Two consecutive posts from Spiked is a guaranteed never-to-be-repeated anomaly, but in this case chief ideologue Frank Furedi's oft-expounded 'politics of fear' line leads to an important point about the Malthusian basis of ecology's millennial crusade.  (It's a point that's made all too rarely; for a more theoretically-informed version see the Iain Boal interview posted a few months back on this site.)  'Terrorism' serves as a sort of template for other official universal enemies: 'global warming', pandemics, 'overpopulation', etc.  (And, coming full-circle, military Malthusians now explicitly cite terrorism alongside resource-shortage as a noxious consequence of profligate working class reproduction.)  Furedi doesn't quite put it this way, but 'terror' is a useful starting point for perpetual emergency-management because the negligible real effect of the phenomenon and the total indeterminacy of the concept mean other fear-triggers can simultaneously be made to seem 'even' more dangerous (by comparison) and always already everywhere (by analogy).  So that unlimited ad-hoc emergency powers become all the more 'necessary' and inevitable.

What mutations in the circulatory logic of capital and spectacle have occurred since September 11th? In their 2005 book Afflicted Powers: Capital in a New Age of War, Bay Area collective Retort argue that neoliberalism has moved from an era of austerity programmes and agreements to one of all out war – over air, land, and media. Here Anustup Basu reviews their book and traces the demise of a Kantian modernity based on ‘enfranchisement and eternal peace’ and the rise of one based on ‘weak citizenship and perpetual conflict’

During the political fallout from the Madrid bombing, Spain’s citizens faced an informatic coup from a government desperate to keep and extend its hold on power. But using organisational tools tested by the anti-globalisation movement, the effects of media manipulation and disinformation were reversed: Spain was no longer following the script. Mayo Fuster-Morell kept a diary of the remarkable events following the bombing

During the last three years, Spain has seen a powerful social mobilisation against globalisation. Out of this has grown a dissident, self-managed social network that, during 2003 and 2004, gathered to impede the war on Iraq and to stop the permanent global war. Aznar, Spain’s Popular Party (PP) President had not listened to the 98 percent of the population opposed to the war, instead basing the country’s foreign policy on his alliance with Bush. This brought the Spanish State into the Iraq war, in solidarity with the USA and the UK.

After the heady days of the dot com boom and the online corporate critique that followed in its wake, net artists’ and activists’ preoccupations are shifting towards the state. Raimundas Malasauskas reports on one New York example

‘Dear Director, I am writing to inform you that I am deeply troubled by your closure of White Box, an absolutely un-American thing to do. Please rescind the order as soon as possible and affirm our freedom of speech and assembly.’ So wrote one angry activist in an email to Carolyn Parker Mayes, the director of the Homeland Security Cultural Bureau (HSCB), after it ordered the White Box gallery in New York’s Chelsea to be shut down on September 11 2002.

Agnese Trocchi of Candida TV analyses the recently released Italian parliamentary report on 'Internal and International Terrorism', which links groups of the social movement such as the Disobedienti to terrorism, and argues that the fate of political activism in Italy hangs in the balance.

This week, in anticipation of imminent conflict in Iraq, the Italian Minister of Internal Affairs Giuseppe Pisanu has decided that the moment is right to deal a blow against voices in disagreement with the war.

What happens when the ‘network of terror’ meets the ‘network society’? The US military reaches for its strategic gurus. JJ King unpicks the latest thinking on asymmetric warfare in an age of ‘full spectrum dominance’

'What do terrorist networks look like? How do they operate? How do they communicate? How can we analyse them? What are their weaknesses? How can we build counter-measures and ultimately how can we disrupt and dismantle them?' - Valdis Krebs, ‘Disrupting Networks of Terrorist Cells’ [http://www.orgnet.com/tnet.html ]

'You have to empower the fringes if you are going to be able to make decisions faster than the bad guy... You can’t do it through hierarchical systems. It just takes too long... We need a network to fight the network' - Lt. Col. Robert Wardell

John Fitzpatrick on how New Labour are planning to phase out politics, errr sorry, ‘terrorism’.

>> Images from www.contrast.org/borders

The Prevention of Terrorism Bill, currently passing through Parliament, represents the single most serious attack on civil liberties in this country since the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 and the original anti-terrorist legislation of 1974.