<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1106" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV>From today's National Post, a review I did of a new collection of cartoons (by various hands) entitled Empire. The editor of this version of Empire was influenced by Hardt and Negri, as explained below.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV> Empire<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p> Edited by Nicholas Blechman<o:p></o:p> $19.99, paperback <o:p></o:p> 168 pp.<o:p></o:p> Princeton Architectural Press<o:p></o:p> By reviewed by Jeet Heer<o:p></o:p>  <o:p></o:p> Propaganda works: that is the distressing lesson we can draw from recent history. Over the last two years a large majority of Americans (and a significant numbers of Canadians) have accepted as fact patently untrue things, notably that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, that the Iraqi government had significant ties to Al-Qaeda, and that Iraq itself was awash in weapons of mass destruction. These factitious notions were spread either by the Bush administration or its Neanderthal allies in right-wing press.<o:p></o:p> Those taken in by war propaganda were not just the simple rubes who faithfully follow Rush Limbaugh and watch Fox News. The New York Times is supposedly a bastion of liberalism and quality journalism. Yet as the editors at the Times confessed this week, their reporters were far too credulous in accepting government sanctioned disinformation about Iraq. <o:p></o:p> Fortunately, there are limits to how successful propaganda can be. For propaganda is a bacteria that activities antibodies of skepticism among an alter citizenry. All over the world millions of people, distressed by the lies of the political elite and the supine mainstream media, have searched for alternative sources of information. The book business in particular has been a beneficiary of this new audience for political dissent.  <o:p></o:p> "It really gets me when the critics say I haven't done enough for the economy, " President Bush recently joked at a Washington black-tie dinner. "I mean, look what I've done for the book publishing industry.” Bush has a real point here. Books critical of his presidency, ranging from simple rants to reasoned treatises, have dominated global best-sellers lists. In the U.S., the Barnes and Noble bookstore chain actually credits its recent profitability to the high demand for books on Iraq war.<o:p></o:p>             Empire, a thematic collection of political drawings, short prose pieces and photos edited by Nicholas Blechman, is a visual counterpart to books like Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men and Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival. Like Moore and Chomsky, Blechman’s crew of artists cast a skeptical eye on recent U.S. foreign policy (although it also includes a few hits against collateral targets such as consumerism and environmental degradation).<o:p></o:p> Two qualities distinguish Empire from the other books on the burgeoning anti-Bush shelf. First, high production values and a wide range of talented artists give Empire an aesthetic appeal other political books lack. Secondly, there is a real intellectual back-bone to Empire because the editor has been influenced by recent political theory about the shifting meanings behind the concept of “imperialism”.<o:p></o:p> The visual strength of Empire is apparent even a cursory glance. The books is printed on a variety of stocks, much of it a distinctive leafy green paper with some white card-boardy inserts. The main body of book uses a narrow palette of somber colours (green, black, and gray). The inserts stand out as little islands of brightness amid the sea of darker hues.<o:p></o:p> The colour scheme may be deliberately limited but the visual range is wide. With his patented blunt stencil icons, Peter Kuper does takes off Magritte’s “This is not a pipe.”  Luba Lukova’s “War is not the answer” offers an optical pun to make its point. Guy Clement, familiar to National Post readers for his charming doodles, takes a wry approach, slightly droller than the other contributors. His “Empirical Observations” meditates on the perennial self-delusion of empires. Paul Sahre weighs in with scabrous portraits of Bush and his advisors. The longest piece in the book is Henny Wagenbreth’s “The Mystery of St. Helena”, an off-kilter fable about Napoleon’s afterlife.<o:p></o:p> With more that forty contributors, Empire has its share of duds. Some of the pieces are pure agitprop, looking like the sort of homemade posters produced by small left-wing sects. There is a long interview with Lewis Lapham which simply takes up space since he merely repeats the jaded, world-weary act he performs every month in the pages of Harper’s. <o:p></o:p> Despite these dead pages, Empire holds up well as a book, in large part because editor Nicholas Blechman has a cohesive (if quirky) sense of what the word imperialism means. As the foreword to the book notes, the term “empire” is usually used to connote a territorially ambitious nation, in the tradition of ancient Rome or Britain in the Victorian era. <o:p></o:p> However, there is a more expansive and metaphorical usage of empire. “For us, ‘empire’ refers to something different,” the authors of the foreword (Knickerbocker and Jesse Gordon) note. “In fact it doesn’t refer to any one thing, but to a vast matrix of forces and counterforces… Pinpointing the heart of such an empire is impossible. Though there are some obvious suspects (the IMF, the World Bank, the U.S.), its nature as a network constantly defies accurate denunciation. Instead, its powers lies in its very connectivity.”<o:p></o:p>             By this account, empire refers not to the power of one single country but rather to a system of total control similar to the Matrix (from the movie of the same name): an all-encompassing cultural and ideological fog. This notion of empire has an interesting pedigree. It was put forward in 2000 by the post-Marxist political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in a book called (you guessed it) Empire. <o:p></o:p> An intellectual best-seller, the Hardt/Negri book described the contemporary capitalist system in startling terms: as dispersed and without a central seat of power. Like the internet, capitalism exists not in one place, but is a network that circles the globe. Such a system, they argued, could not be fought by the traditional left-wing tactics of organizing cadre political parties. The modern empire had to be combated by spontaneous revolts all over the world. In some respects, Hardt and Negri are the intellectual gurus behind the anti-globalization movement (although Negri himself is a controversial figure because of his onetime involvement with a violently radical Italian political sect).<o:p></o:p> The Empire edited by Blechman is, in many respects, a popularization of the Hardt and Negri volume (which is briefly quoted in the current book). Like the political theorists, the artists in Empire want to show us how enmeshed we are in a global system. In filling up our cars with gas we are party to events in the Middle East. We who live in wealthy countries are beneficiaries of a global Empire, although in our daily lives we remain oblivious to this fact. The theory of Empire is designed to clear up the fog that hides these links, making us aware of our responsibilities as global citizens.<o:p></o:p> Empire succeeds on two levels. Simply as a work of graphic art, it is an addition to any bookshelf. But it also works as a guide to political theory, making the difficult ideas of Hardt and Negri vivid and alive for a larger audience.<o:p></o:p>  <o:p></o:p></DIV></BODY></HTML>