EUROPEAN NEGATION OF THE AFROSUBSAHARIAN PHILOSOPHY AND KNOWLEDGE
When Eurocentrism emerges it’s as a hegemonic political-ideological axis of domination, it does so on the basis of depreciation for the “others” peoples of the world, for totally economic purposes. And behind that, the disqualification of religious, intellectual and biological arguments. Institutions such as the Catholic Church, with blood and fire, impose on that “other world” the “Catholic” god, and for their part, the scientific communities of the time would see others – African beings – as the missing links among the monkeys or gorillas and the “humans.” Together, the religious and the scientific, become complicit in the emergence of a perspective of Eurocentric knowledge that would lead to a philosophy of contempt.
That philosophy of contempt became “Eurocentrism” and from there it developed into “universalism.” The “classic” Eurocentric arises as a result of geo-euro-narcissism. In short, the world began to revolve around Western Eurocentric hegemony.
In the 18th century with the most advanced intellectuals of Western Euro-geo-narcissism that philosophical essays appeared to justify thoughts that are unique, universal and vertical and to impose their Eurocentric knowledge and philosophy as an absolute truth that continues to endure to this day.
The time of the industrial revolution is the time of the consolidation of capitalism, the rise of the great European powers, where a discussion scenario will be created that will include the existence or not of God, the questioning of feudalism and its different modalities and the concept of the power of the reigns prolonged in the transfer of power to their descendants.
From that century, the prevailing vertical government models and their economic models for intensive exploitation purposes would arise not only for human beings but also for the sensitive planetary ecosystem. Reviewing the bibliography of that century is extremely important since it is from there that a form of thought would be built that will come to dominate the different European philosophical currents and its projection into conquered and colonized countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the so-called “Latin” America and the Caribbean which stripped them of the different ways of thinking and knowing the world.
In his extraordinary book Laurente Estéve (2002), criticizes these avant-garde thinkers of the 18th century. Estéve tells us that Montesquieu in his book “The spirit of the laws”, among other things, affirmed that: “most of the peoples of the Coast of Africa are wild or barbaric. They don’t have industries, they don’t have a point for art, they have precious metals in abundance that they get from the hands of nature. (Laurent, 2002: 162)
This vision about the “others” kind of the men would influenced the thinking of the independence heroes of the Americas, who spoke of the “lights”, failed to illuminate the Africans way of thinking and instead simplified it via obscurantism as “savagery”
This idea remained in Europe until the end of the 18th century, supported by Jean Jaques Rousseau, who believed in the improvement of human races through climate and education, believing that savages and orangutans could learn to speak and were able to reach the intelligence and science only with which they were granted. (Harris, 1982: 70-71)
The great philosophers like Kant (1982), Hegel, Hume and Voltaire would add to the construction of the philosophy of contempt. Immanuel Kant refers in his theoretical classics the following:
In the torrid countries man matures before in all aspects, but does not reach the perfection of temperate zones. The human race in its most perfect expression manifests itself in the white race. Indians and yellows have a meager talent. Blacks have an even lower level, and the lowest of all is that of a part of the American population. The inhabitants of the temperate zones are more beautiful physically, more workers, more cheerful, more moderate in their passions and more intelligent than any other human race in the world. (Kant, 1982: 78-79)
This expression by Kant about the cult of Western beauty is justification what I have called “euro/geonarcicism”. In his eagerness to disqualify aesthetics and the link with some scientific knowledge of Africans and their diaspora, Kant attacks, relying on another racist philosopher, the German David Hume (1711-1776), who argued that knowledge came from a high sensitivity, and according to him the Africans did not have enough sensitivity to achieve some kind of knowledge:
The blacks of Africa by nature lack a sensitivity that rises above the insignificant. Mr. Hume challenges to be presented with an example that a black man has shown talent, and states that among the hundreds of thousands transported to foreign lands, and although many of them have obtained freedom, not one has been found that has I have imagined something great art in art, in science or in any other honorable quality, while whites frequently present the case of those who, due to their superior conditions, rise from a humble state and conquer an advantageous reputation. (Kant, 1982)
Not content to denigrate the Afro-epistemological development that already existed in sub-Saharan Africa, they ignored that, for example, in what is now Mali, there were universities such as Sankore, a large Afro-epistemic training center located in Toumbuctu or commented on the journey of Abubaraki II to the lands of what is now called America.
Before the emergence of historical Eurocentrism there were already historians such as Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) who systematized not only the history of the Middle East, but also built bridges with Africa:
Its monumental history of the Berbers is the most complete socio-historical study ever written about the Maghreb, in one of the volumes of this history it dedicates famous pages to the Mali empire. We owe him the list of the sovereigns of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries until the year 1390. The prolegomena constitute the basis of sociology and highlight the principles of a scientific and objective history, based on the criticism of the sources. (Niane, 1985: 25)
Eurocentric executioners also kill with silence, silencing the great historical contributions that are not in their circles and that is an evil that remains in a strong Eurocentric academic trend and reproduced with the assimilated academics of the Americas, Europe and Africa.
Two other fourteenth-century Arab researchers “Ibn Battuta and Al-’UMari in essence, show how many fruitful observations belied the stereotyped ideas of bookish culture” (Devise, 1985: 689).
Following the philosophy of contempt, embodied in Mr. Hume, let’s read how he attacks the Afrosubsaharan spiritual concept:
So essential is the difference between these two human races; It seems as great in spiritual faculties as color. The religion of the Fetithes, among them extended, is perhaps a kind of idolatrous cult that falls into the insignificant as deep as it seems possible in human nature. A bird’s feather, a cow horn, a shell or any other vulgar thing, once consecrated with some words, becomes the object of reverence and invocation in oaths. (Kant, 1982)
Once again, ignorance is expressed in this quotation for the domination of Europeans about African spirituality. It was not a fetish, as the European slave traders disparagingly placed the orishas, voodoo or nkisis. It was not about idolatrous cults but about the three-dimensional relationship of the world of the living, the dead and those who will come in the future. Spirituality was and is part of the power of knowledge in the African tradition. What for Africa was already great knowledge settled at the beginning of the 10th century, for these social scientists of the 18th century, it was not knowledge, nor spirituality.
Long before the French declaration of the French revolution in the 18th century, the Kurukan Fuga letter, the first letter on rights and respect for the human being, was written in the former Mandinga empire in 1236. That letter also reflects respect for nature as part of spirituality. The Europeans of the “Enlightenment” never understood that the basis of African spirituality has to do with nature, the cosmos, as well as the relationship between physical death and continuity of life in a spiritual dimension. That these Eurocentric philosophers could not understand. They never understood what we call today as an afroepistemology.
For his part, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) said: “What we understand as Africa is the segregated and lacking history, that is, what is still wrapped in extremely primitive forms, which we have analyzed as a previous step before of venturing into universal history ”(Hegel, 1976: 9).
In that sense, the Russian researcher Dmitri A Olderogge, before this Hegel trial, argues that this conception greatly influenced linguists and historians, since that division of historical and non-historical peoples placed the former as engines of history “while that the passivity of the seconds would have kept them out of the spiritual development of humanity. According to Hegel there is no real historical evolution in Africa itself (Olderoge, 1979: 24).
The three essential aspects of Afroepistemology: knowledge, spirituality and human rights – which already existed in subsaharan Africa – were despised by Westerners to impose the philosophy of exclusion, racism and violence, and ignorance of the knowledge of others.
As it is expressed to us by the sage of Burkina Fasso, Joseph Ki-Zerbo (1922-2006):
The history of Africa, as of all mankind, is, in effect, the story of an awareness. The history of Africa must be rewritten because until now it has been frequently masked, camouflaged, disfigured and mutilated. By “the force of things”, that is to say by ignorance and interest. This continent that traumatized centuries of oppression has seen as generations of travelers, blacksmiths, explorers, missionaries, proconsuls and scholars from all over the world petrified the image of misery, barbarism, irresponsibility and chaos in their image. (Ki-Zerbo 1979: 7)
This rosary of contempt was imposed over the centuries, and even managed to permeate many African and Afro-descendant assimilated intellectuals who now despised their own history, hence the need to reconstruct memory and rewrite history as Ki-Zerbo poses.
Most European chroniclers in contact with sub-Saharan Africa described with their conceptual arsenal what for them was diabolical, bestial and that did not correspond to their “civilizational” model. Like the chroniclers of “Indians” or America, they described, within their respective ignorances, the unknown as fantastic, abnormal and monstrous expressing this in their drawings by placing their heads on the belly of men and women from “those lands.” But another aspect to note is that this philosophy of Eurocentric contempt desperately racialized, for economic purposes, the relationship between human beings as expressed by the former general director of UNESCO, Senegalese Amadou Mbo:
There is also another phenomenon that has significantly impaired the objective study of the African past. I refer to the appearance, with the trafficking of blacks and colonization, of racial clichés that generate contempt and misunderstanding and so deeply rooted that they even corrupted the very concepts of historiography. From the moment in which the nations of “whites” and “blacks” were resorted to generically designate masters and subjugated peoples, Africans had to fight against a double economic and psychological servitude. Recognizable by the pigmentation of the skin, destined for work in mines and on plantations, turned into a commodity like any other, the African came to embody, in the conscience of his oppressors, a racial essence. Imaginary and illusory inferior, black. (Mbo, 1979: 5)
The long process of structuring the psychological inferiority of the African being and his descendants – with the objective of economic exploitation by Europe – definitely marked the history of the peoples of Africa and their diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean space. The dominant Catholic religion, both in Africa and in the Americas, contributed greatly to the psychological introjection of the inferiority of a white, superior God, before the Afro-sub-Saharan gods and turned into demons.
Westerners were sure that spirituality constituted a form of resistance, hence the dominant religion became a coercive instrument to erase the African worldview, since this was a danger to break these underestimation stereotypes.
Eliminating the languages of the Africans to impose that of the communicationist, since language is a factor of unity and permanent struggle, was an instrument of cultural degradation fiercely used by the West to achieve its goal of psycholinguistic domination.
In Africa they imposed the colonial languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, today Portuguese, French and English are dominant in most Afro-Sub-Saharan countries. They tried to make the different ethnic groups feel ethnolinguistic shame in order to better assimilate, colonize and recolonize them.
In the diaspora, colonialism did not accept ethnolinguistic communication, hence they mixed men and women of one ethnic origin with another so that they could only communicate with the language of the master. In the diaspora the essential aspects of languages of African origin were only reduced in religious spaces, especially the Yoruba, Kikongo, Efik-Efok and Fon languages.
The person’s name, as it is known in Africasubsahariana, represents a story, a symbol, a tradition. That was very clear to the colonialists as a factor of domination, hence in Africa and in the diaspora they tried to erase the name of ethnic origin. In the Kongo Dia Ntotela (today Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Congo Brazzaville), the kings or Ntotelas assimilated to Catholicism assumed Catholic names like Joao I, whose original name was Nzinga Nkuwu.
In the diaspora, few names were preserved of African origin. However, many ethnonyms were preserved mainly in Afro-Colombian, Afro-Ecuadorian, Afro-Basel communities, such as Arara, Matamba, Luango, Mina, Lucumi, among others. The names of places (place-names) of African origin were also preserved to be preserved in memory, such as Birongo, Mandinga, Yanga, among other towns and places in the Americas.
African spirituality is the basis of his philosophy, it is what gives him understanding and perception of the world, hence the slave trade and slavery tried both in African territories and in the diaspora to combat symbols, oracles and worldview , which they did not achieve. As the Yoruba philosophy says “Bí Olórun oba mi idá mi nì mò nse”, that is to say “I am as my God has created me”.
APPROXIMATION TO AFROEPISTEMOLOGY
Afroepistemology is the knowledge and perception that we Africans and their descendants have of our own worlds, our worldview, our ways of being, gesturing, walking, loving, being, sharing. That vision is the basis of the social construction of knowledge without it being mediated by others. Our world is our world, which we can share with others on equal terms. Thus we have built our philosophy of African dignity, as opposed to the philosophy of contempt elaborated by the Eurocentric vision.
African and Afro-descendant philosophy, at a time being questioned by some African academic scholars “assimilated” to the European philosophical pattern, does not emerge or emerge as a response to Eurocentrism. It exists and period. As the Nigerian, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Wole Soyinka, said, “the tiger does not say his tigritud … jumps.”
The Encyclopedists and intellectuals of the Enlightenment never gave a thought to the idea that there could be an African philosophy, or at least an African worldview different from that of Europeans, made invisible, denied, ignored within their own ignorance the African philosophical and historical currents as result, first of their own developments as a result of the civilizations existing in that continent and secondly by the contact with Islam in an ebb and flow, exchanges, adaptation and retraining, taking as an example the dialogic relationship between the former Mali Empire structured by the leader Bambara (Mandinga) Sundjata Keita at the end of the 13th century and the visit Kanku Musa, Keita’s nephew, to Mecca and his stay in Cairo in 1336. Subsequently, “the successor of Sundjata, who was his son Mansa Uli, made a pilgrimage to Mecca during the time of Mamluk Sultan Baybars. The Islamic concept of the empire (Mali) took shape under the power of Mansa Musa and his brother Mansa Sulayman (1341-1360), who favored the construction of mosques and the development of Islamic knowledge” (Herbek, 1992: 99).
This connection between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, through Islam, came to strengthen Afro-epistemology, long before the arrival of the West.
Mali had become an important reference for the world at that time with the creation of Sankore University and became the most important reference in sub-Saharan Africa for the spread of Islam.
CONCEPTUALIZING AFROPHILOSOPHY
For a long time the West was defined by a monopoly of knowledge, arbitrarily defining what is and is not science, or what is and is not philosophy, of course they tried to castrate the diversity of thought. However, as some African authors say the Africanity of our philosophy resides, as Hountondji said, above all in the geographical belonging of those who produce it and in the intellectual relationship. As a consequence, to speak of African philosophy is to designate the authors of this philosophy and the recipients and affirm that they are all African natives or African cultural heirs of an African nature and descent (Kinyongo, 1983: 414).
If we believe AJ Smet’s claims that the problem of the existence of an African philosophy has been raised for the first time by P. Tempels in 1944, his predecessors had not used the term philosophy only in the sense psychology and wisdom (Kinongo, 1983).
That the Reverend Tempels was raised in the context of philosophical contempt on the part of Europe the existence of another way of thinking, especially in Africa, was undoubtedly a heresy.
But philosophy without historical knowledge has little foundation. That is why the binomial philosophy and historical knowledge go hand in hand, one justifies the other.
Hence this extraordinary reflection of Amadou Mbo, when, UNESCO, begins the process of writing the general history of Africa.
For a long time, myths and prejudices of all kinds have hidden the real history of Africa from the world. African societies were held by societies that could not have history. Despite the important work carried out, since the first decades of this century (20th century), by pioneers such as Leo Frobenius, Maurice Delafosse, Arturo Labriola, a good number of non-African specialists linked to certain postulates held that these societies did not they could be subject to scientific study, mainly due to lack of sources and written documents. (Mbo, 1985: 13)
These North African specialists had an approach to sub-Saharan Africa based on the works of the chroniclers, logbooks of the captains of the slave ships, report of the colonial administrators, colonizing Catholic priests and travelers. On the other hand, if some of them were physically in “those remote corners” of the planet or as the novelist Joseph Conrad said “in the heart of darkness”, the perception they had was prejudiced perception. Very few, such as the French ethnographer Marcel Grileau, took into account the “word of the elders” or the connoisseurs of African cultures, the case of the Dogon in Mali, as well as the segmented spiritualities in a story that gave and gives sense of town
Returning to Amathar Mbo, it reminds us:
Although The Iliad and the Odyssey could rightly be considered essential sources of ancient Greece, however, all value to the African oral tradition was denied, that memory of the peoples that provides the plot of so many events that have marked their lives. When writing the history of a part of Africa, they were limited to outside sources of this continent, to give a vision not of what the march of the African peoples could be, but of what was believed to be. Frequently, as the European average age, production systems and social relations, as well as political institutions, were taken as a point of reference, they were only understood by reference to Europe’s past. (Mbo, 1985)
Today we are facing an other reality. It is a long process of demystifying the epistemic contribution of sub-Saharan Africa to humanity. Already the works of intellectuals such as Cheikh Anta Diop made these contributions very clear. Subsequently, the successive meetings organized by UNESCO since 1966 between Africa and America have left an important mark to rebuild it. These Eurocentric approaches today are questioned both from the emergence of new academic practices and from the spiritual practices of Afro-Saharan and diaspora carriers.
THE CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC POLICIES IN EDUCATION
It is pedagogy, understanding how the daily practices of transmission of the substrate of the knowledge of civilizations, is one of the fundamental tools to resume our Afro-epistemology. The West tried to impose, and still continues to do, two types of pedagogy. The first was the pedagogy of submission, where the church played a fundamental role through forced religious practices. That pedagogy was expressed in a rosary of recommendations to cleanse the soul of sin to our ancestors and ancestors, erase spiritual practices, changing names, eliminating tongues until kneeling before the cross and before God on earth represented by the Catholic / Apostolic and Roman ecclesiastical power and formerly the master and today the power of wild capitalism. Evangelization was the masterpiece of the pedagogy of submission, then it became in the words of Pablo Freire, the pedagogy of the oppressed (1970). That is, the introjection of oppression as hopelessness. The other pedagogy was that of reproduction, understanding it as the process of assimilating the contemptuous knowledge of the other towards us, reproduced in the formal educational system with a well structured and castrating curriculum about our ancestral knowledge.
Preserving the cultural codes which originated in Africa, having gone through long traumatic processes of slavery, racism and discrimination, is not simply an act of heroism, it is an act of resilience, that is, having had a high coefficient of struggle against adversity. But to preserve those cultural codes expressed in the touches of the different rhythmic cells of the drums, in the codes of ethics (human values), cuisine, hair styles, among others, a technique, a methodical one was needed to transmit all those codes. That is what we call Maroon pedagogy, and we say Maroon for having traversed the times and obstacles that the dominant sectors placed on the road.
These pedagogical practices, recognized or not by the academy and the formal education system, have managed to overcome denigration and substation. Transmitting, conserving and resizing Cimarroan Pedagogy was, is and will continue to be a permanent fight against adversity. The pedagogical practices of the cimarronaje are in open and permanent struggle against the practices of the pedagogy of reproduction. Both coexist in the formal and non-formal education system, it is a totally antagonistic contradiction that is in us and ourselves.
The pedagogical practices of reproduction are all those vertical attitudes of the facilitator or teacher in the educational system in the transmission of Eurocentric knowledge. They express the centrality of power and knowledge. They are practical, castrating and totally contemptuous towards diversity, difference and rejection of possible complementarities between academically legitimated knowledge and socially and culturally produced knowledge.
Cimarron pedagogies have the purpose of fostering our knowledge of both Africa and the diaspora. It is a challenge that we, the Afro-descendant teachers in alliance with those who have conserved, recreated and innovated the original cultures of Africa in all their diversity, have to accept. It is pedagogy of the cimarronaje, the forms from the musical perspectives expressed in the development of more than one hundred and sixty rhythms of the Batas drums in the Ocha rule, as well as their different dances. The practices of maroon pedagogies in food patterns of Afrosubsaharan origin, as well as in the field of aesthetics and ethical contributions for the construction of fairer and more humane societies. Afroepistemology and Pedagogy of Cimarronaje is a proposal that should invite us to break the molds of folkloric or fetish reductionism to which we have been subjected by Western sciences denying all diversity. It is the search for our own paradigms in the framework of the Decade of Afro-descendant peoples that add to the incessant process of reconstruction and reconstruction of our history full of pain and hope.
It is urgent to implement in the educational systems of Latin America and the Caribbean the contributions of Africa and its descendants to our societies in two fundamental aspects: First modify the laws that govern our educational systems, for example in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela after a process In the struggle with Afro-descendant teachers and traditionalists, we achieved that in our new Education Law (2009), our African was recognized. Second, review the curricula and incorporate in them the historical, cultural, technological, spiritual aspects among others of the Africans and their descendants.
Former president Lula did this in Brazil with the compulsory teaching of specific texts on the history of Africans and their descendants and the translation of the eight volumes of the General History of Africa into Portuguese. At the meeting of the creation of CELAC in Caracas in 2011, agreement No. 17 states, “the participation of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples in the independence struggles and recognizing their moral, political, economic, spiritual and cultural contributions in the conformation of our identities and in the construction of our nations and democratic processes ”(CELAC, 2011).
This recognition, together with the recognition that our governments must make to the Decade of Afro-descendant Peoples, serves as an anchor to support us as academics and activists to press the educational public policies of our countries.
BIBLIOGRAFÍA
CELAC 2011 Declaración de la Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y del Caribe (Caracas: CELAC).
Devisse, J. 1985 “África en las relaciones intercontinentales” en Historia General de África (Madrid: Unesco).
Freire, P. 1970 Pedagogía del Oprimido (Montevideo: Tierra Nueva)
Hegel, G. F. W. 1976 Filosofía de la Historia (Buenos Aires: Claridad).
Herbek, I. 1992 “La expansión del islam en África hacia el sur del Sahara” en Historia General de África. (Madrid: Unesco).
Hernández, A. et. al. s/f Las ideas Racista y búsqueda de la identidad
Mexicana. (Zaragoza: Facultad de Estudios Superiores, UNAM). Kant, I. 1982 Lo bello y lo sublime (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe) séptima edición.
Kinyongo, J. 1982 La philosophie africaine et son histoire en Les etudes philosophiques (París: Presses Universitaires de France). Ki-Zerbo, J. 1979 Un continente en busca de su pasado (París: El correo de la Unesco) agosto-septiembre.
Laurente, E. 2002 Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot: du genre humaine au bois d’ébéne (París: Unesco).
Mbo, A. 1979 La historia general de África (París: El Correo de la Unesco).
Niane, D. T. 1985 Historia General de África (Madrid; París: Tecnos; Unesco).
Olderogge, D. A. 1979 Los homínidos africanos contra una teoría errónea (París: Correo de la Unesco) agosto-septiembre.
Chavez and Soros – United in Hate against the Republican Party
CastroChavismo is not “Cultural Marxism”
Use of the term CastroChavismois descriptive of the Socialist-Affiliated Transnational Advocacy Networks in the U.S. receiving support and funding for theactivitiesfrom socialist governments in Latin America (PSUV, PCC, PT); socialist parties in the EU (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung); and transnational NGOs (Open Society Initiative).
The term explicitly alludes to descriptions of activities historically engaged in by the Cuban Communist Party categorized as subversion, while simultaneously differentiating it from narratives about “Cultural Marxism” that may or may not have antisemitic overtones.
People who say I’m being Deleuzional by defining it as a repetition that is also different would be correct.
CastroChavismo is a set of activities with goals that can be organized according to principles of Knowledge Management.
Individuals participating in the events and activities associated with CastroChavismo can be classified as antisemitic for two reasons.
(1) Functional support of the goals and organizations connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as others that have avowed their desire to destroy the state of Israel – the lone Jewish-majority state in the world, which is located in the historic Jewish Homeland – which has been documented by Timothy Pearce, by Tariq Ali, and can be shown at in the alliances of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.
The claim that someone’s ethnic Jewish background, George Soros, who does not even practice Judaism and who Israel also seeks to expose, within the analytical framework of CastroChavismo does not make it antisemitic.
In fact, if we were to extend that same logic – given my own ethnic Jewish background – one could just as similarly claim that all those who deny the historical correctness of CastroChavismo are themselves, anti-Semites.
In fact, people who try and disqualify interlocutors because of this are using a long-established anti-semitic trope.
In fact, given the aforementioned political orientation of those involved with CastroChavismo networks and their use of antisemitic tropes – it’s appropriate to say that people who deny CastroChavismo are themselves antisemitic as their attempt to police speech acts supports those that seek the elimination of Israel.
A Historical Account, Data Analysis, Network Ethnography & Theoretic Exegesis
that
Demonstrates Dr. Philip N. Howard
– Director of the Oxford Internet Institute – Disseminates Disinformation
to Further the Ambitions of the Bolivarian Socialist Movement
and
Demonstrates his Participation in The Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity (REDH),
a Counter-Intelligence Operation
Developed and Managed by the Venezuelan and Cuban Intelligence Services
Abstract:
This article presents the case that Dr. Philip N. Howard has a history of fundamentally fraudulent research designed to politically polarize, misinform and misdirect his audience.
After providing an account of how the Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Philip N. Howard, violated the spirit and letter of the American Sociological Associations code of professional ethics by: (1) refusing to update self-published research (2) by publishing and promoting articles from multiple investigations whose research design was without merit (3) providing testimony to government bodies whose effect was to misdirect or misinform.
Content analysis based on the messaging effects of these publications leads to a hypothesis that Philip N. Howard is a Socialist – a close reading of Philip N. Howard’s academic work and network ethnography proves that this is true and, furthermore, that he is likely a member of a trans-national network of alter-globalization academics promoted by the Hugo Chavez founded, Cuban and Venezuelan Intelligence Services’ managed “Networks of Intellectuals”.
Keywords: Disinformation, Political Manipulation, Fraud, Subversive Academic Networks, Sao Paulo Forum
***
After Dr. Philip N. Howard and I were both quoted in the New York Times about Facebook’s participation in the Social Science One investigation into Social Media and Democracy, I decided to visit the website of the Oxford’s Internet Institute (OII) and review their publications. Upon reading The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulationwhich Howard co-authored with Samantha Bradshaw I noticed four significant errors in their findings – described below – based on my investigation of Venezuela’s social media behavior over the past two years in partnership with Universidad Pontifica Bolivariana (UPB).
As this report was self-published, correctable in under five minutes with Adobe Acrobat Pro and as according to the American Sociological Association’s Code of Ethics Section 12.4 Subsection E it is considered best practice to update research in light of new data I sent OII an email with notification of their errors along with appropriate documentation on September 29th– three days after the Inventory’s publication.
My initial contact was ignored, but after repeated follow ups I received a response, briefly corresponded with Dr. Howard and was then informed that he would not update the document, not answer questions I had casting doubt on his research methodology, and was informed that he would not solicit UPB’s expert opinion for their 2020 Inventory and that he was instructing his subordinates at the OII to ignore all future requests from me. I was shocked by such behavior.
At first I graciously believed this was a result of mere narcissistic negligence – which is random in its effect. But given that this was verbatim the same behavior I’d witnessed when asking certain questions of American media producers that were currently or previously had worked for Venezuela’s state media company I was suspicions.
After investigating Dr. Philip N. Howard’s academic work, press mentions, and professional associations I now understand the reason he wanted to foreclose the inclusion of counterfactual data to his claims is likely a result of his Socialist political convictions manifesting in a desire to misdirect attention from Venezuela’s online and in-real-life political propaganda activities and – most especially – the Leon Trotsky-inspired “network of networks” founded by Hugo Chavez in 2005 to help develop a new Socialist Internationale by providing assistance, amongst other means, to subversive professors – a policy which Venezuela’s ally Cuba has engaged in since 1963.
First I’ll illustrate Dr. Howard’s public history of correcting trivial research errors.
After this I document several significant errors found in his research whose baseless findings have made their way into the press. After this trend is established, I examine Dr. Howard’s testimony to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Service to show his engagement in misdirection and that the submission of his expert opinion the U.K. Parliament was disinformation.
Content analysis is then used to illustrate that the general thrust of Dr. Howard’s research project has been to mirror the political positions of Socialist and Communist Parties associated with the Alter-Globalization/International Socialism Project mentioned above.
Following this I document the evidence showing Dr. Philip Howard’s engagement with Communist and Communist-sympathizing actors and his use of Marxian theoretical frameworks within his published research. In close, I demonstrate what appears to be the effects of participation in the Cuban and Venezuelan Government sponsored Network of Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity and summarize the results of this exercise in ethnographic and process mapping.
Philip N. Howard’s History of Correcting and Ignoring Research Errors
To err is human, to correct mistakes is divine – so when Philip N. Howard amends his article Zuckerberg Goes to Russia as the Global Network Initiative Turns 4 on the blog for Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policyhe is aligning himself with best academic practices. The same is true for the three articles (1– 2– 3) of Philip N. Howard has posted on the Pacific Standard website, and the error he describes in a Tweet on December 9th, 2018. And yet there exists several other research articles and testaments of his which remain unexpiated and that, when placed together indicate his research project’s alignment with the Bolivarian goals.
Both of these journalists, however, overlooked two even larger issues that categorically invalidates the study that this Mother Jones article was based on.
(1) During the period under Oxford’s investigation SparkToro estimated at least 61% of Donald Trump’s Twitter followers were false accounts – which nowhere within the methodology is it stated that this was even accounted for.
(2) According to research from the University of Cambridge, bots retweet much more content than do real humans. Again – nowhere within the methodology is it stated that this was accounted for.
(3) According the findings section of the report a variant of the k-core reduction was used to reduce the data-set to 13,477 users, yet on page 6 of the online supplement it states that the k-core consisted of 12,413 users. Questions about this discrepancy sent to the Oxford Internet Institute went unanswered.
In other words, ironically enough, the researcher who claims to be the authority on “exposing the role of bots and trolls” doesn’t even account for the fact that bots were producing the majority of the content analyzed in his own dataset.
That such an research was published at all ought to surprise anyone familiar with the Twitter ecosystem. Indeed Philip N. Howard seems to admit that this line of research was fundamentally erroneous in a Tweet on February 1st– four days before Mother Jones and several other outlets announced to the world that Donald Trump fake-news sharing fools.
And yet despite these public criticisms and the larger research design flaws – the article remain published and the outlets which cover it remain uncorrected.
After reading the two articles published by OII, I sent a request for more information about the WhatsApp investigation on November 25th, as I has no interest in the Twitter study as I population studies on that platform are essentially invalid, in contrast to what OII claims – which will be discussed later.
The questions that I asked OII were as follows:
Are the privatized data-set available for researchers to review?
Is there a publicly available data repository for review by researchers that contains JUST the 99,988 media files, the 50,795 Original URLS, the 38,800 coded links or even just 200 coded images/videos?
Since URLs were coded on a domain and sub domain level, is there a codebook available to review that shows the classification of domains?
In the sampling and methods section, it’s stated that 200 images/videos were randomly chosen for coding but there the method for randomization is not described.
All these questions stem from a desire to see if their findings could be duplicated. This is important as replicability is a key component of Science, and the inability to do this in the materials science, data science and social sciences has caused some to describe the current capacity of research teams not to repeat experiments and get the same findings of others as a replicability crisis.
That I received no response from OII is suspicious enough in itself, however after doing cursory research into Caio Machado it’s all the more so. Sao Paulo, Brazil – where Machado went to law school – has long been a center of socialist activity. Indeed it hosted the first iteration of a pan-Latin American conference of social movements, Communist and Socialist parties conceived of by Fidel Castro and Lula Brazil to help steer pan-Latin American integration called the Sao Paulo Forum. By itself Caio Machado having gone to law school in Sao Paulo, Brazil means nothing – but in light of the fact that he retweeted content from an account claiming to be the embodiment of the spirit of Communist Cultural Critic Mark Fisher and that he has – it appears – attended a lecture featuring Liberation Theologist Enrique Dussel it appears that there could be a possibility for unreported bias. I emailed Caio Machado, who responded to my introduction, but then decided not to respond to my question about the nature of his relationship to Liberation Theologist Enrique Dussel – pictured above receiving an award from Hugo Chavez from the magazine Humanidad en Red no 0– the magazine of the Red de Intelectuals y Artistas en Defensa de la Humanidad (REDH).
It’s possible that I’m incorrect in my assessment that the WhatsApp research that Oxford Internet Institute published is indeed valid – however given the omissions from their methodological description, their unwillingness to answer basic research design questions, to share data and that one of their researchers to answer a question related to a potential conflict of interest I’m highly suspicions of its legitimacy in light of all of the other issues related to Philip N Howard’s research.
Case Study: Fake Research Pro Venezuela
Philip N. Howard’s research falsely claims that Venezuela’s propaganda activities are far less active and complex then they actually are. Here are, in short, the sections that they get wrong.
Organizational Form and Preference:
The number of citizens and influencers listed on OII’s report is listed as blank – as if no one was engaged in propaganda on behalf of the Venezuelan government. However ABC International has published reports about citizens receiving money for citizen engagements on social media and it’s well known that Danny Glover, Oliver Stone and Roger Waters – and others – have received all gifts and payment for engaging in propaganda on Venezuela’s behalf.
Messaging and Valence:
TeleSUR’s official page shares memes which encourage violence against fascists (a substitute for American politicians, law enforcement, and those whose policies don’t align with Venezuela’s goals). A variety of Jewish groups have published about TeleSUR’s antisemitism and that of their contractors while Venezuela’s other government’s other pages share content meant to appeal to anti-Semites, or that present false, politically polarizing quotes from politicians, and deepfake nudes and images meant to drive hatred towards police.
Communication Strategies:
The OII reports that Venezuela isn’t using mass reporting to take down undesirable content. I provided them with a case study wherein that happened to me for my publications on these topics.
The OII report states that Venezuela isn’t using data driven strategies, however even if one hasn’t engaged in the research or collected data from interviews as UPB has – it’s an on its face absurd proposition that a media network with, which OII admits, multiple centers of activity and its own news network wouldn’t use data to monitor and manage their efforts.
Harassment and Threats of Violence:
While this is a category not included in Oxford’s report, thus something that I did not submit evidence of, had it been included I would have provided examples of digital harassment and threats of violence against me.
Philip N. Howard’s Political Testimony & Lax Ethica
Besides research with design flaws that renders its conclusions invalid, Philip N. Howard has also provided testimony to the British Crown and the United States Senate Intelligence Committee that had the effect of misdirecting politicians from multi-generational irregular, information warfare campaigns to focus exclusively on online activity equivalent with, more or less, to targeted spam campaigns.
Philip N. Howard’s False Research Attempts to Discredit the Brexit Results
“Given the scale of the online advertising achieved with the excess spending, combined with conservative estimates on voter modelling, I estimate that Vote Leave converted the voting intentions of over 800,000 voters in the final days of the campaign as a result of the overspend.”
A website called Order-Order published critical commentary on Philip N. Howard’s findings linked to two Twitter accounts of professionals in the field of statistics and data-journalism that debunked Howard’s testimony.
Their arguments against Philip N. Howard’s research findings are as follows:
The base is too high: the entire electorate was 46.5m.His basic argument is: 80m Facebook users saw the ads
10% click-through rate is much higher than is typically found for Facebook display advertising. Wordstream (US)says less than 1% — that may be based on impressions, not users. Average conversion is 9.2%, but politics is not a standard industry.
Howard’s section on conversion says that 10% click through, 10% believe and “a further 10% of that number can then be expected to do something.” This step is merged or omitted in the calculation.
Finally, the citation given is Howard’s own bookNew Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen says: “Banner ads on political topics generally had a 1 percent click-through rate”. This means that the citation contradicts the statement given in the Court submission.
In other words what Philip N. Howard submitted fundamentally flawed and invalid data to the politicians deciding legal issues related to Brexit.
Philip N. Howard Misleads and Misdirects the Senate Intelligence Committee
In his comments to the panel Philip N. Howard states that “The time for industry self-regulation has passed.” a position which echoes his 2014 editorials for the nationalization of Facebook.
At 1 hour, 19 minutes and 15 seconds into the hearing Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri asks Philip N. Howard “Of the other countries you’ve looked at who should we [the political body in charge of making decisions related to politics] be looking at after Russia that are likely impacting our [American] daily conversation.
Philip N. Howard responds: “Well in our research we look at Turkey, China, Hungary and Iran.”
This is a noteworthy in that it is a non-answer to the question – the way it’s framed Philip N. Howard is merely stating countries that the Oxford Internet Institute has investigated.
Senator Blunt, picking up on this, moves on to another interlocutor.
At 1 hour, 34 minutes and 28 seconds, Senator Joe Manchin again brings up the question asks Philip N Howard directly:
Which country poses the greatest threat to our democracy using social media platforms?
Which countries are making strides to do the same?
Philip N. Howard, again, does not answer the question. Instead he engages in another meandering digression before being Senator Joe Manchin gets him back on topic – at which point Philip N. Howard says – China has the greatest capacity. This, again, is not the question asked of him and, tellingly, despite having done all of this research at no point does he provide any explanation as to what makes one country more of a threat then another.
There are many potential reasons why Howard could have had such difficulty in answering a direct question, however the real reason was he wanted to waste the time of the Senators present and misdirect attention from the greater threat to American democracy – the 17 year long quantitative political programto develop a trans-national, socialist-oriented political party in the United States by Venezuela and Cuba in coordination with the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity (REDH) that help steer it’s development by acting as promoters, authorities and gatekeepers – the Network which Philip N. Howard is himself a part of – as well as their witting or unwitting assistants and financiers.
I’ll now explain first how the above-analyzed social science research findings are in fact anti-Truth, pro-Socialist propaganda and then demonstrate how Philip N. Howard’s career trajectory and academic writing demonstrates his communist political commitments and connections to REDH.
Oxford Internet Institute Research Mirrors Socialist Party Positions
The above graphic organizer shows a side-by-side comparison of research published by the Oxford Internet Institute with Philip N. Howard as the Primary Investigator and the political positions promoted by the Socialist Worker Party (U.K), the Democratic Socialists of America, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Revolutionary Communist Party (USA) and the Brazilian Workers Party (Brazil). Content analysis shows that both the Oxford Internet Institute under Philip N. Howard’s direction and the Socialist parties networked with Venezuela are promoting electoral invalidation of Brexit as well as the elections of Trump and Bolsonaro. I’ve already covered the latter two investigations, and will cover the issue of Brexit after the following two oversvations.
While in these particular articles here neither Oxford or the socialist parties explicitly reference each the other – it is interesting to note is that in the article Bot Use in the Presidential Election that the U.S. Marxist – Leninist Organization quotes Howard and the Oxford Internet Institute extensively.
Also worthy of note is that in the top right image which has the “Another Europe is Possible” banner that this has been a Socialist Worker organizing slogan since at least 2004, as evident from these Indymedia protest photos.
Given all this, and what will subsequentially be depicted, we can correct President Rodrigo Duterte’s claim that Oxford is for “stupid people”– with Oxford is for Cunning Crypto-Communist Professors.
Who Funds Philip N. Howard at Oxford?
Philip N. Howard’s funding comes from pro-Bolivarian Revolution sources.
The four institutional supporters for Oxford Internet Institute’s 2019 Inventory are the European Research Council, Hewlette Foundation, Luminate and the Adessium Foundation. Ascribing broad intentions to large funding councils can be highly problematic so I’ll focus on two facts that relate to the factual constellation developed herein.
Luminate is a subsection of the Pierre Omidyar Foundation, which also funds the strongly left-biased news-outlet The Intercept. The founder of The Intercept, Glen Greenwald, has documented connections to Trevor Fitzgibbon – who Venezuela has used for Public Relations – since at least 2009 when both participated in developing the second edition of the Voices of a People’s History of the United States Project. Notably Zinn is listed as one of the strategy developers for the REDH project. Fitzgibbon – who did PR for Julian Assange before and after he was granted Ecuadorian citizenship by President Rafael Correa, one a reliable ally of the Bolivarian project – also helped Greenwald get his big break by doing PR for Edward Snowden and arranging his safe travels to Russia.
“informed, based on and co-designed together with global environmental justice organizations; many of which had been building their own repositories of knowledge on such ecological conflicts over the past 30 years in some cases. These include the Observatory of mining conflicts of Latin America (OCMAL), Oilwatch, World Rainforest Movement, FIOCRUZ and the Brazilian network of Environmental Justice; GAIA; and the Centro di Documentazione sui Conflitti Ambientali (CDCA), as well as other sourcewe can say that a further aim of the EJAtlas is to support and contribute to the cohesiveness and self-awareness of an emerging globalizing movement for environmental justice (Martinez-Alier et al. 2016). An exercise that falls under what the historian Vijay Prashad describes as a socialist writing project — one intended to produce a confident community of struggle and to empower opposition to the status quo through the sharing of narratives that highlight the agency of those struggling to create better worlds.”
The project itself is fascinating en toto, but in relation to discussion I want to focus solely on three things.
First is the project’s avowedly socialist orientation.
Second is the use of Manuel Castells as an orienting figure – the introductory sentence invokes his scholarship with the statement: “The environmental movement may be “the most comprehensive and influential movement of our time” (Castells 1997: 67), representing for the ‘post-industrial’ age what the workers’ movement was for the industrial period.”
And third that of the authors is Joan Martinez-Alier – a political ecologist who’s given many speeches for the Latin American Council of Social Sciences, blogged for Venezuela’s Chavista website Apporea, and wrote in his report The Environmentalism of the Poor submitted for readership by U.N. that “Eco-Zapatism was overdue in Mexico”. In an article featured on the website of Venezuelan state media outlet TeleSUR, Joan Martinez-Alier’s work forms the basis for numerous ecological movements and the claims made by Delcy Rodriguez, Vice President of Venezuela, that the United States must abide by the Paris Climate Agreement.
Given that Philip N. Howard has written a book on Manuel Castells, this is appropriate theme on which to begin development.
Philip N Howard’s Intellectual and Professional Trajectory
Engagement with The Zapatista Uprising
In Pax Technica Philip N. Howard describes in brief his journey to the heart of a Marxist insurgency.
“In 1995 I traveled to Chiapas, Mexico, to meet with the Zapatista insurgents. I wanted to learn about their motivations and their struggle, and to understand why they were having such an unusual impact on international politics.”
Why did he go there?
“My first investigations took me to Chiapas to meet with the Zapatistas and learn about their internet strategies in 1994.”
While he describes little about his Mexico experiences in Pax Technica, he later wrote an article with Thomas Homer-Dixon that is, in short, a justification of the Marxist revolutionary movement. He also gives an interpretation of the events there that are quite at odds with the wider literature on the Zapatistas. He says, again in Pax Technica, that:
“The stories of the Zapatistas and the Arab Spring are not about nationalist fervor inspiring political revolution. They are not about religious fundamentalism. These movements were not particularly Marxist, Maoist, or populist. They had leaders, but employed comparatively flat organizations of informal teams…”
This is an unusual claims as it is so at odds with the specialist literature on the subject. Reading The Communist Roots of Zapatismo and the Zapatista Uprisingby Christopher Gunderson,The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexicoby Rand, Zapatista: Reinventing Revolution in MexicobyLuis Lorenzano or Todd Wolfson’s From the Zapatistas to Indymediayou’d learn that“Zapatismo emerged dialectically, through a series of confrontations, and was/is a fluid response to material conditions of struggle in Mexico” which originated from a group of six urban openly Marxist revolutionaries, including the now famous spokesperson for the organization Subcomandante Marcos, whose real name is Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicenteand who was a professor in the Sciences and Art for Design Department at UAM that praises Fidel Castroand that assigned his students a reading list that included Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, and Mao Tse-tung. You’d learn that in the 1980s he and his fellow cadre-members moved into the mountains of Chiapas to organize the local Mayan community with the goal of leading an armed uprising that would cause the country to rally to their side so they capture state power.
So why does Howard say that the Zapatistas are not Communists given all this and that the 23 de Enero community in Caracas – the neighborhood that George Ciccariello-Maher claims is the “most radical” –includes an EZLN flag in their movement of movements? Why does Howard make this claim when, as you can see on the bottom right, that Subcomandante Marcos uses Communist icons on flags when he gives public speeches?
I couldn’t say for sure, but all things considered I’d speculate it’s to create the perception of distance from these Marxist revolutionaries. Being an openly communist professor can lead one to increased vigilance being conferred upon their academic work in light of ethical Professional Codes of Ethics and Standards. After all – those who want to overturn all existent rules and laws to suit their whims and those of their comrades are likely to do so in their intellectual work as well. Because of this much of the organizing occurs through email lists – a la the Zapatistas, Social Forum, and IndyMedia – and partnership within the “network of networks” isn’t openly avowed but understood through reference to common symbols, ideas, and connection to other comrade professors.
Indymedia Centers
Emerging in part from the intermingling of myriad NGO activists and academics via encounters curated by the Zapatistas, the Independent Media Centers were born just before the Battle in Seattle. Conceived of as a combination between Alternative Press and vector of cyber-subversion antagonistic to the capitalist paradigm – police record attest to its success toward those ends.
“Past research has demonstrated that Indymedia.org, The Nation and a variety of zines sere as primary sources for information about resistance and social justice for Radical Participatory activities (e.g., Armstrong, 1982; Atkinson & Dougherty, 2006; Atton 2002a; 20040 Downing 2003a; 2003b). These are not the only alternative media titles used by Radical Participatory activists as other titles, like the anarchist news website Inforshop.org, have emerged from additional research projects (e.g., Atton, 2003).”
“Near the convention, Francie is getting ready at the Independent Media Center (IMC). She is twenty-three, petite, and dressed in black and green army fatigues bought at a secondhand store. Francie is angry at her country, disgusted by its blind faith in an environmentally unsustainable economy. Francie believes in a carbon tax that would discourage polluters and create a revenue stream for research into green technologies. She doesn’t believe that the mainstream media do justice to environmental issues, so she has volunteered with the IMC…”
While there is nothing wrong with this by itself, put into the evidentiary constellation that this article is develops this becomes another indicator – weak by itself but more significant in light of everything else – of Philip N. Howard’s in-group membership with a covert, coordinated, subversive network.
The Thought of the Marxist Manuel Castells
In the book Castells and the Media: Theory and Media Philip N. Howard claims that the person in the title, Manuel Castells is “one of the most important contemporary social scientists.” More than that, per Howard’s opening dedication, he is “inspiring”.
As a public intellectual with almost 50 years of teaching and publishing behind him so there is a lot one could say about his work.
For our purposes, I only have two issues to focus on:
The general orientation of Castells’ research
The networks in which Castells operates
The first point is quickly answered: Castells’ is a Marxist. In “Networks in Manuel Castells’ Theory of the Network Society” Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko argues that “‘network’ in Castells’ social theory is not an analytical concept but rather a powerful metaphor that served to capture his idea of the new social morphology of late capitalism.” His career began as a Marxist analyst of the city and as technology developed, he incorporated these new forms of discourse into his work to give the appearance of novelty to his analysis.
As for the networks in which Manuel Castells engages with, he is a political theorist associated with the Sao Paulo Forum, the Association for Progressive Communications and CLACSO– a social sciences organization whose conferences have previously been promoted and covered by Venezuela’s state media. He’s also published open letters via Cuba’s Network in Defense of Humanity.
Taking online graduate level courses with Manuel Castells and a number of other leftist activists and intellectuals such as Juan Carlos Monedero and Pablo Iglesias – two of the founders of Spain’s PODEMOS Party that received over 8.8 million Euros in funding from the governments of Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro Moros for consulting and production work – is possible via CLACSO’s online platform.
Their co-appearances at CLACSO events isn’t the only time that the Director of TeleSUR, Patricia Villegas, and Manuel Castells have had the opportunity to network. They both also gave presentations at the X Encuentro Internacional de Investigadores y Estudiosos de la Información y la Comunicación (ICOM) in Havana, Cuba 2019.
Castells has also been featured in El Telegrafo, an Ecuadorian newspaper, and cited by its director Orlando Perez, who transitioned to becoming an executive at TeleSUR English following the discovery of irregularities during his tenure at El Telegrafo and the departure of his patron, ex-President Rafael Correa due to anti-corruption legal proceedings.
While it’s interesting to note that when Lance Bennett arrived at Yalefor graduate school it was at a time when Black Panther Party activism was high and talk of general strike was in the air – this says nothing per se about the nature of Bennet’s academics. It is, however, noteworthy to point out that Omar González, Cuba’s former Vice-Minister of Culture, is someone that thinks Lance Bennet’s works is important and a useful theoretical basis for Communist Party praxis.
George Soros’s Central European University
From 2013-2015 Philip N. Howard was the founding Professor for the School of Public Policy and the Director of the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University – which was founded and funded by George Soros. George Soros though that this particular department was so worthy that he even recorded a minute long promotional video for the Public Policy Department. My evocation of Soros here is meant to highlight only three points:
in 2017 the Hungarian Parliament adopted amendments to the country’s 2011 Act CCIV on National Higher Education which lead to the University at the end of the next year. The rationale given by Zoltan Balog was due to “foreign policy priorities and National security considerations”.
The choice of icons used in the protests by CEU students when protesting that act.
The importance of the first one will become apparent in the section below titled “Philip N. Howard’s Covert Support of Arab and US Communist Insurrections”. The importance of the second point will be made apparent by referencing the header images – many of which include the raised fist symbols used by those associated with the Bolivarian Socialist Movement. The third point will come into play in light of the section “Philip N. Howard supports Black Lives Matter-related Intellectuals”.
Discourse with Rebecca MacKinnon
One of the “campaigners for internet freedom” that Philip N. Howard highlights and praises in Pax Technica is Rebecca MacKinnon.
A member and director of a number of advocacy groups that educate, agitate and organize under the banner of human rights not codified in U.S. or international law. The U.S. State Department recently formed an Unalienable Rights Commission to act as a counterbalance to the explosive growth of such organizations, and a cursory review of Rebecca MacKinnon’s presentations demonstrate that she is exemplary of those activists that mobilizes misunderstandings of law and human rights discourse for dubious or malignant purposes.
As is evidenced from the above, Rebecca MacKinnon’s book Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedomuses classic socialist iconography. Lest I be deemed guilty of merely judging a book by its cover, it is also worth pointing out that part five of the book is titled “What is to be Done?” – an allusion to the Vladimir Illich Lenin book with the same title.
That Rebecca MacKinnon makes this obvious reference to Lenin is interesting for a number of reasons. For the purposes of brevity I’ll limit my comments to calling attention to the fact that in What is to be Done? Lenin diverges from the classical Marxian conception of seizure of state power and describes the need for a covert, professional revolutionary cadre – a Vanguard Party.
In his article Lenin and the Concept of the Professional Revolutionary, published in the History of Political Thought, Robert Mayer explicates that while this vanguard party – what Gramsci referred to as the Modern Prince – is Lenin’s main concerns there is another intermediary social group between the Party and the Masses. These are the activists, artists, and intellectuals that are covertly connected to or loosely associated with the party and are either consciously subservient or are generally deferential to it – a Network.
In short, to put Lenin’s dual-power conception of politics in general terms – the Vanguard Party is the Revolutionary-Government-In-Waiting, and the Network is their steering committee.
Within this context, this makes a several facts pulled from Rebecca MacKinnon’s academic/activist biography take on an interesting light – and thus Philip N. Howard’s citation of her.
(1) The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) summit that Philip N. Howard describes Rebecca MacKinnon as speaking refers to in the above quote was targeted for institutional capture by the European Social Forum, the European partner of the Sao Paulo Forum – an organization founded by Cuba’s Communist Party and Brazil’s Workers party and now supported by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.
While there is no online list of members or supporters of the now defunct European Social Forum, content analysis of Rebecca MacKinnon’s messaging, her being on the Advisory Board of organizations whose members include those associated with the Sao Paulo Forums and coverage of her book in journals about leftist social movements – provides provisional proof that she was a part of this cadre.
(2) Rebecca MacKinnon worked at CNN at the same time as Andres Izarra – Venezuela’s former Minister of Communication and Information and the ex-president of TeleSUR. Shortly after Izarra left, so too did she. I don’t know if the two of them ever did interact
(4) Rebecca MacKinnon’s partner in the founding of Global Voices– a journalistic organization that would later play a minor role, along with Julian Assange of Wikileaks, in the Arab Spring – was Ethan Zuckerman and he too had a run in with Andres Izarra. In a blog post entitled Opening Sessions at the Aljazeera Forum, Ethan Zuckerman describes attending an Al Jazeera conference where Izarra was on a panel.
Another internet activist/organization that Philip N. Howard believes deserving of praise is Marek Toszynski, one of the founders of Tactical Tech.
In addition to being a member of this democracy advocacy NGO, Marek is also a writer for the New Internationalist– a “new left” periodical that describes advocating for Venezuela in their 2019 annual reportand, as is evident from the above magazine cover, uses variations of the Sao Paulo Forum slogan “Another World is Possible” as an orientation point for their editorial vision.
I’ll forego similar analysis as I did to the above, but as I believe it’s noteworthy I will say that it’s deserving of being pointed out that the second co-founder of Tactical Tech is an artist whose recent exhibition could perhaps be described as AgitProp art against Facebook, Stephanie Hankey, and that she is also an academic working at Oxford’s Internet Institute.
What Does Philip N. Howard Promote?
Philip N. Howard supports the de-platforming of Steve Bannon.
More than expressing some kind of rationale with his positions, he breaks form from the polite Canadian stereotype and says that it’s a mistake to allow him on the “platform” as he “chokes public discourse” – and is a “poison.”
This is noteworthy for two reasons.
Rather than saying that Steve Bannon “shouldn’t be allowed an audience” or “a soap box to stand on” or some other variation of the phrases – Philip N. Howard chooses a term that has been widely adopted by Socialist parties and Antifa activists: platform.
While Philip N. Howard doesn’t out and out call Steve Bannon a fascist – his message is the same as that worded by the Communist Party of Canada and the Hugo Chavez Front of Toronto – the city and country where Philip N. Howard received his Bachelor of Arts degree.
None of this reflects directly upon Philip N. Howard’s scholarship – but the affinities are worthy of being pointed out.
Philip N. Howard’s Covert Support of Arab and US Communist Insurrections
In the article A State Department 2.0 Response to the Arab Spring Philip N. Howard capitalized on the media’s general interest and specialist ignorance to advocate for State Department policy positions that sought to create sympathies for those engaged in the effort to overthrow the Egyptian government. In his own words he writes:
“We need the State Department to do some 21st century thinking. Egypt’s elites are defecting, and taking their networks of support away from Mubarak. The protests in Egypt are about social networks that are beyond Mubarak’s reach. Don’t worry about who is next, worry about which networks need recognition, support, and encouragement. The State Department 2.0 strategy needs to bet on networks of civil society participants in Tunis, Cairo, and the other regional capitals now in crisis. Think in terms of networks, not individual power brokers and traditional political actors. Even the Muslim Brotherhood may be best thought of as a network organization…”
Putting aside the issues of the demands and their legitimacy given by the aggrieved it’s worth point out that nowhere within this article does Howard identify any of the actual actors involved. “The network” as an ideal is all that’s referred to and only by reading other sources, such as the article The Revolutionary Socialists in Post-‘Arab Spring’ Egypt does one learn that many of those initial calls put out to engage in protest were those of Socialists. Ahmed Salah, the “mastermind of the revolution” and the son of a Socialist Labor Party activist is not mentioned at all.
There is, similarly no mention of the role of Julian Assange. Considering groups such as Amnesty International hailed as the catalyst for the Arab Spring, that there is no mention of the fact that it was the World Social Forum that helped propel Assange from lone hacker to networked political actor and that Howard praises Assange’s work in Pax Technica this seems curious.
There’s another compelling omission in Philip N. Howard’s book Democracy’s Fourth Wave?: Digital Media and the Arab Spring – the lack of relationship between poets and revolutionaries.
In Chapter 7 of Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Soul of Tahirwe learn that performance poets played a significant role in promoting the initial events in Egypt. A cursory look into Egypt’s history shows that this is not the first time such artists played a would be significant political role. In The Artist as ProphetChris Hedges open his article on the importance of emotions as a guiding force in politics with a quote from an Egyptian general on how they managed to surprised the Israelis in the 1973 war he states: “Instead of reading the intelligence reports, you should have read our poets.” Were such a connection unique to Egypt then this might be plausibly explained plausibly as a mere oversight – but it’s less so when one considers the actors that have inspired and the activities promoted by Bolivarian Revolutionary Actors.
José Martí is Cuban poet long praised by Castro and other leftists as a guiding light for their cause. Olga Luzardo was a poet and militant that helped found the Communist Party in Venezuela. Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the EZLN who now goes by the name Subcomandante Galeano – someone that Howard would presumably be familiar with having engaged in field research in Chiapas, is a poetas well. Eduardo Galeano, one of the main inspirations and co-conspirators of Bolivarian Movement, is also a poet. So too is Jesus Santrich, one of the current leaders of the FARC. Alice Lovelace, the National Lead Organizer for the United States Social Forum in Atlanta – an event which was, as I go into more detail below, promoted by Venezuelan intelligence – was a poet. Public poetry readings, rap performances and artistic workshop demonstrations and marches all have been hallmarks of the carnivalesque atmosphere encouraged by the Social Forums and all of which are connected to an inter-generational effort at achieving fundamental political change. With this focus on granular details and a comparative context in mind a concrete political strategy comes into view – activities to mobilize emotionally charged, highly expressive individuals into what Manuel Castells calls Networks of Outrage and Hope and what Gustav LeBon calls The Crowd. Strange, then, that this is elided from Howard’s account.
The limited network ethnographic fields which Philip N. Howard’s selects isn’t limited to this singular article. In Pax Technica he similarly described Occupy Wall Street as a “spontaneous” network movement. There Howard states the following:
“People sometimes say that the internet doesn’t “cause” democracy. Or “it’s the people, not the mobile phones.” But people and their technology are often impossible to separate. Try to imagine your life without your mobile phone or your internet connection. Or try to tell the story of the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, or any recent international social movement without mentioning digital media. You’ll find yourself with an incomplete story. Many of the people involved with these movements are eager to talk about the devices and media that are their tools of resistance. Their technology and their story go together.”
despite the fact the extensive documentary evidence shows that this was not some “spontaneous” uprising but a political spectacle that was long planned by groups connected to Venezuela such as the Workers World Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and Crimethinc. (documented here and here) as well as poets and performance artists.
His lack of apparent awareness on the matter is all the more unusual considering that Natalia Buier and Tamara Steger were engaged in research about Occupy Wall Street at Central European University at the same time that Philip N. Howard was there.
Had Philip N. Howard spoken to professor Béla Greskovits during his time at Central European University about Janina Alexandra Mangold’s Master’s thesis The Transnational Diffusion of the Occupy Movement to Germanyor to someone that remembered when two of the people claiming to be co-founders of Occupy Wall Street, Noah Fischer and Maria Byckgave a presentation at Central European University he would have realized this. Had he reached out to Zoltán Glück
who’s a Central European University graduate now working on a PhD in Anthropology with a focus on Critical Theory that’s published a number of articles on Occupy Wall Street it would be in his network ethnography. Were Philip N. Howard have taken the time to talk to Daniel Bochsler, a Central European University professor and attendee of a three day workshop entitled The Transnational Dimension of Protest: From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street organized by World Social Forum scholar and organizer Donatella della Porta could have disabused Howard of this notion. Anil Duman, a Central European University Econmics professor and supporter of Occupy the Economy could have done the same. Julia Buxton, a Central European University professor in the Political Sciences department that is an longtime expert on Venezuela – as evidenced by her giving presentations at Socialist Worker events over a decade ago and being published in the New Left Review, which is now based in Quito, Ecuador a few short blocks from the English language offices of Venezuela’s state media outlet TeleSUR – would have told Philip N. Howard the same. Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, a founding member of the Action Network– a digital tool for organizing people online that’s published research on the processes involved in World Social Forum and that worked under Philip N Howard at the Central European University could have told him that “It’s not just about the technology, it’s about the IRL human networks”.
Philip N. Howard and Black Lives Matter Supporters
That Philip N. Howard would retweet Charlton McIlwain’s new book Black Software – which covers the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement means nothing by itself. Investigation of aspects of the BLM project is entirely valid, and yet in the greater context of the theoretical underpinnings of Howard’s research projects and the networks he is connected to this is highly significant.
The connections between Cuban-Venezuelan intelligence and the founding of Black Lives Matters is under-reported in the academic and popular press, but begins in earnest following Hurricane Katrina. Sekou M. Franklin provides an account of Venezuela’s financial assistance via the Common Grounds Collective and People’s Hurricane Relief Fund in the chapter African Americans, Transnational Contention, and Cross National Politics in the United States and Venezuela. The condensed version of the story is that oil money started to flow to current and former Black Panther Party members such as Malcolm Suber and Malik Rahim to engage in community assistance projects and so too did black-transnational political agitators from Venezueula such as Jesus “Chucho” Garcia– who has since had his diplomatic credentials revoked. The rationale why was never publicized, but it’s likely because of his advocacy on behalf of the Pan-Africanist movement.
Alicia Garza and Opal Tometti, two of the founders of Black Lives Matter, attended the United States Social Forum in 2007 – the U.S. iteration of Sao Paulo Forum. In the ChapterFrankfurt versus Atlantain Political Translation: How Social Movement Democracies Survivethe author Nicole Doerr describes the United States Social Forum as follows: The Coalition now included job centers as well as student organizations, labor, immigrant organizations, North American indigenous people and black and Latino church-based organizations, many of them lead by women and female or queer-identified leaders.” A few years after this, in 2011 Garza, became the Chairperson of the Right to the City Steering Committee – another Social Forum front and a few years after this Tometti would personally receive an award from Nicholas Maduro. Also worth noting is that recently Philip N. Howard’s director at the CCCE, Lance Bennet, gave a talk with Opal Tometion using technology to mobilize people for protests.
Philip N. Howard: Academic Socialist Steganographist
Steganography is the practice of concealing messages or other content within another message or image in order to avoid detection. In addition to looking at the subjects that interest Philip N. Howard, the research designs errors that he makes in his investigations, the impact they have on public discourse and governmental debate, the activists he chooses not to include and exclude in his ethnographic analysis, his professional associations, the activists he promotes and the people that promote him – one can find evidence of Socialist bias within the theoretical framework he employs.
That Philip N. Howard cites Why Not Create a Shadow Government?by Michael Albert – who’s listed on TeleSUR’s websiteas a staff member – in the same article is more notable by itself, all the more so as in Howard’s in-text citation of him and in his listing of him in the References section the author is incorrectly attributed to “Alpert, M” rather than “Albert, Michael”. Without diverting at length into Freudian theories of repression and self-preservation, it’s worth wondering if this is an unconscious disassociation on the part of Howard as a means of intellectual self-preservation. Why is that? I’ll proffer two reasons why.
First is that it obfuscates the schools of thought informing Howard’s article. The first seven pages of results of Howard’s citation on Google does not detect the original article. Going to the website of the magazine listed as the publisher it is discoverable – that is if you know the correct name of the author.
Once someone goes to the ZCommunications landing page, as one needs to do to find the original source, you will learn that their slogan isThe Spirit of Resistance Lives.
ZVideo, according to their write up, is a way to distribute this particular school of thought’s talks and classes that has “proven more accessible.” The speakers and subjects included in their library are “Noam Chomsky’s [who has a] humor[ous] and casual speaking style, the dynamism of Hugo Chavez, and the atmosphere of an evening session at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India.”
ZNet is a “community of people committed to social change” and includes people such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos– one of the founders of the World Social Forum; Medea Benjamin– whose advocacy on behalf of Venezuela has granted her audience with Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro and who used to work with Deborah James, the former director of the Venezuela Information Office, someone interviewed as part of Lance Bennett’s Global Citizen Project; Greg Wilpert– who founder of VenezuelaAnalysis and the first Executive Director of TeleSUR English; Mark Weisbrot– who works at Center for Economic and Policy Research; Bill Fletcher– who had a TV show on TeleSUR English called Global African, and many more.
Marisol Sandoval, a Lecturer at the Department of Culture and Creative Industries at City University London writing in A Critical Contribution to the Foundations of Alternative Media Studies – posted in the City, University of London Institutional Repository – agrees with me. She claims that there is “another type of alternative media that aims at establishing a counter-public sphere” and that “Examples for such a type of media are The New Internationalist, Z Magazine, Rethinking Marxism, Historical Materialism or Monthly Review.”
Secondly rationale is that it obfuscates the specific context which informs Philip N. Howard’s closing contentions. In the article Michael Albert is referred to as a “political hypermedia consultant” and not as the main proponent of Participatory Economics, or ParEcon, which is a form of anarchist economics. In the context of Albert’s larger body of work, he’s not just advocating some political marketing ploy but is using new language to describe V.I. Lenin’s Dual Power political structure – something much debated but groups such as the International Marxist Tendency.
Since I can imagine a reader protesting that this analysis in combination with the above network ethnography is not sufficient evidence to make my case there is, thankfully more that verifies my hypothesis.
“the time is right to match dedication to critical theoryof algorithmic communication with a dedication to empirical research through audit studies, network ethnography, and investigation of the political economy of algorithmic production.”
How does he know this?
“We review[ed] the great variety of critical scholarship on algorithms, automation, and big data in areas of contemporary life…”
Anyone familiar with the Frankfurt School on reading the words I’ve bolded and put in italics and that Philip N. Howard includes in the keywords for the article should immediately pick up on what they reference. For those not familiar with compound components of critical theory one could download the Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory, which has entries that explain “even the most complex of theoretical discourses, such as Marxism.” To keep things succinct, however, I’ll provide a brief explanation as it relates just to this case.
“The term “critical” refers to a tradition of critical theory. An often cited representative of this tradition is the so-called Frankfurt School. This “school” consisted of a network of researchers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which operated from 1923 to 1933, moved to New York during the Nazi regime, but reopened in Frankfurt in 1950. Although the label “Frankfurt School” is problematic and inexact, it does permit associating some basic ideas with the notion of “critical”.
And on page 4 the authors continue that: “Another important figure in critical scholarship is Karl Marx”
In the article The Problem with “Critical” Studies by Joseph Heath – professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto – Heath describes reading a number of books for a prize and noticing a number of “profoundly cringe-inducing” patterns in them:
“the ambition for “critical social science” was to have, not just social science guided by normative commitments, but for those normative commitments to be made explicit. The biggest problem with the books I read is that they almost invariably failed on the second half of this.”
Despite the opening claim that the book will analyze ICT policy, all it really does is advance a number of normative commitments that are socialist in nature. This is evident not only in his choice of framing the evolution of options which net technologies present to social groups – evolving from Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action, to Lance Bennett’s Logic of Collective Action– but also in the wider, transnational framework which he uses.
After Philip N. Howard provides a bafflegab definition for the term Pax Technica he states on page 147 that in this new arrangement of world power:
“In the pax technica, the core and the periphery are not territorially assigned but socially and technologically constructed.”
The concept of core and periphery emerges from World Systems Research and is strongly associated with the theorist who popularized it within the social sciences, the Marxist Immanuel Wallerstein.
Explaining all of the components of the theory and the reasons why this variant of dependency theory didn’t get the goods it’s promoters promised developing countries would fill a series of books – so here I’ll just point out that those who abided by its principles often frequently sought to apply solutions for problems based on pre-existing political commitments and thereby worsened them. There’s numerous examples of this in Pax Technica, but as it would require extensive exegesis I’ll instead point to Philip N Howard’s Political Communication, Computational Propaganda, and Autonomous Agents. There he makes an appeal to human rights that aren’t codified into law and writes that:
“social media sites and proprietary device networks can change their terms of service at any time without informing visitors, turning any speech or activity on the site into a criminal act. For Sandvig and others, this is a violation of the Fifth Amendment right to due process, which requires proper notice to the public of what constitutes criminal behavior”.
For anyone that has a basic understanding of law, there is a significant difference between the Terms of Service on a private social media platform and state and federal legal regulations.
No matter what one may say about the growth of the importance of social media in the general population’s consumption of news media – a person being kicked off Twitter or Instagram for violation of Terms of Service is worlds apart from government agents swarming a facility used to print material, confiscating the equipment and preventing them from publishing and circulating materials. These types of appeals to abstract rights abound in Philip N. Howard and helps explain why he has advocated for the Nationalization of Facebook on Slate – a policy position which is also promoted by the Communists Paul Mason and Lewis Bassett.
Philip N. Howard – Liberation Technologist
Lest this seem like an distorted reading of the Philip N. Howard’s theoretical framework it’s worth pointing out that he closes Pax Technicain praise of what he calls liberation technologies.
While the modern conception is typically rooted in the speculated capabilities of present, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and People’s Commissar for Education and Culture Georg Lukas anticipated this in his notion of totality, as described in History and Class Consciousness.
Advocates of Liberation Theology and Liberation Technology share a similar worldview. Whereas the former sees the eschaton– the end of history – as emerging from mass conversion to “true” Christianity, at the end of an AK-47 if need be, the latter sees it as emerging from “true” non-mediated social relations, at the expense of breaking all existent laws, customs and social mores if need be.
For Liberation Theologists Colombia’s National Liberation Army, the ELN, is representative of such an ideologically-aligned organization. Their engagement in kidnapping, drug-trafficking, assassinations etc. is excusable as it is “God’s work”.
For Liberation Technologists Wikileaks and Anonymous, aka organizations engaged in terrorism-related activities are representative of such an ideologically-aligned organization. Indeed the Tor network, developed by Liberation Technologist Roger Dingledine, has helped facilitate drug trafficking and the financing of terrorism.
While the merits of apps such as Tsunamic Democraticand other platforms aimed at uniting disparate interest groups for political protest and organization are open for debate – it is certainly clear by the above analysis of Philip N. Howard’s published academic work and the existent case-history of “liberation technology” that advocacy of such positions using such terms is akin to how “Hands Off Venezuela” is equivalent to “Viva Socialism!”.
Philip N Howard – Audience Reception
Lest my interpretation of Philip N. Howard’s oeuvre seem to improperly highlight certain elements of his work, I’ve decided to highlight below some of how other researchers interpret his work.
The following section exhibits how Philip N. Howard’s work has been interpreted by other experts in the field and provides network ethnographic descriptions of the individuals and organizations that have cited his work which help prove, along with all of the other evidence, Philip N. Howard’s membership in the REDH network.
Philip N Howard – Perceived as akin to Paulo Freire, Marxist Pedagogue
Paulo Freire, along with Marx, Gramsci and General Zamora, are some of the most revered thought-leaders amongst those advocating 21stcentury socialism.
Robinson Salazar Péreza, a Mexican Critical Theorist and Social Scientist, also promotes Howard, in the context of documents which explicitly references the Network of Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity (REDH).
Philip N. Howard – Perceived as akin to Cristian Fuchs, Marxist Cultural Theorist
Another person with whom Philip N. Howard is frequently associated with is Christian Fuchs.
The content of those edits were to make the claim that the Arab Spring protests were completely non-violent – an empirically false claim attested to by numerous journalists, activists and government authorities present at the events – as well as to include a citation of Philip N. Howard’s article ICT’s and the Fuzzy Causes of the Arab Spring.
Joseph Stiglitz, Mark Weisbrot and Danny Glover are all members of the CEPR advisory board and all have close connections with the Venezuelan government.
The CEPR has published a number of research articles that are, according to Clifton Ross and the numerous others subject area experts he cites in his article Pandering to the Imperial Left: The New CEPR Report “crude piece[s] of gringo-chavista whitewashing aimed at gaining sympathy for “the cause”.
After Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa fled the country for definitive charges of corruption and the rumors that Venezuela’s ally the FARC-EP had helped fund his campaign, three of the executive leaders of Center for Economic Policy and Research were among the signatories of a public warning about the dangers of Ecuador “returning to neoliberalism”.
This, notably, wasn’t the only Sao Paulo Forum associated intellectual to promote Philip N. Howard.
David Evan Harris, a Sao Paulo University graduate whose first writings are about the benefits of ALBA also promotes Philip N. Howard. Two of his articles appear within the syllabus for the Social Movements & Social Mediacourse he teachers. I could certainly find more evidence in the academic world that proves my point of Dr. Howard’s connections REDH, but I’ll stop for now to summarize and close my case.
I find this latter research-article especially revealing as it implies that the popular rejection of Evo Morales from Bolivia supported by law enforcement officers and the military due to his corrupt patronage networks and anti-democratic activities is marred as “less justified” because of Twitter bots. Like the Communists in the Chiapas, Egypt and Occupy, here again Howard presents a false picture of faceless movements. Because of this poor theoretical underpinning and reliance upon categorically invalid forms of quantitative social science he fails to investigate the much more telling facts of the matter such as disinformation networks connected to news outlets, the extensive circulation online of deepfake nudes within Pro-Nicholas Marudo Facebook groups intended to humiliate Jeanine Añez and Fabiana Rosales de Guaidó, evidence that photos claiming to be protest violence by police that are staged with makeup and actors or are from different times and locations, or going into the issues I mentioned earlier about Venezuela’s online and in real life activity. Indeed, the bullets of messages in an information warfare often comprise equally of what is not there as what is.
Philip N. Howard: Conclusion
All of the above evidence indicates that Philip N. Howard is a member of the Cuban and Venezuelan Intelligence sponsored Network of Intellectuals and that one of the activities that is required of him in exchange for professional support is for him to use his credentials as an expert to deceive the Public and to provide fraudulent or misleading testimony to government bodies perceived as enemies to REDH.
The sum rationale for this argument developed into the following propositions:
Someone that had previously corrected errors in his publications, but refuses do so as it relates to research that misdirects attention from Venezuela
Someone who’s faulty research findings is part of a project to invalidate the Brexit vote
Someone who’s faulty research findings is part of a project to invalidate the election of U.S. president Donald Trump
Someone who’s faulty research findings is part of a project to invalidate the election of Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro
Someone whose first instance of field-research was covering a Communist insurgency (Zapatistas) in Mexico that exploited individual activists, academics and NGOs for political ends along netwar lines
Someone who engaged in embedded investigation with an organization (Indymedia) formed in the wake of the Zapatista conflict to replicate their model worldwide
Someone whose supervisor at the University of Washington helped organize the NorthWest Social Forum – a political organization promoted by and directly connected to Venezuelan intelligence
Someone who helped found an academic program funded and promoted by George Soros, which was populated by multiple academics associated with the World Social Forum and Occupy Wall Street
Someone who receives grant money from organizations that also support avowedly socialist academic projects
Someone whose public political positions related to Steve Bannon are the same as the Canadian Communist Party, the Hands Off Venezuela network, and the British Socialist Workers Party
Someone who – like numerous other socialist parties and academics not open as to their party affiliation – advocates for the nationalization of Facebook
Someone who has published a monograph about one of the main Marxist sociologists that has multiple, active connections to the São Paulo Forum, the PSUV and the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity
Someone that promotes the research of Black Lives Matters/Black Liberation Movement associated sociological research
Someone whose published academic uses cryptic allusions to Communist schools of thought in their theoretical framework and avows to being a Critical Theorist
Someone who promotes the Liberation Technology school of thought, which is a variation of the socialist Liberation Theology movement
Someone that promotes other artists and intellectuals whose activism and political positions align with the goals of Cuban and Venezuelan Intelligence Services
Someone whose published academic work is promoted via methods typical of Cuba and Venezuela’s Network of Intellectuals and Artists
Someone whose published academic work is promoted by actors associated with Cuba and Venezuela’s Network of Intellectuals and Artists
Someone who refuses to answer questions about their research and their political connections despite such behavior violating the spirit and letter of the appropriate academic professional code of ethics
Someone whose speech acts provided to the US and UK government can be described, respectably, as misdirection and disinformation
is an enchufado scholar, that is a scholar that is “plugged in” to provide services and material support to the regime of Nicolas Maduro in exchange for the receipt of benefits and funding.
After all, it certainly appears that the effect of Howard’s academic publishing and testimony is to spread disinformation and encourage misdirection on behalf of the Socialist network which has helped make Philip N. Howard appear to be an expert in a field of ICT and not just a partisan political advocate in an Oxford robe.
Screenshot of the Wikipedia page for Colombia Reports with the description of its primary writer’s anarchist political orientation.
Adriaan Alsema is an anarchist from the Netherlands, and the head editor and founder of Colombia Reports. After seeing a fake news story he produced on U.S. soldiers raping Colombian children being repeatedly shared during the Paro Nacional protests in Colombia, I decided to investigate this “news” site some more.
I started by reading Adriaan Alsema’s coverage of the protests and – having read multiple other stories on the matter – realized that his writing was complete disinformation and every chance taken to slip in an editorial addition implying that the Colombian government was categorically evil and ought to be overthrown.
I contacted him via Facebook with links to multiple sources showing that he was writing was fake news – but he ignored them and continued to publish bald-faced lies.
Paro Nacional: A Communist Party Production
The slogan “Another World is Possible” was adopted by the Sao Paulo Forum, a Communist front organization.
The information that I shared with him is that – in contrast to what he claimed – the upcoming protests was clearly part of an operation in coordination with the Venezuela government and the Clandestine Colombian Communist Party.
How this is evident is as follows:
1. The Paro Nacional is clearly based on the same model that Venezuela recently used in coordination with domestic indigenous and leftist groups in Ecuador and in Chile. Step one is to create a sizable mass of people, and then have “professional protestors” intermixed within the larger population work towards achieving strategic goals – such as occupation of key government buildings or engaging in such violence that it’s leads to a response from the police.
2. The slogans used in the propaganda, like the one in the top left of the above image, are directly from those linked to the Sao Paulo Forum – the conferences wherein all of the Communist parties in Latin America meet to plot, plan, and strategize.
3. – As I’ve been monitoring their accounts online and saw evidence of this – which I shared with Adriaan Alsema.
Adriaan Alsema admitting on Facebook that he self-identifies as an anarchist.
Flustered by Adriaan Alsema’s publishing of misinformation about the Paro Nacional protests – I decided to post a comment on the Colombia Reports Facebook page in hopes that public criticism might be more effective than my attempts at private correspondence.
Sure enough he responded.
Adriaan Alsema admitted that he was an anarchist and claimed that a body of 30,000 mostly indigenous people travelling from outside Bogota – a city of 7.1 million people – to occupy the area around the government district was equivalent with “the majority of the people”.
After asking if he would be willing to answer questions for me about his relationship to any international anarchist or socialist organizational bodies, i.e. the Fourth Internationale, and I was blocked from being able to like or comment upon the Colombia Reports Facebook pages.
Adriaan Alsema: Purveyor of Propaganda
An example of Adriaan Alsema’s propaganda being shared in the Paro Nacional Colombia Facebook group.
The media that was widely circulating in different Facebook groups was linked to an urban myth that Adrian Alsema had published as truth, and later recanted.
WNYC produced this interview with Adrian asking him questions related to the claim, not true, that a group of American military contractors raped a bunch of Colombian minors and videotaped it as well as how Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, RussiaToday and TeleSUR all picked up the story.
The above screen shot shows that Adriaan Alsema’s anti-American propaganda is being used by the very groups seeking to get people to attend Paro Nacional events!
No wonder he did not want to answer my questions – his propaganda from years ago was being used as a pretext to help build outrage and thus contribute to violent protests!
Colombia Reports is Bolivarian Propaganda
The Colombian reports masthead corrected to better reflect what it is that Adriaan Alsema writes.
Now more than four years after the story has been proven to be fake, it’s worth noting that multiple media outlets still have coverage of this fake news still on their website:
TeleSUR English still has the story published on their website.
The Nation in an article written by Greg Grandin, still has the story published on their website.
TruthOut still has the story published on their website.
People’s World still has the story published on their website.
Project Censored still has the story published on their website.
ImpunityWatch still has the story published on their website.
Time still has the story published on their website.
The Daily Mail still has the story published on their website.
Most shockingly, even after the author of the fake news story Adrian has admitted that the story is fake – ColombiaReports still has the story published on their website.
Not that you can read my exchange with Adriaan Alsema because of his editing my relationship to the Colombia Reports Facebook page – but I am linking to it below irregardless.
The color red is used by members of the PSUV and the Bloods street gang. Covering one’s face with bandanas is typical of the Bloods and the ELN.
Abstract
Existing aesthetic approaches to interpretating trap and ganga-rap music frequently conceptualize the lyrical performances as being done by someone responding to economic precarity and a low-level likelihood of upward social mobility with an entrepreneurial mindset.
This article seeks to subvert that paradigm and understand it as an expression of wholesale rejection of the existant political institutions which enforce laws. Because of the lyrics of popular artists and the numerous arrests made for those involved with rap labels that are fronts for illicit drug acitivty – most famously the Black Mafia Family – it is my claim that this music is more appropriately situated in a context of transnational drug-trafficking networks, just as narcocorridos are.
By looking at Pusha T’s recent rap-album Daytona in such a light, it appears that it could be interpretated as an articistic confession of participation in drug trafficking operations that involved the FARC, the Venezuela’s Cartel of the Sons, and the Cuban Communist Party.
The first two lines of Daytona establishs a connection between the luxury goods that Pusha T enjoys and Pink Floyd.
Given the braggadocio typical of King Push this seems an interesting choice given Roger Waters doesn’t isn’t even listed amongst the top ten richest rockstars.
Another reason that Pusha T could be citing this particular individual is their mutual connection via Nicholas Maduro Moros – who recently gave a “new toy,” a guitar, to Roger Waters. Waters received this because he had promoted and performed a concert to keep Hands Off Venezuela, a phrase often used by Communist political organizers and activists. Considering Nicholas Maduro Moros and Hugo Chanvez before him has given praise and money to African-Americans they considered to be “fighting their cause” – such as Ajamu Baraka and Danny Glover – this raises the likelihood of such an interpretation being true.
Roger Waters’ new stage show connects the current political climate to 1984. An immediate indicator of possible connection to Venezuela.
The two musicians also share an avowed animosity towards President Donald Trump. Whereas Waters is significantly more ostentatious in his declarations, in an interview on the Angie Martinez Show, Pusha expresses disdain towards Kanye West for his support of the President and his Christianity.
While rapping about cocaine, as Pusha T often does, doesn’t lend the same political cachet as producing the types of songs which Pink Floyd has – it’s worth considering that the valorization of his behavior has a sort of Ninotchka effect – i.e. the development of desires and aspirations within the audience that leads to the normalization of “new” behaviors – in this case accepting cocaine trafficking as the behavior of an anti-hero rather than a law-breaker.
Pusha T’s Knowledge on Cocaine Prices
In the same first song, Pusha T states that many of the rappers currently singing about the prices their connects offer them aren’t accurate. More than that, in additino to proclaiming that many of these rappers turned trappers are fake – he periodizes how long it’s been lower. Because he claims to be a “trappers turned rappers”, he knows the “real price”.
Here are some of the geopolitical events that helped drive down the cost of cocaine.
In the book Bumerán Chávez: Los Fraudes que Llevaron al Colapso de Venezuela by Emili J Blasck, Chávez’s former bodyguard Leamsy Salazar states that Hugo Chávez met with the high command of FARC somewhere in rural Venezuela in 2007. Chávez created a system in which the FARC would provide the Venezuelan government with drugs that would be transported in live cattle and the FARC would receive money and weaponry from the Venezuelan government. According to Salazar, this was done in order to weaken Chávez’s perceived enemy, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe. This drastically reduced the risk costs associated with cocaine production
(2) Rise of Bitcoin as a Means of Managing Drug Money
Bitcoin was first launched on 3, January 2009. The coins were first announced and promoted via an email list populated by numberous computer security specialists with connections to international anarchist organizations and Communist Party Activists. Actors connected to Occupy Wall Street – a Situationist-inspired political festival organized in coordination with above mentioned international Anarchist and Communist activists – were some of it’s first promoters. Their ability to get enough “real people” involved with Bitcoin provided cover for the FARC-EP to use it and thus drastically reduce the risk costs associated with moving money.
While both of these facts are within the public record – neither of them are “general knowledge” and indicate that Pusha T has insider information, that is the information of a co-conspirator.
Pusha T – Confessions of being Under Cuban Surveillance and Relation to Broader Conspiracy
In verse two of If You Know You Know, Pusha T states that amongst the members of a “fraternity of drug dealers” there are still people looking at him with “one eye”. When one consider’s Fidel Castro’s role in cocaine trafficking, and that ten years ago the Cuban Five were released and CubaInformation – who’s logo is a single eye – was founded then this makes much more sense. This “news network” was formed as it allowed Cuba’s Intelligence services to operate in much the same way that the spy-ring did, but with more legal cover.
Following this admission of being under surveillance, he makes two other cryptic statements that can be related to his participation in a transnational-drug trafficking network connected to the FARC, the PSUV, and the PCC.
“The company I keep isn’t corporate enough”
The two great proponents of Che-Z thought: ex-coca-leaf farmer’s union leader turned disgraced president of Bolivia Evo Morales and ex(?) cocaine-trafficker turned rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z.
This seems to be criticism levelled by the fraternity of drug dealers against Pusha T because his closeness to the street prevents him from being able to easily diversify his money laundering operations and corruption networks.
“Child Rebel Soldier, You Ain’t Orphan Enough.”
This screenshot from a FARC account on Facebook seems to hint that those with sexual proclivities for pre-pubescent children will find their desires satisfied if they decide to join the People’s Army.
It’s in this context that we see that this is another criticism levelled by the “fraternity of drug dealers” against Pusha T.
Specifically they seem be upset that he cannot manage “real” artists – like the musicians in Child Rebel Soldier – in the same way that orphans – like Puff Daddy – can be.
This tension between Pusha T and this Fraternitiy; those – to quote from the chorus of this song – which are “coachin from the side of the ball courts” is important and comes up again later in the album.
Pusha T & Cuban Cocaine Trafficking Networks
Lyrics from Santeria, an artistic depiction of Fidel Castro as the Santeria god Elegguá, two examples of FARC logos, the sign for Che Bar and Grill and a photo of Ivan Marquez – leader of the FARC – holding a rose.
Lest all the above seem like a reach, let’s look at Santeria, track five on Pusha T’s album Daytona.
For appropriate context, it’s important to understand that as a religion, Santeria is most appropriately associated with Cuba. According to RT, the state media outlet of Cuba’s long-time ally Russia – Cuba is a paradise for santeros. But the connection between Santeros and Cuba goes even deeper…
In his book Fidel and Religion, the theologian Frei Betto – one of the Liberation Theologists involved with the creation of the Sao Paulo Forum – transcribed his conversations with Fidel Castro. Betto asks him about Castro’s relationship with Santeria. While he denies being a practitioner, he does say that many santeros who supported the Communist Revolution saw in him a spiritual liberator for Cuba, and that there are many who consider him the son of the deity Elegguá. Also worth noting is that in the book Los Brujos de Chavez David Placer provides ample documentation that Hugo Chavez has engaged in Santeria practices.
Pretext done, to the song lyrics.
By Pusha T’s own admission, the song opens with a reference to his road manager’s murder – for reasons that the courts were never able to determine.
Cursory research shows that not only is “CHE” the name of the location of where Pusha’s tour manager DayDay Pickett was stabbed, but that the sign outside the building includes a red rose at the top – which is one of the symbols of the FARC-EP!
Given this graphic, and that restaurants (and concert tours) are often cash-based businesses that provide amble opportunity for money laundering – I would speculate that the “payola” Pusha T mentions relates to contested percentages considered due for such services – be it transporting cocaine or laundering money.
Thus we can come to understand that Pusha T’s equation of himself with a priest is to put himself on the level of Hugo Chavez – who helps grow cocaine – and Raul Castro – who helps ship cocaine.
Is Pusha T a Drug Dealing Money Launderer working on behalf of The Cartel of the Suns, the Cuban Communist Party and the FARC-EP?
“When people show you who they are, believe them.” – Maya Angelou
Given the above – I’m curious as to what it is you think? Is Pusha T currently just a rapper – or, like his idols Big Meech and Sosa – is he engaged in cocaine trafficking with artistry as a cover..?
“The war on drugs has not failed: it has never existed. There has been no war on drugs in the United States.”
– Joseph D Douglass, Jr.
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The extent of money spent by the United States Federal Government on drug enforcement and interdiction nationally and internationally would make the above quote from Joseph D Douglass, Jr.’s book Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America seem intuitively false. And yet in this highly documented tome the author shows how it is that numerous government agencies have prioritized working relations with Communist governments such as China, Russia and Cuba over open conflict with them over facilitation of drug trafficking as a form of irregular warfare. Given the gravity of the claims made within the text I found myself constantly looking up references, and sure enough a geopolitical world-view that I was not at all familiar with started to emerge.
I don’t normally provide background on the authors I read, but given the topic it seems important to do so here…
Dr. Joseph Douglass is a national security analyst and author with expertise in defence policy, threat assessment, deception, intelligence and political warfare, nuclear strategy, terrorism, advanced chemical and biological warfare agents and applications, and international narcotics trafficking. Since the mid-1980s, his primary focus has been research into various dimensions of cultural warfare and notably into the illegal drugs plague, with emphasis on its origins, support structures, and marketing.
Narcotics Trafficking as Irregular Warfare
The case that is laid out in Red Cocaine is that China and the Soviet Union were involved at the state level in the faciltation of trafficking narcotics to the United States. Citing a variety of data points, including several high-ranking Communist Party members, Douglass shows how destroying American youth through drugs and corruption was covert Communist policy. Potential traffickers were identified for training and marketing of drugs and then various government agents – from those monitoring inports/exports to those involved with policing – were encouraged to support their comrades by turning a blind eye or, if they were sufficiently compromised, by themselves actively facilitating such activities.
The case study stemming from the Vietnamese war and Chinese heroin being distributed to the American military was particularly insightful in demonstrating the manner in which the claim that large scale drug-production is just done by individuals is particularly compelling. The war became a sort of social science experiment – with the military being the subjects. Far-below market-value drugs were offered in order to test how this would affect military readiness and morale.
Cuba and Bulgaria are singled out specifically as entrepots for these activities, the former for cocaine and the latter for opium. Fidel Castro’s role in helping the Andean region industrialize cocaine-producers operations is shown to be extensive.
The book also examines issues of strategy. For instance the reason why it is that so many radical leftist groups within Colombia and Venezuela were formed with the encouragement of Fidel. Their development – to whit – created multiple service suppliers should there ever be political periods akin to those of the FARC-EP peace accords. While one snakes head, the FARC, avows not to continue such activity another, the ELN, can take their place.
Narcotics and Corruption as a Vector for Societal Disruption
This By Any Means Necessary approach to political change allowed for foreign intelligence operatives to track and manage Americans that could be used, wittingly or not, to disrupt the country’s economy and political system. Furthermore, it became a means by which to raise funds in order to support these and other military intelligence operations. While the Chinese, Soviets and the Cubans sought to avoid their role in such activities from becoming overtly known, the Americans had an incentive not to look too deeply lest the relationships between the country’s denegrate further.
Black and Hispanic people are specifically targeted by Fidel Castro to be the manner by which drugs are disseminated in the United States. By focusing the building of connections with drug distributors of such demographics, it helped allow the Drug War to be cast as racist and thus facilitate the increase of political polarization. Given that some members of the black community laud Fidel Castro and demonize Ronald Regean, this is an example of a rich Orwellian Irony.
There’s a lot of other detailed accounts that are worth going into in detail, but I’ll close instead by saying if drugs, communism, or geopolitics interests you – definitely give this book a read.
Snow Storm in the Jungle
Quotes from Red Cocaine
Brief Excerpt about Drug Revenue’s Impact
‘In 1996, annual revenues derived from global criminalist activities were estimated by the World Bank’s experts at $1.2 trillion, of which $500 billion were thought to represent profits. These were and remain highly conservative estimates. The narcotics trade alone is in the $500 billion or more range. A more realistic estimate today would probably be of the order of $2 trillion per year – with $1 trillion, more or less, by way of straight profit; and some experts would raise these estimates further, towards $3.0 trillion annually in turnover. That is to say, governments, banks and the global criminalists are arranging the transfer of at least $1.0 trillion every year of national and private wealth into the bank accounts of the global criminal fraternity – a massive transfer of wealth for which there has been no historical parallel. This scandalous state of affairs has been continuing for several decades on an ever expanding scale, and the power conferred as a consequence threatens to destroy governments, democracy and the international banking system itself. Drug money also weakens and corrodes competition by favouring some economic agents at the expense of others’.
‘Two trillion+ dollars a year (a conservative figure, as noted) over the past two decades, excluding interest, would imply that more than $40 trillion will have been added to the wealth of the global criminal classes, including the managers and representatives of Lenin’s continuing world socialist revolution. Most of this money has been invested in property, bonds and stocks, and each year a further trillion or more dollars is added to the pool. Given that these data are believed by some experts to understate the position, the probable value of accrued drug money lodged in the international financial system now exceeds this $40 trillion estimate by a considerable margin. The associated corruption among financial institutions, investment advisory services (including stock brokerage houses and mutual funds), prestigious law firms, and among the political classes, has by now long since reached epidemic proportions. And this transformation has been accompanied by minimal publicity, with the exception of extensively publicised, but intermittent, ‘drug busts’…’.
‘It is critical for the survival of Western civilisation, and in order to slow down its rapid descent into pervasive, corrosive globalised criminality and corruption, which is the grim outlook for the 21st century, that Western countries begin, even at this late hour, to understand the true nature of the illegal drug crisis – which means correctly analysing its sources, especially its political origins, its enabling mechanisms, and its related criminal dimensions. Unless the nature and provenance of the challenge is finally understood, the appropriate strategy and tactics to address it will never be formulated. The drugs scourge continues to escalate because the measures so far developed to counter it do not take account of the geopolitical dimension – that is to say, of the malevolent, revolutionary intent which drives it’.
‘As a consequence, the measures taken, in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, to address the scourge, have remained essentially irrelevant and ineffective…. The plague continues to spread because the West is the victim of a deliberate, sustained and relentless offensive planned and directed by enemy intelligence which Western policymakers appear not to begin, or care, to understand. Some Western leaders even share the ideological objectives of the perpetrators of the drugs offensive. To make matters much worse, the values of many policymakers have been fatally eroded; and if one has no real values, one is not emboldened to defend anything at all, let alone with conviction and vigour. Policymakers too often stand for nothing and fall for everything – for every false assessment, for every piece of fashionable disinformation and for every diversionary tactic which is intended to add to the confusion and which clouds the truth: namely, that the West has been targeted as an act of war, and is the victim of a sustained offensive’.
‘Obviously, the longer this perversity and blindness continue, the more powerful and insuperable will the forces which help to perpetuate this blanket offensive, become. Soon, they will wield almost total power in some Western countries. The European Union’s collectivist structures, with their pork-barrel traditions and inclinations, are conspicuously vulnerable to drug-related corruption…’.
Michael Hardt Speaking about Communism at the European Graduate School, 2009.
“The primary forces that have guided the history of modern resistance struggles and liberation movements, along with the most productive resis tance movements of today, we will argue, are driven at base not only by the struggle against misery and poverty but also by a profound desire for democracy-a real democracy of the rule of all by all based on relation ships of equality and freedom. This democracy is a dream created in the great revolutions of modernity but never yet realized. Today, the new characteristics of the multitude and its biopolitical productivity give powerful new avenues for pursuing that dream. This striving for democracy permeates the entire cycle of protests and demonstrations around the issues of globalization, from the dramatic events at the WTO in Seattle in 1999 to the meetings of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil…”
Recognizing the characteristics of the multitude will allow us to invert our perspective on the world. After the Darstellung, or exposition, of our current state of war, our Forschung, or research, into the nature and condi tions of the multitude, will allow us to reach a new standpoint where we can recognize the real, creative forces that are emerging with the potential to creare a new world. The great production of subjectivity of the multitude, its biopolitical capacities, its struggle against poverty, its constant striving for democracy, all coincide here with the genealogy of these resistances stretching from the early modern era to our own.
In the following sections, therefore, we will followthe genealogy of liberation struggles, from the formation of people’s armies in the great modern revolutions to guerrilla warfare and finally to contemporary forms of nerwork struggle. When we put the genealogy in morion, in faer, the changing forms of resistance will reveal three guiding principles – principles that are really embedded in history and determine its movement. The first principle that guides the genealogy will refer to the historical occasion, that is, the form of resistance that is most effective in combating a specific form of power. The second principle will pose a correspondence berween changing forms of resistance and the transformations of economic and social production: in each era, in other words, the model of resistance that proves to be most effective turns out to have the same form as the dominant models of economic and social production. The third principle that will emerge refers simply to democracy and freedom: each new form of resistance is aimed at addressing the undemocratic qualities of previous forms, creating a chain of ever more democratic movements. This genealogy of wars of liberation and resistance movements, finally, will lead us to see the most adequate form of organization for resistance and liberation struggles in the contemporary material and political situation.”
Alexander Dugin, standing, at the National Bolshevik Bunker in 1996. On his left, is Eduard Limonov.
“Negri and Hardt call the global capitalistic system ‘Empire’ and identify it with globalism and American world government. In their opinion, globalism creates the conditions for a universal, planetary revolution of the masses, who, using the common character of globalism and its possibilities for communication and the wide, open spread of knowledge, create a network of world sabotage, for the shift from humanity (standing out as the subject and object of oppression, hierarchical relations, exploitation and disciplinarian strategies) to post-humanity (mutants, cyborgs, clones, and virtuality), and the free selection of gender, appearance and individual rationality according to one’s arbitrary rule and for any space of time. Negri and Hardt think that this will lead to the freeing up of the creative potential of the masses and at the same time to the destruction of the global power of ‘Empire’…
“The anti-globalisation movement in whole is oriented precisely to such a project of the future. And such actions as ‘the Conference in São Paulo’, where anti-globalists first tried to aim at a common strategy, attest that the New Leftist project is discovering forms of concrete political realisation. Many concrete actions — gay parades, anti-globalisation protests, Occupy Wall Street, the disturbances in immigrant suburbs of European cities, the rebellions of ‘autonomous ones’ in defence of squatters’ rights, broad social protests of new labour unions (all reminding one of a carnival), the movement for the legalisation of drugs, ecological actions and protests and so on — are included in this orientation.”
“…every trend has, as the postmodernists say, trend-setters: those who establish a determinate trend for a specific goal.”
