The People's Record

An ongoing chronicle of communities of resistance around the world: anti-racism, anti-zionism, anti-imperialism, the Arab Spring, anti-austerity protests in Greece and across Europe, student movements all around the world, the Occupy Movement, anti-capitalist movements, anarchist movements, socialist movements, leftist communities and other relevant international news.

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When you are tortured … they beat and beat you until everything is pain. Until there is so much pain that you give up thinking it will stop. In fact you stop hoping it will stop… . Then suddenly, one day, your cell opens and in comes a “nice” fellow who offers you a cigarette. For him you will do everything, anything.

[A Sinhalese] General told me that counter-insurgency is just like that except that instead of giving pain to a person you give pain to a whole community until it too stops hoping it will stop and starts only hoping for the lesser pain. Then you come in as the “nice fellow” and offer them a cigarette, or a constitution, and they will do anything for you.”5

What Sivaram described is strikingly reminiscent of the current situation in northwest Pakistan. Drones may have proven unreliable as tools of precision warfare, but they have yielded unexpected dividends as vehicles of state terror. Although the details of drone strategy remain secret, it appears that the US is consciously using “collectivized torture” as a means of coercing popular consent, not only in Pakistan but also in Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, North Africa, and other flashpoints of resistance to US domination.

From “Collectivized Torture”: Drone Warfare and the Dark Side of Counterinsurgency by Jacob Levich

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