Journal articles on the topic 'Anti-Vietnam War Movement'

In this paper, the authors try to provide an overview of the new socialmovement variant, which is the anti-war movements initiated by hippies.The hippie culture developed rapidly in the 1960s in the United Statesand now has spread to the whole world through cultural globalization.Hippie Movement itself is a subculture movement that has a significantrole in forming a counter-culture in the United States. This movement’ssuccess cannot be separated from the support of the musicians ofthe world through popular culture that will be discussed in this paper throughcultural globalization.

When the 'baby-boomers' had reached university age, their understandings, habits and behaviours often collided with the political discourse of their parents' generation. By 1968, the Monash University Labor Club, fresh from its campaign to raise money for the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF), had discarded the mantle of Labor reformism and set itself on a path of a radical communist activism that scorned the efforts of the Communist Party (CPA) to contain its enthusiasm. In concert with similarly leaning student clubs at the other two Victorian universities it turned its attention to the protest movement outside the university, against conscription and the Vietnam Wm: That brought the inevitable clash with the older established anti war movement led by a loose blend of ALP, CPA, church groups and unions. This process led, in Scalmer's classification of protest actions, to the mode of political demonstrations leaping radically from 'staging' to 'disruption.'

The actual effectiveness of the American anti-war movement from 1964-68 and its attempts to sway the policy of President Johnson's administration on the topic of the Vietnam War is debatable. While popular myth has exaggerated the role of protestors in stopping the war, the movement failed to alter state policy on the war in any serious fashion. The anti-war movement could not develop a universal policy of their aims, differing from a gradual exit from Vietnam to a complete anarchist overthrow of the American system, and as such were unable to lobby the government effectively. Within the war itself, however, the Johnson administration and the United States Military encountered a stronger stimulus to reconsider their involvement: the inability to adapt to a guerilla war, the immense man power and resources required to ensure victory, and ultimately the communist Tet offensive of 1968 pushing American forces back. When President Johnson did seek to negotiate with North Vietnam at the end of his term, it was because America had simply failed to beat the Vietcong.

This article explores the response of the moderate wing of the civil rights movement to the war in Vietnam. The moderates, made up of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and leaders such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, were initially opposed to the civil rights movement taking a stand against the war. This reluctance was the result of a number of factors, including anti-communism and their own closeness with the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. Crucially, it also resulted from their own experiences of the black freedom struggle itself. The article also documents and analyses the growing anti-war dissent amongst the moderates, culminating in the decision of both the NAACP and the Urban League to adopt an anti-war stance at the end of the 1960s. Despite this, they remained unenthusiastic about participating in peace movement activities, and the reasons for this are explained. Finally, the article suggests that the war was important in exposing existing divisions within the civil rights movement, as well as in generating new ones.

The Western European protest movement against the American War in Vietnam stands out as something unique in contemporary history. Here finally, after all the senseless horrors of the twentieth century, reason speaks, demanding an end to Western atrocities against the poor South. But in the rosy fog of humanistic idealism and youthful revolution lies the unanswered question, why did this and not any other conflicts, before or after, render such an intense, widespread reaction? Taking Sweden as a case in point, this article employs the concepts of resistance, trauma, memory, and repetition to explore why the Vietnam movement came into being just as the buried history of the Holocaust resurfaced in a series of well-publicized trials of Nazi war criminals. It suggests that the protests of the radical young Leftists against American “imperialism” and “genocide” were informed by repressed memories of the Holocaust. The Swedish anti-war protests had unique and far-reaching consequences. The ruling Social Democratic Party, in order not to lose these younger Left wing voters to Communism, also engaged actively against the Vietnam War. And, somewhat baffling for a political party often criticized for close ties to Nazi Germany during WWII, its messaging used the same rhetoric as the Far Left, echoing Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.

The U.S. conservative movement in the mid-20th Century argued that the United States needed to continuously get tougher in the fight against communism worldwide. It remained supportive of U.S. efforts throughout the Vietnam War. However, in the period immediately preceding Americanization of the war in 1965, conservatives were uncertain about the outcome of any fighting in Vietnam. Specifically, they claimed that optimism for the Republic of Vietnam was lost with the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Without Diem, conservatives claimed, the Vietnam War was likely lost before it began. This article discusses how Diem went from a barely talked-about anti-Communist ally prior to his death to becoming posthumously the last great hope for Southeast Asia. Conservatives argued that without Diem, the only way the United States would be able to stop Communist expansion in Indochina would be to engage in a massive aerial bombing campaign and find a regional partner to deploy troops. Had he survived, this might not have been necessary. Learning why and how conservatives supported Diem after his death helps us better understand how conservatives reacted to the Vietnam War once Americanization began in 1965.

AbstractThich Tri Quang has long been one of the most controversial actors in the history of the Vietnam War. Scholars on the right have argued that Tri Quang was in all likelihood a communist agent operating at the behest of Hanoi. Scholars on the left have argued that Tri Quang was a peaceful religious leader devoted to democracy and a rapid end to the war. This article argues that neither of these interpretations is persuasive. As American officials rightly concluded throughout the war, there was no compelling evidence to suggest that Tri Quang was a communist agent or in any way sympathetic to the goals of Hanoi or the NLF. Drawing on the extensive archival evidence of Tri Quang's conversations with American officials, it is apparent that Tri Quang was in fact strongly anti-communist and quite receptive to the use of American military power against North Vietnam and China. The main factor that led to conflict between the Buddhist movement and the Johnson administration was Tri Quang's insistence that the military regimes that followed Ngo Dinh Diem were hostile to Buddhism and incapable of leading the struggle against Communism to a successful conclusion.

On the opening day of the 1972 Democratic convention, the women's caucus gave George McGovern a standing ovation. Its first meeting was packed, with 700 female delegates in attendance, exuberant over their numbers at the convention—triple the representation from four years earlier—and their new clout in presidential politics. Of all of the presidential candidates appearing, only Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to run for president, was greeted with enthusiasm comparable to the warm reception for McGovern. Most of the women at the meeting were fervently anti-war and respected McGovern for his early and courageous stance on Vietnam. However, the size of the gathering attested to another of McGovern's achievements: his chairing of the reform commission that had rewritten the Democratic Party's rules on delegate selection, leading to the huge leap in the representation of women. As Liz Carpenter, a former White House aide to LBJ, put it when introducing McGovern, “We know we wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for you.”

Vietnamese resistance to French rule dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, but the first decade of the twentieth century heralded a new chapter in the long history of anti-colonialism in Vietnam. It began with the fervent reformist efforts of a group of nationalist scholars trained and brought up in traditional ways, whose Movement for Modernisation (Phong Trao Duy Tan) was greatly influenced by the rise of Japan in the eastern hemisphere, especially following Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese war (1904–1905). Japan became a source of inspiration and began to be perceived as a model, a stimulant and even as a possible saviour of Vietnam.

That Todd Gitlin, one of the leaders of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1960s, should have about-faced with regard to early millennial U.S. imperial ventures is one of the defining acts of our intellectual moment. In aNew York Timesop-ed piece in September of 2002, Gitlin wrote,The American left … had its version of unilateralism. Responsibility for the [September 11] attacks had, somehow, to lie with American imperialism, because all responsibility has to lie with American imperialism — a perfect echo of the right's idea that all good powers are and should be somehow American. Intellectuals and activists on the far left could not be troubled much with compassion or defense…. Knowing little about Al Qaeda, they filed it under Anti-Imperialism, and American attacks on the Taliban under Vietnam Quagmire. For them, not flying the flag became an urgent cause…. Post-Vietnam liberals have an opening now, freed of our 60s flag anxiety and our reflexive negativity, to embrace a liberal patriotism that is unapologetic and uncowed.Here, any sense of hesitancy about a war on “terror” is ascribed to a loony left; U.S. imperialism, if it isn't seen as some left fabrication, seems peculiarly untroubling to Gitlin. Indeed, the publication in which his op-ed appeared had published a couple of months earlier (in theNew York Times Magazine) an essay by Harvard's Professor of Human Rights Policy [sic] Michael Ignatieff proclaiming imperialism a necessary national exercise: “Imperialism used to be the white man's burden. This gave it a bad reputation. But imperialism doesn't stop being necessary because it is politically incorrect.” This, together with Gitlin's call for a “liberal patriotism,” is pitched against what Gitlin elsewhere, in redolent terminology, names the “reflexive anti-Americanism” to be found “on campuses and in coastal cities, in circles where reality checks are scarce.”

This paper examines newspaper coverage of protests from 1960 to 1999. Initial findings indicated protests received consistent levels of support over that time. In light of this, we expected little change in the extent to which these protests challenged the status quo. However, there was a steady decline, with protest coverage becoming less deviant throughout this study. Further analyses suggest disparities in coverage of different protest-types were apparent during the Vietnam War. The most drastic change in treatment of different protest-types was directly after the height of the anti-war movement followed by gradual change thereafter.

Ever since the collapse of the Greek military regime in 1974 European campaigns over human rights and democracy in Greece have been commonly understood within an anti-totalitarian narrative that has celebrated resistance against both communist dictatorship and right-wing authoritarianism as part of a common journey towards a democratic continent. This article analyses the little-studied history of European solidarity movements with Greece during the 1960s and early 1970s that stretched across both the West and East of the continent. In so doing, it suggests that these campaigns were a facet of the politics of détente and rapprochement that brought together Western and Eastern Europe. Communist peace movements played a central role in these human rights campaigns. This was far from a common anti-totalitarian movement; rather, campaigns for Greece were enmeshed within movements that worked on a wide range of issues – from support for Eastern European dissidents and anti-fascism to world peace and protest against the Vietnam War. Nor were they about ‘a return to Europe’: above all they thrived on common connections in East and West with the Third World.

The general regularities and main tendencies of the development of a war novel have been researched in the article, an attempt of its typology and periodization is realized, the most common genre models is identified. The novel about the Second World War as a leading epic genre, which develops the theme of war in literature, creatively synthesized all the experience gained by the writers and front-line soldiers, became a noticeable artistic phenomenon and widespread genre formation in Western European, American and Slavic writing. It is concluded that the aesthetic and ideological-thematic level of artistic modeling of war reality is localized in different national literatures unevenly and stipulated first of all for the historical and geopolitical scope of the involvement of warring countries in hostilities. For example, in German military romance, is the so-called "Remarkable" novel, as well as a novel with a marked anti-militaristic nature. The main plot of the French war novel is the resistance movement, while the Italian one is fascist domination and occupation actions in the Balkans. Instead, in Britain, which has escaped occupation, military creativity takes a rather modest place. American writing focuses on war as a social phenomenon, armed conflicts in Vietnam. The polivector artistic search, the richness of types and varieties of war novel (panoramic novel, lyric war novel, anti-fascist novel, soldier novel, war novel-education, war novel with documentary basis, etc.) demonstrates military novel prose of Eastern Slavs. In particular, in the development of the Ukrainian war novel, literary critics distinguish such branches as the war novel, the post-war novel of the first decade, the war novel prose of the "second wave" (etc. pol. 50's - 60's), war novel 70’s-80’s, as well as modern war novels.

Since the late 1950s, Third World nationalism in Algeria, Vietnam, and the Middle East had fascinated radical Quebec nationalists. Quebec nationalism’s militant arm, the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), styled itself as a national-liberation movement fighting against Anglo-Canadian exploitation and oppression. After the Six-Day-War, the PLO became a significant source of inspiration for these elements. Quebec was their Palestine, as one prominent Quebec Nationalist asserted. This militant Quebec nationalism coincided and often overlapped with the rise of the New Left at Quebec’s universities and in its unions. Like its European and American counterparts, the Quebec New Left adopted the ideologies of anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, and in 1972, the Quebec-Palestine Association was established in this milieu. Anti-imperialism combined the Marxist analysis of class struggle with a nationalistic worldview, which saw the world divided between oppressor and oppressed nations. For the New Left, Israel became the epitome of an oppressor nation. It was associated with all the supposed vices of the West: Racism, capitalism, inauthenticity, and militarism. This paper sheds light on the founding years of the Quebec anti-Zionist movement in the early 1970 and discusses the themes and images it used to describe Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Furthermore, the paper investigates whether these articulations a genuine critique of Zionism and Israeli policies or whether they were, instead, a reflection of antisemitic stereotypes. Moreover, the paper compares Quebec anti-Zionism to parallel manifestations of New Left anti-Zionism in Germany, asking whether the cultural context in Quebec affected the message of anti-Zionism.

AbstractThis paper discusses the year 1905 as an educational watershed in colonial Vietnam. It focuses on the development of student mobility that transcended colonial and imperial boundaries and gave new momentum to educational training on a transnational scale. In the mid-1900s, the anti-colonial mandarin Phan Bội Châu launched a new nationalist movement called Đông Du, meaning ‘Going East.’ It centred on sending young men to Japan via Hong Kong to train them as effective anti-French activists. These students came from Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina and enrolled in a variety of curricula. Although this initiative collapsed in the late 1900s, it remained a watershed. Regional mobility did not disappear afterwards but mostly redirected itself towards China. This paper brings a great diversity of material face-to-face, including governmental archives and biographies, and challenges the colonial-based vision of Vietnamese education by highlighting its regional dimension, from the early twentieth century to the outset of the Second World War.

The nineteen seventies number among the most interesting periods of post-war times. They included the Vietnam war, the Hippie movement in the United States, the Socialist movement in Western Europe and the policy of ‘Détente’ in the East-West relationships. It was the extra-parliamentary opposition that gave birth to the extreme-left (terrorist) movements in Germany and worker protests in Poland, which, in turn, set about fighting the authorities and changing the relationships in their country. It was a time of rapid, dynamic changes and involvement. In the opinion of the participants in those processes themselves, they brought about a release, they constituted an apotheosis of a freedom such as they would probably never again experience in their lifetimes. These were the years of anti-authoritarian rebellion, of risking one’s own life and of international contacts of various kinds; they were the years which were to change the two countries and their history forever. The Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction) in Germany and the Workers’ Defence Committee in Poland were the two groups which spurred the great mobilisation of the societies in both countries. They provoked the events which were talked about, which were lived, the events which, transforming themselves into a great cause-and-effect machine, introduced changes that gave rise to effects, we have continued to experience to this day. Both groups had a similar genesis; they were rooted in political opposition and revolutionary purpose and they brought about immense consequences for the two societies, for politicians and for history.

It is most welcome that Kieran Allen (2002) is seeking to open up the ‘great globalisation debate’ within Irish sociology. He outlines some of the key current issues and positions taken by well-known European social theorists such as Beck, Giddens, Bauman and Bourdieu. A clear stance in favour of Bourdieu is taken on the basis, it would seem, that he was engaged actively in the movement against neo-liberalism in France towards the end of his life. On the other hand, Giddens, in particular, is castigated for his role as intellectual to the court of New Labour in Britain1. Allen argues that sociologists cannot stand idly by as the anti-globalisation movement builds up steam. In fact, he draws a direct parallel with the 1969 split in the American Sociological Association over the Vietnam War that led to the formation of a Sociology Liberation Movement which rejected the mainstream proclamation of value-free neutrality. While we should welcome Irish sociology's overdue engagement with the globalisation paradigm, I wish to raise some problems with Allen's analysis and pursue some of the issues raised a bit further.

AbstractMany of the most iconic moments of Germany's “1968” took place in the walled confines of West Berlin, the emblematic Cold War city often referred to as the “capital of the revolt.” Most accounts portray the events in West Berlin as having been characterized by confrontations between the leftist student movement, on the one hand, and a conservative press and generally hostile, older, urban population, on the other. This article rethinks and refines existing historiographical narratives of the 1968 student movement in West Berlin, as well as of West Berlin's place in the student movement. It examines the actions and experiences of student activists in West Berlin, who rarely feature in the familiar narrative—namely, Christian Democratic activists, particularly those from the Association of Christian Democratic Students (RCDS). Using oral history interviews, memoirs, and a wide array of archival sources from German and US archives, the article sheds light on the background of some of the most important conservative players and discusses the manifold ways in which they engaged with the goals of the revolutionary left in the city. The analysis pays special attention to the effects that German division and life in West Berlin had on Christian Democratic activists, to the sources of their anti-Communism, and to their views about the US-led war in Vietnam, a major Cold War conflict that carried special resonance in the divided city. The article concludes that there were important (yet shifting and often porous) dividing lines in West Berlin's “1968” other than those that separated politicized students from an older and more conservative city leadership and population, a conclusion that calls for a modification of the familiar storyline that simply pits Rudi Dutschke and others on the left against the city's “establishment.” The article suggests that this has repercussions for interpretations of the student movement that center on generation. It argues, in short, that Christian Democratic students—activists who were, in effect, other ’68ers—helped to shape and were, in turn, shaped by the events that took place in West Berlin in 1968.

The July 1974 invasion of Cyprus by Turkey caught the Greek Colonels (1967–74) off guard, as they proved entirely incapable of responding to the casus belli, partly provoked by their own actions. Greece remained technically in the state of military mobilisation for about four months and with the democratic transition well underway. This article catalogues the ways in which this conflict mobilised Greek civil society in unprecedented ways. Using oral testimonies, press clippings and three major documentaries of the time (Nikos Koundouros’ The Songs of Fire, Michael Cacoyannis’ Attila 74, and Nikos Kavoukidis’ Testimonials), the article dissects the cultural resistances against the war in one of the most traumatic moments in contemporary Greek history. It analyses the gigantic concerts that took place in the largest stadiums of Athens to protest the war, next to mass demonstrations and popular films protesting the invasion. It argues that these cultural events and artifacts re-enacted facets of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the respective countercultural scene in the US of the late 1960s. The article concludes that these modes of cultural and political resistance activated post-authoritarian Greek civil society, renegotiating the parameters of political participation and partly resetting the agenda of the country’s foreign policy following popular demand.

"Californians, this is the time for us to do our utmost for the University because it has done its utmost for us,” said Chief Justice Earl Warren at the April 1967 convocation at Berkeley. And what a time it was—on the heels of the Free Speech Movement in 1964, the Vietnam Day marches in 1965, an escalation of anti-war protests in 1966, and, in January of 1967, the dramatic firing of UC President Clark Kerr by Governor Ronald Regan at a meeting of the Board Regents. The following year the University of California would celebrate its hundredth year, and to celebrate this, the UC hired photographer Ansel Adams to take thousands of images of the rapidly expanding UC system. Adams was charged to take photographs of the future. What might these images from futures past tell us about the future for both this university and the state to which it belongs?

The youthful activists who made up the New Left during the 1960s were largely in accord in their opposition to the Vietnam War and their support for the black freedom movement. By contrast, they were deeply divided about how to approach the Arab-Israeli conflict. Some left-wing youth championed the Palestinian cause as another example of support for anti-imperialist struggles in the Third World. Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party (BPP), and famous Youth International Party (Yippie) figures Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin felt this way, as did certain members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Other members of the New Left balked at calling Israel an imperialist oppressor and pushed back, including some in SDS, but also groups like the Radical Zionist Alliance. The result was bitter conflict and invective that was worsened by the fact that left-wing Jews, who were present in disproportionately large numbers in the New Left, were represented on both sides of this issue.

In this article, I consider the value and challenges of using oral history interviews to access and interpret narrative memories of men and women who became active in the left network around Britain’s anti-war movement, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. I focus in-depth on the individual stories of one man and one woman who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, joined far left Trotskyist organisations. The stories reveal a two-fold search for past revolutionary and current selves. Reading between the shifting layers of past and present, the article will explore what deeper insights interviewing offers into the complex ways in which activists shaped subjectivities both in their far left groups and in the interview itself. It engages with the concept of inter-subjectivity to reflect on the interpersonal relationship between interviewer and interviewee in the oral history encounter. It thus considers the meeting of particular subjectivities and the role they played in shaping the oral history narratives. Through careful attention to my own internal state at the time of interviewing, and to how the interviewees’ stories made me feel, I seek to understand unconsidered political, social and emotional gendered experiences of life on the British far left around 1968.

Ralph Ellison's career will undoubtedly provide students of American literature and biographers much to puzzle over in the coming years. He published his first novel, Invisible Man, in 1952 when he was 38, an age when Faulkner was in the midst of his great period and just poised to publish Absalom, Absalom! After the early 1950s, Ellison published two books of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), and a few excerpts from an ever more mythical work-in-progress. That work-in-progress, or some truncated version of it, has now appeared with the intriguing title, Juneteenth, which refers to the day, 19 June 1865, when the slaves in Texas learned they were free, some two months after the end of the Civil War.Without a doubt, Ralph Ellison considered himself, above all, an American writer of the modernist persuasion; indeed, he was one of the most patriotic of writer-citizens in the republic of letters. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was attacked by anti-war forces for his qualified support for the Johnson administration's prosecution of the Vietnam War, and black radicals for insufficient militance about his “blackness.” Through it all, Ellison resolutely resisted the obligation to make his art explicitly political. It was precisely that which was at issue in his famous polemical exchanges with Irving Howe.Yet, Ellison's writing always was political in at least two senses. First, as he asserted in 1964 before the civil rights movement gave way to Black Power and its cultural wing, the Black Arts movement: “protest is an element of all art, though it does not necessarily take the form of speaking for a political or social program.” In other words: art was political but not in the programmatic way demanded by others, whoever they might be.

The role of mass protest has been recurrently central yet controversial in the American culture. Central because American history presents a constellation of significant collective protest movements, very different among them but generally symptomatic of a contrast between the people and the state: from the 1775 Boston Massacre and the 1787 Shays’s Rebellion, to the 1863 Draft Riots, but also considering the 1917 Houston Riot or anti-Vietnam war pacifist protests. Controversial, since despite—or because of—its historical persistence, American mass protest has generated a media bias which labelled mobs and crowds as a disruptive popular expression, thus constructing an opposition—practical and rhetorical—between popular subversive tensions, and the so-called middle class “conservative” and self-preserving struggle. During the 20th century, this scenario was significantly influenced by 1968. “The sixties [we]re not fictional”, Stephen King claims in Hearts of Atlantis (1999), in fact “they actually happened”, and had a strong impact on the American culture of protest to the point that their legacy has spread into the post 9/11 era manifestations of dissent. Yet, in the light of this evolution, I believe the very perception of protesting crowds has transformed, producing a narrative in which collectivity functions both as “perpetrator” and “victim”, unlike in the traditional dichotomy. Hence, my purpose is to demonstrate the emergence of this new and historically peculiar connotation of crowds and mobs in America as a result of recent reinterpretations of the history and practice of protest in the 1960s, namely re-thinking the tropes of protest movements of those years, and relocating them in contemporary forms of protest. For this reason, I will concentrate on Nathan Hill’s recent novel, The Nix (2016), and focus on the constant dialogue it establishes between the 1968 modes of protest and the Occupy movement.

Berlin was the location in which most of the intelligence operations in Europe have taken place in the first twenty years of the conquest and the Cold War. In November 27, 1958, Khrushchev issued a formal letter to the Allies, demanding that the western Allies evacuate Berlin and enable the establishment of an independent political unit, a free city. He threatened that if the West would not comply with this, the soviets would hand over to the East Germany’s government the control over the roads to Berlin. In the coming months Moscow conducted a war of nerves as the last date of the end of the ultimatum, May 27, 1959, came close. Finally the Soviets retreated as a result of the determination of the West. This event reconfirmed the claims of the West that “the US, Britain and France have legal rights to stay in Berlin.” According to Halle: “These rights derive from the fact that Germany surrendered as a result of our common struggle against Nazi Germany.” (Note 2) The Russians have done many attempts to change Berlin’s status. In 1961 Berlin Wall was constructed, almost without response on the part of the West, and by so doing, the Soviets perpetuated the status quo that had been since 1948. In July 25, 1961 Kennedy addressed the Americans on television, saying that “West Berlin is not as it had ever been, the location of the biggest test of the courage and the will power of the West.” (Note 3) On June 26, 1963, Kennedy went out to Berlin, which was divided by the wall, torn between east and west, in order to announce his message. In his speech outside the city council of West Berlin, Kennedy won the hearts of the Berliners as well as those of the world when he said: “Ich bin ein Berliner”, I’m a Berliner. The sixties were years of heating of the conflict with the Soviet Block. In 1961 the Berlin Wall was constructed. Then Kennedy came into power, there was the movement for human rights and the political tension between whites and blacks in America. The conflict increase as the Korean War started, and afterwards when America intervened in Vietnam. There was also the crisis in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, which almost pushed the whole world into a nuclear war and catastrophe. During the 28 years of the Berlin Wall, 13.8.61-9.11.89, this was notorious as an example of a political border that marked the seclusion and freezing more than freedom of movement, communication and change. At the same time there was the most obvious sign of the division of Germany after WWII and the division of Europe to East and West by the Iron Curtain. The wall was the background of stories by writers from east and west. The writers of espionage thrillers were fascinated by the global conflict between east and west and the Cold War with Berlin as the setting of the divided city. Berlin presented a permanent conflict that was perceived as endless, or as Mews defined it: “Berlin is perfect, a romantic past, tragic present, secluded in the heart of East Germany.” (Note 4) The city presented the writers with a situation that demanded a reassessment of the genres and the ideological and aesthetic perceptions of this type of writing. This was the reason that the genre of espionage books blossomed in the sixties, mainly those with the wall. The wall was not just a symbol of a political failure, as East Germany could not stop the flow of people escaping from it. The city was ugly, dirty, and full of wires and lit by a yellow light, like a concentration camp. A West German policeman says: “If the Allies were not here, there would not have been a wall. He expressed the acknowledgment that the Western powers had also an interest in the wall as a tool for preventing the unification of Germany. But his colleague answers: If they were not here, the wall would not have been, but the same applies for Berlin. (Note 5) Berlin was the world capital of the Cold War. The wall threatened and created risks and was known as one of the big justifications for the mentality of the Cold War. The construction of the wall in August 1961 strengthened Berlin’s status as the frontline of the Cold War and as a political microcosmos, which reflected topographical as well as the ideological global struggle between east and west. It made Berlin a focus of interest, and this focus in turn caused an incentive for the espionage literature with the rise of neorealism with the anti-hero, as it also ended the era of romanticism. (Note 6) The works of le Carré and Deighton are the best examples of this change in literature. Both of them use the wall as the arena of events and a symbol in their works. Only at the end of the fifties, upon the final withdrawal of McCarthyism and the relative weakening of the Cold War, there started have to appear films with new images about the position and nature of the Germans and the representations of Nazism in the new history. The films of the Cold War presented the communists as enemies or saboteurs. Together with this view about the Soviets, developed the rehabilitation of the German image. Each part of the German society was rehabilitated and become a victim instead of an assistant of the Nazis. The critic Dwight MacDonald was impressed by the way in which the German population” has changed from a fearful assistant of one totalitarian regime to the hero opponent of another totalitarian regime”. (Note 7) This approach has to be examined, and how it influenced the development of the German representation, since many films I have investigated demonstrate a different approach of the German representation.

This article explores transnational connections between anti-imperialist groups in West Germany and Japan through an examination of the protest around the Japanese Emperor’s state visit to Bonn in 1971. Although anti-imperialist movements in Japan and West Germany had many similarities and moments of contact, there are few treatments of these groups in transnational perspective. The event offers a unique moment of entanglement between New Left groups in the global 1960s and a rare moment of mutual discussion of the Japanese and German wartime past. The Showa Emperor (better known as Hirohito) traveled to Europe as a way to promote a new, peaceful, Japan; however, his role as a wartime leader complicated this image. Hirohito’s presence in West Germany presented major issues of wartime crimes that were filtered through German’s own memory of perpetration and victimhood. Radical students in and West Germany responded to the Emperor’s visit by cooperating with Japanese exchange students to analyze and protest the history of Japanese militarism and fascism – and also its postwar attempts to regain an empire, especially in Southeast Asia and Vietnam. These concepts were seen, therefore, on another level: the US war in Vietnam, and Japanese and West German complicity in this conflict.

In the early 1970s, in the American Island State of Hawaii, popular music began a transformation that was, to some extent, similar in form to what occurred on the American mainland ten to fifteen years earlier, when popular music first merged with the civil rights movement and then with the anti-Vietnam movement. Hawaiian popular musicians, reacting to the commercially slick music of the tourist trade and the Wai Ki Ki nightclubs, reached back to embrace the few ethnic artists still alive and performing. They searched their island past for traditional material and, as the movement consolidated, merged this material with their own pressing social and cultural concerns to create a new type of music – part contemporary, part traditional and all wrapped in a cloak of strong social protest against non-native Hawaiians who they saw as having nearly totally destroyed their culture, their selfidentity, their pride and their sacred land. As Haunai-Kay Trask (1982, p. C2), a spokesperson for the movement, put it:Any society that has experienced the kind of impact the Hawaiian culture and Hawaiian people have experienced wind up being on the bottom because they are inundated with another culture … High rises, fancy clothes, and freeways – that's what United States culture stands for. It's grotesque. They have no feeling for the fragility of life. Or flora or fauna. Part of me hates the haoles with a passion, but part of me doesn't care. They're just stupid and I want them to stay away.

With the historical televised first presidential debates of John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, television made its national debut as a political influence. Television became a third player in the debates in the way it filmed the candidates. Kennedy and Nixon respectively served as models of effective and ineffective presentations of oneself on the electronic screen. Because of this event, “The Image” emerged as part of the sensibility for any public figure as well as an intrinsic part of the political lexicon. Kennedy, as President, also developed a model of his frequent usage of television as an outreach connection to the public. A few years later television became the dominant media when it presented the Vietnam War to the viewers’ living rooms. This sparked a series of protests not only anti-draft but from other movements: civil rights, black protest, student rights, women’s rights in a society that was becoming part of an unprecedented information age. Television not only reported these events, it repeated its visual imagery which helped to reinforce changing norms in our society. Fifty-five years later, Donald Trump, known for his television celebrity as well as his reputation as a successful businessman, became an unusual marker of reality about public tolerance and acceptance, largely helped by cable television and its effect after fifty-five years of viewers and the additional factor of hundreds of cable channels. Kennedy, Nixon and Trump serve as bookends for television’s prominent and definitely mediated influence on American history.

This paper uncovers the history of antiwar activist Nguyen Thai Binh and the birth of the Union of Vietnamese after his death. As a former student at the University of Washington, Seattle, Binh participated in numerous antiwar protests against the U.S. military and imperialist government. On July 2, 1972, he hijacked Pan Am Flight 841 headed to Tan Son Nhut airport to protest American bombings of North Vietnam, but was assassinated in the attempt. Amidst the broiling anti-war movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Union of Vietnamese was the only group of Vietnamese in America to organize against the war following Binh’s death, suggesting the unique positionality of Vietnamese students and early immigrants among other marginalized groups in their struggles for liberation. In this paper, I reference the works of scholars Karen Ishizuka and Sylvia Shin Huey Chong to compare different methodological approaches to writing about the Asian American antiwar movement. Their texts frame my discussions of the invisibility of the Vietnamese antiwar narrative, the cross-cultural alliances that formed from political convergences, and the orientalist perception of the Vietnamese body. Thus, I argue that Nguyen Thai Binh’s activism and the Union of Vietnamese demonstrate a departure from the predominantly non-Vietnamese antiwar historiography. Through my analysis of letters, pamphlets, and government documents, I consider the ways in which Binh’s fatal devotion to ending American brutality in Vietnam and the Vietnamese antiwar movement both challenge American perceptions of race and ethnicity and critique the violent militarism of the war in Vietnam.

The past ten years have witnessed a revival in scholarship on militarism, through which scholars have used the concept to make sense of the embeddedness of warlike relations in contemporary liberal societies and to account for how the social, political and economic contours of those same societies are implicated in the legitimation and organization of political violence. However, a persistent shortcoming has been the secondary role of race and coloniality in these accounts. This article demonstrates how we might position racism and colonialism as integral to the functioning of contemporary militarism. Centring the thought and praxis of the US Black Panther Party, we argue that the particular analysis developed by Black Panther Party members, alongside their often-tense participation in the anti–Vietnam War movement, offers a strong reading of the racialized and colonial politics of militarism. In particular, we show how their analysis of the ghetto as a colonial space, their understanding of the police as an illegitimate army of occupation and, most importantly, Huey Newton’s concept of intercommunalism prefigure an understanding of militarism premised on the interconnections between racial capitalism, violent practices of un/bordering and the dissolving boundaries between war and police action.

According to media conglomerate CNN, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s peace crusade began in 1971. CNN’s on-line news group Showbiz on June 22, 1997 frames John and Yoko’s campaign for peace: “Former Beatle John Lennon was honoured posthumously Friday for his contributions to world peace at a star-studded ceremony in London for the 22nd Silver Clef awards. Lennon’s song “Imagine” has been a leading anthem for the peace movement”. This is a rather limited selection that overlooks a number of earlier (and more radical) possibilities in the Lennon-Ono musical arsenal. A 1969 article in Newsweek entitled “The Peace Anthem” records the phenomenal success of “Give Peace a Chance” in mobilizing the protesting masses against the war in Vietnam. Newsweek relates how “Chance” became the chant for anti-war protestors in Washington on November 15, 1969. On that day, 250,000 marchers demonstrated at the American nation’s capitol for a Moratorium to stop the fighting in Vietnam. Led by folk singer Pete Seeger, the crowd was swept up in the endless repetition of the Lennon dictum, “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” When Lennon tuned into the signals from Washington, he dubbed it one of the “biggest moments of my life” (Wiener 97). Dodging the immigration authorities that would not let John and Yoko physically into the United States, John and Yoko’s anti-war signals had been transmitted over the border from the “Bed-in” in Montreal where the song originated, to rally the masses marching on the mall in Washington. The story concluded: “The peace movement had found an anthem” (Newsweek 102). “Give Peace a Chance”—and the Vietnam War against which it raised its voice—have been deleted from CNN’s selective memory. Its brand of political dissent and anti-war activism does not fit the rubric of a 90’s Showbiz column. Yet, this is how the avant-garde performance artist and the hippie rock and roller conceived their peacemaking efforts—as the invasion and intervention of “showbiz” and media hype into the space of mass politics. In their fight for peace, the newly wed John and Yoko staged a series of art and media events in the form of interviews, songs, ads, concerts, demonstrations and happenings. Many of these media-savvy events took place in Canada in 1969. For example, John and Yoko’s The Plastic Ono Band played Varsity Stadium in Toronto in September at the concert known as “Live Peace” which included performances of “Give Peace a Chance” and Yoko’s intense lament “John, John (Let’s Hope for Peace).” With these events, Yoko’s avant-garde strategies of Fluxus and Conceptual art combined forces with John’s energies of rock and roll rebellion to forge a program of media activism and political dissent. Biographer Jon Wiener recalls that John and Yoko’s anti-war campaign represented a new chapter in New Left politics and its relation to mass media. Rather than reject newspapers and TV as “exclusively instruments of corporate domination,” John and Yoko sought “to work within the mass media, to use them, briefly and sporadically, against the system in which they functioned” (89). Umberto Eco pointed to this in his 1967 essay “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,” suggesting that “the universe of Technological Communication” (i.e., mass media) be patrolled by “groups of communications guerrillas” who would engage in “future communications guerrilla warfare” to restore a critical dimension involving “the constant correction of perspectives, the checking of codes, and the ever renewed interpretation of mass messages” (143-144). Eco’s formulation provides a possible frame of reference for John and Yoko’s media war and their series of events countering, checking and, to quote Yoko, “criticizing the establishment” and its pro-war propaganda (Giulano 71). The 1969 “Bed-Ins” were media events that used the publicity around John and Yoko’s honeymoon as a lure for the press to report on their anti-war campaign. The first took place in Amsterdam in late March and John and Yoko staged a second honeymoon in Montreal in late May. As non-stop salespeople for their peace product, John and Yoko gave ten hours of press interviews every day invoking the media maxim that repetition induces belief. Blurring art and life, the “Bed-Ins” illustrate the strategies of happenings and Fluxus performance at the heart of Yoko’s aesthetic. At the Amsterdam press conference, Yoko framed their work as an avant-garde performance piece electrified by mass communications media. “Everything we do is a happening. All of our events are directly connected with society. We would like to communicate with the world. This event is called the ““Bed Peace”, and it’s not p-i-e-c-e, it’s p-e-a-c-e. Let’s just stay in bed and grow hair instead of being violent” (Giulano 46). The word plays of “Bed Peace” and “Hair Peace” pasted above their nuptial bed appealed to both Yoko and John’s punster sensibilities, their express aim being to play the world’s clowns for peace and mobilize the subversive power of laughter. The “Bed-Ins” must be situated against the background of the sit-ins on American college campuses at that time of anti-Vietnam war protests. Indeed, John referred to the event as “the bed sit-in” showing that this connection was in his mind. The direct links to the student revolt were further underscored in the telephone exchange between John and Yoko in Montreal and the rioters in People’s Park in Berkeley when Lennon played peace guru, encouraging the demonstrators to avoid violence at all costs (Wiener 92-93). Around the same time, John and Yoko also began their playfully named “Nuts for Peace” campaign by sending acorns to fifty heads of state and asking them to plant them as a symbolic gesture for peace. Another John and Yoko media blitz took over billboards as the sites to wage communications guerrilla warfare. When asked at a press conference to explain the “War is Over Poster Campaign”, the peace PR man stated: “It’s part of our advertising campaign for peace” (Giulano 83). This particular aspect of the media war recalls the international dissemination of the poster “War is Over! If You Want It. Happy Christmas from John and Yoko” in twelve urban centres. Since the mid-sixties, Beatle John had been delivering promotional peace and good will messages on vinyl to his fans at Christmas. In 1969, he and his new partner in art prepared a visual Christmas card using public space to blur the boundaries between art, activism, and advertising. The glaring headline stated the fantasy as if already fulfilled (War is Over!). This was followed by the empowering call to mass action reminding the viewer of what was needed to attain the goal (If You Want It). To kick off the campaign, the international peace politicos gave a “Christmas for Peace” charity concert in London for the United Nations Children’s Fund. When asked about the costs of the poster, Lennon sidestepped the issue, saying he didn’t want to think about it, but joking, “I’ll have to write a song or two to earn me money back” (Giulano 83). The critics attacked this statement as evasive and not willing to own up to how the promoters were direct beneficiaries of the marketing of peace. Rather than focusing on how this campaign would afford free publicity to John and Yoko and promote further demand for their products, Lennon focused on extensive outlays of capital. This recalls another rather hostile exchange at a November 1969 press conference having the look of an all-out media war on the occasion of Lennon returning his M.B.E. Medal of Honour to the Queen. Lennon’s letter read in part: “Your Majesty, I am returning this M.B.E. in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts” (Wiener 106). Numerous critics sought to deflate Lennon’s claim that this was an act of political protest in the fight for peace, characterising it as a mere self-serving publicity stunt for his latest single. John: “Well, we use advertising.” Reporter: “You’re an advertisement.” John: “Will you shut up a minute!” (Giulano 109) In the heat of exchange, Lennon breaks his cool at the reporter who underscores that there is no way to differentiate between the use of advertising to promote peace and to promote John and Yoko. This concurs with Graeme Turner’s argument in Fame Games that “the celebrity’s ultimate power is to sell the commodity that is themselves” (Turner 12). At the point that would convert this speaking subject into a walking advertisement, the hippie peacenik snaps and reveals a violent temper not befitting someone who would follow Gandhi’s way of non-violence. Engaging with the mass media, John and Yoko’s media war packaged and promoted their peace product as art and advertising, as information and entertainment, as a discourse of political dissent and of self-promotion. With a slogan like “War is Over! If You Want It,” these two media warriors supplied youth culture at the end of the 60’s with the peace product and process that was lacking. Their consuming images and anthems anticipated the “collusional critique” of eighties art and its appropriation of media images that function as “both critical manifesto and the very commodity it critiques” (Sussman 15). In this case, John and Yoko’s media war provided a critique of the official war program while capitalizing upon the very commodity against which war had been declared. For if John seriously wanted to “make peace big business for everybody” (Newsweek 102), this could be achieved only in a parasitic relationship with a war economy making John and Yoko both peace prophets and profiteers. But even if one acknowledges the profit motive in the peace campaign—and this assumes that John was not misappropriated as a “peace capitalist” by the establishment press—there was something else fluxing up the media machine and the war program. John and Yoko understood how their star power and international celebrity gave them a privileged and almost unlimited access to a mass media that wanted to soak up their Pop star aura to satisfy its own instrumentalist agenda. The press and the public wanted John and Yoko, and these two media stars fed this desire and then some. They complied with the pop star demand, but spiked it with the dangerous supplements of political dissent and subversive humour. They fed this desire with a feedback loop and interventionist strategy, with an anti-war army surplus provided at no extra charge. The year 1969 concluded with another savvy media event that lent John and Yoko’s media war more political credibility and gave the American establishment something they had not bargained for: a photo-op and peace dialogue with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada. Once again, John and Yoko’s media war had added an extra twist and an extra shout that the war programmers would have preferred not to hear, the message “War is Over (If You Want It!)” and “War is Over” whether they wanted it or not. Imagine that. Works Cited “The Peace Anthem,” Newsweek, December 1, 1969. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality, San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Giulano, Geoffrey and Brenda. The Lost Lennon Interviews, Holbrook, MA: Adams Media Corporation, 1996. Sussman, Elizabeth. On the Passage of a Few People Through a Brief Moment of Time: The Situationist International 1957-1972, Boston: M.I.T. Press and Institute of Contemporary Art, 1989. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner and David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Wiener, Jon. Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (New York: Random House, 1984). Links http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/9706/21/lennon.award Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Kaplan, Louis. "“War is Over! If You Want It”" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/06-warisover.php>. APA Style Kaplan, L., (2003, Feb 26). “War is Over! If You Want It”. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/06-warisover.html

In the mass media, the primacy of ever more intimate perspectives on violent confrontation, which has long been a staple of journalistic profit and practice, has undergone a crucial transformation over the last century. From an overt eagerness to take an active role in the experience of war to a coy, self-promoting emphasis on the risks of the trade, the representation of violent subjects has consistently been filtered through reportorial, yet tremendous change has befallen the role of professional interlocutors in the serving up the experience of war and violent conflict for domestic consumption. The triumph of a technologised perspective has eclipsed journalistic agency, collapsing the distinction between the pen and the sword in a way that reporters, for all their efforts to command the prestige of each, could never achieve. The focus on the fight, narrowed to the point of impact, strips away orienting discourses to produce a dehumanised perspective that is, if no more or less violent in its own right, unquestioning in its pursuit of the vivid sensation violence provides. In this essay, I hope to illuminate some of the relationships between pen and sword that have evolved from the time of my own historical period of specialisation, the Cuban-Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars, to the unfortunate juncture at which we find ourselves a century later. I will begin, however, in the middle, for it is in my own experience of looking for a fight, finding and reporting on it, and then, later, as a historian, reflecting upon the phenomenon in historical comparison with previous correspondents, that I arrived at the conclusions presented here. My work as a “front-line” correspondent took place in environments largely lacking front lines or sophisticated machinery. From skulking about in back alleys to avoid Duvalier’s secret police in Haiti, I had graduated to the “low intensity conflict” of the Philippines. Sporadic and isolated though such violence might be, it was nonetheless my mission to seek it out and capitalise upon it. I felt long past appreciating the news value of being in the line of fire, however, I was soon speeding madly from the scene of my first at-risk gunplay, on February 7, 1986, the day of the Marcos-Aquino election, prelude to the People Power revolution later that month. That violence begets violence, incidental and otherwise, was being made all too clear: as I listened to the thumps representing the likely ends of roadside dogs and cats unfortunate enough to be in the way of the speeding getaway car driven by my Filipino oppositionist hosts, I noted that my ostensibly peaceful guides were vigorously contemplating an armed response. There was news value in the scene, but I was sickened by their rapid descent into revenge mode. My disappointment was not entirely based on aversion to the addictive and infectious power of violence, however: in showing that they, too, were capable of bloodshed, my once-sympathetic guides were spoiling a clean story line. In the moment, knowing my market, I was, it must be admitted, every bit as inclined to value a sharp image over a nuanced portrait as the narrowly focused machine I at other times decry. My article presented the story in diverse detail, but the market logic of its genesis had directed it toward the singular, violent departure point on which I did, indeed, focus when, asked that morning where I wanted to go, I had responded, “Wherever there’s going to be fighting.” In addition to market considerations holding violence as the highest news value, though, my approach had roots in the aspiring war correspondent’s classic infatuation with getting a piece of the action. Just as soldiers need a war to amass the medals and experience necessary for rapid advancement, journalists can extract from exposure to the most arresting stories professional opportunity and, often, the thrill of a lifetime. The cultural capital offered by a role in a good fight is a currency subjected to official devaluation over the years, but in the marketplace of personal identity, war stories retain worth. My students appear to like hearing them; I must admit that I can revel in telling one. Like an accounting of scars and scares past, it celebrates triumph over threats large and small. Even a well-established reputation is no bar to glory-seeking on the basis of proximity to the fight. Top New York Times reporter R.W. Apple’s tale of a bullet passing through the loose folds of his trousers was undermined by the absence of evidence (other reporters could not believe he would throw out so treasured a souvenir), but it only serves to emphasise all the more the delicious appeal to reporters of a physical link to the fighting. Such anecdotes, and the ascendant prestige accorded photojournalists, who must place themselves closer to the action than those who only have to write about it, serve to emphasise the emergence of an informal pecking order based on proximity to peril. This emphasis on risk, with its evocation of potential sacrifice, represents a historical change. Where today facing danger is a featured facet of journalistic practice, a century ago the emphasis was on dishing it out. For example, I found in the Manuscript Division of the U.S. Library of Congress a letter from John Barrett, the first journalist to suggest military action in the Philippines to a national American audience, in which he wrote to his mother of having derived “great pleasure in firing five or six shots at the enemy.” Despite his former rank as consul to Siam and the position of power and distinction he enjoyed as correspondent for both the prestigious North American Review and the widely-read network of newspapers headed by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, Barrett sought parity with simple soldiers whose institutional base more readily connoted glory. "[I] may not be an enlisted soldier but in my way as a correspondent of the greatest daily newspapers of the world—i.e., the most extensively read—bear a responsibility quite equal to a lesser officer unto those who are on the rank.” he wrote to his mother on June 26, 1898, adding, “I would not send any 'fake' account of the battle even if ordered to do so by the editor himself and if I do not send a 'fake' story I must be at the front where I can see what is actually done." Barrett’s location of the “actual” war at the front lines, where hot lead and blood were imagined to flow freely, adhered to a prevailing press perspective valorizing immersion in the fight. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, widespread acceptance was accorded to the notion of the superiority of “hard-won” knowledge, gained through exposure to combat (or perhaps, as in the case of a rival interlocutor of Philippine affairs, Dean Worcester, to alternative threats such head-hunters). In part a reflection of the rough-edged Social Darwinism holding up such survivors as the “fittest” and in part a simple testament to the universal power of warrior myths, battle-certified claims to a higher degree of both patriotism and veracity were an effective rhetorical trump card against the reasoned, impassioned pleas for caution and humanity emerging from the mostly older men of letters leading the anti-imperialist movement. Other reporters of the age also won fame for their activist roles. One of Hearst’s other minions, Karl Decker, engineered an 1897 jailbreak in Cuba that brought to a nationwide audience New York Journal’s tale of the “Cuban girl martyr,” Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros. Other reporters fought alongside the Cuban rebels, sweetening the romantic notion of siding with the underdog—which contributed mightily to the popularity of the “yellow” press’ sensational accounts of war. While the insertion of such blatant reportorial machismo into war reporting has diminished with time and the supposed rise of objectivity as a guiding standard, the interest of media audiences in intimate details of the experience of war has not diminished, and the technologies available to answer such demands have proliferated. From the “living room war” so roundly decried by those who mistakenly saw the seeds of defeat in enhanced public access to the details of war in Vietnam, we have “advanced” to a perspective on warfare that is funneled through the dispassionate gaze of the weapons themselves. The video game metaphor for war, popularised during and since the first Persian Gulf War, gave rise to a missile’s-eye-view that rendered apparently superfluous the role of the reporter. Government restrictions on press access to war zones, instituted in Grenada in 1983 and carried to new lengths in Iraq in 1991, further contributed to the marginalisation of the reportorial agency. It did not help that reporters did so poor and tardy a job of exposing as false the notions of technological infallibility promoted by officialdom. Their failure to question the Big Lie of reported Patriot missile accuracy in striking down Iraqi Scuds only served to support the notion that machines were more reliable than men. Meanwhile, the celebrity of “Scud Stud” Arthur Kent was largely based on his positioning before a pyrotechnic backdrop of flares, tracers, and the occasional missile, which helped keep alive the impression that a reporter’s importance is contingent upon close physical connection with the scene of the fight. Today, we see the new face of war through the lens of the Predator, an unmanned drone that can both gather and disseminate information and issue a deadly strike. The bomber-camera combo dissolves the dated dichotomy constructed as pen vs. sword. All too frequently a false construction in the first place, the “which is mightier?” question nonetheless offered value in its oppositional frame. Even if reporters understood the supremacy of arms, and tied their own identities to their use in diverse and sometimes contradictory fashion, their ability to wield words had a self-interested way of conveying the hazards of war, and thus at least some of its potential human consequences. Akin to the dashboard-cam that has pervaded consciousness in the age of “Cops” and other all-car-chase-all-the-time forms of television, the machine vision that orders and produces audience perceptions of distant fighting has sidelined the reportorial perspective, putting the viewer in the imaginary cockpit. Has the stripping away of reportorial mediation produced any more or less humane or accurate an impression? Despite the often pugnacious and self-glorifying approach of reporters seeking to validate their vitality and influence, the removal of journalistic agency has left the field open for manipulation by the controllers of the bomber-camera combo, and thus has impoverished public understanding of the deadly spiral violence inspires. There is historical precedent, or at least parallel, for this, and it is not encouraging. Public enthusiasm for taking the Philippines was stirred in 1898 by the ease with which the technologically superior new American gunboats destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. Newspapers filled page after page with illustrations and descriptions of naval ordnance, inspiring a fusion of technophilia and war fever that helped prepare the way for the United States’ rapid conversion from an anti-imperialist polity into an expanding power with global ambitions and concomitant responsibilities and exposures. What began as an ostensibly diversionary military manoeuver designed to keep Spanish ships from playing a highly unlikely role in reinforcing the defense of Cuba—a preemptive strike, to use a currently popular term—grew, through an initial affinity for the new fighting machines, into an engagement that ended up portending a transoceanic American empire and altered national destinies to go with it. Not long after, bogged down in a grisly and unexpectedly lengthy land war against Filipino independence-seekers, Americans had reason to rethink their assumptions about the ease with which wars could be prosecuted. The Philippine-American war has been largely erased from American history, along with the accounts of the war correspondents who covered it. But the legacy of globalised imperial violence it initiated lives on, with the next installment coming soon. Check your local listings. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Vaughan, Christopher. "If It Bleeds, It Leads" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/04-ifitbleeds.php>. APA Style Vaughan, C., (2003, Feb 26). If It Bleeds, It Leads. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/04-ifitbleeds.html

What is the countercultural potential of citizen science? As a participant in the wider citizen science movement, I can attest that contemporary citizen science initiatives rarely characterise themselves as countercultural. Rather, the goal of most citizen science projects is to be seen as producing orthodox scientific knowledge: the ethos is respectability rather than rebellion (NERC). I will suggest instead that there are resonances with the counterculture that emerged in the 1960s, most visibly through an emphasis on participatory experimentation and the principles of environmental sustainability and social justice. This will be illustrated by example, through two citizen science projects that have a commitment to combining social values with scientific practice. I will then describe the explicitly countercultural organisation, Science for the People, which arose from within the scientific community itself, out of opposition to the Vietnam War. Methodological and conceptual weaknesses in the authoritative model of science are explored, suggesting that there is an opportunity for citizen science to become anti-hegemonic by challenging the hegemony of science itself. This reformulation will be expressed through Deleuze and Guattari's notion of nomadic science, the means through which citizen science could become countercultural. Counterculture Before examining the countercultural potential of citizen science, I set out some of the grounds for identifying a counterculture drawing on the ideas of Theodore Roszak, who invented the term counterculture to describe the new forms of youth movements that emerged in the 1960s (Roszak). This was a perspective that allowed the carnivalesque procession of beatniks, hippies and the New Left to be seen as a single paradigm shift combining psychic and social revolution. But just as striking and more often forgotten is the way Roszak characterised the role of the counterculture as mobilising a vital critique of the scientific worldview (Roszak 273-274). The concept of counterculture has been taken up in diverse ways since its original formation. We can draw, for example, on Lawrence Grossberg's more contemporary analysis of counterculture (Grossberg) to clarify the main concepts and contrast them with a scientific approach. Firstly, a counterculture works on and through cultural formations. This positions it as something the scientific community would see as the other, as the opposite to the objective, repeatable and quantitative truth-seeking of science. Secondly, a counterculture is a diverse and hybrid space without a unitary identity. Again, scientists would often see science as a singular activity applied in modulated forms depending on the context, although in practice the different sciences can experience each other as different tribes. Thirdly, a counterculture is lived as a transformative experience where the participant is fundamentally changed at a psychic level through participation in unique events. Contrast this with the scientific idea of the separation of observer and observed, and the objective repeatability of the experiment irrespective of the experimenter. Fourthly, a counterculture is associated with a unique moment in time, a point of shift from the old to the new. For the counterculture of the 1960s this was the Age of Aquarius. In general, the aim of science and scientists is to contribute to a form of truth that is essentially timeless, in that a physical law is assumed to hold across all time (and space), although science also has moments of radical change with regard to scientific paradigms. Finally, and significantly for the conclusions of this paper, according to Roszak a counterculture stands against the mainstream. It offers a challenge not at the level of detail but, to the fundamental assumptions of the status quo. This is what “science” cannot do, in as much as science itself has become the mainstream. It was the character of science as the bedrock of all values that Roszak himself opposed and for which he named and welcomed the counterculture. Although critical of some of the more shallow aspects of its psychedelic experimentation or political militancy, he shared its criticism of the technocratic society (the technocracy) and the egocentric mode of consciousness. His hope was that the counterculture could help restore a visionary imagination along with a more human sense of community. What Is Citizen Science? In recent years the concept of citizen science has grown massively in popularity, but is still an open and unstable term with many variants. Current moves towards institutionalisation (Citizen Science Association) are attempting to marry growth and stabilisation, with the first Annual General Meeting of the European Citizen Science Association securing a tentative agreement on the common principles of citizen science (Haklay, "European"). Key papers and presentations in the mainstream of the movement emphasise that citizen science is not a new activity (Bonney et al.) with much being made of the fact that the National Audubon Society started its annual Christmas Bird Count in 1900 (National Audubon Society). However, this elides the key role of the Internet in the current surge, which takes two distinct forms; the organisation of distributed fieldwork, and the online crowdsourcing of data analysis. To scientists, the appeal of citizen science fieldwork follows from its distributed character; they can research patterns over large scales and across latitudes in ways that would be impossible for a researcher at a single study site (Toomey). Gathering together the volunteer, observations are made possible by an infrastructure of web tools. The role of the citizen in this is to be a careful observer; the eyes and ears of the scientist in cyberspace. In online crowdsourcing, the internet is used to present pattern recognition tasks; enrolling users in searching images for signs of new planets or the jets of material from black holes. The growth of science crowdsourcing is exponential; one of the largest sites facilitating this kind of citizen science now has well in excess of a million registered users (Zooniverse). Such is the force of the technological aura around crowdsourced science that mainstream publications often conflate it with the whole of citizen science (Parr). There are projects within citizen science which share core values with the counterculture as originally defined by Roszak, in particular open participation and social justice. These projects also show characteristics from Grossberg's analysis of counterculture; they are diverse and hybrid spaces, carry a sense of moving from an old era to a new one, and have cultural forms of their own. They open up the full range of the scientific method to participation, including problem definition, research design, analysis and action. Citizen science projects that aim for participation in all these areas include the Extreme Citizen Science research group (ExCiteS) at University College London (UCL), the associated social enterprise Mapping for Change (Mapping for Change), and the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab). ExCiteS sees its version of citizen science as "a situated, bottom-up practice" that "takes into account local needs, practices and culture". Public Lab, meanwhile, argue that many citizen science projects only offer non-scientists token forms of participation in scientific inquiry that rarely amount to more that data collection and record keeping. They counter this through an open process which tries to involve communities all the way from framing the research questions, to prototyping tools, to collating and interpreting the measurements. ExCiteS and Public Lab also share an implicit commitment to social justice through scientific activity. The Public Lab mission is to "put scientific inquiry at the heart of civic life" and the UCL research group strive for "new devices and knowledge creation processes that can transform the world". All of their work is framed by environmental sustainability and care for the planet, whether it's enabling environmental monitoring by indigenous communities in the Congo (ExCiteS) or developing do-it-yourself spectrometry kits to detect crude oil pollution (Public Lab, "Homebrew"). Having provided a case for elements of countercultural DNA being present in bottom-up and problem-driven citizen science, we can contrast this with Science for the People, a scientific movement that was born out of the counterculture. Countercultural Science from the 1970s: Science for the People Science for the People (SftP) was a scientific movement seeded by a rebellion of young physicists against the role of US science in the Vietnam War. Young members of the American Physical Society (APS) lobbied for it to take a position against the war but were heavily criticised by other members, whose written complaints in the communications of the APS focused on the importance of scientific neutrality and the need to maintain the association's purely scientific nature rather than allowing science to become contaminated by politics (Sarah Bridger, in Plenary 2, 0:46 to 1:04). The counter-narrative from the dissidents argued that science is not neutral, invoking the example of Nazi science as a justification for taking a stand. After losing the internal vote the young radicals left to form Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action (SESPA), which later became Science for the People (SftP). As well as opposition to the Vietnam War, SftP embodied from the start other key themes of the counterculture, such as civil rights and feminism. For example, the first edition of Science for the People magazine (appearing as Vol. 2, No. 2 of the SESPA Newsletter) included an article about leading Black Panther, Bobby Seale, alongside a piece entitled “Women Demand Equality in Science.” The final articles in the same issue are indicators of SftP's dual approach to science and change; both the radicalisation of professionals (“Computer Professionals for Peace”) and the demystification of technical practices (“Statistics for the People”) (Science for the People). Science for the People was by no means just a magazine. For example, their technical assistance programme provided practical support to street health clinics run by the Black Panthers, and brought SftP under FBI surveillance (Herb Fox, in Plenary 1, 0:25 to 0:35). Both as a magazine and as a movement, SftP showed a tenacious longevity, with the publication being produced every two months between August 1970 and May/June 1989. It mutated through a network of affiliated local groups and international links, and was deeply involved in constructing early critiques of nuclear power and genetic determinism. SftP itself seems to have had a consistent commitment to non-hierarchical processes and, as one of the founders expressed it, a “shit kicking” approach to putting its principles in to practice (Al Weinrub, in Plenary 1, 0:25 to 0:35). SftP criticised power, front and centre. It is this opposition to hegemony that puts the “counter” into counterculture, and is missing from citizen science as currently practised. Cracks in the authority of orthodox science, which can be traced to both methodologies and basic concepts, follow in this paper. These can be seen as an opportunity for citizen science to directly challenge orthodox science and thus establish an anti-hegemonic stance of its own. Weaknesses of Scientific Hegemony In this section I argue that the weaknesses of scientific hegemony are in proportion to its claims to authority (Feyerabend). Through my scientific training as an experimental particle physicist I have participated in many discussions about the ontological and epistemological grounds for scientific authority. While most scientists choose to present their practice publicly as an infallible machine for the production of truths, the opinions behind the curtain are far more mixed. Physicist Lee Somolin has written a devastating critique of science-in-practice that focuses on the capture of the institutional economy of science by an ideological grouping of string theorists (Smolin), and his account is replete with questions about science itself and ethnographic details that bring to life the messy behind-the-scenes conflicts in scientific-knowledge making. Knowledge of this messiness has prompted some citizen science advocates to take science to task, for example for demanding higher standards in data consistency from citizen science than is often the case in orthodox science (Haklay, "Assertions"; Freitag, "Good Science"). Scientists will also and invariably refer to reproducibility as the basis for the authority of scientific truths. The principle that the same experiments always get the same results, irrespective of who is doing the experiment, and as long as they follow the same method, is a foundation of scientific objectivity. However, a 2012 study of landmark results in cancer science was able to reproduce only 11 per cent of the original findings (Begley and Ellis). While this may be an outlier case, there are broader issues with statistics and falsification, a bias on positive results, weaknesses in peer review and the “publish or perish” academic culture (The Economist). While the pressures are all-too-human, the resulting distortions are rarely acknowledged in public by scientists themselves. On the other hand, citizen science has been slow to pick up the gauntlet. For example, while some scientists involved in citizen science have commented on the inequality and inappropriateness of orthodox peer review for citizen science papers (Freitag, “What Is the Role”) there has been no direct challenge to any significant part of the scientific edifice. I argue that the nearest thing to a real challenge to orthodox science is the proposal for a post-normal science, which pre-dates the current wave of citizen science. Post-normal science tries to accommodate the philosophical implications of post-structuralism and at the same time position science to tackle problems such as climate change, intractable to reproducibility (Funtowicz and Ravetz). It accomplishes this by extending the domains in which science can provide meaningful answers to include issues such as global warming, which involve high decision stakes and high uncertainty. It extends traditional peer review into an extended peer community, which includes all the stakeholders in an issue, and may involve active research as well as quality assessment. The idea of extended peer review has obvious overlaps with community-oriented citizen science, but has yet to be widely mobilised as a theoretical buttress for citizen-led science. Prior even to post-normal science are the potential cracks in the core philosophy of science. In her book Cosmopolitics, Isabelle Stengers characterises the essential nature of scientific truth as the ability to disqualify and exclude other truth claims. This, she asserts, is the hegemony of physics and its singular claim to decide what is real and what is true. Stengers traces this, in part, to the confrontation more than one hundred years ago between Max Planck and Ernst Mach, whereas the latter argued that claims to an absolute truth should be replaced by formulations that tied physical laws to the human practices that produced them. Planck stood firmly for knowledge forms that were unbounded by time, space or specific social-material procedures (Stengers). Although contemporary understandings of science are based on Planck's version, citizen science has the potential to re-open these questions in a productive manner for its own practices, if it can re-conceive of itself as what Deleuze and Guattari would call nomadic science (Deleuze; Deleuze & Guattari). Citizen Science as Nomadic Science Deleuze and Guattari referred to orthodox science as Royal Science or Striated Science, referring in part to its state-like form of authority and practice, as well as its psycho-social character. Their alternative is a smooth or nomadic science that, importantly for citizen science, does not have the ambition to totalise knowledge. Nomadic science is a form of empirical investigation that has no need to be hooked up to a grand narrative. The concept of nomadic science is a natural fit for bottom-up citizen science because it can valorise truths that are non-dual and that go beyond objectivity to include the experiential. In this sense it is like the extended peer review of post-normal science but without the need to be limited to high-risk high-stakes questions. As there is no a priori problem with provisional knowledges, it naturally inclines towards the local, the situated and the culturally reflective. The apparent unreliability of citizen science in terms of participants and tools, which is solely a source of anxiety, can become heuristic for nomadic science when re-cast through the forgotten alternatives like Mach's formulation; that truths are never separated from the specifics of the context and process that produced them (Stengers 6-18; 223). Nomadic science, I believe, will start to emerge through projects that are prepared to tackle toxic epistemology as much as toxic pollutants. For example, the Community Based Auditing (CBA) developed by environmental activists in Tasmania (Tattersall) challenges local alliances of state and extractive industries by undermining their own truth claims with regards to environmental impact, a process described in the CBA Toolbox as disconfirmation. In CBA, this mixture of post-normal science and Stenger's critique is combined with forms of data collection and analysis known as Community Based Sampling (Tattersall et al.), which would be recognisable to any citizen science project. The change from citizen science to nomadic science is not a total rupture but a shift in the starting point: it is based on an overt critique of power. One way to bring this about is being tested in the “Kosovo Science for Change” project (Science for Change Kosovo), where I am a researcher and where we have adopted the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire as the starting point for our empirical investigations (Freire). Critical pedagogy is learning as the co-operative activity of understanding—how our lived experience is constructed by power, and how to make a difference in the world. Taking a position such as nomadic science, openly critical of Royal Science, is the anti-hegemonic stance that could qualify citizen science as properly countercultural. Citizen Science and Counterculture Counterculture, as I have expressed it, stands against or rejects the hegemonic culture. However, there is a strong tendency in contemporary social movements to take a stance not only against the dominant structures but against hegemony itself. They contest what Richard Day calls the hegemony of hegemony (Day). I witnessed this during the counter-G8 mobilisation of 2001. Having been an activist in the 1980s and 1990s I was wearily familiar with the sectarian competitiveness of various radical narratives, each seeking to establish itself as the correct path. So it was a strongly affective experience to stand in the convergence centre and listen to so many divergent social groups and movements agree to support each other's tactics, expressing a solidarity based on a non-judgemental pluralism. Since then we have seen the emergence of similarly anti-hegemonic countercultures around the Occupy and Anonymous movements. It is in this context of counterculture that I will try to summarise and evaluate the countercultural potential of citizen science and what being countercultural might offer to citizen science itself. To be countercultural it is not enough for citizen science to counterpose participation against the institutional and hierarchical aspects of professional science. As an activity defined purely by engagement it offers to plug the legitimacy gap for science while still being wholly dependent on it. A countercultural citizen science must pose a strong challenge to the status quo, and I have suggested that a route to this would be to develop as nomadic science. This does not mean replacing or overthrowing science but constructing an other to science with its own claim to empirical methods. It is fair to ask what this would offer citizen science that it does not already have. At an abstract level it would gain a freedom of movement; an ability to occupy Deleuzian smooth spaces rather than be constrained by the striation of established science. The founders of Science for the People are clear that it could never have existed if it had not been able to draw on the mass movements of its time. Being countercultural would give citizen science an affinity with the bottom-up, local and community-based issues where empirical methods are likely to have the most social impact. One of many examples is the movement against fracking (the hydraulic fracturing of deep rock formations to release shale gas). Together, these benefits of being countercultural open up the possibility for forms of citizen science to spread rhizomatically in a way that is not about immaterial virtual labour but is itself part of a wider cultural change. 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On 23 August 2005, John Howard, then Prime Minister, called together Muslim ‘representatives’ from around the nation for a Muslim Summit in response to the London bombings in July of that year. One of the outcomes of the two hour summit was a Statement of Principles committing Muslim communities in Australia to resist radicalisation and pursue a ‘moderate’ Islam. Since then the ill-defined term ‘moderate Muslim’ has been used in both the political and media discourse to refer to a preferred form of Islamic practice that does not challenge the hegemony of the nation state and that is coherent with the principles of secularism. Akbarzadeh and Smith conclude that the terms ‘moderate’ and ‘mainstream’ are used to describe Muslims whom Australians should not fear in contrast to ‘extremists’. Ironically, the policy direction towards regulating the practice of Islam in Australia in favour of a state defined ‘moderate’ Islam signals an attempt by the state to mediate the practice of religion, undermining the ethos of secularism as it is expressed in the Australian Constitution. It also – arguably – impacts upon the citizenship rights of Australian Muslims in so far as citizenship presents not just as a formal set of rights accorded to an individual but also to democratic participation: the ability of citizens to enjoy those rights at a substantive level. Based on the findings of research into how Australian Muslims and members of the broader community are responding to the political and media discourses on terrorism, this article examines the impact of these discourses on how Muslims are practicing citizenship and re-defining an Australian Muslim identity. Free Speech Free speech has been a hallmark of liberal democracies ever since its defence became part of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Australian Constitution does not expressly contain a provision for free speech. The right to free speech in Australia is implied in Australia’s ratification of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), article 19 of which affirms: Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. The ultimate recent endorsement of free speech rights, arguably associated with the radical free speech ‘open platform’ movement of the 1960s at the University of California Berkeley, constructs free speech as essential to human and civil liberties. Its approach has been expressed in terms such as: “I reject and detest XYZ views but will defend to the utmost a person’s right to express them”. An active defence of free speech is based on the observation that, unless held to account, “[Authorities] would grant free speech to those with whom they agree, but not to minorities whom they consider unorthodox or threatening” (“Online Archives of California”). Such minorities, differing from the majority view, do so as a right accorded to citizens. In very challenging circumstances – such as opposing the Cold War operations of the US Senate Anti-American Activities Committee – the free speech movement has been celebrated as holding fast (or embodying a ‘return’) to the true meaning of the American First Amendment. It was in public statements of unpopular and minority views, which opposed those of the majority, that the right to free speech could most non-controvertibly be demonstrated. Some have argued that such rights should be balanced by anti-vilification legislation, by prohibitions upon incitement to violence, and by considerations as to whether the organisation defended by the speaker was banned. In the latter case, there can be problems with excluding the defence of banned organisations from legitimate debate. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Sinn Fein was denounced in the UK as the ‘political wing of the IRA’ (the IRA being a banned organisation) and denied a speaking position in many forums, yet has proved to be an important party in the eventual reconciliation of the Northern Ireland divide. In effect, the banning of an organisation is a political act and such acts should best be interrogated through free speech and democratic debate. Arguably, such disputation is a responsibility of an involved citizenry. In general, liberal democracies such as Australia do not hesitate to claim that citizens have a right to free speech and that this is a right worth defending. There is a legitimate expectation by Australians of their rights as citizens to freedom of expression. For some Australian Muslims, however, the appeal to free speech seems a hollow one. Muslim citizens run the risk of being constructed as ‘un-Australian’ when they articulate their concerns or opinions. Calls by some Muslim leaders not to reprint the Danish cartoons depicting images of the Prophet Mohammed for example, met with a broader community backlash and drew responses that, typically, constructed Muslims as a threat to Australian cultural values of freedom and liberty. These kinds of responses to expressions by Australian Muslims of their deeply held convictions are rarely, if ever, interpreted as attempts to curtail Australian Muslims’ rights to free speech. There is a poor fit between what many Australian Muslims believe and what they feel the current climate in Australia allows them to say in the public domain. Positioned as the potential ‘enemy within’ in the evolving media and political discourse post September 11, they have been allocated restricted speaking positions on many subjects from the role and training of their Imams to the right to request Sharia courts (which could operate in parallel with Australian courts in the same way that Catholic divorce/annulment courts do). These social and political restrictions lead them to question whether Muslims enjoy citizenship rights on an equal footing with Australians from the broader community. The following comment from an Australian woman, an Iraqi refugee, made in a research interview demonstrates this: The media say that if you are Australian it means that you enjoy freedom, you enjoy the rights of citizenship. That is the idea of what it means to be Australian, that you do those things. But if you are a Muslim, you are not Australian. You are a people who are dangerous, a people who are suspicious, a people who do not want democracy—all the characteristics that make up terrorists. So yes, there is a difference, a big difference. And it is a feeling all Muslims have, not just me, whether you are at school, at work, and especially if you wear the hijab. (Translated from Arabic by Anne Aly) At the same time, Australian Muslims observe some members of the broader community making strong assertions about Muslims (often based on misunderstanding or misinformation) with very little in the way of censure or rebuke. For example, again in 2005, Liberal backbenchers Sophie Panopoulos and Bronwyn Bishop made an emotive plea for the banning of headscarves in public schools, drawing explicitly on the historically inherited image of Islam as a violent, backward and oppressive ideology that has no place in Western liberal democracy: I fear a frightening Islamic class emerging, supported by a perverse interpretation of the Koran where disenchantment breeds disengagement, where powerful and subversive orthodoxies are inculcated into passionate and impressionable young Muslims, where the Islamic mosque becomes the breeding ground for violence and rejection of Australian law and ideals, where extremists hijack the Islamic faith with their own prescriptive and unbending version of the Koran and where extremist views are given currency and validity … . Why should one section of the community be stuck in the Dark Ages of compliance cloaked under a veil of some distorted form of religious freedom? (Panopoulos) Several studies attest to the fact that, since the terrorist attacks in the United States in September 2001, Islam, and by association Australian Muslims, have been positioned as other in the political and media discourse (see for example Aly). The construct of Muslims as ‘out of place’ (Saniotis) denies them entry and representation in the public sphere: a key requisite for democratic participation according to Habermas (cited in Haas). This notion of a lack of a context for Muslim citizenship in Australian public spheres arises out of the popular construction of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Australian’ as mutually exclusive modes of being. Denied access to public spaces to partake in democratic dialogue as political citizens, Australian Muslims must pursue alternative communicative spaces. Some respond by limiting their expressions to closed spheres of communication – a kind of enforced silence. Others respond by pursuing alternative media discourses that challenge the dominant stereotypes of Muslims in Western media and reinforce majority-world cultural views. Enforced Silence In closed spheres of discussion, Australian Muslims can openly share their perceptions about terrorism, the government and media. Speaking openly in public however, is not common practice and results in forced silence for fear of reprisal or being branded a terrorist: “if we jump up and go ‘oh how dare you say this, rah, rah’, he’ll be like ‘oh he’s going to go off, he’ll blow something up’”. One research participant recalled that when his work colleagues were discussing the September 11 attacks he decided not to partake in the conversation because it “might be taken against me”. The participant made this decision despite the fact that his colleagues were expressing the opinion that United States foreign policy was the likely cause for the attacks—an opinion with which he agreed. This suggests some support for the theory that the fear of social isolation may make Australian Muslims especially anxious or fearful of expressing opinions about terrorism in public discussions (Noelle-Neumann). However, it also suggests that the fear of social isolation for Muslims is not solely related to the expression of minority opinion, as theorised in Noelle-Neumann’s Spiral of Silence . Given that many members of the wider community shared the theory that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre in 2001 may have been a response to American foreign policy, this may well not be a minority view. Nonetheless, Australian Muslims hesitated to embrace it. Saniotis draws attention to the pressure on Australian Muslims to publicly distance themselves from the terrorist attacks of September 11 and to openly denounce the actions of terrorists. The extent to which Muslims were positioned as a threatening other was contingent on their ability to demonstrate that they too participated in the distal responses to the terrorist attacks—initial pity for the sufferer and eventual marginalisation and rejection of the perceived aggressor. Australian Muslims were obliged to declare their loyalty and commitment to Australia’s ally and, in this way, partake in the nationalistic responses to the threat of terrorism. At the same time however, Australian Muslims were positioned as an imagined enemy and a threat to national identity. Australian Muslims were therefore placed in a paradoxical bind- as Australians they were expected to respond as the victims of fear; as Muslims they were positioned as the objects of fear. Even in discussions where their opinions are congruent with the dominant opinion being expressed, Australian Muslims describe themselves as feeling apprehensive or anxious about expressing their opinions because of how these “might be taken”. Pursuing alternative discourses The overriding message from the research project’s Muslim participants was that the media, as a powerful purveyor of public opinion, had inculcated a perception of Muslims as a risk to Australia and Australians: an ‘enemy within’; the potential ‘home grown terrorist’. The daily experience of visibly-different Australian Muslims, however, is that they are more fearing than fear-inspiring. The Aly and Balnaves fear scale indicates that Australian Muslims have twice as many fear indicators as non-Muslims Australians. Disengagement from Western media and media that is seen to be influenced or controlled by the West is widespread among Australian Muslims who increasingly argue that the media institutions are motivated by an agenda that includes profit and the perpetuation of a negative stereotype of Muslims both in Australia and around the globe, particularly in relation to Middle Eastern affairs. The negative stereotypes of Muslims in the Australian media have inculcated a sense of victimhood which Muslims in Australia have used as the basis for a reconstruction of their identity and the creation of alternative narratives of belonging (Aly). Central to the notion of identity among Australian Muslims is a sense of having their citizenship rights curtailed by virtue of their faith: of being included in a general Western dismissal of Muslims’ rights and experiences. As one interviewee said: If you look at the Channel Al Jazeera for example, it’s a channel but they aren’t making up stories, they are taping videos in Iraqi, Palestine and other Muslim countries, and they just show it to people, that’s all they do. And then George Bush, you know, we hear on the news that George Bush was discussing with Tony Blair that he was thinking to bomb Al Jazeera so why would these people have their right to freedom and we don’t? So that’s why I think the people who are in power, they have the control over the media, and it’s a big political game. Because if it wasn’t then George Bush, he’s the symbol of politics, why would he want to bomb Al Jazeera for example? Amidst leaks and rumours (Timms) that the 2003 US bombing of Al Jazeera was a deliberate attack upon one of the few elements of the public sphere in which some Western-nationality Muslims have confidence, many elements of the mainstream Western media rose to Al Jazeera’s defence. For example, using an appeal to the right of citizens to engage in and consume free speech, the editors of influential US paper The Nation commented that: If the classified memo detailing President Bush’s alleged proposal to bomb the headquarters of Al Jazeera is provided to The Nation, we will publish the relevant sections. Why is it so vital that this information be made available to the American people? Because if a President who claims to be using the US military to liberate countries in order to spread freedom then conspires to destroy media that fail to echo his sentiments, he does not merely disgrace his office and soil the reputation of his country. He attacks a fundamental principle, freedom of the press—particularly a dissenting and disagreeable press—upon which that country was founded. (cited in Scahill) For other Australian Muslims, it is the fact that some media organisations have been listed as banned by the US that gives them their ultimate credibility. This is the case with Al Manar, for example. Feeling that they are denied access to public spaces to partake in democratic dialogue as equal political citizens, Australian Muslims are pursuing alternative communicative spaces that support and reinforce their own cultural worldviews. The act of engaging with marginalised and alternative communicative spaces constitutes what Clifford terms ‘collective practices of displaced dwelling’. It is through these practices of displaced dwelling that Australian Muslims essentialise their diasporic identity and negotiate new identities based on common perceptions of injustice against Muslims. But you look at Al Jazeera they talk in the same tongue as the Western media in our language. And then you look again at something like Al Manar who talks of their own tongue. They do not use the other media’s ideas. They have been attacked by the Australians, been attacked by the Israelis and they have their own opinion. This statement came from an Australian Muslim of Jordanian background in her late forties. It reflects a growing trend towards engaging with media messages that coincide with and reinforce a sense of injustice. The Al Manar television station to which this participant refers is a Lebanese based station run by the militant Hezbollah movement and accessible to Australians via satellite. Much like Al Jazeera, Al Manar broadcasts images of Iraqi and Palestinian suffering and, in the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah, graphic images of Lebanese casualties of Israeli air strikes. Unlike the Al Jazeera broadcasts, these images are formatted into video clips accompanied by music and lyrics such as “we do not fear America”. Despite political pressure including a decision by the US to list Al Manar as a terrorist organisation in December 2004, just one week after a French ban on the station because its programming had “a militant perspective with anti-Semitic connotations” (Jorisch), Al Manar continued to broadcast videos depicting the US as the “mother of terrorism”. In one particularly graphic sequence, the Statue of Liberty rises from the depths of the sea, wielding a knife in place of the torch and dripping in blood, her face altered to resemble a skull. As she rises out of the sea accompanied by music resembling a funeral march the following words in Arabic are emblazoned across the screen: On the dead bodies of millions of native Americans And through the enslavement of tens of millions Africans The US rose It pried into the affairs of most countries in the world After an extensive list of countries impacted by US foreign policy including China, Japan, Congo, Vietnam, Peru, Laos, Libya and Guatamala, the video comes to a gruelling halt with the words ‘America owes blood to all of humanity’. Another video juxtaposes images of Bush with Hitler with the caption ‘History repeats itself’. One website run by the Coalition against Media Terrorism refers to Al Manar as ‘the beacon of hatred’ and applauds the decisions by the French and US governments to ban the station. Al Manar defended itself against the bans stating on its website that they are attempts “to terrorise and silence thoughts that are not in line with the US and Israeli policies.” The station claims that it continues on its mission “to carry the message of defending our peoples’ rights, holy places and just causes…within internationally agreed professional laws and standards”. The particular brand of propaganda employed by Al Manar is gaining popularity among some Muslims in Australia largely because it affirms their own views and opinions and offers them opportunities to engage in an alternative public space in which Muslims are positioned as the victims and not the aggressors. Renegotiating an ‘Othered’ Identity The negative portrayal of Muslims as ‘other’ in the Australian media and in political discourse has resulted in Australian Muslims constructing alternative identities based on a common perception of injustice. Particularly since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 and the ensuing “war on terror”, the ethnic divisions within the Muslim diaspora are becoming less significant as Australian Muslims reconstruct their identity based on a notion of supporting each other in the face of a global alliance against Islam. Religious identity is increasingly becoming the identity of choice for Muslims in Australia. This causes problems, however, since religious identity has no place in the liberal democratic model, which espouses secularism. This is particularly the case where that religion is sometimes constructed as being at odds with the principles and values of liberal democracy; namely tolerance and adherence to the rule of law. This problematic creates a context in which Muslim Australians are not only denied their heterogeneity in the media and political discourse but are dealt with through an understanding of Islam that is constructed on the basis of a cultural and ideological clash between Islam and the West. Religion has become the sole and only characteristic by which Muslims are recognised, denying them political citizenship and access to the public spaces of citizenship. Such ‘essentialising practices’ as eliding considerable diversity into a single descriptor serves to reinforce and consolidate diasporic identity among Muslims in Australia, but does little to promote and assist participatory citizenship or to equip Muslims with the tools necessary to access the public sphere as political citizens of the secular state. In such circumstances, the moderate Muslim may be not so much a ‘preferred’ citizen as one whose rights has been constrained. 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