<nettime> imperial shrub digest [mccullagh, driscoll]

["nettime's_topiary.artist" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
     Re: <nettime> Re: Bush Insisted Only HE Should Decide Who Stands Trial
"charmaine driscoll" <missplateau@hotmail.com>
     bush  imperium

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Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 22:41:45 -0500
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Re: Bush Insisted Only HE Should Decide Who Stands Trial--NEWSWEEK

On Mon, Nov 19, 2001 at 02:40:48PM -0500, Ivo Skoric wrote:
> In any case, the loophole in the executive order is obvious - it 
> applies exclusively to non-citizens - therefore Al Qaeda just needs 

Of course, that's a loophole that could be closed with the stroke of
a pen after Bush signs Secret Military Tribunals Executive Order v2.0.

What, you think the Supreme Court or Congress will do anything to stop it?

-Declan

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From: "charmaine driscoll" <missplateau@hotmail.com>
Subject: bush  imperium
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 00:10:47 -0500

--------------- I think that you raise interesting points. For one 
historically republics in the AMerican style were modeled to some extent on 
the Roman idea which did in fact become Empire. The image of the Eagle -- a 
strong icon in American mythos making -- is everywhere evident and is 
immanent to its power. The struggle be between the the now growing family 
lineage style of the presidency,the executive, congress and the people would 
seem to replicate similar struggles of Roman history. So one level we have a 
representational democratic machine struggling with the imperial desires of 
the growing despotic signifier of the Imperium; the imperium is also however 
in struggle and collaboration with the multinational power mongers and 
profit makers ie. one thinks of Bill Gates as supranational international 
multibillionaire with world wielding powers and wealth untold almost 
infinite to measure and make his own war machines versus the present and 
previous administrations attempts to shackle and control this infinite 
wealth power; another level of the 20 century feudal international style of 
recent baronage of capital which at the same time molecularizes and 
capitalizes a series of what are normally molar paths of desire; a type of 
implosion of the molecular line against the molar;this is often times  
called miniaturization and represents a new type of threat to our 
understanding of media, power and desire. So empire as family fiefdom is at 
war with feudal corporate interest is at conflict and war with democratizing 
impulses of representational democracy of old congress and days of the old 
American revolution which is of course  a nostalgic memory of an ideal which 
was never fulfilled but was underway at least partially. Can capital in this 
form sustain its own hegemony? Can it bear its own zero tolerance for death? 
Perhaps not, and in the meantime we wait for the Mad Emperors of America to 
take their place on the world stage. Which is a role delegated in the 
interim to others. Baudrillard'S recent text speaks to this intolerance of 
death which animates much of the american capital imperial system.
A horde of barbarian despotic signifiers at loose with toys to wreak havoc 
on humans has been in the works since Hitler, Stalin and the other various 
gangsters who have been slaughtering and killling on this planet for a long 
time to say the only obvious; there is Pol Pot and now Osama a devil's share 
of the bargain perhaps? a shadow come back to haunt? Power's intolerance of 
itself in Baudrillard's argument. But who watches as Americans drop weapons 
from the air and then leave, who watches but the billions of China, India 
and

aprés ca? qui sait? what courage to field 10 million soldiers this becoems 
the nightmare of the Empire as they have no more of the courage of the old 
Republic. Old Rome was not, in Marxian terms, a capitalist system yet, so 
therefore it laid waste to its own republic at each step of the way of its 
imperial gains; Perhaps after Bush 2 we shall have Clinton 2 then Bush 3 and 
so on. And so

Marx says somewhere that the first time round history is tragic and the 
second time round it is comic or farcial.

But what he did not ask was, what is history the fourth time round? Because 
we live in the fourth time round of world war 2 which never ended.


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