Mediumelding

I've started a new blog to showcase parts of the exploration I've been undergoing in class this semester.
The site is: mediumelding.blogspot.com

I've also updated my Video essay a bit, adding features and effects from Motion as well as some new audio components.






I'm also going to use this space to try to explain some of the specifics and choices of the "Libyan Democracy" video essay. The main two speakers you hear in the essay are Hillary Clinton and Noam Chomsky. Being the current Secretary of State, Clinton offers the official US Government stance on our actions in Libya and her comments were broadcasted internationally through many major television/radio/internet media sources. Professor Chomsky on the other hand, a highly respected Linguistics professor at MIT as well as probably the most outspoken public critic of the United States foreign policy, is virtually unknown in the American Mainstream, shunned by every major TV news outlet and only very occasionally mentioned in print publications. Chomsky is extremely popular in Europe, the Middle East, and pretty much every where besides the US, spending much of his time touring the world giving lectures and interviews. The NY Times has said Chomsky is "arguably the most important intellectual alive" despite regularly ignoring his comments and critiques of US foreign policy along with the rest of what we commonly call "Mainstream Media". Chomsky is a regular guest on Democracy NOW! as well as a variety of British, Middle Eastern and many other media outlets. I chose to use Chomsky's voice in this essay since his opinion is outside the main stream of thought on foreign policy despite being unbelievably well supported by decades of news reports and declassified government files. Chomsky brings up the attitudes of Libyans towards the West in terms of intervention. He recalls a massacre of Libyan's at the hands of Italians between WWI and WWII. "We have a short memory for atrocities" Chomsky quips, "but the Libyans have not forgotten." The concluding quote from Chomsky details a report commissioned by US President Eisenhower in the 50s into why there was such widespread hate for American policies in the Middle East. Our government has been supporting brutal, autocratic regimes and bloody coups for decades in order to maintain a semblance of control over the exportation of oil in the region. It is obvious that the events of September 11th were not only a retribution or "blowback" (as Ron Paul suggests, courtesy of a CIA report) but as we know actually perpetrated by people trained under our own regime tampering activities (i.e. Osama bin Laden having been trained by the CIA to combat the Soviets in Afghanistan). The catastrophic and tragic events of 9/11 were simply the first 21st Century reverberation of activities that have been occurring between our state's government and the "sovereign" nations of the Middle East for a very long time.