the culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception (1944)

(385): "under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through..."

(386): "movies and radio no longer pretend to be art. the truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce."

(386): "no mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. a technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. it is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself."

(386): "the step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. the former stillallowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. the latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listerners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same."

(386): interesting, and possibly problematic--"the attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it."

(387): "the whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry."

(387): brilliant--"the entertainments manufacturers know what their products will be consumed with alertness even when the customer is distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the masses, whether at work or t leisure -- which is akin to work."

(387): "this promise held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical."

(388): "to speak of culture was always contrary to culture. culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematization and process of cataloging and classification which bring culture within the sphere of adminstration."

(388): yes--"in front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape... the secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of fulfillment as a broken promise."

(389): brilliant--"but the original affinity of business and amusment is shown in the latter's specific significance: to defend society. to be pleased means to say Yes. it is possible only by insulation from the totality of the social process... Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, bur from the last remaining thought of resistance. the liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation."

(389): but this verges on indulging what is worst in the intellectual--"even when the public does--exceptionally--rebel against the pleasure industry, all it can muster is that feeble resistance which that very industry has inculcated in it."

(389): "personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. the triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them."

the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (1936)

(363): "the transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the changi n the conditions of production..." what follows are "theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production..."

(365): "the situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated."

(365-366): the notion of "aura," or what is lost in the reproduction process...

(367): key--"for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. to an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.... but the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice--politics."

(368): "by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental."

(368): "when the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever. the resulting change in the function of art transcended the perspective of the century; for a long time it even escaped that of the twentieth century, which experienced the development of the film."

(370): "man has to operate ith his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura."

(371): "so long as the movie-makers' capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today's film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art."

(372): "the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character."

(373): important--"magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. the painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant thatn that of the paitner, since it offers, precisely because of the theoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. and that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art."

(373): "mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. the reactionary attitude toward a picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a chaplin movie. the progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert."

(374): "painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the movie today.... thus the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism."

(375): "then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder..." (!)

(375-376): the film and dadaism

(376-377): "clearly, this [referring to the haughty critique of film] is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. that is a commonplace. the question remains whether it provides a platform for the analysis of the film. a closer look is needed here."

(377): "since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. today it does so in the film. reception is in a state of distraction... the film makes the cult value recede into the background not only bu putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at ht movies this position requires no attention. the public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one."

(378): important--"the growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right but instead a chance ot express themselves."

(378): "all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war."

(378): the Futurist Manifesto

(378): "the horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in th e process of production--in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets."

(378): "Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches."

(379): "Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art."

culture conundrum:
Ever since the early 19th century, culture or civilisation has been the opposite of barbarism. Behind this opposition lay a kind of narrative: first you had barbarism, then civilisation was dredged out of its murky depths. Radical thinkers, by contrast, have always seen barbarism and civilisation as synchronous. This is what the German Marxist Walter Benjamin had in mind when he declared that "every document of civilisation is at the same time a record of barbarism". For every cathedral, a pit of bones; for every work of art, the mass labour that granted the artist the resources to create it. Civilisation needs to be wrested from nature by violence, but the violence lives on in the coercion used to protect civilisation - a coercion known among other things as the political state.

hip-hop and corporate america:
Corporations have been usurping and reshaping Black mass culture for decades -- hip hop is just the latest product line.
(...) Hip Hop music is also a product, produced by giant corporations for mass distribution to a carefully targeted and cultivated demographic market. Corporate executives map out multi-year campaigns to increase their share of the targeted market, hiring and firing subordinates -- the men and women of Artists and Recordings (A&R) departments -- whose job is to find the raw material for the product (artists), and shape it into the package upper management has decreed is most marketable (the artist's public persona, image, style and behavior). It is a corporate process at every stage of artist "development," one that was in place long before the artist was "discovered" or signed to the corporate label. What the public sees, hears and consumes is the end result of a process that is integral to the business model crafted by top corporate executives. The artist, the song, the presentation -- all of it is a corporate product.
(...) As the great French author and revolutionary Franz Fanon would have understood perfectly, colonized and racially oppressed peoples internalize -- take ownership -- of the social pathologies fostered by the oppressor. Thus, the anti-social aspects of commercial hip hop are perceived as a "Black" problem, to be overcome through internal devices (preaching and other forms of collective self-flagellation), rather than viewed as an assault by hostile, outside forces secondarily abetted by opportunists within the group.
(...) As "conscious" rapper Paris wrote, there is no viable alternative to the corporate nexus for hip hop artists seeking to reach a mass audience. "WHAT underground?" said Paris. "Do you know how much good material is marginalized because it doesn't fit white cooperate America's ideals of acceptability? Independents can't get radio or video play anymore, at least not through commercial outlets, and most listeners don't acknowledge material that they don't see or hear regularly on the radio or on T.V."
(...) African Americans do not control the packaging and dissemination of their culture: corporations and their Black comprador allies and annexes do. The mass Gangsta Rap phenomenon is a boardroom invention. I know.
(...) By 1990, the major labels were preparing to swallow the independent labels that had birthed commercial hip hop, which had evolved into a wondrous mix of party, political and "street"-aggressive subsets. One of the corporate labels (I can't remember which) conducted a study that shocked the industry: The most "active" consumers of Hip Hop, they discovered, were "tweens," the demographic slice between the ages of 11 and 13. The numbers were unprecedented. Even in the early years of Black radio, R&B music's most "active" consumers were at least two or three years older than "tweens." It didn't take a roomful of PhDs in human development science to grasp the ramifications of the data. Early and pre-adolescents of both genders are sexual-socially undeveloped -- uncertain and afraid of the other gender. Tweens revel in honing their newfound skills in profanity; they love to curse. Males, especially, act out their anxieties about females through aggression and derision. This is the cohort for which the major labels would package their hip hop products. Commercial Gangsta Rap was born -- a sub-genre that would lock a whole generation in perpetual arrested social development.
(...) A young female artist broke down at my kitchen table one afternoon, after we had finished a promotional interview. "They're trying to make me into a whore," she said, sobbing. "They say I'm not ‘street' enough." Her skills on the mic were fine. "They" were the A&R people from her corporate label.

mamdani on islam:
The public debate that followed 9/11 was defined by two prominent semi-official intellectuals, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University and Bernard Lewis of Princeton University. As in every debate, their disagreement unfolded within a common frame. The ground they shared has come to define political “common sense” in the United States. This common sense is driven by a presumption that the world we live in is divided in two: between those modern and those pre-modern. It is said that those modern make their culture; they have a reflexive attitude to it; they can separate the good from the bad, build on the good and correct the bad; their culture develops historically; and the story of that historical development is what we call progress. The pre-modern peoples, in contrast, are said to be born into a culture; they are said to have a tendency to internalize their culture rather than have a critical attitude to it. Rather than make their culture historically, they seem condemned to live it uncritically, and content to pass it on from one generation to another. Pre-modern peoples are said to wear culture as a badge, or to suffer from it, like a twitch, even a fever. That fever used to be thought of as tropical, now it is more likely to be imagined as desert fever. Prior to 9/11, Africans were considered the quintessentially pre-modern people; now the characterization is more likely to be use with regard to Muslims. It is said that except for a founding prophetic moment and some monuments, Muslims tend to live their culture as a destiny. The claim is that you can read the politics of Muslims from their culture.
(...) The Iraq war was supposed to be a realization of this inspiration. It was said that once bad Muslim were overthrown good ones would rise to the occasion, as indeed Eastern Europeans had done; they would garland American soldiers and that would be the dawn of democracy in Iraq. But, lo and behold, the history of Iraq since 2003 is testimony to thousands, even millions, of so-called good Muslims turning bad overnight. Anybody who followed the public discussion in the US about good and bad Muslims soon realized that good and bad were not adjectives describing the attitude of Muslims to Islam. They were actually adjectives describing Muslim attitudes to Western power. They were not cultural adjectives; they were political adjectives.
(...)This, then, is my first point: all culture, like all politics, is historical; all, without exception. It is not a particularly profound point. Rather, it is simple, and should be obvious, but is not. One would have thought this was settled with the struggle against colonialism. That it is not shows that the power of ideas does not simply flow from their internal consistency and explanatory power, but also from their relationship to the world of power.
(...) There is also no doubt of the existence of political Islam, nor about the
existence of a tendency in political Islam – called jihadi Islam – that has embraced political violence as the way to change the world. So is culture unimportant? I don’t think so. What I want to dispense with is not the notion of culture but the idea that the culture of some peoples is historical and that of other peoples is not. I simply think that culture has to be understood historically.
(...) When I read Sayyid Qutb’s book, Signposts, I was struck by the kind of
resonance it produced in a person like me, that is, one who came of political age in the 1960s and 70s. Sayyid Qutb says in the introduction to Signposts that he wrote this for the Islamist vanguard; I thought I was reading a version of Lenin’s What is to be Done. And when I read the text and encountered Sayyid Qutb’s main argument that you must make a distinction between friends and enemies, because with friends you use persuasion and with enemies you use force, I thought I was reading Mao Zedong on the correct handling of contradictions amongst the people.
(...) Are we to accept Huntington’s and Bernard Lewis’ contention that the history of thought is best understood as developing inside containers called civilizations; one Islamic, another Hindu, another Confucian, another Christian?
(...) Was not Mawdudi’s disillusionment with Islam as a social project and his embrace of a statist project part of a larger shift that had occurred in different types of nationalism, religious and secular? Was not Sayyid Qutb’s embrace of political violence in line with a growing romance with armed struggle in movements of national liberation in the ‘50s and ‘60s – many driven by a presumption that armed struggle was not only the most effective form of struggle but also the only genuine mode of struggle? The fact is that both Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb were involved in multiple conversations: they were in a debate not only with Islamic intellectuals, whether contemporaries or of previous generations, but also with contending intellectuals anchored in other modes of political thought. And the main competition then was Marxism-Leninism, a militantly secular ideology which influenced both their language and their method of organization and struggle.
(...) We may be able to speak before 1491 of civilizations as separate containers, with transactions at their borders, but no longer after 1491. Globalization begins with modern colonialism, for modern colonialism break the levies of cultural life. Even if European intellectuals – those born and working in European languages – could continue to function exclusively in European languages and think of the European experience as universal, this luxury was not available to intellectuals from the colonized world. For the colonized intellectual, it became a matter of necessity, indeed of survival, to function in languages other than one’s native tongue. The colonized intellectual had no choice but to go universal, which meant to work in more than one family of languages, and become immersed in a deterritorialized culture. We need to distinguish between culture and politics. Politics is overwhelmingly territorial, as in the expression geopolitical. But not culture. The rupture between culture and territory has always been there, but it has been particularly radical since 1491.
(...) Both were non-religious intellectuals; Mawdudi was a journalist; Sayyid Qutb
was a literary critic. It is worth noting the fact that none of the key intellectuals of contemporary political Islam – from al-Afghani to Mawdudi to Said Qutb to Ali Shariati in Iran – have come from the religious domain. In this they resemble key intellectuals that have shaped contemporary political Hinduism, even political Zionism. How does one explain this? To understand why it was so easy for non-religious intellectuals in Islam to come into the religious domain, we have to understand that we were dealing with a religion organized differently from Christianity. Western Christianity, particularly Catholicism, has historically been organized on the model of the Roman empire; and Protestantism has been organized on the model of the nation state. There is an institutionalized hierarchy of power inside the Church, from the floor to the ceiling. Organized power in institutionalized religion has historically functioned parallel to organized power in the state. Part of the question of secularism in the West has been that of policing the line of demarcation between two different powers, in the state and in the Church.
There is no such religious hierarchy in Sunni Islam. There is only the prayer leader, not even a priesthood. In spite of attempts by states to create a hierarchy from the top-down there really isn’t one. This was also true of Shi’a Islam until the creation of vilayat-i-faqih by Ayatollah Khomeini. I think of Ayatollah Khomeini’s innovation as preemptive, as a safeguard against intellectuals from the secular domain, intellectuals like Ali Shariati. We may also note that Ayatollah Khomeini’s innovation is no longer universally accepted in Shia Islam. The most,prominent challenge has come from Ayatollah Sistani, who has argued for religious leaders to
function as a moral presence outside the state, and not as a political force in the state.
(...) Bigotry, however, is not blasphemy. Blasphemy is the practice of questioning a tradition from the inside. In contrast, bigotry is an assault on that tradition from the outside. If blasphemy is an attempt to speak truth to power, bigotry is the reverse: an attempt by power to instrumentalize truth. I have argued that a defining feature of the cartoon debate is that bigotry is being mistaken for blasphemy.
(...) Blasphemy was aimed at the Church as an institutional
power, which is why it is more of a European than an American tradition. I have already pointed out that institutionalized religion in medieval Europe was organized as a form of hierarchical power, with an authority from the floor to the ceiling. No earthly place symbolized the Church as an institutionalized power more than Calvin’s Geneva. Every act was governed by rigid spiritual rule: drunkards, dancers and adulterers were excommunicated; a child who struck his parents was beheaded; and men and women who transgressed Calvin’s code were burnt at the stake. R. H. Tawney wrote of it as “a city of glass, in which every household lived its life under the supervision of a spiritual police.” In this context, blasphemy was a weapon against religiously-sanctioned terror.
(...) The problem, according to this point of view, is
that the laws reflect the cultural sensibility of particular countries in a particular historical period, so that blasphemy laws tend to protect the state religion only, such as Anglicanism in England and Lutheranism in Denmark. Europe also has laws against certain forms of bigotry, particularly anti-Semitism. In England, the net is cast a little wider. The Race Relations Act prohibits the use of a language which would incite racial hatred. But it has yet to prohibit the incitement of hatred against groups defined culturally and religiously. Tariq Modood has pointed out that it has not even been 15 years since Britain’s Commission on Racial Equality denied that the vilification of Muslims was a form of racism. In France, laws limit or outlaw debates on certain issues. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust. But French law also makes it compulsory for schools to teach that colonialism was beneficial for those who were colonized.
(...) What is striking about the Dworkin piece is its silence about hate speech and bigotry and how to confront it. Ask yourself: what, after all, is the rationale for criminalizing Holocaust Denial? Clearly, not free speech. Rather, it is the more urgent imperative for peaceful coexistence between Christians and Jews in post-Holocaust Europe. Let us remember that the very notion of a Judeo-Christian civilization is mainly a post-Holocaust political project. Prior to the Holocaust, mainstream politics did not hyphenate Judaism with Christianity, but opposed one to the other.
(...) My sense is that we are now entering a period where Islamophobia is maturing into an ideology of hate, a grand ideology driven by a core explanation of what is wrong with the world: hence the growing claim that there is a clash of civilizations. The clash of civilizations is, in turn, the ideological arm of the war on terror. This is why it is particularly significant that when the Danish cartoons met with protests, the response was to up the ante from that of defense of free speech to a defense of civilization.

culture as collateral damage (englehart/chalmers johnson [july 2005]):
The destruction began as Baghdad fell. Words disappeared instantly. They simply blinked off the screen of Iraqi history, many of them forever. First, there was the looting of the National Museum. That took care of some of the earliest words on clay, including, possibly, cuneiform tablets with missing parts of the epic of Gilgamesh. Soon after, the great libraries and archives of the capital went up in flames and books, letters, government documents, ancient Korans, religious manuscripts, stretching back centuries -- all those things not pressed into clay, or etched on stone, or engraved on metal, just words on that most precious and perishable of all commonplaces, paper -- vanished forever. What we're talking about, of course, is the flesh of history. And it was no less a victim of the American invasion -- of the Bush administration's lack of attention to, its lack of any sense of the value of what Iraq held (other than oil) -- than the Iraqi people. All of this has been, in that grim phrase created by the Pentagon, "collateral damage."
[chalmers johnson starts here]
(...) In their "joint statement on Iraq's future" of April 8, 2003, George Bush and Tony Blair declared, "We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq's natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit."[1] In this they were true to their word. Among the few places American soldiers actually did guard during and in the wake of their invasion were oil fields and the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. But the real Iraqi patrimony, that invaluable human inheritance of thousands of years, was another matter. At a time when American pundits were warning of a future "clash of civilizations," our occupation forces were letting perhaps the greatest of all human patrimonies be looted and smashed.
(...) No other places in the Bible except for Israel have more history and prophecy associated with them than Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer), and Mesopotamia -- different names for the territory that the British around the time of World War I began to call "Iraq," using the old Arab term for the lands of the former Turkish enclave of Mesopotamia (in Greek: "between the [Tigris and Eurphrates] rivers").[3] Most of the early books of Genesis are set in Iraq (see, for instance, Genesis 10:10, 11:31; also Daniel 1-4; II Kings 24).
(...) Nowhere was this failure more apparent than in the indifference -- even the glee -- shown by Rumsfeld and his generals toward the looting on April 11 and 12, 2003, of the National Museum in Baghdad and the burning on April 14, 2003, of the National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowments. These events were, according to Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, "the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years." Eleanor Robson of All Souls College, Oxford, said, "You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale."[6] Yet Secretary Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game and shrugged it off with the comment that "Freedom's untidy. . . . Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes."[7]
(...) Since then, as a result of an amnesty for looters, about 4,000 of the artifacts have been recovered in Iraq, and over a thousand have been confiscated in the United States.[10] Curtis noted that random checks of Western soldiers leaving Iraq had led to the discovery of several in illegal possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the U.S. then found more. Officials in Jordan have impounded about 2,000 pieces smuggled in from Iraq; in France, 500 pieces; in Italy, 300; in Syria, 300; and in Switzerland, 250. Lesser numbers have been seized in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad.
(...) The torching of books and manuscripts in the Library of Korans and the National Library was in itself a historical disaster of the first order. Most of the Ottoman imperial documents and the old royal archives concerning the creation of Iraq were reduced to ashes. According to Humberto Márquez, the Venezuelan writer and author of Historia Universal de La Destrucción de Los Libros (2004), about a million books and ten million documents were destroyed by the fires of April 14, 2003.[12] Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent of the Independent of London, was in Baghdad the day of the fires. He rushed to the offices of the U.S. Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau and gave the officer on duty precise map locations for the two archives and their names in Arabic and English, and pointed out that the smoke could be seen from three miles away. The officer shouted to a colleague, "This guy says some biblical library is on fire," but the Americans did nothing to try to put out the flames.[13]
(...) In January 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, an American delegation of scholars, museum directors, art collectors, and antiquities dealers met with officials at the Pentagon to discuss the forthcoming invasion. They specifically warned that Baghdad's National Museum was the single most important site in the country. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute said, "I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected."
(...) However, a more ominous indicator of things to come was reported in the April 14, 2003, London Guardian: Rich American collectors with connections to the White House were busy "persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq's heritage by prevention of sales abroad." On January 24, 2003, some sixty New York-based collectors and dealers organized themselves into a new group called the American Council for Cultural Policy and met with Bush administration and Pentagon officials to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws.[16] Opening up private trade in Iraqi artifacts, they suggested, would offer such items better security than they could receive in Iraq.
(...) First on Gen. Garner's list of places to protect was the Iraqi Central Bank, which is now a ruin; second was the Museum of Antiquities. Sixteenth was the Oil Ministry, the only place that U.S. forces occupying Baghdad actually defended.
(...) At the 6,000-year-old Sumerian city of Ur with its massive ziggurat, or stepped temple-tower (built in the period 2112 - 2095 B.C. and restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century B.C.), the Marines spray-painted their motto, "Semper Fi" (semper fidelis, always faithful) onto its walls.[20] The military then made the monument "off limits" to everyone in order to disguise the desecration that had occurred there, including the looting by U.S. soldiers of clay bricks used in the construction of the ancient buildings.
(...) However, the U.S. military chose the land immediately adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base with two runways measuring 12,000 and 9,700 feet respectively and four satellite camps. In the process, military engineers moved more than 9,500 truckloads of dirt in order to build 350,000 square feet of hangars and other facilities for aircraft and Predator unmanned drones. They completely ruined the area, the literal heartland of human civilization, for any further archaeological research or future tourism. On October 24, 2003, according to the Global Security Organization, the Army and Air Force built its own modern ziggurat. It "opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility, co-located with [a] . . . Pizza Hut, provides another Burger King restaurant so that more service men and women serving in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget about the task at hand in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent that takes them back home."[21]
(...) Before our invasion of Afghanistan, we condemned the Taliban for their dynamiting of the monumental third century A.D. Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in March, 2001. Those were two gigantic statues of remarkable historical value and the barbarism involved in their destruction blazed in headlines and horrified commentaries in our country. Today, our own government is guilty of far greater crimes when it comes to the destruction of a whole universe of antiquity, and few here, when they consider Iraqi attitudes toward the American occupation, even take that into consideration. But what we do not care to remember, others may recall all too well.

amilcar cabral on culture and national liberation (1970):
In order to escape this choice--which may be called the dilemma of cultural resistance--imperialist colonial domination has tried to create theories which, in fact, are only gross formulations of racism, and which, in practice, are translated into a permanent state of siege of the indigenous populations on the basis of racist dictatorship (or democracy). This, for example, is the case with the so-called theory of progressive assimilation of native populations, which turns out to be only a more or less violent attempt to deny the culture of the people in question.
(...) [on giving culture a place in materialist view of history] The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history and a determinant of history, by the positive or negative influence which it exerts on the evolution of relationships between man and his environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as among different societies.
(...) History allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalance and conflicts (economic, political and social) which characterize the evolution of a society; culture allows us to know the dynamic syntheses which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in the search for survival and progress.
(...) [does he distance himself from progressive views of culture, if culture is melded to history?]
Thus it is understood that imperialist domination by denying the historical development of the dominated people, necessarily also denies their cultural development. It is also understood why imperialist domination, like all other foreign domination for its own security, requires cultural oppression and the attempt at direct or indirect liquidation of the essential elements of the culture of the dominated people.
(...) [he is confused, in my opinion: because understands that the old metrics no longer apply] In our time it is common to affirm that all peoples have a culture. The time is past when, in an effort to perpetuate the domination of a people, culture was considered an attribute of privileged peoples or nations, and when, out of either ignorance or malice, culture was confused with technical power, if not with skin color or the shape of one's eyes. The liberation movement, as representative and defender of the culture of the people, must be conscious of the fact that, whatever may be the material conditions of the society it represents, the society is the bearer and creator of culture. The liberation movement must furthermore embody the mass character, the popular character of the culture--which is not and never could be the privilege of one or of some sectors of the society.
(...) [levels of culture?] In the specific conditions of our country--and we would say, of Africa--the horizontal and vertical distribution of levels of culture is somewhat complex. In fact, from villages to towns, from one ethnic group to another, from one age group to another, from the peasant to the workman or to the indigenous intellectual who is more or less assimilated, and, as we have said, even from individual to individual within the same social group, the quantitative and qualitative level of culture varies significantly.
(...) [durkheimian claims] In societies with a horizontal social structure, such as the Balante, for example, the distribution of cultural levels is more or less uniform, variations being linked uniquely to characteristics of individuals or of age groups. On the other hand, in societies with a vertical structure, such as the Fula, there are important variations from the top to the bottom of the social pyramid. These differences in social structure illustrate once more the close relationship between culture and economy, and also explain differences in the general or sectoral behavior of these two ethnic groups in relation to the liberation movement.
(...) [much like fanon here] A reconversion of minds--of mental set--is thus indispensable to the true integration of people into the liberation movement. Such reonversion--re-Africanization, in our case--may take place before the struggle, but it is completed only during the course of the struggle, through daily contact with the popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by the struggle.
(...) [has been working backward from this point, i suspect] Whatever may be the complexity of this basic cultural panorama, the liberation movement must be capable of distinguishing within it the essential from the secondary, the positive from the negative, the progressive from the reactionary in order to characterize the master line which defines progressively a national culture.