward Lorenz, en 1963, et s’intitule « Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow » (flot déterministe et non périodique). Il s’agit de l’un des textes fondateurs de la théorie du chaos. Son contenu passera dans le grand public un peu plus tard à travers la belle image de l’effet papillon : un battement d’ailes d’un papillon au Brésil pourrait engendrer un ouragan au Texas. Cette publication est un mélange extraordinaire de physique, de météorologie, de mathématiques et de simulations numériques. Je l’ai lue et relue un très grand nombre de fois et je croyais la connaître jusque la semaine dernière.
Un article de Joshua Sokol dans Quanta Magazine m’a appris que j’aurais dû lire le dernier paragraphe dans lequel l’auteur remercie « Miss Ellen Fetter qui a pris en charge les nombreux calculs et les graphiques ». Comment ? Ce n’est pas Edward Lorenz qui a fait les calculs, mais une assistante ? Il faut comprendre que simuler le mouvement de l’atmosphère sur un ordinateur était une composante essentielle de l’article. En 1963, les ordinateurs étaient primitifs et « prendre en charge les calculs » aurait probablement mérité un peu plus qu’un discret remerciement.
Ce n’est pas la première fois que des scientifiques utilisent des « calculatrices féminines », dont les noms apparaissent au mieux dans les remerciements. Dix ans auparavant, Enrico Fermi, John Pasta et Stanislaw Ulam publiaient la première simulation numérique d’un système physique complexe. On peut considérer cet article comme la naissance d’une nouvelle discipline de physique mathématique. Il s’agissait d’étudier, sur un ordinateur, les vibrations d’une chaîne constituée d’une soixantaine de ressorts « non linéaires ».
Là encore, deux lignes discrètes dans la publication remercient Miss Mary Tsingou pour « la programmation efficace du problème et pour avoir effectué les calculs sur l’ordinateur Maniac de Los Alamos », ce qui représente pourtant une partie très importante du travail. Ce n’est qu’en 2008 que le physicien Thierry Dauxois lira ces deux lignes et proposera d’appeler Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou cette simulation numérique. J’aurais même proposé de respecter l’ordre alphabétique…
]]>Sur l’#Europe_forteresse, quelques #critiques...
Extrait d’un entretien avec #Sandro_Mezzadra :
Vous réfutez la vision d’une Europe forteresse. Réfutez-vous aussi le durcissement des politiques migratoires mises en œuvre par les États membres de l’UE ?
Je critique la vision unilatérale des frontières les réduisant à leur fonction de mur. Les #frontières excluent, séparent, c’est un fait. Mais elles ne sont pas que cela. Je ne cherche pas à nier la #violence qui s’exerce aux frontières, la manière dont des vies sont exploitées, enlevées. Mais il me semble qu’il faut changer de point de vue afin de retrouver un angle d’attaque plus efficace. Le concept d’Europe forteresse a été inventé dans les années 1990 pour dénoncer les politiques migratoires européennes. La référence de cette métaphore est militaire, puisque l’Europe forteresse désignait les fortifications nazies bordant les rivages de l’Atlantique. Cette image n’est pas inutile. Mais, au cours des dernières années, elle a été récupérée par les institutions européennes elles-mêmes, notamment par Frontex. À trop l’utiliser, on risque de faire le jeu des politiques qu’elle est censée combattre.
Pour répondre à votre question, il n’existe pas de politique européenne migratoire commune. Mais il existe un cadre global, à travers la mise en place de règles minimales, l’identification de supposées “bonnes pratiques”, le déroulement de négociations informelles ou encore l’établissement de relations bilatérales. Ce cadre global tend à instaurer une politique de sélection inclusive. Le but des politiques migratoires européennes n’est pas de barrer la route aux migrants. Ça, c’est le spectacle. Des centaines de milliers de personnes entrent et s’installent légalement – mais aussi illégalement – chaque année dans l’Union européenne. Les États membres ne s’en plaignent pas. Au contraire, ils en ont besoin, pour des raisons économiques et démographiques identifiées depuis longtemps par Bruxelles. L’Europe vieillit, l’Europe a besoin de main-d’œuvre. Les systèmes de migrations saisonnières, de migrations circulaires, les systèmes à point sont appréciés. Ces dispositifs sélectifs sont compatibles avec la flexibilité exigée par les économies de marché.
Les dirigeants et experts européens débattent du “management de l’immigration” et de “just-in-time” ou “to-the-point migrations”. Ils ont cru, un temps, comme en Italie, que les quotas étaient une solution adéquate. Or ceux-ci se sont avérés particulièrement rigides, donc inadaptés aux besoins des entreprises. Ce management a à voir avec une gestion entrepreneuriale. L’objectif est de diversifier les compétences des migrants. La figure du migrant peu qualifié, recruté comme OS dans l’industrie automobile, est dépassée en tant que point de référence normatif pour les politiques et expériences migratoires. La figure du migrant est multiple. Les statuts, les expériences des migrants sont plurielles. De même que la figure du citoyen et du travailleur s’est fragmentée, celle du migrant a explosé.
▻https://editionsasymetrie.org/frontieres/2019/05/21/interview-mezzadra
#Forteresse_Europe #Mezzadra #critique #migrations #réfugiés #récupération #vocabulaire #terminologie #mots
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« La “forteresse”, une image dramatiquement fausse. Un article de @isskein
Tous ces aspects vont à l’encontre du syntagme figé de “forteresse Europe”, dont le succès est grand dans les mouvements altermondialistes. Parfois utile pour mobiliser, il est calamiteux pour l’analyse et l’action. D’abord parce qu’il focalise sur la répression : si l’Europe mène une guerre aux migrants, dont les morts se comptent par milliers, du détroit de Gibraltar aux côtes maltaises et siciliennes, du tunnel sous la Manche à la frontière gréco-turque, on oublie trop souvent que la politique européenne est aussi fondée sur l’utilitarisme : “Nous avons besoin des immigrés, mais ils devront être choisis, contrôlés et placés” déclare Romano Prodi (11 sept 2000, dépêche Ansa). On oublie surtout que la fermeture et le contrôle des frontières sont mis en échec chaque jour : selon Europol chaque année près de 500.000 personnes réussissent à franchir “illégalement” les frontières de l’UE.
Cette vision victimaire, paternaliste, strictement humanitaire, fait des migrants les victimes d’inévitables catastrophes dues à la globalisation néolibérale, des corps soumis voués à l’invisibilité, à l’errance et à l’attente, alors que, comme le font remarquer Étienne Balibar et Edward Saïd, ils ne sont ni “une masse fluctuante indifférenciée”, ni “d’innombrables troupeaux d’innocents relevant d’une aide internationale d’urgence”.
Appliquée aux camps, l’image de la forteresse est tout aussi dramatiquement fausse. Ceux que l’on y enferme ne sont pas, comme le voudraient les différents corps policiers, administratifs et humanitaires qui les gèrent, des catégories (“clandestins”, “irréguliers”), mais des femmes et des hommes.
Il y a une autonomie des migrations, qui les rend irréductibles aux lois internationales de l’offre et de la demande (le « push-pull » des théories classiques), car c’est un mouvement social autonome. Et les migrants sont des sujets, des femmes et des hommes qui, en exerçant quotidiennement leur droit de fuite et de fugue, mettent en question les frontières et la citoyenneté européenne.
Il ne s’agit pas là de céder au romantisme de l’exil et du nomadisme, ou de considérer que la migration est en elle-même porteuse d’émancipation, mais de placer au premier plan la résistance et la dignité de sujets. »
’Orientalism,’ Then and Now | by Adam Shatz | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
▻https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/20/orientalism-then-and-now
Un retour sur l’histoire de l’orientalisme et sa « mutation » à l’époque actuelle.
Edward Said’s Orientalism is one of the most influential works of intellectual history of the postwar era. It is also one of the most misunderstood. Perhaps the most common misunderstanding is that it is “about” the Middle East; on the contrary, it is a study of Western representations of the Arab-Islamic world—of what Said called “mind-forg’d manacles,” after William Blake. The book’s conservative critics misread it as a nativist denunciation of Western scholarship, ignoring its praise for Louis Massignon, Jacques Berque, and Clifford Geertz, while some Islamists praised the book on the basis of the same misunderstanding, overlooking Said’s commitment to secular politics.
Since the book’s first publication in 1978, “Orientalism” has become one of those words that shuts down conversation on liberal campuses, where no one wants to be accused of being “Orientalist” any more than they want to be called racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic. That “Orientalist” is now a commonly applied epithet is a tribute to the power of Said’s account, but also to its vulgarization. With Orientalism, Said wanted to open a discussion about the way the Arab-Islamic world had been imagined by the West—not to prevent a clear-eyed reckoning with the region’s problems, of which he was all too painfully aware.
]]>Condamné pour pédophilie, le cardinal Pell visé par une procédure civile
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/06/08/condamne-pour-pedophilie-le-cardinal-pell-desormais-vise-par-une-procedure-c
Le cardinal australien George Pell, déjà condamné pour pédophilie, risque de nouveaux démêlés avec la justice, avoir été accusé dans une plainte portée au civil d’avoir couvert un prêtre dont il savait qu’il abusait d’enfants.
La plainte a été déposée vendredi 7 juin auprès de la Cour suprême de l’Etat de Victoria par un homme qui affirmé avoir été abusé par le frère chrétien Edward « Ted » Dowan lors de scolarité à Melbourne au début des années 1980, a rapporté la presse locale.
George Pell, ex-numéro trois du Vatican, qui était à l’époque évêque vicaire à l’éducation pour la région de Ballarat (sud), est accusé d’avoir permis l’ecclésiastique de passer d’une école à une autre alors qu’il était au courant de faits qui lui sont reprochés.
Lire aussi En Australie, le cardinal Pell a contesté en appel sa condamnation pour pédophilie
Pell « doit répondre » de crimes « commis par d’autres prêtres »
« Pell doit répondre non seulement pour ses propres crimes mais aussi pour ceux commis par d’autres prêtres et frères dont il a autorisé la mutation d’une école à l’autre et d’une paroisse à l’autre », a dit Michael Magazanik, l’avocat de la victime, cité par le journal The Australian.
Outre George Pell, la Commission catholique pour l’éducation, l’évêque de Ballarat Paul Bird et l’archevêque de Melbourne Peter Comensoli sont mentionnés dans la plainte, selon la même source. L’affaire doit faire l’objet d’une médiation.
Lire aussi Après Notre-Dame, une messe de Pâques de « renaissance » à l’église Saint-Eustache
George Pell a fait appel de sa condamnation pénale pour actes de pédophilie. A l’issue d’une audience jeudi, les trois magistrats de la Cour suprême ont mis leur décision en délibéré et on ignore quand elle sera annoncée. Ils peuvent confirmer la condamnation, ordonner un nouveau procès ou acquitter le prélat.
George Pell avait été reconnu coupable en décembre de cinq chefs d’accusation portant sur des agressions sexuelles commises contre deux enfants de chœur en 1996 et 1997. Il avait ensuite été condamné en mars à six ans d’emprisonnement.
#catholicisme #culture_du_viol #violophilie #pedocriminalité
]]>Israël aurait largement compté sur la #NSA pendant la #guerre du #Liban de 2006 | The Times of Israël
▻https://fr.timesofisrael.com/israel-aurait-largement-compte-sur-la-nsa-pendant-la-guerre-du-lib
Israël a largement compté sur les renseignements américains lors de la guerre du Liban de 2006, et a demandé, à de nombreuses reprises, de l’aide pour localiser des terroristes du #Hezbollah en vue d’assassinats ciblés, selon les derniers documents classifiés ayant fuité par l’intermédiaire du lanceur d’alerte américain Edward Snowden.
Les deux documents divulgués mercredi ont révélé que même si l’Agence de sécurité nationale (NSA) n’avait pas l’autorisation légale de partager des informations en vue d’assassinats ciblés, la pression israélienne a conduit à la création d’un nouveau cadre de travail pour faciliter le partage de renseignements entre les deux pays.
L’un des documents rendu public cette semaine, par The Intercept, était un article de 2006 paru dans la newsletter interne de la NSA, SIDToday, écrit par un officiel anonyme de la NSA à Tel Aviv qui officiait comme agent de liaison avec des officiels israéliens pendant le conflit de 2006.
[...]
Le rapport explique que la guerre de 2006 a poussé l’ISNU [l’unité israélienne SIGINT de renseignements militaires] dans ses « limites techniques et de moyens », et des officiels israéliens se sont tournés vers leurs homologues américains à la NSA pour obtenir un grand soutien et de nombreuses informations sur des cibles du Hezbollah.
]]>Baltimore paralysée par un virus informatique en partie créé par la NSA
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2019/05/29/la-ville-de-baltimore-paralysee-par-un-virus-informatique-en-partie-cree-par
Le problème, c’est que, trois semaines plus tard, l’affaire n’est toujours pas résolue. Les serveurs et les e-mails de la ville restent désespérément bloqués. « Service limité », indiquent les écriteaux à l’entrée les bâtiments municipaux. Les équipes municipales, le FBI, les services de renseignement américains et les firmes informatiques de la Côte ouest s’y sont tous mis : impossible de débarrasser les dix mille ordinateurs de la ville de ce virus, un rançongiciel. Et pour cause : selon le New York Times, l’un des composants de ce programme virulent a été créé par les services secrets américains, la National Security Agency (NSA), qui ont exploité une faille du logiciel Windows de Microsoft. L’ennui, c’est que la NSA s’est fait voler en 2017 cette arme informatique devenue quasi impossible à contrôler.
Alors, beaucoup de bruit pour rien ? Non, à cause du rôle trouble de la NSA. Selon le New York Times, celle-ci a développé un outil, EternalBlue (« bleu éternel »), en cherchant pendant plus d’une année une faille dans le logiciel de Microsoft.
L’ennui, c’est que l’outil a été volé par un groupe intitulé les Shadow Brokers (« courtiers de l’ombre »), sans que l’on sache s’il s’agit d’une puissance étrangère ou de hackeurs américains. Les Nord-Coréens l’ont utilisé en premier en 2017 lors d’une attaque baptisée Wannacry, qui a paralysé le système de santé britannique et touché les chemins de fer allemands. Puis ce fut au tour de la Russie de s’en servir pour attaquer l’Ukraine : code de l’opération NotPetya. L’offensive a atteint des entreprises, comme l’entreprise de messagerie FedEx et le laboratoire pharmaceutique Merck, qui auraient perdu respectivement 400 millions et 670 millions de dollars.
Depuis, EternalBlue n’en finit pas d’être utilisé, par la Chine ou l’Iran, notamment. Et aux Etats-Unis, contre des organisations vulnérables, telle la ville de Baltimore, mais aussi celles de San Antonio (Texas) ou Allentown (Pennsylvanie). L’affaire est jugée, à certains égards, plus grave que la fuite géante d’informations par l’ancien informaticien Edward Snowden en 2013.
Le débat s’ouvre à nouveau sur la responsabilité de la NSA, qui n’aurait informé Microsoft de la faille de son réseau qu’après s’être fait voler son outil. Trop tard. En dépit d’un correctif, des centaines de milliers d’ordinateurs n’ayant pas appliqué la mise à jour restent non protégés. Un de ses anciens dirigeants, l’amiral Michael Rogers, a tenté de dédouaner son ancienne agence en expliquant que, si un terroriste remplissait un pick-up Toyota d’explosifs, on n’allait pas accuser Toyota. « L’outil qu’a développé la NSA n’a pas été conçu pour faire ce qu’il a fait », a-t-il argué.
Tom Burt, responsable chez Microsoft de la confiance des consommateurs, se dit « en total désaccord » avec ce propos lénifiant : « Ces programmes sont développés et gardés secrètement par les gouvernements dans le but précis de les utiliser comme armes ou outils d’espionnage. Ils sont, en soi, dangereux. Quand quelqu’un prend cela, il ne le transforme pas en bombe : c’est déjà une bombe », a-t-il protesté dans le New York Times.
]]>The Statue of Liberty’s new museum: Lady Liberty celebrated freed slaves, not immigrants - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/05/23/statue-liberty-was-created-celebrate-freed-slaves-not-immigrants
The new Statue of Liberty Museum in New York Harbor boasts a number of treasures: the original torch, which was replaced in the 1980s; an unoxidized (read: not green) copper replica of Lady Liberty’s face; and recordings of immigrants describing the sight of the 305-foot monument.
It also revives an aspect of the statue’s long-forgotten history: Lady Liberty was originally designed to celebrate the end of slavery, not the arrival of immigrants. Ellis Island, the inspection station through which millions of immigrants passed, didn’t open until six years after the statue was unveiled in 1886. The plaque with the famous Emma Lazarus poem — “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — wasn’t added until 1903.
“One of the first meanings [of the statue] had to do with abolition, but it’s a meaning that didn’t stick,” Edward Berenson, a history professor at New York University and author of the book “The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story,” said in an interview with The Washington Post.
]]>Who Was Shakespeare? Could the Author Have Been a Woman? - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/who-is-shakespeare-emilia-bassano/588076
On a spring night in 2018, I stood on a Manhattan sidewalk with friends, reading Shakespeare aloud. We were in line to see an adaptation of Macbeth and had decided to pass the time refreshing our memories of the play’s best lines. I pulled up Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy on my iPhone. “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,” I read, thrilled once again by the incantatory power of the verse. I remembered where I was when I first heard those lines: in my 10th-grade English class, startled out of my adolescent stupor by this woman rebelling magnificently and malevolently against her submissive status. “Make thick my blood, / Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse.” Six months into the #MeToo movement, her fury and frustration felt newly resonant.
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Pulled back into plays I’d studied in college and graduate school, I found myself mesmerized by Lady Macbeth and her sisters in the Shakespeare canon. Beatrice, in Much Ado About Nothing, raging at the limitations of her sex (“O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace”). Rosalind, in As You Like It, affecting the swagger of masculine confidence to escape those limitations (“We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside, / As many other mannish cowards have / That do outface it with their semblances”). Isabella, in Measure for Measure, fearing no one will believe her word against Angelo’s, rapist though he is (“To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, / Who would believe me?”). Kate, in The Taming of the Shrew, refusing to be silenced by her husband (“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, / Or else my heart concealing it will break”). Emilia, in one of her last speeches in Othello before Iago kills her, arguing for women’s equality (“Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them”).
I was reminded of all the remarkable female friendships, too: Beatrice and Hero’s allegiance; Emilia’s devotion to her mistress, Desdemona; Paulina’s brave loyalty to Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; and plenty more. (“Let’s consult together against this greasy knight,” resolve the merry wives of Windsor, revenging themselves on Falstaff.) These intimate female alliances are fresh inventions—they don’t exist in the literary sources from which many of the plays are drawn. And when the plays lean on historical sources (Plutarch, for instance), they feminize them, portraying legendary male figures through the eyes of mothers, wives, and lovers. “Why was Shakespeare able to see the woman’s position, write entirely as if he were a woman, in a way that none of the other playwrights of the age were able to?” In her book about the plays’ female characters, Tina Packer, the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, asked the question very much on my mind.
Doubts about whether William Shakespeare (who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died in 1616) really wrote the works attributed to him are almost as old as the writing itself. Alternative contenders—Francis Bacon; Christopher Marlowe; and Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, prominent among them—continue to have champions, whose fervor can sometimes border on fanaticism. In response, orthodox Shakespeare scholars have settled into dogmatism of their own. Even to dabble in authorship questions is considered a sign of bad faith, a blinkered failure to countenance genius in a glover’s son. The time had come, I felt, to tug at the blinkers of both camps and reconsider the authorship debate: Had anyone ever proposed that the creator of those extraordinary women might be a woman? Each of the male possibilities requires an elaborate theory to explain his use of another’s name. None of the candidates has succeeded in dethroning the man from Stratford. Yet a simple reason would explain a playwright’s need for a pseudonym in Elizabethan England: being female.
Who was this woman writing “immortal work” in the same year that Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print?
Long before Tina Packer marveled at the bard’s uncanny insight, others were no less awed by the empathy that pervades the work. “One would think that he had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman,” wrote Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century philosopher and playwright. The critic John Ruskin said, “Shakespeare has no heroes—he has only heroines.” A striking number of those heroines refuse to obey rules. At least 10 defy their fathers, bucking betrothals they don’t like to find their own paths to love. Eight disguise themselves as men, outwitting patriarchal controls—more gender-swapping than can be found in the work of any previous English playwright. Six lead armies.
The prevailing view, however, has been that no women in Renaissance England wrote for the theater, because that was against the rules. Religious verse and translation were deemed suitable female literary pursuits; “closet dramas,” meant only for private reading, were acceptable. The stage was off-limits. Yet scholars have lately established that women were involved in the business of acting companies as patrons, shareholders, suppliers of costumes, and gatherers of entrance fees. What’s more, 80 percent of the plays printed in the 1580s were written anonymously, and that number didn’t fall below 50 percent until the early 1600s. At least one eminent Shakespeare scholar, Phyllis Rackin, of the University of Pennsylvania, challenges the blanket assumption that the commercial drama pouring forth in the period bore no trace of a female hand. So did Virginia Woolf, even as she sighed over the obstacles that would have confronted a female Shakespeare: “Undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned.”
A tantalizing nudge lies buried in the writings of Gabriel Harvey, a well-known Elizabethan literary critic. In 1593, he referred cryptically to an “excellent Gentlewoman” who had written three sonnets and a comedy. “I dare not Particularise her Description,” he wrote, even as he heaped praise on her.
All her conceits are illuminate with the light of Reason; all her speeches beautified with the grace of Affability … In her mind there appeareth a certain heavenly Logic; in her tongue & pen a divine Rhetoric … I dare undertake with warrant, whatsoever she writeth must needs remain an immortal work, and will leave, in the activest world, an eternal memory of the silliest vermin that she should vouchsafe to grace with her beautiful and allective style, as ingenious as elegant.
Who was this woman writing “immortal work” in the same year that Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print, on the poem “Venus and Adonis,” a scandalous parody of masculine seduction tales (in which the woman forces herself on the man)? Harvey’s tribute is extraordinary, yet orthodox Shakespeareans and anti-Stratfordians alike have almost entirely ignored it.
Until recently, that is, when a few bold outliers began to advance the case that Shakespeare might well have been a woman. One candidate is Mary Sidney, the countess of Pembroke (and beloved sister of the celebrated poet Philip Sidney)—one of the most educated women of her time, a translator and poet, and the doyenne of the Wilton Circle, a literary salon dedicated to galvanizing an English cultural renaissance. Clues beckon, not least that Sidney and her husband were the patrons of one of the first theater companies to perform Shakespeare’s plays. Was Shakespeare’s name useful camouflage, allowing her to publish what she otherwise couldn’t?
Shakespeare’s life is remarkably well documented—yet no records from his lifetime identify him unequivocally as a writer.
But the candidate who intrigued me more was a woman as exotic and peripheral as Sidney was pedigreed and prominent. Not long after my Macbeth outing, I learned that Shakespeare’s Globe, in London, had set out to explore this figure’s input to the canon. The theater’s summer 2018 season concluded with a new play, Emilia, about a contemporary of Shakespeare’s named Emilia Bassano. Born in London in 1569 to a family of Venetian immigrants—musicians and instrument-makers who were likely Jewish—she was one of the first women in England to publish a volume of poetry (suitably religious yet startlingly feminist, arguing for women’s “Libertie” and against male oppression). Her existence was unearthed in 1973 by the Oxford historian A. L. Rowse, who speculated that she was Shakespeare’s mistress, the “dark lady” described in the sonnets. In Emilia, the playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm goes a step further: Her Shakespeare is a plagiarist who uses Bassano’s words for Emilia’s famous defense of women in Othello.
Could Bassano have contributed even more widely and directly? The idea felt like a feminist fantasy about the past—but then, stories about women’s lost and obscured achievements so often have a dreamlike quality, unveiling a history different from the one we’ve learned. Was I getting carried away, reinventing Shakespeare in the image of our age? Or was I seeing past gendered assumptions to the woman who—like Shakespeare’s heroines—had fashioned herself a clever disguise? Perhaps the time was finally ripe for us to see her.
The ranks of Shakespeare skeptics comprise a kind of literary underworld—a cross-disciplinary array of academics, actors (Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance are perhaps the best known), writers, teachers, lawyers, a few Supreme Court justices (Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens). Look further back and you’ll find such illustrious names as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Charlie Chaplin. Their ideas about the authorship of the plays and poems differ, but they concur that Shakespeare is not the man who wrote them.
Their doubt is rooted in an empirical conundrum. Shakespeare’s life is remarkably well documented, by the standards of the period—yet no records from his lifetime identify him unequivocally as a writer. The more than 70 documents that exist show him as an actor, a shareholder in a theater company, a moneylender, and a property investor. They show that he dodged taxes, was fined for hoarding grain during a shortage, pursued petty lawsuits, and was subject to a restraining order. The profile is remarkably coherent, adding up to a mercenary impresario of the Renaissance entertainment industry. What’s missing is any sign that he wrote.
From January 1863: Nathaniel Hawthorne considers authorship while visiting Stratford-upon-Avon
No such void exists for other major writers of the period, as a meticulous scholar named Diana Price has demonstrated. Many left fewer documents than Shakespeare did, but among them are manuscripts, letters, and payment records proving that writing was their profession. For example, court records show payment to Ben Jonson for “those services of his wit & pen.” Desperate to come up with comparable material to round out Shakespeare, scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries forged evidence—later debunked—of a writerly life.
To be sure, Shakespeare’s name can be found linked, during his lifetime, to written works. With Love’s Labour’s Lost, in 1598, it started appearing on the title pages of one-play editions called “quartos.” (Several of the plays attributed to Shakespeare were first published anonymously.) Commentators at the time saluted him by name, praising “Shakespeare’s fine filed phrase” and “honey-tongued Shakespeare.” But such evidence proves attribution, not actual authorship—as even some orthodox Shakespeare scholars grant. “I would love to find a contemporary document that said William Shakespeare was the dramatist of Stratford-upon-Avon written during his lifetime,” Stanley Wells, a professor emeritus at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, has said. “That would shut the buggers up!”
FROM THE ARCHIVES
October 1991 Atlantic cover
In 1991, The Atlantic commissioned two pieces from admittedly partisan authors, Irving Matus and Tom Bethell, to examine and debate the argument:
In Defense of Shakespeare
The Case for Oxford
By contrast, more than a few of Shakespeare’s contemporaries are on record suggesting that his name got affixed to work that wasn’t his. In 1591, the dramatist Robert Greene wrote of the practice of “underhand brokery”—of poets who “get some other Batillus to set his name to their verses.” (Batillus was a mediocre Roman poet who claimed some of Virgil’s verses as his own.) The following year, he warned fellow playwrights about an “upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,” who thinks he is the “onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” Most scholars agree that the “Crow” is Shakespeare, then an actor in his late 20s, and conclude that the new-hatched playwright was starting to irk established figures. Anti-Stratfordians see something else: In Aesop’s fables, the crow was a proud strutter who stole the feathers of others; Horace’s crow, in his epistles, was a plagiarist. Shakespeare was being attacked, they say, not as a budding dramatist, but as a paymaster taking credit for others’ work. “Seeke you better Maisters,” Greene advised, urging his colleagues to cease writing for the Crow.
Ben Jonson, among others, got in his digs, too. Scholars agree that the character of Sogliardo in Every Man Out of His Humour—a country bumpkin “without brain, wit, anything, indeed, ramping to gentility”—is a parody of Shakespeare, a social climber whose pursuit of a coat of arms was common lore among his circle of actors. In a satirical poem called “On Poet-Ape,” Jonson was likely taking aim at Shakespeare the theater-world wheeler-dealer. This poet-ape, Jonson wrote, “from brokage is become so bold a thief,”
At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
Buy the reversion of old plays; now grown
To a little wealth, and credit in the scene,
He takes up all, makes each man’s wit his own
What to make of the fact that Jonson changed his tune in the prefatory material that he contributed to the First Folio of plays when it appeared seven years after Shakespeare’s death? Jonson’s praise there did more than attribute the work to Shakespeare. It declared his art unmatched: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” The anti-Stratfordian response is to note the shameless hype at the heart of the Folio project. “Whatever you do, Buy,” the compilers urged in their dedication, intent on a hard sell for a dramatist who, doubters emphasize, was curiously unsung at his death. The Folio’s introductory effusions, they argue, contain double meanings. Jonson tells readers, for example, to find Shakespeare not in his portrait “but his Booke,” seeming to undercut the relation between the man and the work. And near the start of his over-the-top tribute, Jonson riffs on the unreliability of extravagant praise, “which doth ne’er advance / The truth.”
From September 1904: Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrates Shakespeare
The authorship puzzles don’t end there. How did the man born in Stratford acquire the wide-ranging knowledge on display in the plays—of the Elizabethan court, as well as of multiple languages, the law, astronomy, music, the military, and foreign lands, especially northern Italian cities? The author’s linguistic brilliance shines in words and sayings imported from foreign vocabularies, but Shakespeare wasn’t educated past the age of 13. Perhaps he traveled, joined the army, worked as a tutor, or all three, scholars have proposed. Yet no proof exists of any of those experiences, despite, as the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out in an essay, “the greatest battery of organized research that has ever been directed upon a single person.”
Emilia Bassano’s life encompassed the breadth of the Shakespeare canon: its low-class references and knowledge of the court; its Italian sources and Jewish allusions; its music and feminism.
In fact, a document that does exist—Shakespeare’s will—would seem to undercut such hypotheses. A wealthy man when he retired to Stratford, he was meticulous about bequeathing his properties and possessions (his silver, his second-best bed). Yet he left behind not a single book, though the plays draw on hundreds of texts, including some—in Italian and French—that hadn’t yet been translated into English. Nor did he leave any musical instruments, though the plays use at least 300 musical terms and refer to 26 instruments. He remembered three actor-owners in his company, but no one in the literary profession. Strangest of all, he made no mention of manuscripts or writing. Perhaps as startling as the gaps in his will, Shakespeare appears to have neglected his daughters’ education—an incongruity, given the erudition of so many of the playwright’s female characters. One signed with her mark, the other with a signature a scholar has called “painfully formed.”
“Weak and unconvincing” was Trevor-Roper’s verdict on the case for Shakespeare. My delving left me in agreement, not that the briefs for the male alternatives struck me as compelling either. Steeped in the plays, I felt their author would surely join me in bridling at the Stratfordians’ unquestioning worship at the shrine—their arrogant dismissal of skeptics as mere deluded “buggers,” or worse. (“Is there any more fanatic zealot than the priest-like defender of a challenged creed?” asked Richmond Crinkley, a former director of programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library who was nonetheless sympathetic to the anti-Stratfordian view.) To appreciate how belief blossoms into fact—how readily myths about someone get disseminated as truth—one can’t do better than to read Shakespeare. Just think of how obsessed the work is with mistaken identities, concealed women, forged and anonymous documents—with the error of trusting in outward appearances. What if searchers for the real Shakespeare simply haven’t set their sights on the right pool of candidates?
Read: An interview with the author of ‘The Shakespeare Wars’
I met Emilia Bassano’s most ardent champion at Alice’s Tea Cup, which seemed unexpectedly apt: A teahouse on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, it has quotes from Alice in Wonderland scrawled across the walls. (“off with their heads!”) John Hudson, an Englishman in his 60s who pursued a degree at the Shakespeare Institute in a mid-career swerve, had been on the Bassano case for years, he told me. In 2014, he published Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier, the Woman Behind Shakespeare’s Plays? His zeal can sometimes get the better of him, yet he emphasizes that his methods and findings are laid out “for anyone … to refute if they wish.” Like Alice’s rabbit hole, Bassano’s case opened up new and richly disorienting perspectives—on the plays, on the ways we think about genius and gender, and on a fascinating life.
Hudson first learned of Bassano from A. L. Rowse, who discovered mention of her in the notebooks of an Elizabethan physician and astrologer named Simon Forman. In her teens, she became the mistress of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the master of court entertainment and patron of Shakespeare’s acting company. And that is only the start. Whether or not Bassano was Shakespeare’s lover (scholars now dismiss Rowse’s claim), the discernible contours of her biography supply what the available material about Shakespeare’s life doesn’t: circumstantial evidence of opportunities to acquire an impressive expanse of knowledge.
Bassano lived, Hudson points out, “an existence on the boundaries of many different social worlds,” encompassing the breadth of the Shakespeare canon: its coarse, low-class references and its intimate knowledge of the court; its Italian sources and its Jewish allusions; its music and its feminism. And her imprint, as Hudson reads the plays, extends over a long period. He notes the many uses of her name, citing several early on—for instance, an Emilia in The Comedy of Errors. (Emilia, the most common female name in the plays alongside Katherine, wasn’t used in the 16th century by any other English playwright.) Titus Andronicus features a character named Bassianus, which was the original Roman name of Bassano del Grappa, her family’s hometown before their move to Venice. Later, in The Merchant of Venice, the romantic hero is a Venetian named Bassanio, an indication that the author perhaps knew of the Bassanos’ connection to Venice. (Bassanio is a spelling of their name in some records.)
Further on, in Othello, another Emilia appears—Iago’s wife. Her famous speech against abusive husbands, Hudson notes, doesn’t show up until 1623, in the First Folio, included among lines that hadn’t appeared in an earlier version (lines that Stratfordians assume—without any proof—were written before Shakespeare’s death). Bassano was still alive, and by then had known her share of hardship at the hands of men. More to the point, she had already spoken out, in her 1611 book of poetry, against men who “do like vipers deface the wombs wherein they were bred.”
Prodded by Hudson, you can discern traces of Bassano’s own life trajectory in particular works across the canon. In All’s Well That Ends Well, a lowborn girl lives with a dowager countess and a general named Bertram. When Bassano’s father, Baptista, died in 1576, Emilia, then 7, was taken in by Susan Bertie, the dowager countess of Kent. The countess’s brother, Peregrine Bertie, was—like the fictional Bertram—a celebrated general. In the play, the countess tells how a father “famous … in his profession” left “his sole child … bequeathed to my overlooking. I have those hopes of her good that her education promises.” Bassano received a remarkable humanist education with the countess. In her book of poetry, she praised her guardian as “the Mistris of my youth, / The noble guide of my ungovern’d dayes.”
Bassano’s life sheds possible light on the plays’ preoccupation with women caught in forced or loveless marriages.
As for the celebrated general, Hudson seizes on the possibility that Bassano’s ears, and perhaps eyes, were opened by Peregrine Bertie as well. In 1582, Bertie was named ambassador to Denmark by the queen and sent to the court at Elsinore—the setting of Hamlet. Records show that the trip included state dinners with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose names appear in the play. Because emissaries from the same two families later visited the English court, the trip isn’t decisive, but another encounter is telling: Bertie met with the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose astronomical theories influenced the play. Was Bassano (then just entering her teens) on the trip? Bertie was accompanied by a “whole traine,” but only the names of important gentlemen are recorded. In any case, Hudson argues, she would have heard tales on his return.
Later, as the mistress of Henry Carey (43 years her senior), Bassano gained access to more than the theater world. Carey, the queen’s cousin, held various legal and military positions. Bassano was “favoured much of her Majesty and of many noblemen,” the physician Forman noted, indicating the kind of extensive aristocratic associations that only vague guesswork can accord to Shakespeare. His company didn’t perform at court until Christmas of 1594, after several of the plays informed by courtly life had already been written. Shakespeare’s history plays, concerned as they are with the interactions of the governing class, presume an insider perspective on aristocratic life. Yet mere court performances wouldn’t have enabled such familiarity, and no trace exists of Shakespeare’s presence in any upper-class household.
And then, in late 1592, Bassano (now 23) was expelled from court. She was pregnant. Carey gave her money and jewels and, for appearance’s sake, married her off to Alphonso Lanier, a court musician. A few months later, she had a son. Despite the glittering dowry, Lanier must not have been pleased. “Her husband hath dealt hardly with her,” Forman wrote, “and spent and consumed her goods.”
Bassano was later employed in a noble household, probably as a music tutor, and roughly a decade after that opened a school. Whether she accompanied her male relatives—whose consort of recorder players at the English court lasted 90 years—on their trips back to northern Italy isn’t known. But the family link to the home country offers support for the fine-grained familiarity with the region that (along with in-depth musical knowledge) any plausible candidate for authorship would seem to need—just what scholars have had to strain to establish for Shakespeare. (Perhaps, theories go, he chatted with travelers or consulted books.) In Othello, for example, Iago gives a speech that precisely describes a fresco in Bassano del Grappa—also the location of a shop owned by Giovanni Otello, a likely source of the title character’s name.
Her Bassano lineage—scholars suggest the family were conversos, converted or hidden Jews presenting as Christians—also helps account for the Jewish references that scholars of the plays have noted. The plea in The Merchant of Venice for the equality and humanity of Jews, a radical departure from typical anti-Semitic portrayals of the period, is well known. “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” Shylock asks. “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” A Midsummer Night’s Dream draws from a passage in the Talmud about marriage vows; spoken Hebrew is mixed into the nonsense language of All’s Well That Ends Well.
Stephen Doyle
What’s more, the Bassano family’s background suggests a source close to home for the particular interest in dark figures in the sonnets, Othello, and elsewhere. A 1584 document about the arrest of two Bassano men records them as “black”—among Elizabethans, the term could apply to anyone darker than the fair-skinned English, including those with a Mediterranean complexion. (The fellows uttered lines that could come straight from a comic interlude in the plays: “We have as good friends in the court as thou hast and better too … Send us to ward? Thou wert as good kiss our arse.”) In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the noblemen derisively compare Rosaline, the princess’s attendant, to “chimney-sweepers” and “colliers” (coal miners). The king joins in, telling Berowne, who is infatuated with her, “Thy love is black as ebony,” to which the young lord responds, “O wood divine!”
Bassano’s life sheds possible light, too, on another outsider theme: the plays’ preoccupation with women caught in forced or loveless marriages. Hudson sees her misery reflected in the sonnets, thought to have been written from the early 1590s to the early 1600s. “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state, /And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, /And look upon myself and curse my fate,” reads sonnet 29. (When Maya Angelou first encountered the poem as a child, she thought Shakespeare must have been a black girl who had been sexually abused: “How else could he know what I know?”) For Shakespeare, those years brought a rise in status: In 1596, he was granted a coat of arms, and by 1597, he was rich enough to buy the second-largest house in Stratford.
Read: What Maya Angelou meant when she said ‘Shakespeare must be a black girl’
In what is considered an early or muddled version of The Taming of the Shrew, a man named Alphonso (as was Bassano’s husband) tries to marry off his three daughters, Emilia, Kate, and Philema. Emilia drops out in the later version, and the father is now called Baptista (the name of Bassano’s father). As a portrait of a husband dealing “hardly” with a wife, the play is horrifying. Yet Kate’s speech of submission, with its allusions to the Letters of Paul, is slippery: Even as she exaggeratedly parrots the Christian doctrine of womanly subjection, she is anything but dutifully silent.
Shakespeare’s women repeatedly subvert such teachings, perhaps most radically in The Winter’s Tale, another drama of male cruelty. There the noblewoman Paulina, scorned by King Leontes as “a most intelligencing bawd” with a “boundless tongue,” bears fierce witness against him (no man dares to) when he wrongly accuses Queen Hermione of adultery and imprisons her. As in so many of the comedies, a more enlightened society emerges in the end because the women’s values triumph.
I was stunned to realize that the year The Winter’s Tale was likely completed, 1611, was the same year Bassano published her book of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum. Her writing style bears no obvious resemblance to Shakespeare’s in his plays, though Hudson strains to suggest similarities. The overlap lies in the feminist content. Bassano’s poetry registers as more than conventional religious verse designed to win patronage (she dedicates it to nine women, Mary Sidney included, fashioning a female literary community). Scholars have observed that it reads as a “transgressive” defense of Eve and womankind. Like a cross-dressing Shakespearean heroine, Bassano refuses to play by the rules, heretically reinterpreting scripture. “If Eve did err, it was for knowledge sake,” she writes. Arguing that the crucifixion, a crime committed by men, was a greater crime than Eve’s, she challenges the basis of men’s “tyranny” over women.
“I always feel something Italian, something Jewish about Shakespeare,” Jorge Luis Borges told The Paris Review in 1966. “Perhaps Englishmen admire him because of that, because it’s so unlike them.” Borges didn’t mention feeling “something female” about the bard, yet that response has never ceased to be part of Shakespeare’s allure—embodiment though he is of the patriarchal authority of the Western canon. What would the revelation of a woman’s hand at work mean, aside from the loss of a prime tourist attraction in Stratford-upon-Avon? Would the effect be a blow to the cultural patriarchy, or the erosion of the canon’s status? Would (male) myths of inexplicable genius take a hit? Would women at last claim their rightful authority as historical and intellectual forces?
I was curious to take the temperature of the combative authorship debate as women edge their way into it. Over more tea, I tested Hudson’s room for flexibility. Could the plays’ many connections to Bassano be explained by simply assuming the playwright knew her well? “Shakespeare would have had to run to her every few minutes for a musical reference or an Italian pun,” he said. I caught up with Mark Rylance, the actor and former artistic director of the Globe, in the midst of rehearsals for Othello (whose plot, he noted, comes from an Italian text that didn’t exist in English). A latitudinarian doubter—embracing the inquiry, not any single candidate—Rylance has lately observed that the once heretical notion of collaboration between Shakespeare and other writers “is now accepted, pursued and published by leading orthodox scholars.” He told me that “Emilia should be studied by anyone interested in the creation of the plays.” David Scott Kastan, a well-known Shakespeare scholar at Yale, urged further exploration too, though he wasn’t ready to anoint her bard. “What’s clear is that it’s important to know more about her,” he said, and even got playful with pronouns: “The more we know about her and the world she lived in, the more we’ll know about Shakespeare, whoever she was.”
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In the fall, I joined the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust—a gathering of skeptics at the Globe—feeling excited that gender would be at the top of the agenda. Some eyebrows were raised even in this company, but enthusiasm ran high. “People have been totally frustrated with authorship debates that go nowhere, but that’s because there have been 200 years of bad candidates,” one participant from the University of Toronto exclaimed. “They didn’t want to see women in this,” he reflected. “It’s a tragedy of history.”
He favored Sidney. Others were eager to learn about Bassano, and with collaboration in mind, I wondered whether the two women had perhaps worked together, or as part of a group. I thought of Bassano’s Salve Deus, in which she writes that men have wrongly taken credit for knowledge: “Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke / From Eve’s faire hand, as from a learned Booke.”
The night after the meeting, I went to a performance of Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre. I sat enthralled, still listening for the poet in her words, trying to catch her reflection in some forgotten bit of verse. “Give me my robe, put on my crown,” cried the queen, “I have / Immortal longings in me.” There she was, kissing her ladies goodbye, raising the serpent to her breast. “I am fire and air.”
]]>U.S. sinks Arctic accord due to climate change differences - diplomats - Reuters
▻https://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFKCN1SD13W
The United States has refused to sign an agreement on challenges in the Arctic due to discrepancies over climate change wording, diplomats said on Tuesday, jeopardising cooperation in the polar region at the sharp edge of global warming.
With Arctic temperatures rising at twice the rate of the rest of the globe, the melting ice is creating potential new shipping lanes and has opened much of the world’s last untapped reserves of oil and gas to commercial exploitation .
A meeting of eight nations bordering the Arctic in Rovaniemi in Finland on Tuesday was supposed to frame a two-year agenda to balance the challenge of global warming with sustainable development of mineral wealth.
But sources with knowledge of the discussions said the United States balked at signing a final declaration as it disagreed with wording that climate change was a serious threat to the Arctic.
It was the first time a declaration had been cancelled since the Arctic Council was formed in 1996.
]]>Rapid #permafrost thaw unrecognized threat to landscape, global warming researcher warns — ScienceDaily
▻https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190430121755.htm
Le dégel rapide du #pergélisol est une menace non reconnue pour le paysage
▻https://newsbeezer.com/canadafr/un-chercheur-met-en-garde-contre-le-rechauffement-climatique-en-raison-d
Les scientifiques étudient depuis longtemps comment le dégel progressif du pergélisol survenant pendant des décennies sur des centimètres de sol de surface influera sur le rejet de carbone dans l’atmosphère. Mais Turetsky et une équipe internationale de chercheurs envisagent quelque chose de très différent : l’effondrement rapide du pergélisol qui peut transformer le paysage en quelques mois seulement par le biais d’affaissements, d’inondations et de glissements de terrain.
Le pergélisol fond si rapidement dans l’#Arctique que les scientifiques perdent leur équipement)
▻https://reporterre.net/Le-pergelisol-fond-si-rapidement-dans-l-Arctique-que-les-scientifiques-p
Venezuela: El fundador de Blackwater busca crear un ejército de mercenarios para derrocar a Maduro | Público
▻https://www.publico.es/internacional/fundador-blackwater-busca-crear-ejercito-mercenarios-derrocar-maduro.html
Blackwater au service de Guaido au #Venezuela : BFM TV va-t-elle en parler ?
Erik Prince, el fundador de la controvertida empresa de seguridad privada Blackwater y declarado partidario del presidente Donald Trump, ha estado tratando de impulsar un plan para desplegar un ejército privado para ayudar a derrocar al presidente de Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, según han contado a Reuters cuatro fuentes conocedoras de los esfuerzos.
En los últimos meses, según las fuentes, Prince ha buscado inversión y apoyo político para tal empresa por parte de influyentes partidarios de Trump y ricos exiliados venezolanos. En encuentros privados en Estados Unidos y Europa, Prince ha esbozado un plan para desplegar a hasta 5.000 soldados a sueldo en nombre del líder opositor Juan Guaidó, según dos fuentes con conocimiento directo de las gestiones de Prince.
Una de las fuentes ha contado que Prince ha mantenido reuniones sobre este asunto hasta mediados de abril. El portavoz del Consejo de Seguridad Nacional de la Casa Blanca, Garrett Marquis, no ha querido hacer comentarios sobre si Prince ha planteado su plan al Gobierno y si este sería considerado, si bien una fuente conocedora del sentir de la Casa Blanca ha apuntado a que no lo respaldaría.
Por su parte, el portavoz de Guaidó, Edward Rodríguez, se ha limitado a afirmar que los responsables de la oposición venezolana no han discutido sobre operaciones militares con Prince, mientas que el Gobierno de Maduro no ha querido hacer comentarios.
Algunos expertos de seguridad estadounidenses y venezolanos, a los que Reuters ha contado el plan, lo han considerado políticamente inverosímil y potencialmente peligroso ya que podría desencadenar una guerra civil.
Un exiliado venezolano próximo a la oposición se ha mostrado de acuerdo pero ha señalado que los contratistas privados podrían resultar útiles, en caso de que el Gobierno de Maduro se desmorone, ofreciendo seguridad para una nueva administración el día después.
Marc Cohen, portavoz de Prince, dijo este mes que el fundador de Blackwater «no tiene planes de operar o llevar a cabo una operación en Venezuela» y declinó responder a más preguntas.
]]>Charles Marville - Vues du Vieux Paris | Vergue
▻http://vergue.com/category/Auteurs/Charles-Marville/Vues-de-Paris
Charles Marville - Vues du Paris d’Haussmann | Vergue
▻http://vergue.com/category/Auteurs/Charles-Marville/Paris-Haussmann
Photographes | Vergue
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]]>Je pense que la phrase, niveau café-du-commerce-de-droite, que j’ai la plus entendue, et ça depuis que je suis gamin, c’est : « Le problème, en France, c’est qu’on n’y aime pas les riches ». Un temps, ça c’est vaguement affiné pour devenir « c’est qu’on n’y aime pas ceux qui réussissent ». Le moindre crétin de droite, avec un verre dans le pif, va te la sortir (et comme tu sais, ça sert de fondement philosophique à la longue complainte, qui va suivre, sur les impôts).
Et donc on avait bien besoin du quotidien de révérence pour aborder ce sujet tabou : Les riches, ces mal-aimés
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/m-perso/article/2019/04/19/les-riches-ces-mal-aimes_5452586_4497916.html
On les jalouse, on les envie, surtout on ne les aime pas. Même quand ils donnent leur argent pour la bonne cause. L’historien allemand Rainer Zitelmann a étudié dans plusieurs pays, dont la France, les mécanismes de cette détestation.
]]>D’abord, ils sont venus pour Assange…
▻https://lundi.am/D-abord-ils-sont-venus-pour-Assange-par-LeakyWeek
En conclusion, et comme l’ont déjà affirmé Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Reporters Sans Frontières, The Guardian et bon nombre d’autres institutions [5] pourtant plus souvent complaisantes qu’adverses à l’égard des puissants, l’arrestation d’#Assange est un coup porté à la #liberté d’#information dans son ensemble. Sa capture est voulue à tout prix pour l’exemple au mépris du droit international et des promesses faites dans le passé par un gouvernement Équatorien manifestement acheté par les US (l’Équateur a opportunément reçu un prêt de 10 milliards par le FMI [6]...). Jeter Assange en prison vise à décourager quiconque de suivre son inspiration pour publier sans compromis ce qui expose les crimes et #mensonges des puissants. Ne nous y trompons pas, et au-delà des désaccords avec certains des propos d’Assange, il est urgent de reconnaître la portée de l’héritage de #WikiLeaks : de ce qu’il inspire pour le présent et pour le futur d’une presse libre et d’une information qui permettrait de collectivement et durablement rétablir les rapports de force, d’inquiéter les dominants et d’espérer un jour les faire payer pour leurs crimes et mensonges.
]]>The U.S. Government’s Indictment of Julian Assange Poses Grave Thre...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/8870014
The U.S. Government’s Indictment of Julian Assange Poses Grave Threats to Press Freedom
#Assange #Wikileaks #press #journalism #democracy #freespeech #PressFreedom
]]>How children lost the right to roam in four generations | Daily Mail Online
►https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html
Even if he wanted to play outdoors, none of his friends strays from their home or garden unsupervised.
The contrast between Edward and George’s childhoods is highlighted in a report which warns that the mental health of 21st-century children is at risk because they are missing out on the exposure to the natural world enjoyed by past generations.
The report says the change in attitudes is reflected in four generations of the Thomas family in Sheffield.
The oldest member, George, was allowed to roam for six miles from home unaccompanied when he was eight.
His home was tiny and crowded and he spent most of his time outside, playing games and making dens.
Mr Thomas, who went on to become a carpenter, has never lost some of the habits picked up as a child and, aged 88, is still a keen walker.
His son-in-law, Jack Hattersley, 63, was also given freedom to roam.
He was aged eight in 1950, and was allowed to walk for about one mile on his own to the local woods. Again, he walked to school and never travelled by car.
]]>Old Stuff !!
▻http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/moacrealsloa/old-stuff-
Playlist :
Jandek : The Stumble (The place - Corwood Industries - 2003)
Naked city : Grand Guignol (Grand Guignol - Avant - 1992)
Sadato : Guitar Taiko (1992 - Atonal Records - 1992)
AMM III : Radio Activity (It Had Been An Ordinary Enough Day In Peublo, Colorado - ECM Records - 1991)
Blurt : The Tree Is Dead, Long Live The Tree (Smoke Time - Moving Target - 1987)
Holy Modal Rounders : The Second Hand-Watch (Indian War Whoop - ESP Disk / ZYX Music - original 1967)
Current Ninety Three : The Magical Birds In The Magical Woods (Sleep Has His House - Durtro - 2000)
Third Ear Band : Spirits (Radio Session - Voiceprint - 1994)
Jon Rose : Semi Membranosus (Moves and Games (In Six Mouvements)) (Pulled Muscles - Immigrant - 1993)
Edward ka-Spel : Inferno (Down In The City Of Heartbreak And (...)
▻http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/moacrealsloa/old-stuff-_06525__1.mp3
]]>Know The Coin: Interview with #bitcoin Gold’s Communications Director Edward Iskra
▻https://hackernoon.com/know-the-coin-interview-with-bitcoin-golds-communications-director-edwar
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Know The Coin with ChangeNOW! Today’s guest is Edward Iskra, Communications Director and Board Member in Bitcoin Gold, who was very nice to sit down with our marketing manager Pauline and talk about BTG, its history, features, and future updates!Hey there, Edward! Could you tell me a little bit about yourself and your background? Was the Bitcoin Gold your first sort of venture into the #crypto world?No, it wasn’t. I’m a little older than an average person in crypto. I got my computer science degree back in the early 90s. I was following the news about Bitcoin during its first peak over $1k value, before the Mt. Gox era. I wasn’t actively involved, though — no mining or investing — I was too busy working as an IT director in a small investment bank (...)
]]>NSA Whistleblower: Government Collecting Everything You Do
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/nsa-whistleblower-government-collecting-everything-you-do
Abby Martin interviews former Technical Director of the National Security Agency, Bill Binney, who blew the whistle on warrantless spying years before Edward Snowden released the evidence. They...
]]>Edward Saïd — Wikipédia
▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Sa%C3%AFd
Un extrait de la fiche Wikipedia sur Edward Saïd, en fait l’intégralité de ce qui est résumé à propos de ce qui reste pour beaucoup son principal ouvrage, L’Orientalisme. A peine 4 lignes pour ses thèses, 26 pour présenter les réfutations apportées à ses thèses, à commencer par Bernard Lewis... Bon, c’est quand même mieux en anglais...
En 1978, il publie son livre le plus connu, L’Orientalisme, considéré comme le texte fondateur des études postcoloniales. Il y mène une analyse de l’histoire du discours colonial sur les populations orientales placées sous domination européenne en développant quatre thèses, à savoir la domination politique et culturelle de l’Orient par l’Occident, la dépréciation de la langue arabe, la diabolisation de l’arabe et de l’islam, et la cause palestinienne. Le livre suscite des commentaires très divers, et notamment une célèbre controverse avec Bernard Lewis.
Dans un article intitulé « La question de l’orientalisme » (The New York Review of Books, 24 juin 1982), Bernard Lewis répond aux attaques visant les orientalistes, et particulièrement à celles que leur adresse Edward Saïd. Bernard Lewis estime que la démonstration d’Edward Said n’est pas convaincante. Il reproche à Said11 :
de créer artificiellement un groupe, les orientalistes, qui partageraient, en gros la même thèse, ce que Bernard Lewis juge absurde ;
d’ignorer les travaux des orientalistes du monde germanique (ce qui « n’a pas plus de sens qu’une histoire de la musique ou de la philosophie européenne avec la même omission »), pour se focaliser sur les Britanniques et les Français, et de négliger, parmi ces derniers, bon nombre d’auteurs majeurs, comme Claude Cahen ;
de préférer, souvent, les « écrits mineurs ou occasionnels » aux « contributions majeures à la science » ;
de faire commencer l’orientalisme moderne à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, dans un contexte d’expansion coloniale de la Grande-Bretagne et de la France, alors que cette science émerge au XVIe siècle, c’est-à-dire au moment où l’Empire ottoman domine la Méditerranée ;
d’intégrer dans son analyse des auteurs qui ne sont pas de vrais orientalistes, comme Gérard de Nerval ;
de commettre une série d’entorses à la vérité et d’erreurs factuelles, notamment quand Edward Said accuse Sylvestre de Sacy d’avoir volé des documents et commis des traductions malhonnêtes (« Cette monstrueuse diffamation d’un grand savant est sans un grain de vérité »), ou lorsqu’il écrit que les armées musulmanes ont conquis la Turquie avant l’Afrique du nord (« c’est-à-dire que le XIe siècle est venu avant le VIIe ») ;
de faire des interprétations absurdes de certains passages écrits par des orientalistes, notamment par Bernard Lewis lui-même ;
d’utiliser deux poids, deux mesures : « les spécialistes soviétiques, en particulier quand ils traitent des régions islamiques et d’autres régions non européennes de l’Union soviétique, se rapprochent le plus — beaucoup plus que tous ces Britanniques et ces Français qu’il condamne — de la littérature tendancieuse et dénigrante, qu’Edward Said déteste tant chez les autres » ; or Said ne mentionnerait jamais les thèses contestables d’auteurs russes.
Edward Saïd écrit alors une lettre à la New York Review of Books, publiée avec une réplique de Bernard Lewis12.
Deux ans avant cette controverse, Jean-Pierre Péroncel-Hugoz avait publié dans Le Monde un compte-rendu de lecture recoupant certaines critiques de Bernard Lewis, en particulier le mélange fait entre des savants et des écrivains de fiction (« L’une des principales faiblesses de la thèse d’Edward Saïd est d’avoir mis sur le même plan les créations littéraires inspirées par l’Orient à des écrivains non orientalistes, dont l’art a nécessairement transformé la réalité, et l’orientalisme purement scientifique, le vrai. »), la focalisation excessive sur des aspects secondaires dans l’œuvre de certains orientalistes, et l’omission de nombreux spécialistes (Jean-Pierre Péroncel-Hugoz donne une liste, dans laquelle se trouvent Antoine Galland, Robert Mantran et Vincent Monteil)13.
Tout en se déclarant d’accord avec Edward Saïd sur certains points importants, comme la définition du terme orientalisme, le philosophe Sadek al-Azem a conclu pour sa part, que le livre manquait trop de rigueur pour être vraiment concluant : « chez Saïd, le polémiste et le styliste prennent très souvent le pas sur le penseur systématique14. » Malcolm Kerr, professeur à l’université de Californie à Los Angeles puis président de l’université américaine de Beyrouth a porté une appréciation assez similaire sur l’ouvrage : « En accusant l’ensemble de la tradition européenne et américaine d’études orientales de pécher par réductionnisme et caricature, il commet précisément la même erreur15. »
]]>Robert Tibbo, l’avocat d’Edward Snowden forcé à l’exil
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2019/03/29/robert-tibbo-l-avocat-d-edward-snowden-force-a-l-exil_5443069_4408996.html
Le sort de cet avocat des droits de l’homme et de sept de ses clients est lié au destin du lanceur d’alerte américain, à l’origine des révélations sur la surveillance de masse menée par les Etats-Unis. C’est une belle victoire qui a dû adoucir, au moins pendant quelques heures, l’exil de Robert Tibbo en France. Après plusieurs années de bataille, l’une des clientes de cet avocat canadien, Vanessa Rodel, et sa fille Keana viennent d’obtenir, le 25 mars, l’asile au Canada. Elles faisaient partie d’un (...)
]]>Top oil firms spending millions lobbying to block climate change policies, says report
Ad campaigns hide investment in a huge expansion of oil and gas extraction, says InfluenceMap.
The largest five stock market listed oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m (£153m) a year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change, according to a new report.
#Chevron, #BP and #ExxonMobil were the main companies leading the field in direct lobbying to push against a climate policy to tackle global warming, the report said.
Increasingly they are using social media to successfully push their agenda to weaken and oppose any meaningful legislation to tackle global warming.
In the run-up to the US midterm elections last year $2m was spent on targeted Facebook and Instagram ads by global oil giants and their industry bodies, promoting the benefits of increased fossil fuel production, according to the report published on Friday by InfluenceMap (▻https://influencemap.org/report/How-Big-Oil-Continues-to-Oppose-the-Paris-Agreement-38212275958aa21196).
Separately, BP donated $13m to a campaign, also supported by Chevron, that successfully stopped a carbon tax in Washington state – $1m of which was spent on social media ads, the research shows.
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Edward Collins, the report’s author, analysed corporate spending on lobbying, briefing and advertising, and assessed what proportion was dedicated to climate issues.
He said: “Oil majors’ climate branding sounds increasingly hollow and their credibility is on the line. They publicly support climate action while lobbying against binding policy. They advocate low-carbon solutions but such investments are dwarfed by spending on expanding their fossil fuel business.”
After the Paris climate agreement in 2015 the large integrated oil and gas companies said they supported a price on carbon and formed groups like the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative which promote voluntary measures.
But, the report states, there is a glaring gap between their words and their actions.
The five publicly listed oil majors – ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP and Total – now spend about $195m a year on branding campaigns suggesting they support action against climate change.
But the report said these campaigns were misleading the public about the extent of the oil companies’ actions because while publicly endorsing the need to act, they are massively increasing investment in a huge expansion of oil and gas extraction. In 2019 their spending will increase to $115bn, with just 3% of that directed at low carbon projects.
Shell said in a statement: “We firmly reject the premise of this report. We are very clear about our support for the Paris agreement, and the steps that we are taking to help meet society’s needs for more and cleaner energy.
“We make no apology for talking to policymakers and regulators around the world to make our voice heard on crucial topics such as climate change and how to address it.”
Chevron said it disagreed with the report’s findings. “Chevron is taking prudent, cost-effective actions and is committed to working with policymakers to design balanced and transparent greenhouse gas emissions reductions policies that address environmental goals and ensure consumers have access to affordable, reliable and ever cleaner energy.”
The successful lobbying and direct opposition to policy measures to tackle global warming have hindered governments globally in their efforts to implement policies after the Paris agreement to meet climate targets and keep warming below 1.5C.
▻https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/mar/22/top-oil-firms-spending-millions-lobbying-to-block-climate-change-polici
#lobby #climat #changement_climatique #pétrole #industrie_du_pétrole #rapport
ce qui se passe à Ferguson mérite quelques secondes d’attention. Depuis 2014 les militant.e.s là-bas qui ont impulsé le mouvement #BlackLivesMatter meurent les uns après les autres. De mort violente.
L’hypothèse d’une série d’exécutions commises par un groupe de tueurs suprémacistes blancs ne peut plus être étouffée, même si la police et la justice s’y emploient fermement.
Police, the FBI and Homeland Security have monitored black activists throughout the country, especially after Michael Brown’s killing.” D’autres témoignages glaçants et des précisions importantes dans cet article du média indépendant Black Agenda Report.
The Fight for Justice Takes Its Toll on Ferguson Activists | Black Agenda Report
►https://www.blackagendareport.com/fight-justice-takes-its-toll-ferguson-activists
▻http://www.blackagendareport.com
Darren Seals, one of the two activists who were shot and found in burning cars, had said in a November 2014 Facebook post that he had been shot before. Some activists in St. Louis also often suffer from depression and isolation, and have limited access to therapy and other resources.
St. Louis is one of the most segregated cities in the US, with Delmar Blvd. dividing the more affluent white population from neighborhoods that are up to 98 percent black in North St. Louis. The Ferguson protests in 2014 were a flash-point, but “there’s a long history of this kind of violent reaction to black folks in St. Louis generally, and certainly violent reaction to protesters,” said Blake Strode, the executive director of ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit civil rights law firm that has worked on dozens of cases of police brutality.
“St. Louis has the highest murder rate in America.”
Besides the unexplained deaths, Ferguson activists have experienced myriad threats to their physical and mental well-being. In 2014, one young activist, Josh Williams, was arrested after lighting a garbage can on fire while protesting the police killing of another black man, Antonio Martin, according to activists. He was convicted a year later, after pleading guilty for arson, burglary, and theft, and sentenced to prison for eight years. He told Vice News that his harsh sentence was to make an example out of him, and that prison guards verbally abuse him with racist slurs.
]]>Capitalismo e orientalismo
Un nuovo libro analizza il lavoro di #Edward_Said alla luce del marxismo, mostrando che l’imperialismo non è soltanto un fenomeno culturale
Un très beau texte
Lettre à Alain Finkielkraut - Dominique EDDE - L’Orient-Le Jour
►https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1160808/lettre-a-alain-finkielkraut.html
Cher Alain Finkielkraut,
Permettez-moi de commencer par vous dire « salamtak », le mot qui s’emploie en arabe pour souhaiter le meilleur à qui échappe à un accident ou, dans votre cas, une agression. La violence et la haine qui vous ont été infligées ne m’ont pas seulement indignée, elles m’ont fait mal. Parviendrais-je, dans cette situation, à trouver les mots qui vous diront simultanément ma solidarité et le fond de ma pensée ? Je vais essayer. Car, en m’adressant à vous, je m’adresse aussi, à travers vous, à ceux qui ont envie de paix.
Peut-être vous souvenez-vous. Nous nous sommes connus au début des années 1980 à Paris, aux éditions du Seuil, et soigneusement évités depuis. Lors de l’invasion du Liban par Israël, vous n’aviez pas supporté de m’entendre dire qu’un immeuble s’était effondré comme un château de cartes sous le coup d’une bombe à fragmentation israélienne. Cette vérité-là blessait trop la vôtre pour se frayer un chemin. C’est l’arrivée impromptue dans le bureau où nous nous trouvions, de l’historien israélien Saul Friedländer, qui permit de rétablir la vérité. Il connaissait les faits. J’ai respiré. Vous êtes parti sans faire de place à ma colère. Il n’y avait de place, en vous, que pour la vôtre. Durant les décennies qui ont suivi, le syndrome s’est accentué. Vous aviez beau aimer Levinas, penseur par excellence de l’altérité, il vous devenait de plus en plus difficile, voire impossible, de céder le moindre pouce de territoire à celle ou celui que vous ressentiez comme une menace. Cette mesure d’étanchéité, parfaitement compréhensible compte tenu de l’histoire qui est la vôtre, n’eût posé aucun problème si elle ne s’était transformée en croisade intellectuelle. Cette façon que vous avez de vous mettre dans tous vos états pour peu que survienne un désaccord n’a cessé de m’inspirer, chaque fois que je vous écoute, l’empathie et l’exaspération. L’empathie, car je vous sais sincère, l’exaspération, car votre intelligence est décidément mieux disposée à se faire entendre qu’à entendre l’autre.
Le plus clair de vos raisonnements est de manière récurrente rattrapé en chemin par votre allergie à ce qui est de nature à le ralentir, à lui faire de l’ombre. Ainsi, l’islam salafiste, notre ennemi commun et, pour des raisons d’expérience, le mien avant d’être le vôtre, vous a-t-il fait plus d’une fois confondre deux milliards de musulmans et une culture millénaire avec un livre, un verset, un slogan. Pour vous, le temps s’est arrêté au moment où le nazisme a décapité l’humanité. Il n’y avait plus d’avenir et de chemin possible que dans l’antériorité. Dans le retour à une civilisation telle qu’un Européen pouvait la rêver avant la catastrophe. Cela, j’ai d’autant moins de mal à le comprendre que j’ai la même nostalgie que vous des chantiers intellectuels du début du siècle dernier. Mais vous vous êtes autorisé cette fusion de la nostalgie et de la pensée qui, au prix de la lucidité, met la seconde au service de la première. Plus inquiétant, vous avez renoncé dans ce « monde d’hier » à ce qu’il avait de plus réjouissant : son cosmopolitisme, son mélange. Les couleurs, les langues, les visages, les mémoires qui, venues d’ailleurs, polluent le monde que vous regrettez, sont assignées par vous à disparaître ou à se faire oublier. Vous dites que deux menaces pèsent sur la France : la judéophobie et la francophobie. Pourquoi refusez-vous obstinément d’inscrire l’islamophobie dans la liste de vos inquiétudes ? Ce n’est pas faire de la place à l’islamisme que d’en faire aux musulmans. C’est même le contraire. À ne vouloir, à ne pouvoir partager votre malaise avec celui d’un nombre considérable de musulmans français, vous faites ce que le sionisme a fait à ses débuts, lorsqu’il a prétendu que la terre d’Israël était « une terre sans peuple pour un peuple sans terre ». Vous niez une partie de la réalité pour en faire exister une autre. Sans prendre la peine de vous représenter, au passage, la frustration, la rage muette de ceux qui, dans vos propos, passent à la trappe.
Vous avez cédé à ce contre quoi Canetti nous avait brillamment mis en garde avec Masse et puissance. Vous avez développé la « phobie du contact » à partir de laquelle une communauté, repliée comme un poing fermé, se met en position de défense aveugle, n’a plus d’yeux pour voir hors d’elle-même. Cette posture typique d’une certaine politique israélienne, et non de la pensée juive, constitue, entre autre et au-delà de votre cas, la crispation qui rend impossible l’invention de la paix. C’est d’autant plus dommage qu’il y a fort à parier que le monde dont vous portez le deuil est très proche de celui d’un nombre considérable de gens qui vivent en pays arabes sous la coupe de régimes mafieux et/ou islamistes. Pourquoi ceux-là comptent-ils si peu pour vous ? Pourquoi préférez-vous mettre le paquet sur vos ennemis déclarés que donner leur chance à de potentiels amis ? Le renoncement à l’idéal, dont j’évoque longuement la nécessité dans mon dernier livre sur Edward Said, est un pas que vous ne voulez pas franchir. J’entends par idéal la projection de soi promue au rang de projet collectif. Or, le seul rêve politique qui vaille, on peut aussi l’appeler utopie, c’est celui qui prend acte de la réalité et se propose d’en tirer le meilleur et non de la mettre au pas d’un fantasme. C’est précisément le contraire de l’idéal en circuit fermé qui fonctionne sur le mode d’une fixation infantile et nous fait brusquement découvrir, à la faveur d’une mauvaise rencontre, qu’il nourrit la haine de ceux qui n’ont pas les moyens de ne pas haïr. Cet homme qui vous a injurié a tout injurié d’un coup : votre personne, les Juifs et ceux que cette ignominie écœure. Il ne suffit toutefois pas de le dire pour le combattre et moins encore pour épuiser le sujet. À cet égard, je vous remercie d’avoir précisé à la radio que l’antisémitisme et l’antisionisme ne pouvaient être confondus d’un trait.
]]>Lettre à Alain Finkielkraut, par Dominique EDDE (L’Orient-Le Jour), via @mona
►https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1160808/lettre-a-alain-finkielkraut.html
Cher Alain Finkielkraut, je vous demande et je demande aux responsables politiques de ne pas minorer ces petites victoires du bon sens sur la bêtise, de la banalité du bien sur la banalité du mal. Préférez les vrais adversaires qui vous parlent aux faux amis qui vous plaignent. Aidez-nous à vous aider dans le combat contre l’antisémitisme : ne le confinez pas au recours permanent à l’injonction, l’intimidation, la mise en demeure. Ceux qui se font traiter d’antisémites sans l’être ne sont pas moins insultés que vous. Ne tranchez pas à si bon compte dans le vécu de ceux qui ont une autre représentation du monde que vous. Si antisionisme n’est plus un mot adapté, donnez-nous-en un qui soit à la mesure de l’occupation, de la confiscation des terres et des maisons par Israël, et nous vous rendrons celui-ci. Il est vrai que beaucoup d’entre nous ont renoncé à parler. Mais ne faites pas confiance au silence quand il n’est qu’une absence provisoire de bruit. Un mutisme obligé peut accoucher de monstres. Je vous propose pour finir ce proverbe igbo : « Le monde est comme un masque qui danse : pour bien le voir, il ne faut pas rester au même endroit. »
Snowden Joins Calls For Google To End Censored Chinese Search Project
▻https://www.dailydot.com/debug/snowden-google-censored-china
Mikael Thalen— Dec 11 2018 - Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has joined numerous human rights groups in condemning Google over its plan to launch a censored search engine in China.
In an open letter published Monday, Snowden and more than 60 organizations including Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Human Rights Watch, called on the tech giant to cease its work on the secretive “Dragonfly” project.
“Facilitating Chinese authorities’ access to personal data, as described in media reports, would be particularly reckless,” the letter states. “If such features were launched, there is a real risk that Google would directly assist the Chinese government in arresting or imprisoning people simply for expressing their views online, making the company complicit in human rights violations.”
First revealed last August by the Intercept, the search app, made in an attempt by Google to re-enter the Chinese market, would not only surveil users but blacklist results for search queries such as “student protest” and “Nobel Prize” at the behest of Beijing.
“New details leaked to the media strongly suggest that if Google launches such a product it would facilitate repressive state censorship, surveillance, and other violations affecting nearly a billion people in China,” the letter adds.
Describing the project as “reckless,” the letter also warns that deploying Dragonfly would likely “set a terrible precedent for human rights and press freedoms worldwide.”
Monday’s statement comes just weeks after more than 600 Google employees signed a similar letter demanding the company cancel Dragonfly’s development.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who was confronted about Dragonfly during testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee Monday, has repeatedly alleged that there are no plans “right now” to launch the project.
A leaked meeting transcript from July, however, revealed Google’s search chief Ben Gomes had said the company intended to launch Dragonfly somewhere between January and April of 2019.
]]>Glenn Greenwald sur Twitter : “The very first NSA program we revealed from Snowden documents - the mass domestic spying program of Americans’ phone records, which James Clapper lied about; Obama insisted was vital to national security - has been shut down” / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1102741757035462662
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/us/politics/nsa-phone-records-program-shut-down.html
(Non) #vital
]]>►http://www.desordre.net/photographie/numerique/divers/201902.htm
Je rentre dans les dernières centaines de pages de la lecture du Dossier M. De Grégoire Bouillier, ébloui, littéralement, un peu de coq à lune pour se mettre en jambe, un peu de punaise de février, L’Image enregistrée, Les Images de l’accumulateur, qu’est-ce qu’un soubassophne me demande-t-elle, un soubassophone c’est ça lui répondis-je, fancy a cup of coffee with your lasagnas ? Et si je mettais bout à bout toutes mes vidéos du mois de janvier ? Les facéties de Zoé, la bonne trogne d’Emile, Eve Risser / Benjamin Duboc / Edward Perraud, Ervan Parker & Tyshawn Sorey, jouer du chaudron sur ressort, un art que je maîtrise encore mal, le temple de Janus, des huîtres ? Mais nous ne sommes pas lundi Martin, quand mes deux ordinateurs sont côte à côte c’est souvent qu’ils échangent à propos de Robert Frank pour l’un et d’Andreï Tarkovski pour l’autre, l’atelier d’Oana Munteanu, celui de Martin, toi aussi apprends à colorier en suivant les modèles de Diego, En Formation de Julien Meunier et Sébastien en cours de montage, Sylvain Lemêtre & Benjamin Flament, où je découvre, incrédule que c’est Grégoire Bouillier qui est l’auteur du mail de rupture de Sophie Calle, un tremblement de terre m’aurait fait moins d’effet (ceci dit je n’ai jamais vu de tremblement de terre), Marcel Solide m’a composé un très beau morceau de musique pour le mois de novembre de Clignements, retour dans le garage, l’appareil-photo est réparé, mais je ne fais plus de photos, Sylvain Lemêtre & Raphaël Thierry, et je n’aime pas les dimanches matins de semaine impaire parce qu’il n’y a pas de nouveau film de la série de L’Abécédaire des prépositions de Pierre Ménard, une jeune femme de ma connaissance souffle ses vingt bougies, je pourrais m’évanouir, Daphné Bitchatch à Angle-d’art-allez-y-voir, The Favorite de Yorgos Lanthimos, le Red Desert Orchestra, j’ai retrouvé le carnet de croquis dans lequel Emile et moi dessinions tous les soirs quand tout n’allait pas si bien, Canine de Yorgos Lanthimos, La Liberté de Guillaume Massart, une pensée pour Dominique, la grande galerie de l’évolution en compagnie d’Emile, thé à la mosquée, My Beautiful Boy de Félix Van Groeningen, mon économiseur d’écran affiche de belles photographies de Robert Frank, les Caroline déchirent, Sarah Murcia déchire (surtout quand elle chante L’Anarchie au Royaume Uni)
]]>Best Operating Systems for Anonymity: Comparing Titans
▻https://hackernoon.com/best-operating-systems-for-anonymity-comparing-titans-3501fd5cba3b?sourc
There are plenty of operating systems aimed at achieving online anonymity. But how many of them are really good? I think that not many. Below I want to suggest several Linux distributions that can help to solve numerous privacy\anonymity issues. Let’s go!Tails OSTails is a Debian-based Linux distribution designed to provide privacy and anonymity. All outgoing connections are routed through the #tor network, and all non-anonymous connections are blocked. The system is designed to boot from Live CD or Live USB and leaves no traces on the machine on which it was used. The Tor project is the main sponsor of Tails. This operating system is recommended for use by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and was also used by Edward Snowden to expose PRISM.In order to evaluate all the pros and cons of (...)
]]>How much does your government spy on you? U.N. may rank the snoopers | Reuters
▻https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-un-cyber-rights-idUKKCN1QH1YU
▻https://s2.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20190228&t=2&i=1361381786&w=1200&r=LYNXNPEF1R144
Joseph Cannataci, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to privacy, submitted the draft questionnaire - touching on everything from chatrooms to systematic surveillance - to the U.N. Human Rights Council, and invited comments by June 30.
Cannataci’s role investigating digital privacy was created by the council in 2015 after Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S. surveillance, and he has strongly criticised #surveillance activities by the United States and other countries.
As the first person in the job, Cannataci set out an action plan for tackling the task and said he planned to take a methodical approach to monitoring surveillance and privacy laws to help him to decide which countries to investigate.
The council’s 47 member states are not be obliged to agree with his findings, but special rapporteurs’ reports are generally influential in a forum where governments are keen to appear to have an unblemished human rights record.
]]>Antisémitisme et antisionisme : une assimilation absurde dans le monde arabe - Caroline HAYEK et Anthony SAMRANI - L’Orient-Le Jour
▻https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1158662/antisemitisme-et-antisionisme-une-assimilation-absurde-dans-le-monde-
Au Proche-Orient, c’est le sionisme et plus largement la politique israélienne qui ont fait le lit de l’antisémitisme.
Caroline HAYEK et Anthony SAMRANI | OLJ
23/02/2019
C’est un débat qui se joue en France mais qui est suivi avec attention de l’autre côté de la Méditerranée. Emmanuel Macron a annoncé mercredi vouloir intégrer l’antisionisme – dans le sens de la négation du droit d’Israël à exister – à la définition juridique de l’antisémitisme. Le président français considère que « l’antisionisme est une des formes modernes de l’antisémitisme », alors que les actes antisémites en France étaient en hausse de 74 % en 2018 par rapport à l’année précédente.
Plusieurs voix critiques ont fait remarquer que cela pouvait conduire à des incohérences – la plus absurde étant d’être amené à considérer certains juifs antisionistes comme des antisémites – et à créer une confusion entre une idéologie politique et une identité religieuse. Cela revient aussi à faire le jeu du Premier ministre israélien Benjamin Netanyahu, pour qui les deux termes sont indissociables, et à donner l’impression qu’il n’est pas permis en France de critiquer la politique israélienne, même si ce n’est pas du tout le sens de l’initiative présidentielle.
Vue du monde arabe, l’assimilation entre ces deux termes apparaît pour le moins inadaptée. Si l’antisionisme peut parfois, comme en Europe, cacher des relents d’antisémitisme, c’est bien le sionisme qui apparaît comme la cause première de la montée de l’antisémitisme, et non l’inverse. L’antisémitisme est un terme inventé au XIXe siècle pour évoquer la discrimination à l’égard des populations juives au sein des sociétés européennes. Outre l’argument un peu simpliste que les Arabes sont eux-mêmes un peuple sémite, la notion n’a pas vraiment de sens dans le contexte arabe. Malgré un statut particulier les empêchant, à l’instar des chrétiens, d’accéder aux hautes fonctions politiques et administratives, les juifs étaient bien intégrés au sein des sociétés arabes et n’ont pas subi de persécutions comparables à ce qu’ont pu être les pogroms en Europe.
« La communauté juive a connu un moment de gloire et de puissance à l’époque ottomane, notamment lors de l’arrivée massive des juifs chassés d’Espagne », note Henry Laurens, professeur au Collège de France et titulaire de la chaire d’histoire contemporaine du monde arabe, interrogé par L’Orient-Le Jour. « Avant la déclaration Balfour et tout ce qu’elle entraînera par la suite, les juifs sont une communauté parmi d’autres dans le monde arabe, qui, depuis l’ère ottomane en particulier, a été organisée sur une base communautaire », confirme à L’OLJ Gilbert Achcar, professeur à la School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London), auteur d’un ouvrage sur Les Arabes et la Shoah : la guerre israélo-arabe des récits (2013).
Dégradation continue
La diffusion des thèses sionistes développées par l’intellectuel autrichien Theodor Herzl va peu à peu changer la donne jusqu’au tournant de la création d’Israël en 1948, véritable choc pour les populations arabes. Au début du XXe siècle, les populations locales ne font pas nécessairement la distinction entre juifs et sionistes, le second terme n’étant pas encore véritablement assimilé. « Les habitants de la Palestine historique avaient l’habitude de désigner les juifs comme juifs. Certains étaient sionistes, mais beaucoup ne l’étaient pas. Ils étaient pour la plupart des juifs religieux et asionistes ou antisionistes », décrit à L’OLJ Tarek Mitri, ancien ministre et directeur de l’institut d’études politiques Issam Farès de l’AUB.
« Les Arabes ont d’abord connu le sionisme de façon indirecte, en lisant la presse européenne. En Palestine, les premières réactions ne sont pas nécessairement négatives, mais les choses changent à partir de la déclaration Balfour, et le sionisme est progressivement considéré comme un danger pour les Palestiniens d’une part, et pour les Arabes du Proche-Orient d’autre part. Cela conduit à une dégradation continue de la situation des communautés juives du Proche-Orient à partir des années 1930 », dit Henry Laurens.
Les relations se compliquent à mesure que l’immigration juive s’accélère en raison de la répression dont ils sont victimes en Europe.
« Dans les discours, il y avait une distinction entre les juifs et les mouvements sionistes. Dans la pratique, ce qui inquiétait particulièrement les Arabes, c’est le fait de voir une communauté parmi d’autres se doter d’un territoire, de passer de la communauté à la nation », note Henry Laurens.Dans les années 1930 et 1940, c’est l’histoire européenne qui rencontre frontalement celle du Proche-Orient, de façon encore plus brutale après l’Holocauste et jusqu’à la création de l’État hébreu. Durant cette période, le grand mufti de Jérusalem Hajj Amine al-Husseini – qui n’était toutefois pas représentatif des Palestiniens – va collaborer avec l’Allemagne hitlérienne, au départ pour contrecarrer les projets anglais d’établissement d’un foyer juif, jusqu’à approuver sa politique génocidaire contre les juifs. Cet épisode va être largement instrumentalisé par la propagande israélienne pour démontrer un soi-disant antisémitisme arabe, au point que Benjamin Netanyahu va même aller jusqu’à présenter le mufti comme l’inspirateur de la solution finale.
Complotisme et négationnisme
La création de l’État hébreu va profondément changer les rapports entre les juifs et les autres communautés dans le monde arabe. Si, pour les sionistes, l’aboutissement du projet étatique est avant tout le fruit d’une volonté collective de plusieurs décennies, il apparaît aux yeux des Arabes comme une injustice liée à un génocide dont ils ne sont en aucun cas responsables. Les juifs du monde arabe n’accueillent pas forcément avec enthousiasme la naissance d’Israël. « Les communautés juives du monde arabe, surtout d’Égypte et d’Irak, n’étaient pas vraiment tentées au début par la migration vers la Palestine. Mais il y a eu deux facteurs qui ont encouragé ce mouvement. D’une part, la politique israélienne qui a tout fait pour les attirer, au point que le Mossad a organisé des attentats contre des synagogues pour leur faire peur. D’autre part, il y a une méfiance arabe qui s’est installée et qui faisait que les juifs pouvaient être perçus comme une sorte de 5e colonne », explique Tarek Mitri.
Après la proclamation de l’indépendance d’Israël par David Ben Gourion, l’antisionisme va devenir dominant dans le monde arabe. Le sionisme apparaît comme un projet colonial avalisé par les puissances occidentales visant à déposséder les Arabes de leurs terres. La distinction devient très nette dans les discours entre juifs et sionistes. « Dans leurs discours, Nasser ou Arafat ne font pas d’amalgame entre sioniste et juif, bien au contraire. Au début de son combat, le projet politique de Arafat était d’instaurer un débat laïc et démocratique en Palestine où juifs, chrétiens et musulmans coexisteraient », explique Tarek Mitri.
Le double sentiment d’injustice et d’humiliation que les Arabes ont vis-à-vis de l’État hébreu va toutefois être le moteur d’un antisémitisme qui va avoir un certain écho au sein des classes populaires arabes – où le terme juif est parfois utilisé comme une insulte – et va être largement relayé par les mouvements islamistes. Cela va être particulièrement visible à travers la propagation de deux phénomènes intimement liés : le complotisme et le négationnisme.
« Les théories du complot qui sont dans le discours antisémite occidental ont pu facilement trouver un public dans le monde arabe, parce que, de fait, c’est une région qui a connu de vrais complots, à commencer par les fameux accords secrets Sykes-Picot », constate Gilbert Achcar. L’idée complotiste des protocoles des sages de Sion, qui attribuent aux juifs des plans de domination du monde, est largement répandue au sein du monde arabe. « Chez les islamistes, il y a eu un moment où on a ressuscité une vieille littérature parareligieuse qui ridiculise et avilie les juifs. Ils puisent dans les textes sacrés ce qui est de nature à susciter la méfiance ou même la haine à l’égard des juifs », note Tarek Mitri.
Le négationnisme concernant l’Holocauste trouve aussi ses adeptes, même s’ils restent minoritaires. Dans un article publié en 1998 dans le Monde diplomatique, le grand intellectuel palestino-américain Edward Saïd s’indignait que « la thèse selon laquelle l’Holocauste ne serait qu’une fabrication des sionistes circule ici et là. Pourquoi attendons-nous du monde entier qu’il prenne conscience de nos souffrances en tant qu’Arabes si nous ne sommes pas en mesure de prendre conscience de celles des autres, quand bien même il s’agit de nos oppresseurs ? » ajoutait-il non sans une certaine verve. « La plupart des gens qui ont un peu de culture savent que la Shoah n’est pas une invention, mais un certain négationniste a pu trouver un écho favorable chez les gens étroits d’esprit, qu’ils soient ultranationalistes ou intégristes », dit Gilbert Achcar.
Ce dernier insiste toutefois sur le fait qu’il n’y a pas d’antisémitisme propre au monde arabe, mais que la diffusion des thèses antisémites dans cette région n’est pas comparable à ce qui se passe en Occident. « Toute l’équation entre le monde occidental et le monde arabe est complètement faussée par le fait que les juifs étaient opprimés pendant des siècles en Europe, tandis que dans le monde arabe, ce qu’on peut qualifier de haine envers les juifs est surtout le produit d’une histoire moderne marquée par la présence d’un État oppresseur, qui insiste lui-même à se faire appeler État juif », résume Gilbert Achcar. Et Tarek Mitri de conclure, pour insister sur la nécessité de distinguer les deux termes dans le monde arabe : « Il y avait une résolution de l’Assemblée générale de l’ONU en 1975 qui disait que le sionisme était une forme de racisme et de discrimination. Elle a été révoquée en 1991, mais elle avait suscité un grand enthousiasme dans le monde arabe. »
]]>#Huawei : les #Etats-Unis mettent la pression sur l’#Europe
▻https://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/hightech/0600686058084-huawei-les-etats-unis-mettent-la-pression-sur-leurope-2244251
« Quand le parti communiste demande quelque chose à une entreprise chinoise, elle obéit », assure un porte-parole du Département d’Etat. « La Chine est un pays communiste depuis 1949, mais l’autoritarisme s’y est encore renforcé ces six dernières années. Cela se reflète dans les lois passées récemment sur la sécurité nationale, la cybersécurité, le contre-terrorisme... Il y est très clair que les entreprises doivent collaborer, sans qu’il soit besoin d’une décision de justice ».
Après les révélations d’Edward Snowden, qui ont prouvé l’étendue de l’espionnage américain sur ses propres alliés, la mise en garde peut faire sourire. Mais les Etats-Unis font valoir qu’il existe à l’Ouest des contre-pouvoirs - tribunaux indépendants, partis d’opposition, presse libre... - qui n’existent pas en Chine. Au Département d’Etat, on ajoute que « les Etats-Unis, comme la France ou le Royaume-Uni, ne mènent pas ce genre d’opérations pour réprimer la dissidence politique, intimider les gens, faire profiter ses propres entreprises de l’espionnage commercial. La Chine, si »
]]>The Knesset candidate who says Zionism encourages anti-Semitism and calls Netanyahu ’arch-murderer’ - Israel Election 2019 - Haaretz.com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/.premium.MAGAZINE-knesset-candidate-netanyahu-is-an-arch-murderer-zionism-e
Few Israelis have heard of Dr. Ofer Cassif, the Jewish representative on the far-leftist Hadash party’s Knesset slate. On April 9, that will change
By Ravit Hecht Feb 16, 2019
Ofer Cassif is fire and brimstone. Not even the flu he’s suffering from today can contain his bursting energy. His words are blazing, and he bounds through his modest apartment, searching frenetically for books by Karl Marx and Primo Levi in order to find quotations to back up his ideas. Only occasional sips from a cup of maté bring his impassioned delivery to a momentary halt. The South American drink is meant to help fight his illness, he explains.
Cassif is third on the slate of Knesset candidates in Hadash (the Hebrew acronym for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), the successor to Israel’s Communist Party. He holds the party’s “Jewish slot,” replacing MK Dov Khenin. Cassif is likely to draw fire from opponents and be a conspicuous figure in the next Knesset, following the April 9 election.
Indeed, the assault on him began as soon as he was selected by the party’s convention. The media pursued him; a columnist in the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Ben-Dror Yemini, called for him to be disqualified from running for the Knesset. It would be naive to say that this was unexpected. Cassif, who was one of the first Israeli soldiers to refuse to serve in the territories, in 1987, gained fame thanks to a number of provocative statements. The best known is his branding of Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked as “neo-Nazi scum.” On another occasion, he characterized Jews who visit the Temple Mount as “cancer with metastases that have to be eradicated.”
On his alternate Facebook page, launched after repeated blockages of his original account by a blitz of posts from right-wing activists, he asserted that Culture Minister Miri Regev is “repulsive gutter contamination,” that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an “arch-murderer” and that the new Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, is a “war criminal.”
Do you regret making those remarks?
Cassif: “‘Regret’ is a word of emotion. Those statements were made against a background of particular events: the fence in Gaza, horrible legislation, and the wild antics of Im Tirtzu [an ultranationalist organization] on campus. That’s what I had to say at the time. I didn’t count on being in the Knesset. That wasn’t part of my plan. But it’s clear to me that as a public personality, I would not have made those comments.”
Is Netanyahu an arch-murderer?
“Yes. I wrote it in the specific context of a particular day in the Gaza Strip. A massacre of innocent people was perpetrated there, and no one’s going to persuade me that those people were endangering anyone. It’s a concentration camp. Not a ‘concentration camp’ in the sense of Bergen-Belsen; I am absolutely not comparing the Holocaust to what’s happening.”
You term what Israel is doing to the Palestinians “genocide.”
“I call it ‘creeping genocide.’ Genocide is not only a matter of taking people to gas chambers. When Yeshayahu Leibowitz used the term ‘Judeo-Nazis,’ people asked him, ‘How can you say that? Are we about to build gas chambers?’ To that, he had two things to say. First, if the whole difference between us and the Nazis boils down to the fact that we’re not building gas chambers, we’re already in trouble. And second, maybe we won’t use gas chambers, but the mentality that exists today in Israel – and he said this 40 years ago – would allow it. I’m afraid that today, after four years of such an extreme government, it possesses even greater legitimacy.
“But you know what, put aside ‘genocide’ – ethnic cleansing is taking place there. And that ethnic cleansing is also being carried out by means of killing, although mainly by way of humiliation and of making life intolerable. The trampling of human dignity. It reminds me of Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is a Man.’”
You say you’re not comparing, but you repeatedly come back to Holocaust references. On Facebook, you also uploaded the scene from “Schindler’s List” in which the SS commander Amon Goeth picks off Jews with his rifle from the balcony of his quarters in the camp. You compared that to what was taking place along the border fence in the Gaza Strip.
“Today, I would find different comparisons. In the past I wrote an article titled, ‘On Holocaust and on Other Crimes.’ It’s online [in Hebrew]. I wrote there that anyone who compares Israel to the Holocaust is cheapening the Holocaust. My comparison between here and what happened in the early 1930s [in Germany] is a very different matter.”
Clarity vs. crudity
Given Cassif’s style, not everyone in Hadash was happy with his election, particularly when it comes to the Jewish members of the predominantly Arab party. Dov Khenin, for example, declined to be interviewed and say what he thinks of his parliamentary successor. According to a veteran party figure, “From the conversations I had, it turns out that almost none of the Jewish delegates – who make up about 100 of the party’s 940 delegates – supported his candidacy.
“He is perceived, and rightly so,” the party veteran continues, “as someone who closes doors to Hadash activity within Israeli society. Each of the other Jewish candidates presented a record of action and of struggles they spearheaded. What does he do? Curses right-wing politicians on Facebook. Why did the party leadership throw the full force of its weight behind him? In a continuation of the [trend exemplified by] its becoming part of the Joint List, Ofer’s election reflects insularity and an ongoing retreat from the historical goal of implementing change in Israeli society.”
At the same time, as his selection by a 60 percent majority shows, many in the party believe that it’s time to change course. “Israeli society is moving rightward, and what’s perceived as Dov’s [Khenin] more gentle style didn’t generate any great breakthrough on the Jewish street,” a senior source in Hadash notes.
“It’s not a question of the tension between extremism and moderation, but of how to signpost an alternative that will develop over time. Clarity, which is sometimes called crudity, never interfered with cooperation between Arabs and Jews. On the contrary. Ofer says things that we all agreed with but didn’t so much say, and of course that’s going to rile the right wing. And a good thing, too.”
Hadash chairman MK Ayman Odeh also says he’s pleased with the choice, though sources in the party claim that Odeh is apprehensive about Cassif’s style and that he actually supported a different candidate. “Dov went for the widest possible alliances in order to wield influence,” says Odeh. “Ofer will go for very sharp positions at the expense of the breadth of the alliance. But his sharp statements could have a large impact.”
Khenin was deeply esteemed by everyone. When he ran for mayor of Tel Aviv in 2008, some 35 percent of the electorate voted for him, because he was able to touch people who weren’t only from his political milieu.
Odeh: “No one has a higher regard for Dov than I do. But just to remind you, we are not a regular opposition, we are beyond the pale. And there are all kinds of styles. Influence can be wielded through comments that are vexatious the first time but which people get used to the second time. When an Arab speaks about the Nakba and about the massacre in Kafr Kassem [an Israeli Arab village, in 1956], it will be taken in a particular way, but when uttered by a Jew it takes on special importance.”
He will be the cause of many attacks on the party.
“Ahlan wa sahlan – welcome.”
Cassif will be the first to tell you that, with all due respect for the approach pursued by Khenin and by his predecessor in the Jewish slot, Tamar Gozansky, he will be something completely different. “I totally admire what Tamar and Dov did – nothing less than that,” he says, while adding, “But my agenda will be different. The three immediate dangers to Israeli society are the occupation, racism and the diminishment of the democratic space to the point of liquidation. That’s the agenda that has to be the hub of the struggle, as long as Israel rules over millions of people who have no rights, enters [people’s houses] in the middle of the night, arrests minors on a daily basis and shoots people in the back.
"Israel commits murder on a daily basis. When you murder one Palestinian, you’re called Elor Azaria [the IDF soldier convicted and jailed for killing an incapacitated Palestinian assailant]; when you murder and oppress thousands of Palestinians, you’re called the State of Israel.”
So you plan to be the provocateur in the next Knesset?
“It’s not my intention to be a provocateur, to stand there and scream and revile people. Even on Facebook I was compelled to stop that. But I definitely intend to challenge the dialogue in terms of the content, and mainly with a type of sarcasm.”
’Bags of blood’
Cassif, 54, who holds a doctorate in political philosophy from the London School of Economics, teaches political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Sapir Academic College in Sderot and at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo. He lives in Rehovot, is married and is the father of a 19-year-old son. He’s been active in Hadash for three decades and has held a number of posts in the party.
As a lecturer, he stands out for his boldness and fierce rhetoric, which draws students of all stripes. He even hangs out with some of his Haredi students, one of whom wrote a post on the eve of the Hadash primary urging the delegates to choose him. After his election, a student from a settlement in the territories wrote to him, “You are a determined and industrious person, and for that I hold you in high regard. Hoping we will meet on the field of action and growth for the success of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state (I felt obliged to add a small touch of irony in conclusion).”
Cassif grew up in a home that supported Mapai, forerunner of Labor, in Rishon Letzion. He was an only child; his father was an accountant, his mother held a variety of jobs. He was a news hound from an early age, and at 12 ran for the student council in school. He veered sharply to the left in his teens, becoming a keen follower of Marx and socialism.
Following military service in the IDF’s Nahal brigade and a period in the airborne Nahal, Cassif entered the Hebrew University. There his political career moved one step forward, and there he also forsook the Zionist left permanently. His first position was as a parliamentary aide to the secretary general of the Communist Party, Meir Wilner.
“At first I was closer to Mapam [the United Workers Party, which was Zionist], and then I refused to serve in the territories. I was the first refusenik in the first intifada to be jailed. I didn’t get support from Mapam, I got support from the people of Hadash, and I drew close to them. I was later jailed three more times for refusing to serve in the territories.”
His rivals in the student organizations at the Hebrew University remember him as the epitome of the extreme left.
“Even in the Arab-Jewish student association, Cassif was considered off-the-wall,” says Motti Ohana, who was chairman of Likud’s student association and active in the Student Union at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. “One time I got into a brawl with him. It was during the first intifada, when he brought two bags of blood, emptied them out in the university’s corridors and declared, ‘There is no difference between Jewish and Arab blood,’ likening Israeli soldiers to terrorists. The custom on campus was that we would quarrel, left-right, Arabs-Jews, and after that we would sit together, have a coffee and talk. But not Cassif.”
According to Ohana, today a member of the Likud central committee, the right-wing activists knew that, “You could count on Ofer to fall into every trap. There was one event at the Hebrew University that was a kind of political Hyde Park. The right wanted to boot the left out of there, so we hung up the flag. It was obvious that Ofer would react, and in fact he tore the flag, and in the wake of the ruckus that developed, political activity was stopped for good.”
Replacing the anthem
Cassif voices clearly and cogently positions that challenge the public discourse in Israel, and does so with ardor and charisma. Four candidates vied for Hadash’s Jewish slot, and they all delivered speeches at the convention. The three candidates who lost to him – Efraim Davidi, Yaela Raanan and the head of the party’s Tel Aviv branch, Noa Levy – described their activity and their guiding principles. When they spoke, there was the regular buzz of an audience that’s waiting for lunch. But when Cassif took the stage, the effect was magnetic.
“Peace will not be established without a correction of the crimes of the Nakba and [recognition of] the right of return,” he shouted, and the crowd cheered him. As one senior party figure put it, “Efraim talked about workers’ rights, Yaela about the Negev, Noa about activity in Tel Aviv – and Ofer was Ofer.”
What do you mean by “right of return”?
Cassif: “The first thing is the actual recognition of the Nakba and of the wrong done by Israel. Compare it to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa, if you like, or with the commissions in Chile after Pinochet. Israel must recognize the wrong it committed. Now, recognition of the wrong also includes recognition of the right of return. The question is how it’s implemented. It has to be done by agreement. I can’t say that tomorrow Tel Aviv University has to be dismantled and that Sheikh Munis [the Arab village on whose ruins the university stands] has to be rebuilt there. The possibility can be examined of giving compensation in place of return, for example.”
But what is the just solution, in your opinion?
“For the Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.”
That means there will be Jews who will have to leave their home.
“In some places, unequivocally, yes. People will have to be told: ‘You must evacuate your places.’ The classic example is Ikrit and Biram [Christian-Arab villages in Galilee whose residents were promised – untruly – by the Israeli authorities in 1948 that they would be able to return, and whose lands were turned over to Jewish communities]. But there are places where there is certainly greater difficulty. You don’t right one wrong with another.”
What about the public space in Israel? What should it look like?
“The public space has to change, to belong to all the state’s residents. I dispute the conception of ‘Jewish publicness.’”
How should that be realized?
“For example, by changing the national symbols, changing the national anthem. [Former Hadash MK] Mohammed Barakeh once suggested ‘I Believe’ [‘Sahki, Sahki’] by [Shaul] Tchernichovsky – a poem that is not exactly an expression of Palestinian nationalism. He chose it because of the line, ‘For in mankind I’ll believe.’ What does it mean to believe in mankind? It’s not a Jew, or a Palestinian, or a Frenchman, or I don’t know what.”
What’s the difference between you and the [Arab] Balad party? Both parties overall want two states – a state “of all its citizens” and a Palestinian state.
“In the big picture, yes. But Balad puts identity first on the agenda. We are not nationalists. We do not espouse nationalism as a supreme value. For us, self-determination is a means. We are engaged in class politics. By the way, Balad [the National Democratic Assembly] and Ta’al [MK Ahmad Tibi’s Arab Movement for Renewal] took the idea of a state of all its citizens from us, from Hadash. We’ve been talking about it for ages.”
If you were a Palestinian, what would you do today?
“In Israel, what my Palestinian friends are doing, and I with them – [wage] a parliamentary and extra-parliamentary struggle.”
And what about the Palestinians in the territories?
“We have always been against harming innocent civilians. Always. In all our demonstrations, one of our leading slogans was: ‘In Gaza and in Sderot, children want to live.’ With all my criticism of the settlers, to enter a house and slaughter children, as in the case of the Fogel family [who were murdered in their beds in the settlement of Itamar in 2011], is intolerable. You have to be a human being and reject that.”
And attacks on soldiers?
“An attack on soldiers is not terrorism. Even Netanyahu, in his book about terrorism, explicitly categorizes attacks on soldiers or on the security forces as guerrilla warfare. It’s perfectly legitimate, according to every moral criterion – and, by the way, in international law. At the same time, I am not saying it’s something wonderful, joyful or desirable. The party’s Haifa office is on Ben-Gurion Street, and suddenly, after years, I noticed a memorial plaque there for a fighter in Lehi [pre-state underground militia, also known as the Stern Gang] who assassinated a British officer. Wherever there has been a struggle for liberation from oppression, there are national heroes, who in 90 percent of the cases carried out some operations that were unlawful. Nelson Mandela is today considered a hero, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but according to the conventional definition, he was a terrorist. Most of the victims of the ANC [African National Congress] were civilians.”
In other words, today’s Hamas commanders who are carrying out attacks on soldiers will be heroes of the future Palestinian state?
“Of course.”
Anti-Zionist identity
Cassif terms himself an explicit anti-Zionist. “There are three reasons for that,” he says. “To begin with, Zionism is a colonialist movement, and as a socialist, I am against colonialism. Second, as far as I am concerned, Zionism is racist in ideology and in practice. I am not referring to the definition of race theory – even though there are also some who impute that to the Zionist movement – but to what I call Jewish supremacy. No socialist can accept that. My supreme value is equality, and I can’t abide any supremacy – Jewish or Arab. The third thing is that Zionism, like other ethno-nationalistic movements, splits the working class and all weakened groups. Instead of uniting them in a struggle for social justice, for equality, for democracy, it divides the exploited classes and the enfeebled groups, and by that means strengthens the rule of capital.”
He continues, “Zionism also sustains anti-Semitism. I don’t say it does so deliberately – even though I have no doubt that there are some who do it deliberately, like Netanyahu, who is connected to people like the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, and the leader of the far right in Austria, Hans Christian Strache.”
Did Mapai-style Zionism also encourage anti-Semitism?
“The phenomenon was very striking in Mapai. Think about it for a minute, not only historically, but logically. If the goal of political and practical Zionism is really the establishment of a Jewish state containing a Jewish majority, and for Diaspora Jewry to settle there, nothing serves them better than anti-Semitism.”
What in their actions encouraged anti-Semitism?
“The very appeal to Jews throughout the world – the very fact of treating them as belonging to the same nation, when they were living among other nations. The whole old ‘dual loyalty’ story – Zionism actually encouraged that. Therefore, I maintain that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not the same thing, but are precisely opposites. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there are no anti-Zionists who are also anti-Semites. Most of the BDS people are of course anti-Zionists, but they are in no way anti-Semites. But there are anti-Semites there, too.”
Do you support BDS?
“It’s too complex a subject for a yes or no answer; there are aspects I don’t support.”
Do you think that the Jews deserve a national home in the Land of Israel?
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘national home.’ It’s very amorphous. We in Hadash say explicitly that Israel has a right to exist as a sovereign state. Our struggle is not against the state’s existence, but over its character.”
But that state is the product of the actions of the Zionist movement, which you say has been colonialist and criminal from day one.
“That’s true, but the circumstances have changed. That’s the reason that the majority of the members of the Communist Party accepted the [1947] partition agreement at the time. They recognized that the circumstances had changed. I think that one of the traits that sets communist thought apart, and makes it more apt, is the understanding and the attempt to strike the proper balance between what should be, and reality. So it’s true that Zionism started as colonialism, but what do you do with the people who were already born here? What do you tell them? Because your grandparents committed a crime, you have to leave? The question is how you transform the situation that’s been created into one that’s just, democratic and equal.”
So, a person who survived a death camp and came here is a criminal?
“The individual person, of course not. I’m in favor of taking in refugees in distress, no matter who or what they are. I am against Zionism’s cynical use of Jews in distress, including the refugees from the Holocaust. I have a problem with the fact that the natives whose homeland this is cannot return, while people for whom it’s not their homeland, can, because they supposedly have some sort of blood tie and an ‘imaginary friend’ promised them the land.”
I understand that you are in favor of the annulment of the Law of Return?
“Yes. Definitely.”
But you are in favor of the Palestinian right of return.
“There’s no comparison. There’s no symmetry here at all. Jerry Seinfeld was by chance born to a Jewish family. What’s his connection to this place? Why should he have preference over a refugee from Sabra or Chatila, or Edward Said, who did well in the United States? They are the true refugees. This is their homeland. Not Seinfeld’s.”
Are you critical of the Arabs, too?
“Certainly. One criticism is of their cooperation with imperialism – take the case of today’s Saudi Arabia, Qatar and so on. Another, from the past, relates to the reactionary forces that did not accept that the Jews have a right to live here.”
Hadash refrained from criticizing the Assad regime even as it was massacring civilians in Syria. The party even torpedoed a condemnation of Assad after the chemical attack. Do you identify with that approach?
“Hadash was critical of the Assad regime – father and son – for years, so we can’t be accused in any way of supporting Assad or Hezbollah. We are not Ba’ath, we are not Islamists. We are communists. But as I said earlier, the struggle, unfortunately, is generally not between the ideal and what exists in practice, but many times between two evils. And then you have to ask yourself which is the lesser evil. The Syrian constellation is extremely complicated. On the one hand, there is the United States, which is intervening, and despite all the pretense of being against ISIS, supported ISIS and made it possible for ISIS to sprout.
"I remind you that ISIS started from the occupation of Iraq. And ideologically and practically, ISIS is definitely a thousand times worse than the Assad regime, which is at base also a secular regime. Our position was and is against the countries that pose the greatest danger to regional peace, which above all are Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and the United States, which supports them. That doesn’t mean that we support Assad.”
Wrong language
Cassif’s economic views are almost as far from the consensus as his political ideas. He lives modestly in an apartment that’s furnished like a young couple’s first home. You won’t find an espresso maker or unnecessary products of convenience in his place. To his credit, it can be said that he extracts the maximum from Elite instant coffee.
What is your utopian vision – to nationalize Israel’s conglomerates, such as Cellcom, the telecommunications company, or Osem, the food manufacturer and distributor?
“The bottom line is yes. How exactly will it be done? That’s an excellent question, which I can’t answer. Perhaps by transferring ownership to the state or to the workers, with democratic tools. And there are other alternatives. But certainly, I would like it if a large part of the resources were not in private hands, as was the case before the big privatizations. It’s true that it won’t be socialism, because, again, there can be no such thing as Zionist socialism, but there won’t be privatization like we have today. What is the result of capitalism in Israel? The collapse of the health system, the absence of a social-welfare system, a high cost of living and of housing, the elderly and the disabled in a terrible situation.”
Does any private sector have the right to exist?
“Look, the question is what you mean by ‘private sector.’ If we’re talking about huge concerns that the owners of capital control completely through their wealth, then no.”
What growth was there in the communist countries? How can anyone support communism, in light of the grim experience wherever it was tried?
“It’s true, we know that in the absolute majority of societies where an attempt was made to implement socialism, there was no growth or prosperity, and we need to ask ourselves why, and how to avoid that. When I talk about communism, I’m not talking about Stalin and all the crimes that were committed in the name of the communist idea. Communism is not North Korea and it is not Pol Pot in Cambodia. Heaven forbid.”
And what about Venezuela?
“Venezuela is not communism. In fact, they didn’t go far enough in the direction of socialism.”
Chavez was not enough of a socialist?
“Chavez, but in particular Maduro. The Communist Party is critical of the regime. They support it because the main enemy is truly American imperialism and its handmaidens. Let’s look at what the U.S. did over the years. At how many times it invaded and employed bullying, fascist forces. Not only in Latin America, its backyard, but everywhere.”
Venezuela is falling apart, people there don’t have anything to eat, there’s no medicine, everyone who can flees – and it’s the fault of the United States?
“You can’t deny that the regime has made mistakes. It’s not ideal. But basically, it is the result of American imperialism and its lackeys. After all, the masses voted for Chavez and for Maduro not because things were good for them. But because American corporations stole the country’s resources and filled their own pockets. I wouldn’t make Chavez into an icon, but he did some excellent things.”
Then how do you generate individual wealth within the method you’re proposing? I understand that I am now talking to you capitalistically, but the reality is that people see the accumulation of assets as an expression of progress in life.
“Your question is indeed framed in capitalist language, which simply departs from what I believe in. Because you are actually asking me how the distribution of resources is supposed to occur within the capitalist framework. And I say no, I am not talking about resource distribution within a capitalist framework.”
Gantz vs. Netanyahu
Cassif was chosen as the polls showed Meretz and Labor, the representatives of the Zionist left, barely scraping through into the next Knesset and in fact facing a serious possibility of electoral extinction. The critique of both parties from the radical left is sometimes more acerbic than from the right.
Would you like to see the Labor Party disappear?
“No. I think that what’s happening at the moment with Labor and with Meretz is extremely dangerous. I speak about them as collectives, because they contain individuals with whom I see no possibility of engaging in a dialogue. But I think that they absolutely must be in the Knesset.”
Is a left-winger who defines himself as a Zionist your partner in any way?
“Yes. We need partners. We can’t be picky. Certainly we will cooperate with liberals and Zionists on such issues as combating violence against women or the battle to rescue the health system. Maybe even in putting an end to the occupation.”
I’ll put a scenario to you: Benny Gantz does really well in the election and somehow overcomes Netanyahu. Do you support the person who led Operation Protective Edge in Gaza when he was chief of staff?
“Heaven forbid. But we don’t reject people, we reject policy. I remind you that it was [then-defense minister] Yitzhak Rabin who led the most violent tendency in the first intifada, with his ‘Break their bones.’ But when he came to the Oslo Accords, it was Hadash and the Arab parties that gave him, from outside the coalition, an insurmountable bloc. I can’t speak for the party, but if there is ever a government whose policy is one that we agree with – eliminating the occupation, combating racism, abolishing the nation-state law – I believe we will give our support in one way or another.”
And if Gantz doesn’t declare his intention to eliminate the occupation, he isn’t preferable to Netanyahu in any case?
“If so, why should we recommend him [to the president to form the next government]? After the clips he posted boasting about how many people he killed and how he hurled Gaza back into the Stone Age, I’m far from certain that he’s better.”
]]>▻https://www.francemusique.fr/emissions/l-improviste/le-trio-en-corps-eve-risser-benjamin-duboc-et-edward-perraud-l-atelier
Hier soir magnifique concert d’Eve Risser, Edward Perraud et Benjamion Duboc aux Sons d’hiver . Du coup je suis allé retrouver cette émission d’A l’improviste. Et le disque ( ▻http://www.darktree-records.com/dt07-en-corps-generation-disque-page ) est absolument superbe.
]]>Alerte / en marche vers la privatisation de la démocratie ?
par Quitterie de Villepin, démocrate, qui rapelle des choses simples et basiques autour des enjeux des outils informatiques pour un réel débat public. Elle tacle la #startup Cap Collectif mais pourrait aussi bien évoquer #facebook...
▻https://blogs.mediapart.fr/quitterie-de-villepin/blog/300119/alerte-en-marche-vers-la-privatisation-de-la-democratie
Alors qu’explose en France une demande sans précédent de démocratie de la part des citoyens et des citoyens, de Nuit Debout, aux Gilets jaunes (assemblées réunies à Commercy) celles et ceux qui sont censés être au service de cette participation citoyenne, ne voient pas ou font semblant de ne pas voir, qu’une entreprise s’approprie et capte cette formidable émulation collective, qui représente un commun, puisque financé par des deniers publics et enrichis grâce au travail de toutes et tous.
/.../
Pour moi, les plus grands visionnaires de notre ère sont Richard Stallman, Wikipédia, Edward Snowden, Aaron Schwartz, Birgitta Jonsdottir, Audrey Tang.
Celles et ceux qui se battent par et pour les citoyen.ne.s, la connaissance partagée, la coopération de pair à pair, la transparence, l’émancipation de toutes et tous par toutes et tous. Qui ont compris que philosophiquement les choix de code d’algorithmes sont par essence politique.
Et vous, qui sont vos héros ? Zuckerberg ? Cambridge Analytica ? Monsanto ? Bayer ?
Pour rappel cette startup a fait ses premières armes-test via les assemblées des #giletsjaunes ▻https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cap+collectif&t=fpas&ia=web ... ça vous rappelle rien ? Mais siii vous savez, cette privatisation du nom #Nuit_Debout qui avait provoqué une super enquête #seenthissienne !
#privatisation #algocratie
Toni Negri : « Les gilets jaunes sont à la mesure de l’écroulement de la politique » | Mediapart
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/290119/toni-negri-les-gilets-jaunes-sont-la-mesure-de-l-ecroulement-de-la-politiq
es gilets jaunes doivent rester un contre-pouvoir et ne surtout pas se transformer en parti politique, estime Antonio Negri. Le philosophe italien, qui vit à Paris depuis 1983, observe depuis longtemps les mouvements sociaux de par le monde. Dans Assembly, son dernier ouvrage coécrit en 2018 avec Michael Hardt (non traduit en français), il donnait un cadre philosophique aux occupations de places publiques qui ont vu le jour ces dix dernières années. Dans Empire, publié avec le même auteur en 2000, il inventait le concept de « multitude », qui prend aujourd’hui une acuité particulière avec l’actualité des gilets jaunes. Le mouvement qui a démarré en France en novembre révèle, d’après lui, une nouvelle forme de lutte qui s’appuie sur la fraternité. Entretien.
Mediapart : Depuis une dizaine d’années, de nombreux mouvements de protestation ont émergé, en Europe et dans le monde, en dehors de tout parti ou organisation syndicale. Qu’est-ce que les gilets jaunes apportent de fondamentalement nouveau par rapport à cela ?
Antonio Negri : Les gilets jaunes s’inscrivent dans cette mouvance que l’on observe depuis 2011 : des mouvements qui sortent des catégories droite/gauche comme Occupy Wall Street, les Indignés, ou encore le soulèvement tunisien.
assembly
En Italie aussi les gens se sont mobilisés, tout d’abord dans les universités avec le mouvement Onda [La Vague – ndlr], puis autour des communs avec l’opposition au TAV [la ligne ferroviaire Lyon-Turin – ndlr] ou la gestion des déchets à Naples. À chaque fois, il s’agit de luttes importantes qui ne se positionnent ni à droite ni à gauche, mais qui reposent sur une communauté locale.
C’est quelque chose que l’on retrouve chez les gilets jaunes : il y a dans ce mouvement un sens de la communauté, la volonté de défendre ce qu’on est. Cela me fait penser à l’« économie morale de la foule » que l’historien britannique Edward Thompson avait théorisée sur la période précédant la révolution industrielle.
Ce qu’il y a de nouveau, toutefois, avec les gilets jaunes, c’est une certaine ouverture au concept du bonheur : on est heureux d’être ensemble, on n’a pas peur parce qu’on est en germe d’une fraternité et d’une majorité.
L’autre point important, me semble-t-il, c’est le dépassement du niveau syndical de la lutte. Le problème du coût de la vie reste central, mais le point de vue catégoriel est dépassé. Les gilets jaunes sont en recherche d’égalité autour du coût de la vie et du mode de vie. Ils ont fait émerger un discours sur la distribution de ce profit social que constituent les impôts à partir d’une revendication de départ qui était à la fois très concrète et très générale : la baisse de la taxe sur le carburant.
S’il y avait une gauche véritable en France, elle se serait jetée sur les gilets jaunes et aurait constitué un élément insurrectionnel. Mais le passage de ce type de lutte à la transformation de la société est un processus terriblement long et parfois cruel.
Est-on en train d’assister à l’émergence d’un nouveau corpus, alors que depuis l’écroulement du bloc communiste, les idées peinent à s’imposer pour faire face au rouleau compresseur du libéralisme ?
De mon côté, cela fait vingt ans que je parle de « multitude » précisément pour analyser la dissolution des anciennes classes sociales. La classe ouvrière était une classe productive, liée à une temporalité et une localisation : on travaillait à l’usine et la ville marchait au rythme de l’usine. À Turin par exemple, les tramways étaient réglés sur les horaires de la journée de travail.
Tout cela est terminé. Je ne suis pas nostalgique de cette époque, car l’usine tuait les gens. Certes, on a perdu le lien de la production, le lien de la journée de travail, le collectif. Mais aujourd’hui, on a de la coopération ; cela va plus loin que le collectif.
La multitude, ce n’est pas une foule d’individus isolés, renfermés sur eux-mêmes et égoïstes. C’est un ensemble de singularités qui travaillent, qui peuvent être précaires, chômeurs ou retraités, mais qui sont dans la coopération.
Il y a une dimension spatiale dans cette multitude : ce sont des singularités qui, pour exister, demandent à être en contact les unes avec les autres. Il ne s’agit pas seulement de quantité. C’est aussi la qualité des relations qui est en jeu.
Est-ce un constat que vous faites également à propos du Mouvement Cinq Étoiles, né il y a une dizaine d’années en Italie et aujourd’hui membre du gouvernement aux côtés de la Ligue, parti d’extrême droite ?
En effet, à l’origine des Cinq Étoiles se trouvaient des gens issus des mouvements autonomes, des luttes pour les communs, mais aussi, plus tard, de la critique des réformes constitutionnelles voulues par Matteo Renzi. C’était marqué à gauche. À la différence de la France où cela a explosé d’un coup, en Italie, tout cela s’est étalé dans le temps, les gens se sont formés petit à petit.
Puis, avec leur habileté, le comique Beppe Grillo et Gianroberto Casaleggio [mort en 2016 – ndlr] ont commencé à faire un travail électoral sur ces mobilisations. Le pouvoir est progressivement passé du côté de ceux qui maîtrisaient les techniques politiques.
À partir du moment où il a cherché à gouverner, sous la direction de Luigi Di Maio, le M5S s’est complètement fourvoyé. Prendre le pouvoir n’est pas révolutionnaire. Ce qui est révolutionnaire, c’est d’être en capacité de détruire le pouvoir ou, à la limite, de le réformer.
Depuis, ce que fait le M5S au gouvernement est révoltant. Le revenu de citoyenneté universel qu’il avait promis l’an dernier pendant la campagne électorale est devenu une loi de pauvreté : le revenu n’est distribué qu’à une partie des chômeurs et il est assorti d’obligations disciplinaires. Ainsi, à la troisième offre d’emploi, le bénéficiaire est obligé de l’accepter, quelle que soit la distance à laquelle elle se trouve de son domicile.
Les Cinq Étoiles ont été rattrapés par l’avidité, la gourmandise du pouvoir. Ils ont fait alliance avec des fascistes bien réels qui sont en même temps de profonds néolibéraux. Le fascisme est le visage politique du néolibéralisme en crise. Mais il y a une justice électorale : le M5S va perdre de nombreuses voix aux élections européennes de mai prochain.
]]>Why Signal and not Threema ? : signal
▻https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/852qor/why_signal_and_not_threema
Signal is open source, Threema is not, so that disqualifies Threema as a secure app in my opinion. You could as well continue using WhatsApp since it’s also end to end encrypted but closed source. Wire is another great alternative, and it’s German.
Hacker erklären, welche Messenger-App am sichersten ist - Motherboard
▻https://motherboard.vice.com/de/article/7xea4z/hacker-erklaren-welche-messenger-app-am-sichersten-ist
Passons sur les exigences plus poussées, je ne vois que Signal qui satisfait tous ces besoins. Après on peut toujours utiliser plusieurs « messenger apps » afin de rester au courant des « updates » de tout le monde - à l’exception des apps de Facebook (Whatsapp), Wechat et Google parce que leur utilistion constitue une menace de votre vie privée simplement par l’installation sur votre portable.
Roland Schilling (33) und Frieder Steinmetz (28) haben vor sechs Jahren begonnen, an der TU Hamburg unter anderem zu dieser Frage zu forschen. In einer Zeit, als noch niemand den Namen Edward Snowden auch nur gehört hatte, brüteten Schilling und Steinmetz bereits über die Vor- und Nachteile verschiedener Verschlüsselungsprotokolle und Messenger-Apps. So haben sie beispielsweise im vergangenen Jahr geschafft, die Verschlüsselung von Threema per Reverse Engineering nachzuvollziehen.
Ihre Forschung ist mittlerweile zu einer Art Aktivismus und Hobby geworden, sagen die beiden: Sie wollen Menschen außerhalb von Fachkreisen vermitteln, wie elementar die Privatsphäre in einer Demokratie ist. Im Interview erklären sie, auf was man bei der Wahl des Messengers achten soll, welche App in punkto Sicherheit nicht unbedingt hält, was sie verspricht und warum Kreditinstitute sich über datenhungrige Messenger freuen.
...
Roland Schilling: Bei mir ist es anders. Ich bringe die Leute einfach dazu, die Apps zu benutzen, die ich auch nutze. Das sind ausschließlich Threema, Signal und Wire. Wenn Leute mit mir reden wollen, dann klappt das eigentlich immer auf einer von den Dreien.
...
Frieder: ... Signal und WhatsApp etwa setzen auf die gleiche technische Grundlage, das Signal-Protokoll, unterscheiden sich aber in Nuancen. Threema hat ein eigenes, nicht ganz schlechtes Protokoll, das aber beispielsweise keine ‘Perfect Forward Secrecy’ garantiert. Die Technik verhindert, dass jemand mir in der Zukunft meinen geheimen Schlüssel vom Handy klaut und damit meine gesamte verschlüsselte Kommunikation entschlüsseln kann, die ich über das Handy geführt habe. Signal und WhatsApp haben das.
...
Roland: Ein gutes Messenger-Protokoll ist Open Source und ermöglicht damit Forschern und der Öffentlichkeit, eventuell bestehende Schwachstellen zu entdecken und das Protokoll zu verbessern. Leider gibt es auf dem Messenger-Markt auch viele Angebote, die ihre vorgebliche „Verschlüsselung“ diesem Prozess entziehen und geheim halten, oder das Protokoll zwar veröffentlichen, aber auf Kritik nicht eingehen.
Secure WhatsApp Alternatives – Messenger Comparison
▻https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/blog/post/encryption-comparison-secure-messaging-apps
Threema and Telegram under Control of Russia’s Government ?
▻https://medium.com/@vadiman/threema-and-telegram-under-control-of-russias-government-f81f8e28714b
WhatsApp Exploited by NSA and US Secret Services?
Go to the profile of Vadim An
Vadim An
Mar 7, 2018
This is the end of era centralized communication!
The 2017/2018 years are hot and saturated with cybersecurity challenges. Almost every week, a major media source reported hacking incidents or backdoor exploits in popular communication and messaging services. Some of which granted government agents unauthorized access to private and confidential information from within the communications industry.
According to mass-media reports, one of the most popular Swiss secure messaging apps Threema moved under the control of the Russian government and has been listed in the official registry with a view to controlling user communications.
This can be seen on regulatory public website ▻https://97-fz.rkn.gov.ru/organizer-dissemination/viewregistry/#searchform
This knockout news was commented by Crypviser — innovative German developer of the most secure instant communication platform based on Blockchain technologies, of the point of view, what does it mean for millions of Threema users?
To answer this question, let’s understand the requirements for getting listed in this registry as an “information-dissemination organizers” according to a new Russian federal law, beginning from 01 June 2018.
The law requires that all companies listed in internet regulator’s registry must store all users’ metadata (“information about the arrival, transmission, delivery, and processing of voice data, written text, images, sounds, or other kinds of action”), along with content of correspondence, voice call records and make it accessible to the Russian authorities. Websites can avoid the hassle of setting aside this information by granting Russian officials unfettered, constant access to their entire data stream.
This is very bad news for Threema users. Threema officials have reported that they are not aware of any requirements to store, collect, or provide information. Maybe not yet though since there is still some time until 01 June 2018 when the new law kicks in and Threema will be obligated to provide direct access to sensitive user’s data.
It’s possible that Threema is fully aware of this despite claiming otherwise. They may realize that the most popular messenger in Russia, Telegram, has been under pressure since refusing to officially cooperate with Russian secret services. If Russia takes steps to block Telegram as a result, then Threema would become the next best alternative service. That is assuming they’re willing to violating the security and privacy rights of its users by giving in to the new law’s requirements.
Based on the reports of Financial Time magazine, the Telegram founder agreed to register their app with Russian censors by the end of June 2017. This, however; is not a big loss for Telegram community because of the lack of security in Telegram to date. During the last 2 years, its security protocol has been criticized many times and many security issues were found by researchers. Although there is no direct evidence showing that Telegram has already cooperated with the Russian government or other governments, these exploitable bugs and poor security models make Telegram users vulnerable victims to hackers and secret services of different countries.
The same security benchmark issues have been explored in the biggest communication app WhatsApp. The security model of WhatsApp has been recognized as vulnerable by the most reputed cryptographic experts and researchers worldwide. According to the Guardian, a serious “backdoor” was found in encryption. More specifically, the key exchange algorithm.
A common security practice in encrypted messaging services involves the generation and store of a private encryption key offline on the user’s device. And only the public key gets broadcasted to other users through the company’s server. In the case of WhatsApp, we have to trust the company that it will not alter public key exchange mechanism between the sender and receiver to perform man-in-the-middle attack for snooping of users encrypted private communication.
Tobias Boelter, security researcher from the University of California, has reported that WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, based on Signal protocol, has been implemented in a way that if WhatsApp or any hacker intercepts your chats, by exploiting trust-based key exchange mechanism, you will never come to know if any change in encryption key has occurred in the background.
The Guardian reports, “WhatsApp has implemented a backdoor into the Signal protocol, giving itself the ability to force the generation of new encryption keys for offline users and to make the sender re-encrypt messages with new keys and send them again for any messages that have not been marked as delivered. The recipient is not made aware of this change in encryption.”
But on the other hand, the developer of Signal messaging app Open Whisper Systems says, ”There is no WhatsApp backdoor”, “it is how cryptography works,” and the MITM attack “is endemic to public key cryptography, not just WhatsApp.”
It’s worth noting that none of the security experts or the company itself have denied the fact that, if required by the government, WhatsApp can intercept your chats. They do say; however, WhatsApp is designed to be simple, and users should not lose access to messages sent to them when their encryption key is changed. With this statement, agrees on a cybersecurity expert and CTO of Crypviser, Vadim Andryan.
“The Man-in-the-Middle attack threat is the biggest and historical challenge of asymmetric cryptography, which is the base of end-to-end encryption model. It’s hard to say, is this “backdoor” admitted intentionally or its became on front due lack of reliable public — key authentication model. But it definitely one of the huge disadvantages of current cryptographic models used for secure instant communication networks, and one of the main advantage of Crypviser platform.”
Crypviser has introduced a new era of cryptography based on Blockchain technologies. It utilizes Blockchain to eliminate all threats of Man-in-the-Middle attack and solves the historical public key encryption issue by using decentralized encryption keys, exchanges, and authorization algorithms. The authentication model of Crypviser provides public key distribution and authorization in peer-to-peer or automated mode through Blockchain.
After commercial launch of Crypviser unified app, ”messenger” for secure social communication will be available on the market in free and premium plans. The free plan in peer-to-peer authentication mode requires user interaction to check security codes for every new chat and call. The full-featured premium plan offers Blockchain based automated encryption model and powerful professional security features on all levels.
You can see the comperisation table of Crypviser with centralized alternatives in the below table
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