Alternative Press
Week in Review

A regular weekly roundup of news, essays and other items of interest.
February 24 - March 2, 2003

Poll: US Biggest Threat to Peace
TIME asks which country really poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003. The results as of 3/2/03:
North Korea 5.6%
Iraq 6.7%
United States 87.7%
Total votes cast: 630,100

Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein

Radical Propaganda Archive

Mark Fiore Animation

Website of the Week

INCOMING! - A short list of some of the more interesting items received at the Alternative Press Review office this week.

Book of the week - Power and Terror: Post 9-11 talks and interviews
By Noam Chomsky (Seven Stories Press)

In Power and Terror, his first new book following his runaway bestseller 9-11, Chomsky presents his latest thinking on terrorism, U.S. foreign policy, and the meaning and true impact of militarism in the world today, based on a series of talks and conversations in March and May of 2002 in California, Cambridge, Mass., and New York.

Zine of the week - anchorage anarchy
(issue #2, February 2003)

A 12-page anti-government anarchist publication from Bad Press (PO Box 230332, Anchorage, AK 99523-0332) and edited by Joe Peacott.

Magazine of the week - The Progressive
(Volume 67, Number 3 - March 2003)

Howard Zinn on war, Nat Hentoff on Ashcroft, Barbara Ehrenreich on Porto Allegre, Behrooz Arshadi's personal account of INS mistreatment, Mark Engler and Saurav Sarkar on Ashcroft's roundup, Matthew Rothschild confronts the apologists for empire, and an interview with cartoonist Tom Tomorrow.

CDs of the week

Ani DiFranco - Evolve (Righteous Babe Records)

Five Days Over Seattle - an audio document of free radio station Y2WTKO (Cascadia Media Collective)
Under incredibly rough conditions up high in a tree, Y2WTKO/Free Radio Cascadia kept a signal of resistance up throughout the Battle of Seattle '99. These tracks were recorded off the air or from the raw program material itself. The broadcast is alternately hilarious and anguished; thoughtful and frustrated; low-tech and high art.

Upcoming Events

International Women's Day Week of Events
Washington, DC
March 3 - 9, 2003
Join thousands of women and men from all walks of life for this amazing women-led peace convergence. Join with Alice Walker, Vandana Shiva, comedian Janeane Garofalo, Susan Griffen, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Granny D, Barbara Ehrenreich, Rania Masri, Michelle Shocked, feminist theologian Hyun Kyung, Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams, Cheri Honkala, Maxine Hong Kingston, Inga Muscio, Terry Tempest Williams, Medea Benjamin, Starhawk, and many others for the rally and march.

ON THE LEGITIMACY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE
454 Willamette, Eugene, OR
March 9, 2003
A Presentation by Former Spokesperson for the Earth Liberation Front, and longtime social justice activist, Craig Rosebraugh. Within Westernized societies, particularly the United States, there has been a near universal acceptance that non-violent action has been the foundation on which the progress and/or success of political and social justice movements has been built. Yet, contrary to popular beliefs held by many in the United States, political violence has played a crucial role in advancing historical justice struggles. This lecture examines the historical roles that both nonviolence and political violence have played in social and political movements both in the United States and internationally. Lessons obtained through historical case studies will then be applied to current justice struggles in the United States. For more info on this event, contact Break The Chains collective at breakthechains02@yahoo.com

Fifth Annual Southern Girls Convention
March 14 - 16, 2003
Warren Wilson College - Asheville, North Carolina
The Southern Girls Convention is an annual grassroots meeting of social justice activists devoted to empowering women and girls in the South, and discussing Southern culture, views and stereotypes of the South, and the struggle for social justice. Each year's convention is hosted by a different Southern community and facilitated by local organizers. Past conventions have brought hundreds of participants to Memphis, Tennessee; Lousville, Kentucky; Auburn, Alabama; and Athens, Georgia.

Articles of the Week

An Alternative to War
Charles Fink, APR Web Feature
It should not surprise us, then, that George Washington-the wealthiest man in revolutionary America-and Thomas Jefferson were slaveholders. Or that the most powerful people in American history have been liars, thieves, ethnic cleansers, racists, mass murders. In fact, it is entirely predicable.

When Peace is War
Willful Disobedience Vol 3, #5
We are all aware that the United States is gearing up for an attack on Iraq. The formalities are still being worked out, but at this point, US military action seems almost certain. But this war will not be without resistance.

Traces of Poison
Salman Abu-Sitta, Al-Ahram Weekly
Israel, not Iraq, holds that distinction of being the first country in the region to use weapons of mass destruction with genocidal intent.

The Party's Over
Richard Heinberg, New College News
"Industrial nations' fossil-fueled joyride is about to end . . . is anyone prepared?" When Mike Bowlin, Chairman of ARCO, said in 1999 that "We've embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil," he was voicing a truth that many others in the petroleum industry knew but dared not utter. Over the past few years, evidence has mounted that global oil production is nearing its historic peak. Oil has been the cheapest and most convenient energy resource ever discovered by humans. During the past two centuries, people in industrial nations accustomed themselves to a regime in which more fossil-fuel energy was available each year, and the global population grew quickly to take advantage of this energy windfall. Industrial nations also came to rely on an economic system built on the assumption that growth is normal and necessary, and that it can go on forever. When oil production peaks, that assumption will come crashing down.

War by Numbers
George Szamuely, Centre for Research on Globalisation
It's a ploy that was used again and again in the Balkans over the past decade. Back then Serbia, not Iraq, was crying out to be punished by the righteous nations led by the United States. Serbs were beyond the pale.

Programming the Work Force: The Failure of Mass Education
Charles Sullivan, CounterPunch
Our schools are really factories of mass production where the object isn't to educate and inform, but to produce a homogenous culture of non-thinking conformists and consumers.

H ow the news will be censored in this war
Robert Fisk, The Independent
A new CNN system of "script approval" - the iniquitous instruction to reporters that they have to send all their copy to anonymous officials in Atlanta to ensure it is suitably sanitised - suggests that the Pentagon and the Department of State have nothing to worry about.

Shock and Yawn
Geov Parrish, Working for Change
Are Americans -- politicians, media executives, and ordinary citizens -- so numb, or oblivious, or callous to the horrors of war that we cannot raise ourselves to be bothered by what would be, if it works as planned, one of the greatest massacres, one of the greatest war crimes, in the history of the world, committed in our name and with our money?

The Anti-war Talk I Never Made
Mickey Z, Dissident Voice
"Two worlds are in conflict -- two philosophies of life -- one of these two worlds must break asunder." These are not the words of our un-elected president but rather Adolph Hitler, in the 1930s. I do not compare these two time periods lightly.

The Mexican Farmers' Movement: Exposing the Myths of Free Trade
Laura Carlsen, Americas Policy Report
Not since agrarian reform under President Lázaro Cárdenas in the late thirties had so many campesinos marched in the nation's capital. And perhaps not since the revolution had such a diverse crowd united behind such radical demands.

Missing US-Iraq History
Robert Parry, Consortiumnews.com
Before George W. Bush gives the final order to invade Iraq -- a nation that has not threatened the United States -- the American people might want a few facts about the real history of U.S.-Iraq relations. Missing chapters from 1980 to the present would be crucial in judging Bush's case for war.

Afghani-Sham
Schnews
In the week that George W. presents his 'vision' for a post-war Iraq, a vision that he has already refused to contribute to financially, SchNEWS reckons it's appropriate to look at Afghanistan one year on. Just how has bombing and killing civilians improved the situation for the Afghan people?

War
Howard Zinn, www.howardzinn.org
The anti-war movement will not likely surrender to the martial atmosphere. The hundreds of thousands who marched in Washington and San Francisco and New York and Boston - and in villages, towns, cities all over the country from Georgia to Montana - will not meekly withdraw. Unlike the shallow support for the war, the opposition to the war is deep, cannot be easily dislodged or frightened into silence.

Bl air Hypocrisy
John Pilger, ZNet
Having failed to fabricate a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and prove that Iraq has a secret armoury of banned weapons, the warmongers have fallen back on the "moral case" for an unprovoked attack on a stricken country. Farce has arrived.

The Dangers of Dissent
Heather Wokusch, www.heatherwokusch.com
Dissent isn't easy these days. You're branded unpatriotic for questioning an unelected president's rush to war, and dismissed as insignificant even when you number in the millions.

To talitarianism for Dummies
In a brave move by the literary publishers the book 1984 has been re-branded and re-marketed as "totalitarianism for dummies." Now in a bright yellow cover with a photograph of George Bush emblazoned across it with the slogan "I did it and I can't even pass high school exams" the book explains in easy terms and step by step guides how to control your population with a state of "Permanent War", how to set up your own "Ministry of Truth" and how to control the minds of your minions with Doublethink.

NewsWire

Ari Gets Laughed Out of the White House Briefing Room

Coalition of the Willing? Make that War Criminals

Coalition of the Willing or Coalition of the Coerced?

Allies Hushed Up Weapons' Destruction

Gulf War Vet Group: US Troops Set Kuwaiti Oil Fires

US to Unveil Massive New Bomb

Section by section analysis of the Patriot Act II

Enemies of the State: Bill O'Reilly has issued a warning

Antiwar activists plan nonviolent blockades

Anti- war Protestors to Block Main US Army Base in Germany

Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war