Fwd: Paye's "Global War on Liberty"

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Richard Moore

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Sep 4, 2009, 10:17:19 AM9/4/09

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from extended review of Paye's "Global War on Liberty":

Indeed, more than an insertion of totalitarian or dictatorial rule into Western democracies through the many instances of suspension of the law, what Paye's text reveals is that this suppression of the law gives way to the creation of a new normative system (one for which there may not be any appropriate political vocabulary yet). As Paye puts it, the generalized state of exception "breaks new ground by modifying the very form of the state" (34). Or, as he adds later on, "this morphing of the legal order is significant . . . [because] it lays the foundations of a new kind of political regime" (61). Today's permanent state of emergency/exceptionality ushers in a new legal system and, more importantly for Paye, it announces a new political order, one that reshuffles the logic of social action and scrambles the relationship between the state and the citizen. Paye's analysis demonstrates that the contemporary condition is not just a return to totalitarianism or dictatorship (his temptation to fall back onto those terms notwithstanding). Or, at the very least, what we commonly take to be totalitarianism will have to be reconsidered to match the contemporary circumstances.

Begin forwarded message:

From: Harvey Jones
Date: 4 September 2009 05:12:43 IST
To: r...@quaylargo.com
Subject: Global structures

Hi Richard

I had a quick look at the index of just one of the linked pdf files below and thought it may be of interest to you and your readers. The file is dated 2004,2005 and runs to over 200 pages, but covers a lot of topics.
It appears to be the plans and system set up for the near future.

I wish it were science fiction, but suspect otherwise.

take care
H

(I was able to find more on Paye using the Yahoo search engine. What I
have noticed recently is that, whereas Google may show next to nothing
on certain topics, I am successful with other search engines.)

We are all familiar with insults to human rights such as the
wiretapping, or torture, conducted by the Bush administration. What
caught my interest in your comments on Paye is that he documented this
as a part of a larger pattern of abuses extending both temporally and
internationally and that he did this with the seriousness and rigor of
an academic. While Paye does this by an analysis of changes in the legal
system, it appears that this is just one aspect of a larger pattern. For
example, see the work of the International Campaign Against Mass
Surveillance (e.g., "The Emergence of a Global Structure for Mass
Registration and Surveillance":
http://www.hollings.org/Content/ICAMS-TheEmergenceOfAGlobalInfrastructureForMassRegistrationAndSurveillance.pdf ), or a study done by the European Union Parliament "An Appraisal of Technologies for Political Control" ( http://www.hollings.org/Content/EUParliament-AnAppraisalOfTechnologiesOfPoliticalControl.pdf ). Another interesting work, although lacking the rigor of the other studies, makes up for it in the comprehensiveness of its picture: Nield's "Police State Road Map" ( http://www.hollings.org/Content/Nield-PoliceStateRoadMap.pdf ). What comes out of this all seems to me an emerging new dark age that would return humanity to conditions before the Magna Carta. To those with an "accidentalist" view of history, I would ask how likely such a pattern of unpopular changes in disparate fields of law, registration, surveillance, political control, etc., could emerge simultaneously and within multiple countries, particularly given that many of these changes began before 9-11? More concretely, do we suppose that it just by accident that we got all the traffic cameras springing up simultaneously across the United States and the UK?

An extended review of Paye's "Global War on Liberty" is at
http://www.hollings.org/Content/Debrix-JeanClaudePaye%
27sGlobalWarOnLiberty.pdf .

"If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves."

                          Lane Kirkland:

Harvey Jones                               Programmer/Analyst

School of Psychology

Massey University

Palmerston North

New Zealand.

            URL: http://psychology.massey.ac.nz/