Telescoping batons in action! - The sex-violence-state nexus, illustrated

At right you see the cover of Naše Vojsko — Vojesnký a policejní magazín (“Our Military — The Military and Police Manazine”), a Czech publication. This is issue 3/2009, and the magazine is in its fifth year of production.

I picked up this issue at Svět Knihy Praha 2009, the annual Prague book fair, earlier this year. The cover photo really caught my eye.

The article which goes with the photo is entitled “Teleskopy v akci” (“Telescoping batons in action”). It features a series of photographs in which men dressed in clown suits military and police uniforms can be seen using these telescoping police batons to:

• Immobilize a man in a pain hold which threatens to break his elbow
• Subdue a prone man
• Project an image of power
• Conduct close combat with an unruly crowd
• Smash a train window
• Smash the window of a van
• Threaten the resident of an apartment during a raid
• Inspect the underside of a vehicle with a mirror extension

There is also another photo accompanying the article, with the telescoping baton filling the role of striptease club dance pole, complete with a beautiful young lingerie-clad pole dancer.

Rather than project my own thoughts here, I’d like to invite you, gentle reader, to share yours. Your comments on the image are most welcome, but if you really want to have an impact, click through on the picture for the full-resolution version, and make your own blog post, Facebook note or whatever with it, alongside your own commentary.

Can the military coexist with social networking sites?

Gosh, I sure hope not.

The idea that Twitter, MySpace and Facebook could simply crash the modern cyber-state’s ability to wage war — which is to oppress, occupy, conscript, tax, torture, rape, murder, rob, poison, dispossess, expel, infect, regulate, control, police, imprison, degrade, dehumanize and destroy human beings — simply tickles me.

And it just may be possible.

At different times and in different combinations, military service personnel communication with the outside world is and has always been banned, blocked, censored, controlled, forced, edited in transit, misdirected, intercepted, co-opted, manipulated and so on.

The technology to do that has typically relied on the application of policy and physical means to the hired thugs themselves and their communications channels. In the dead age of empires, that mostly meant controlling the mails, access to military sites, physical documents and the like.

The modern mercenary for Leviathan has all manner of fresh, cool, exciting, low-power and long-reach wireless communications tools available which can beam messages, documents, position information, local data feeds and so forth around the globe to millions — on or off the secret military networks — in seconds. Those tools, in combination with the existing social networking services, might well make it impossible for wealthier nations to maintain typical military discipline and operational security.

This is not to mention that the tools are sometimes used by accident, and that just like the number of intentional uses, the number of accidental uses in increasing in tandem with the tools’ growing reach, range, speed, popularity, ease of use, market penetration, protocol and network compatibility, interchangeability, user loyalty and the like, plus their shrinking costs, sizes, power profiles, new-user learning curves, and detectability by Powers That Be and Pointy-Haired Bosses.

Let’s hope that’s enough to make the modern makers of mass misery not just obsolete, but impossible.

But if it’s not enough, what’s coming is distributed, peer-to-peer, organic, cypherpunk- and crypto-anarchist-created Facebook- and Twitter-like social networking and communication services that support unbreakable hard encryption, market-produced unfalsifiable digital identity management, mathematically guaranteed transactional and locational anonymity by default or at will, untraceable anonymous digital bearer certificate trading networks and, of course, assassination markets.

And when those things launch, they’re going to launch on all channels. Linux clients? You betcha! MAC OS X? Yes we can! Windows Vista? ¡Viva Bill Gates! Official Apple iStore version for iPhone? Gosh yes! But it doesn’t stop there, of course — there will be interfaces and gateways springing up on everything from your old-school two-way pager to instant messaging services like ICQ, AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Skype, Gadu-gadu and all the rest. Plugins and widgets and gizmos and HUDs for Counterstrike and World of Warcraft and Second Life and Runescape. Classified ads in the local advertising circular. Newsletters and forms by post. Scratch-off cards in cereal boxes. And nice men and women at church or in cafes who field requests and handle messages into and out of the darknet for the benefit of those who can’t manage the tech themselves.

To troops everywhere: think about getting into a new line of work.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDCsp1atehU

Neda Soltani

(YouTube video comment by witness)

shery630

June 20, 2009

Place: Karekar Ave., at the corner crossing Khosravi St. and Salehi st. (Tehran)

A young woman who was standing aside with her father watching the protests was shot by a basij member hiding on the rooftop of a civilian house. He had clear shot at the girl and could not miss her. However, he aimed straight her heart. I am a doctor, so I rushed to try to save her. But the impact of the gunshot was so fierce that the bullet had blasted inside the victim’s chest, and she died in less than 2 minutes.

The protests were going on about 1 kilometers away in the main street and some of the protesting crowd were running from tear gass used among them, towards Salehi St.

The film is shot by my friend who was standing beside me.

Please let the world know.

Neda Soltani

From Facebook:

Neda Soltani (1982 – 20th June 2009; age 26–27) was an young Iranian woman whose killing, allegedly by Basij militia during the 2009 Iranian election protests, was captured on video by bystanders. The graphic videos were posted on the Internet, and her name quickly became a rallying cry for the opposition.

Neda means “voice” or “calling” in Persian, and she has been referred to as the “voice of Iran” and “a symbol” of this revolution taking place right now. Ya Neda, Ya Neda…. Ya Neda.

In the sociopolitical sphere, what I find myself drawn to the most is the idea that we ought to reject any sort of institutionalized privilege: king over subject, collective over individual, priest over congregation, man over woman, master over slave, capital over labor, state over citizen (or non-citizen!). Alongside that, of course, I have my own preferences that I advocate as well, but an opposition to privilege, at least, ought to be universal.

Power and privilege are two different things. Privilege is that which says “okay for me, banned for thee”.

I have no issue at all with consensual organization, employment, business per se. The “authority“, the power, which arises by virtue of reputation, of achievement, of value given to others, by appreciation from others is not the authority I oppose: it is the type of non-consensual authority which gives some people a presumption of greater social worth and an expectation of deference to them, usually codified in oppressive institutions, the most visible and omnipresent of which is the state.

Unable to find the version by The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (1990?), which was my first exposure to this wonderful work, I present a fine mashup of the original track by Gil Scott-Heron (1970) together with “California über Alles” (1979) by the Dead Kennedys, previously featured at this very blog in its later “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now” remake verson.

Scott-Heron’s original lyrics, from his site:

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.