ISSN 2562-9948
On Thursday, April 25, 2019, I had the honour of participating in two separate radio interviews concerning the case of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The first was with Glen Ford of Black Agenda Radio, and the second was with Chris Cook of “Gorilla Radio” at CFUV 101.9 FM—both of the sound files are available below. […]
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Big Chief, Big Daddy, Big Babysitter to the World If “winning hearts and minds” is at the top of your global campaign agenda for strategic communication, then you need to insert yourself into some of the most intimate, domestic, and familial places of restive, hungry, and increasingly angry populations. Getting all domestic is what the […]
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Encoding Poverty, Backwardness, and Dependency in US Military Imagery Bare feet. Ever since I was a small child, I have been made aware of how not wearing shoes was symbolically loaded with ideas of poverty, backwardness, primitiveness, or being low class. Images of barefoot people in newspapers and magazines almost always showed villagers in Africa […]
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This and previous issues have been archived on a dedicated site—please see: ENCIRCLING EMPIRE. For frequent updates, please “like” our Facebook page and/or follow on Twitter. Over the period of a month, from October to November of this year, an experiment was attempted: to deliver an extended “lecture” via Zero Anthropology and its Twitter and […]
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“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist—McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps”. (Friedman, 1999/3/28) With keenly supportive interest from […]
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The following is an extract from my chapter, “A Flickr of Militarization: Photographic Regulation, Symbolic Consecration, and the Strategic Communication of ‘Good Intentions’,” published in Good Intentions: Norms and Practices of Imperial Humanitarianism (Montreal: Alert Press, 2014), pp. 185-279: US military documents make it quite clear that, for the military, a photograph is a straightforward, […]
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The following is an extract from my chapter, “A Flickr of Militarization: Photographic Regulation, Symbolic Consecration, and the Strategic Communication of ‘Good Intentions’,” published in Good Intentions: Norms and Practices of Imperial Humanitarianism (Montreal: Alert Press, 2014), pp. 185-279: In 2009 the Department of the Army produced a field manual titled, “Visual Information Operations” (US […]
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The following is an extract from my chapter, “A Flickr of Militarization: Photographic Regulation, Symbolic Consecration, and the Strategic Communication of ‘Good Intentions’,” published in Good Intentions: Norms and Practices of Imperial Humanitarianism (Montreal: Alert Press, 2014), pp. 185-279: One of the possibly more fruitful areas of inquiry to come out of studies of contemporary […]
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Could it be any more obvious how the Pentagon has learned to mimic certain styles of anthropological photography as shown in the instance above? Resembling any of a vast number of photographs of or by anthropologists, such as famous ones of Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead “in the field,” this one also features the note-taking […]
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Encircling Empire Reports is a selection of essays, blog posts, and news reports covering a given time period, providing links and representative extracts or key passages from each resource, usually focusing on certain countries/continents and/or processes in each report. The focus of the reports ranges from imperialism discussed in broad strokes, to specific facets of […]
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On 20 January 2009, this is what an instrument of American pacification stated on his entry into office: To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to […]
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By Rev. Martin Luther King 4 April 1967 Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with […]
Read More…[This is the third and final article in a series of three about Wikileaks. The first was “The Wikileaks Revolution” that led to a parallel article published in CounterPunch. The second one was “Wikileaks and the Moral Dualism of the U.S. State Department.”] “I,______, in the Presence of the Mighty Ones, do of my own free […]
Read More…The New Imperialism is the title of an annual seminar which I offer at Concordia University to advanced undergraduates. It is an unusual course, and given the content of past student evaluations, one that is extremely popular with participants who unanimously rated it as excellent on all levels. Part of the reason might be that there […]
Read More…Adding far more detail to what was discussed in the last post, “Justifying Corporate Welfare for the Military: What the Logic Sounds Like,” the following is Hugh Gusterson‘s article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published 29 October 2010. An open letter to the Tea Party BY HUGH GUSTERSON | 29 OCTOBER 2010 Congratulations […]
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ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY 