tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-75191935474514731502024-02-06T21:51:30.372-08:00Complete Unknowndeleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.comBlogger61125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-78599839306761948342023-10-18T08:42:00.003-07:002023-10-19T01:59:03.149-07:00The Violence of the Oppressed<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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"Do you condemn Hamas violence?" Another oft-repeated cue, a question routinely put to Palestinian leaders (non-Hamas) interviewed in the mainstream media.
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Martin Luther King had a good response here - as a leader in the civil rights movement in the 1960s who preached non-violent resistance, similar questions would be put to him by establishment figures and the media, and he faced a similar dilemma when it came to black youth who sometimes resorted to violent means in struggling against the brutality they faced, particularly in the American South. At the same time, the Vietnam war was raging, and many fellow civil rights leaders urged him not to speak out on the issue (as they wanted the US Government on their side in enacting reforms to bring about racial equality and desegregation). This is what he said, in a <a href="https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil100/17.%20MLK%20Beyond%20Vietnam.pdf?fbclid=IwAR11rah6uQIpmm6FeUSeh6_cwm2XXwQPNS1GZ50uP60dUbHatBduVw4dghQ" target="_blank">key speech</a> entitled 'Beyond Vietnam':
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"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government."
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Likewise, I cannot bring myself to denounce the violence of Palestinians in their struggle, until I see world leaders denounce the illegal occupation of Palestinian land by Israel and the blockade of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and Israel's deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians including children over the past 70 years, resulting in thousands of deaths, cheered on (literally) by Israeli civilians. Until that happens, and until world leaders put serious pressure on Israel to end the blockade of Gaza which has gone on for over a decade, and agree a workable two state solution that gives the Palestinians full self-determination, until then I do not think it appropriate to expect any Palestinian to "condemn" Hamas violence. First things first. We cannot conflate the violence of the oppressed with that of the oppressor.
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To boot, Israel <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/" target="_blank">helped create Hamas (literally)</a>, in order to undermine the moderate Fatah and the Palestinian Authority in their efforts to pursue recognition and pressure Israel through international institutions. Israeli politicians have for that reason explicitly referred to Hamas as an "asset" - amongst other things, it has given Israeli officials a pretext to treat Palestinian civilians in Gaza as a legitimate target, and they have made statements to that effect, including in <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/10/14/hamas-israel-palestinian-authority/?fbclid=IwAR3iHZSQU_Wiut2-H_thbSyZlOdKMWDqcc9xFeyXJuMVYvbbmhS51eAbzQs" target="_blank">public comments and leaked diplomatic cables</a>.
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In other words, just as they conflate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism, as if they are one and the same, they conflate the Palestinians (including civilians) with Hamas, making them in turn legitimate targets. These are two sides of the same deranged coin.
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And yet, former commander of US forces in Iraq, David Petraus, speaking on Radio 4's Today Programme the other today tells us that Israel "fully understands" the complexity of fighting in a densely-populated urban environment against an enemy who "doesn't have the regard for civilians that we do."
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What a bunch of hypocrite bollocks. This coming from the US establishment, which has, since WWII, caused more bloodshed and civilian deaths than virtually anyone else, including by funding and supporting the violent overthrow of democratically-elected governments worldwide, directly training and financing death squads and torturers across Latin America, not to mention the illegal coup of the Palestinian Authority in 2006-07, or for that matter Iraq.
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At the moment, most of what I hear from the top leadership in the US and here in the UK and other European countries is sickening. The US is preparing to deploy 2,000 troops to support Israel. Seeing things like this, I can imagine how something like the Holocaust or any other genocide could have happened, as the world stood by - back then, the tabloid press wrote about and demonised Jewish refugees from Germany in the same way they demonise refugees from the middle east these days. Their pain - the pain the Palestinians suffer and have suffered under a brutal occupation, and a decade-long blockade of Gaza, as their civilians and leaders are systematically killed, abducted, and so forth - their pain simply doesn't matter to our leaders the same way that Israeli pain does. Their pain has been legalised.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnsbidQqrlWllPqCC5JbXWohlIAZmlOpuZeISJdU8a3C7FtD5w4PGbsbbwMRO34caPErDP0oqp-GPG8ETrSfENKWTyMH_0ZgMLV8Ta6J8jMXdDkXGZons9xCkrH2uGVbmrMOB_RpMauC9xo9T5N2yqFRpcpcrJ9lqbu1ghUEj0JPteTAyute11i-R4eBP_/s516/BVQTKHuCMAEos6j-2.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="477" data-original-width="516" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnsbidQqrlWllPqCC5JbXWohlIAZmlOpuZeISJdU8a3C7FtD5w4PGbsbbwMRO34caPErDP0oqp-GPG8ETrSfENKWTyMH_0ZgMLV8Ta6J8jMXdDkXGZons9xCkrH2uGVbmrMOB_RpMauC9xo9T5N2yqFRpcpcrJ9lqbu1ghUEj0JPteTAyute11i-R4eBP_/s400/BVQTKHuCMAEos6j-2.jpg"/></a>
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I would also add, for all the talk of beheadings of babies by Hamas (for which the IDF now admits they have no evidence, despite President Biden claiming he had seen it), it is worth remembering one of the worst crimes in history, certainly the worst in the past century or so, perpetrated by Nazis against the Jewish people, the Holocaust - the real horror of it was not this type of spectacular violence, but precisely what is termed 'administrative massacre'. Annihilating Palestinians by way of 'collateral damage' in the way Israel has been doing for decades through indiscriminate bombing (with deliberate disregard for any distinction between civilians and combatants, as per the comments referenced above), levelling entire apartment blocks and neighbourhoods, fits into the same general category. They kill a lot more Palestinians than Hamas could Israelis, don’t they?
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I can also imagine here how world wars start, as Iran and the US have both now conditionally pledged their involvement - wars have started over less. World War I was famously triggered by the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand in my hometown, Sarajevo, by a young Bosnian anarchist rebel.
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Keir Starmer was on Radio 4 too, shortly after Petraus, and his lack of any moral or ethical backbone is equally sickening. How far the Labour Party has fallen. I would liken this to a situation where, say, the Ukrainians, in resisting Russian occupation (and in retaliation for years of Russian atrocities), have crossed into Russia and committed atrocities, and killed civilians - and suddenly now we all "stand with Russia", instead of the occupied and oppressed Ukrainians.
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Except that this would never happen in regards to Russians and Ukrainians, because the Ukrainians are 'White' - when it’s White against White, it’s ok to side with the obvious underdog, the victims in the fight. We will even give them weapons. But in the Middle East, our leaders urge everyone that we must "stand with Israel", because Israel is more 'White' than Palestinians, and our leaders are a bunch of morally bankrupt racists and Islamophobes. The war in Gaza is part of a modern Judeo-Christian continuation of the Crusades, aimed at purging the Brown Arab heathen from the Holy Land. We really haven't advanced much since the Middle Ages, here in Europe.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0FEypF7256rWcMLoARNuFgt7dOI72u7RUjbVyMEPU-ocZ0xoSUGsL_HuJPl4TOOaBXPfz8dGDUhrTJbOAkg4sHhFVDT1n96etlbCmy1hrvw0NIg6BfzeWt_qLtVuezmlA3uKXi4hCuOSd-wobfa66c7iuYpn5Mkm0lctlFLo1QnU7gBzR6ma3iX9Uqmgg/s9079/gettyimages-587492330.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="5107" data-original-width="9079" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0FEypF7256rWcMLoARNuFgt7dOI72u7RUjbVyMEPU-ocZ0xoSUGsL_HuJPl4TOOaBXPfz8dGDUhrTJbOAkg4sHhFVDT1n96etlbCmy1hrvw0NIg6BfzeWt_qLtVuezmlA3uKXi4hCuOSd-wobfa66c7iuYpn5Mkm0lctlFLo1QnU7gBzR6ma3iX9Uqmgg/s400/gettyimages-587492330.jpg"/></a>
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</p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-73687989782714037782023-10-14T11:40:00.007-07:002023-10-18T11:01:48.008-07:00"Israel has a right to defend itself"<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6Pz_FCHdM6PXZna_vv9bzW930u1Ho_zUqY-5KwhAVUiG6Cx4gbMPqmjlhvCxwHNVKLRacMRh1mVTXBjR2evgyat1lu6YqITCmXoNYUIj9EdyVWEdvyHOYcBqw9vCRyRun3lbkwgtxKN3068iZiK2MYpplDvSnSJwZnLLw4frzoG6ELliWlsK-qzUl9dj9/s1080/391709001_10159220445692030_8882589413508478302_n.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="540" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="1080" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6Pz_FCHdM6PXZna_vv9bzW930u1Ho_zUqY-5KwhAVUiG6Cx4gbMPqmjlhvCxwHNVKLRacMRh1mVTXBjR2evgyat1lu6YqITCmXoNYUIj9EdyVWEdvyHOYcBqw9vCRyRun3lbkwgtxKN3068iZiK2MYpplDvSnSJwZnLLw4frzoG6ELliWlsK-qzUl9dj9/s320/391709001_10159220445692030_8882589413508478302_n.jpg"/></a>
“Israel has a right to defend itself” - I hear this phrase unthinkingly parroted so often, but it seems almost nobody expressing or questioning this sentiment gives much thought to what it means, to the difference between a war of defence and a war of aggression or occupation, or to the fact that notwithstanding this currently pending invasion of Gaza, the Palestinians have been living under a brutal Israeli apartheid occupation for decades. I've written a lot about it in a previous post <a href="https://thinwildmercurythought.blogspot.com/2014/07/all-you-need-is-kill-from-pre-emptive.html" target="_blank">here</a>.
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Is the forced expulsion of 1.1 million residents in a humanitarian disaster zone under siege - virtually the entirety of Gaza city - and a full scale invasion that is likely to flatten their homes and leave many of those who survive nothing to return to, in the world’s largest open-air prison - a war of defence? Imagine that Iraqis or Vietnamese or Chileans or Iranians or any other country that has suffered unchecked aggression or terrorism by British or American forces (or by US-funded militias or terrorists) had the resources to “defend” themselves in this way, and did the same - imagine that they amassed troops on the border and ordered the expulsion of the entire population of New York or Washington or London from their homes in advance of a full scale military invasion - because they, too, have a right to defend themselves. If that is how we define "defence", where does it stop? The war in Iraq itself - which we now all know was justified by a hoax orchestrated by top-level leadership in the US and Britain - was pitched to the British and American public as a pre-emptive war of “defence”.
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There is a racist, imperial logic underpinning all this - when Palestinians kill Israeli soldiers and civilians as an act of resistance to occupation, they are "terrorists". Yet British or American or Israeli troops, no matter what they do, even when they invade other countries illegaly and with impunity, murder civilians and commit war crimes, torture, rape women and children, are always fighting a war of "defence". Once they have defined their objective as 'defence' and ensured the effective dissemination of that message via an entire array of military-industrial media networks, there is no limit to what they can do.
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Anyone who doesn't get the point, I have no words for you. Trigger warning - I've survived two years under siege by Serbs in Sarajevo, all the while they were proclaiming in the media that the Bosnians / Muslims were "bombing themselves" and using civilians as "human shields" - as if it's even possible to fight a war under siege in a densely-populated urban area, to resist occupation, without defending fighters at some point being in close proximity to civilians, at least from the viewpoint of long-range artillery. The Nazis themselves perfected this kind of logic, referring to the partisans as 'terrorists'. And the Serbs too saw themselves as "defending" Europe from Muslim hordes, in the process committing genocide.
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But "Hamas denies Israel's right to exist, it's in their charter." Oh yes, and Israel likewise, quite clearly denies the Palestinian state the right to exist, and has been much more successful at it than Hamas, given that the Palestinians don’t have a state - Israel has denied them that since long before Hamas existed, from the creation of Israel and the Nakba in 1948. When they tried legitimate means, through free and fair elections in 2005, Israel reacted by arresting Palestinian legislators, jailing hundreds of them indefinitely without trial - for the crime of election campaigning. Not exactly the way to encourage a peaceful solution and dialogue.
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On the whole, it is not really in the Palestinians' interest to disrupt the peace process - it has largely been successive Israeli governments that have repeatedly disrupted the peace process, because they cannot possibly ever agree either a one state or two state solution, for as long as Palestinians outnumber Israelis, and for as long as a number of Palestinians or their descendants may seek to exercise a 'right of return' to the homes they were expelled from in what is now Israel. Even the creation of Hamas as a formidable force is the Israeli government and IDF's doing - because they needed to undermine the legitimacy of the moderate and secular PLO led by Yasser Arafat, and demonise the Palestinians. You can read all about it <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/?fbclid=IwAR0Jvli7Gcaf448g0qMTokmUbftpQu6pk_1rgGlWibAucuEGehhQrZ-ImFE" target="_blank">here</a>.
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And, I have to add, putting my lawyer hat on - technically, any Palestinian questioning Israel's right to exist does have an arguable case here. The population of Mandatory Palestine under British rule in the 1920s was around 80% Arab - if a democratic state had been created, it should have been majority Arab; which is why the creation of a Jewish state necessitated the forced expulsion of a significant portion of the Arab population from what is today Israel, which resulted in the 'Nakba' - in other words, ethnic cleansing, which is not only unethical but illegal under international law. Any fair-minded person, equipped with the facts and knowledge of the history of the region, should be able to appreciate that you don't have to be a bloodthirsty religious fanatic to legitimately think that Israel should not exist. It's not very different from Native Americans feeling that the United States should not exist, however impractical the sentiment may be as the foundation for a political platform.
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And make no mistake - the historical expulsion of Jews from the Holy Land over the millennia was not the Palestinians' or Arabs' doing - oh no, for most of history, until the early 20th century, and until the British colonial administration massively fucked things up with their 'divide and conquer' style of governance, the Arabs were among the few allies Jews have had had in the region. The exile and persecution of Jews in the Holy Land has been largely at the hands of Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and later Christian Crusaders in the Middle Ages. Ironically, it was the Persians (ancestors of modern Iranians) and later the Arabs and Ottomans who brought the Jews back to the Holy Land. The Ottoman empire was a refuge for Jews exiled from Europe during the Spanish Inquisition and various other pogroms. And in Jerusalem under Ottoman rule for four whole centuries (until 1917), it was common practice for Muslims and Jews and Christians to all pray together at the site of the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount - one of the holiest sites in Islam, and for Jews as well, being the location of the former Jewish Temple (first destroyed by Babylonians, later the Romans). That this would be unthinkable today, is a measure of how bad things have got, and how fast.
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Understandably, the Zionist cause got a boost after the Holocaust. The Jews needed a state of their own. But why did the Palestinians have to pay the price for it? Why wasn't it somehow pinned to those responsible for the historical wrongs done to Jews, from the Roman Empire and Christian Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust - the Germans, Italians, Spanish? They should have been made to pay. You think Hamas are extremists for taking extreme measures to resist occupation? Think of the Nazis, the Fascists, the Inquisitors and Conquistadores - nobody did anything to them to make them genocidal psychopaths. They were not oppressed or living under siege. Let's also not forget previous incursions into Gaza, or the Lebanon war of 2006, in which Israel launched a full scale invasion of southern Lebanon, displacing around 1 million people and killing over a thousand, and causing extensive damage to civilian infrastructure. Why? Because Hezbollah attacked an Israeli military transport patrolling the border and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, demanding the release of prisoners held by Israel.
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But I digress. What I want to say is, this pending invasion of Gaza is not about 'defence'. The Israeli leadership are seizing on an opportunity to kill more Palestinians, flatten more Palestinian homes (something they have been doing for decades, not just with artillery but even plain old bulldozers), and in the long term seize more land, once it’s become uninhabitable for Palestinians. Hamas is useful to them. They started the occupation, they created Hamas (literally), and they ultimately provoked this. There is no fair solution, fair to all - two state or one state - that the Israeli leadership would accept. They are outnumbered, and they know that. You think Hamas are extremists? Look at the Israeli politicians. Ayelet Shaked, one of the most influential Israeli lawmakers, formerly Minister of Justice and Minister of the Interior, has in the past posted statements on Facebook referring to Palestinian children as "little snakes", and condoning the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians, suggesting they should all be treated as "enemy combatants", not just those doing the actual fighting. I fear that many Israelis themselves have, in their historical memory of exile, internalised the European racism that was once turned against Jews and Arabs alike (rooted in the Crusades and Inquisition), just as many Arabs have internalised the anti-semitism that led to the Holocaust (also a European creation). Yet they remain brethren - the Jews claiming descent from Isaac, the Palestinians from Ishmael, both sons of Abraham.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIRc5aYA9pAhWWMGOes5N3FTXjmb6zIL_5TP4pWbo40LGZ86OS_ra9XL0dw3Bq8GEpCV-OvA_WOFMkyYU4Jvc06IQY8mdJVpEBYL6iRFupBWAFB0UKS2CoUymzClSNSAttPm0fRHPtGNBdCr_ke3jSP8K0oDTqdsol0gKht5uD5Y4YC-NwiAWTbGlrTu8S/s1487/Rembrandt_Harmensz._van_Rijn_035.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1487" data-original-width="1024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIRc5aYA9pAhWWMGOes5N3FTXjmb6zIL_5TP4pWbo40LGZ86OS_ra9XL0dw3Bq8GEpCV-OvA_WOFMkyYU4Jvc06IQY8mdJVpEBYL6iRFupBWAFB0UKS2CoUymzClSNSAttPm0fRHPtGNBdCr_ke3jSP8K0oDTqdsol0gKht5uD5Y4YC-NwiAWTbGlrTu8S/s320/Rembrandt_Harmensz._van_Rijn_035.jpg"/></a>
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</p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-21084657422262170872015-11-15T06:57:00.003-08:002023-10-17T02:18:40.444-07:00Paris je t’aime<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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After the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/14/paris-attacks-timeline-of-terror">attacks in Paris</a> on Friday, for some reason I keep thinking back to Sarajevo circa ’92. Maybe because of the sudden intrusion of extreme violence in a relatively peaceful place. Maybe because I’ve been to Paris, walked its streets, have friends who live there or are from there. And maybe also because, unlike previous incidents of this type, the targets chosen by the attackers are not the edifices of power and privilege, or the transport networks, nor the source of any specific provocation - but seemingly random targets in the less privileged multicultural, multi-ethnic and anti-establishmentarian neighbourhoods of Paris. They have no particular strategic value (relative to other potential targets), unless the attackers’ aim (or that of their commanders) was precisely to attack that multiculturalism, to sow discord and hatred where there was none before, to tacitly collude with the political forces of the Right and the military-industrial complex to close Europe’s borders and stem the flow of refugees fleeing ISIS on the one hand, and stimulate increased military expenditure on the other.
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There is such violence in the world all the time of course, most notably in recent days in Beirut - ironically, a city once nicknamed the ‘Paris of the Middle East’. Yet some of the accusations of racism in the outpourings of solidarity after the Paris attacks seem misplaced. On one hand, because many of us did speak out en masse against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Palestine, etc - even before they happened in some cases. Some key figures in the French government at the time did so too. We all know about the root causes. And I’ve spoken much more about those than about this.
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On the other hand, major violence in a place that you have a connection to (material and philosophical), especially if it’s a short train ride away, affects you more on a personal level. I know people there, I’ve been there, I could have been there. I even had a strange sense of foreboding on Friday morning - maybe just because it was the 13th. (It also happens to be a few days before what would have been the birthday of my late dad, from whom I inherited a certain appreciation for Foucault, Deleuze, and other French postwar thinkers whose spirit very much imbues those multicultural and anti-establishmentarian neighbourhoods of Paris.)
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There may be an element of self-interest involved in all this, but not racism (unless you’re a supporter of the Front National) - especially since the victims, according to reports, are of at least 15 different nationalities from all over the world. It's not so much about how we value the lives of others, but about how close to home the violence gets, or how connected we are to it.
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I won’t pray for Paris because, as one French artist pointed out, on average Parisians aren’t really into religion. Except one, I might suggest - Religion of Love, Church of Rock n’ Roll. In the words of one famous adherent and inhabitant of Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, Jim Morrison (aka the Lizard King):
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Do you know how pale and wanton thrillful<br />
comes death on a strange hour<br />
unannounced, unplanned for<br />
like a scaring over-friendly guest you've<br />
brought to bed<br />
Death makes angels of us all<br />
and gives us wings<br />
where we had shoulders<br />
smooth as ravens’ claws<br /><br />
I will not go<br />
Prefer a Feast of Friends<br />
To the Giant Family<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmqTjoMfrSicQUjr8UnHSgm8G_RvAGbQ7rz6VpD9NzJAmCrbnxSnlbRfsxKkcam65tjC7UNdt7USw6EpXRd2iWfzLvdFd2fV6yrFrR91Nio4nK7cMIwiM05iibaJc1cBP4FiU5WP_l8TfK/s1600/P1000217.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmqTjoMfrSicQUjr8UnHSgm8G_RvAGbQ7rz6VpD9NzJAmCrbnxSnlbRfsxKkcam65tjC7UNdt7USw6EpXRd2iWfzLvdFd2fV6yrFrR91Nio4nK7cMIwiM05iibaJc1cBP4FiU5WP_l8TfK/s400/P1000217.JPG" /></a>
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</p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-65570402861106533292015-07-13T04:02:00.002-07:002023-10-17T02:19:06.793-07:00There is a New Berlin Wall and it's called The Euro<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyQz1Rt2MZvIpH1_RqVjCppO8GKxZRh7IlT0AO1mTCvciBmeAcQPcWxqs8pVvrGj-BxFYvFjt74N9w5BIeW8-Aw9CD9yo37tYlIZv0mVUSAqa_N7JW25WIN12I0SjIx5I45gSKFz7MrYw9/s1600/berlinWALL.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyQz1Rt2MZvIpH1_RqVjCppO8GKxZRh7IlT0AO1mTCvciBmeAcQPcWxqs8pVvrGj-BxFYvFjt74N9w5BIeW8-Aw9CD9yo37tYlIZv0mVUSAqa_N7JW25WIN12I0SjIx5I45gSKFz7MrYw9/s320/berlinWALL.jpg" /></a>
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"The whole of the Mediterranean now finds itself in the wrong currency, and yet virtually nobody in the political arena has the courage to stand up and say that. I feel that the continent is now divided from north to south. There is a new Berlin Wall and it's called the euro."
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I find myself surprised to report that these incisive and insightful words were uttered recently before the European Parliament by none other than Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain's far-right Euroskeptic party, UKIP - though I'm not sure the label 'far-right' is really appropriate any more. For in the charged political climate of today's Europe, it is perhaps an indication of just how acrimonious and divisive the politics of the eurozone have become - how irrational, fanatical, and hegemonic the policies of certain of its members - that Farage comes off sounding like the Voice of Reason. The eurozone seems to be in the grip of an economic neo-fascism far more extreme than anything UKIP could drum up.
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I now officially count myself among the Euro-skeptics - not just with regard to currency union (that was the case before) but with regard to the EU project as a whole. I am not going to fault the UK or anyone for wanting to hold a referendum on EU membership in the future. All the worst fears about the EU, so far mostly peddled in the tabloid press - about surrendering national sovereignty and decision-making to faceless technocrats in Brussels, and EU politicians unaccountable to the people over whom they exercise enormous power - have been fully confirmed. And even worse - it would be bad enough if we were simply ruled by technocrats and bureaucrats in Brussels, but that would suggest at least a commitment to rational, data-driven policies. This is far worse. The latest rumblings over the Greek debt in Brussels - deal or no deal - suggest a political union driven by an irrational, sadistic, vindictive, fanatical and divisive neo-fascist politics of domination and hegemony, a conspiracy against the public, a conspiracy against democratic politics, led by politicians who are prepared to punish voters in a member country for their choice of government, for demanding rational economic policy, for making choices that their EU overlords dislike.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5BUOvzVKo9jM9rMLMlcxCUi4aNU8Ud-WU1wwHjTsZsINik4RpCiLPh4SzlhFJ2pOcoX0zynrPnq6CzS3lkWMr2u95CBMMvLORF7q8FSShC4bi0Ci8OybJKP5i1hP4UnOsyA9kIw9L5jP2/s1600/Greece.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5BUOvzVKo9jM9rMLMlcxCUi4aNU8Ud-WU1wwHjTsZsINik4RpCiLPh4SzlhFJ2pOcoX0zynrPnq6CzS3lkWMr2u95CBMMvLORF7q8FSShC4bi0Ci8OybJKP5i1hP4UnOsyA9kIw9L5jP2/s400/Greece.jpg" /></a>
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Economist Tim Worstall, <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/07/12/germanys-plan-to-rescue-greece-wars-have-started-over-less-than-this/">writing in <i>Forbes</i></a> (hardly a lefty political rag), is more-less in line with Krugman, Stiglitz, and any number of award-winning economists: "It’s very difficult indeed to design plans for Greece that are actually worse than the one the European Union is trying to impose upon that benighted country. Decades of enforced poverty in order to maintain a currency (and possibly even a political order) that the country should never have embraced, should never have been allowed into, just isn’t one of those things that would win you a gold star in your high school economics class. Everyone from Milton Friedman to Paul Krugman, with a few insignificant bag carriers like myself bringing up the rear, has been screaming that the problem is the euro and while that remains so will the problem...However, amazingly, the German finance ministry seems to have managed to come up with a plan that is even worse...As has been pointed out, those who don’t [study history] are doomed to repeat it."
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Paul Krugman <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/killing-the-european-project/">in <i>The New York Times</i></a> calls the Eurogroup's demands "madness...This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept…" And while Chancellor Merkel is harping on about trust, Krugman insists - "Who will ever trust Germany’s good intentions after this?...In a way, the economics have almost become secondary. But still, let’s be clear: what we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line...even a complete Greek capitulation would be a dead end...The European project — a project I have always praised and supported — has just been dealt a terrible, perhaps fatal blow. And whatever you think of Syriza, or Greece, it wasn’t the Greeks who did it."
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Joseph Stiglitz, another Nobel-winning economist, also <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/26/nobel-winner-germanys-the-problem-not-greece.html">insists</a> that the real problem is Germany, which has benefited greatly under the euro. While he believes the eurozone should stay together, he notes that most economists (including himself) hold that "the best solution for Europe, if it's going to break up, is for Germany to leave. The mark would raise, the German economy would be dampened...and Germany would find out just how much it needs the euro to stay together...and possibly be more willing to help out the countries that are struggling...There's a whole set of an unfinished economic agenda which most economists agree on, except Germany doesn't."
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"If Greece leaves," Stiglitz adds, "I think Greece will actually do better...There will be a period of adjustment. But Greece will start to grow."
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Even on this side of the Atlantic, Wolfgang Munchau, associate editor of the <i>Financial Times</i> and former co-editor of <i>FT Deutschland</i>, <a href="http://on.ft.com/1O09wu3">writes</a> that Greece's creditors "have destroyed the eurozone as we know it and demolished the idea of a monetary union as a step towards a democratic political union...In doing so they reverted to the nationalist European power struggles of the 19th and early 20th century. They demoted the eurozone into a toxic fixed exchange-rate system, with a shared single currency, run in the interests of Germany, held together by the threat of absolute destitution for those who challenge the prevailing order...This brings us back to a more toxic version of the old exchange-rate mechanism of the 1990s that left countries trapped in a system run primarily for the benefit of Germany, which led to the exit of the English pound and the temporary departure of the Italian lira. What was left was a coalition of countries willing to adjust their economies to Germany’s. Britain had to leave because it was not...Once you strip the eurozone of any ambitions for a political and economic union, it changes into a utilitarian project in which member states will coldly weigh the benefits and costs, just as Britain is currently assessing the relative advantages or disadvantages of EU membership. In such a system, someone, somewhere, will want to leave sometime. And the strong political commitment to save it will no longer be there either."
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In fact, I have yet to read a credible, independent expert opinion that has anything positive to say about Greece's creditors and their role in this debacle. One financial analyst, Marc Ostwald of ADM Investor Services, claimed the latest deal offered by the creditors was <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/13/athens-and-eurozone-agree-bailout-deal-for-greece">worse than the 1919 Treaty of Versailles</a> that crushed Weimar Germany with debt and paved the way for the second world war. The creditors, he added, seem to be trying “to completely destroy Greece”.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiKtahfQD2HqhZQtiE_3h7MPhdYhNN0z5VaE70ReJPfQszIBy1JWj9HPOKkDhTPm6fAEEl2wijtrwyb2eEdW7F8Nv2aNn89dFkl2GqpT9ORBZQfS7fqyrZLSxgJitQZJBO5ihnlzwsoXCt/s1600/Charlie-Hebdo-Takes-On-The-Greek-Crisis.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiKtahfQD2HqhZQtiE_3h7MPhdYhNN0z5VaE70ReJPfQszIBy1JWj9HPOKkDhTPm6fAEEl2wijtrwyb2eEdW7F8Nv2aNn89dFkl2GqpT9ORBZQfS7fqyrZLSxgJitQZJBO5ihnlzwsoXCt/s400/Charlie-Hebdo-Takes-On-The-Greek-Crisis.jpg" /></a>
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Even Jeffrey Sachs, one of the infamous 'shock doctors' much-maligned by Naomi Klein in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine"><i>The Shock Doctrine</i></a> (he is in fact credited with having coined the term 'economic shock therapy'), has effectively <a href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/greece-endgame-eurozone-default-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2015-06#2p43rTpjQF5b7BTS.99">cast his lot with Syriza</a>, writing that "Europe’s demands – ostensibly aimed at ensuring that Greece can service its foreign debt – are petulant, naive, and fundamentally self-destructive. In rejecting them, the Greeks are not playing games; they are trying to stay alive...The Greek government is right to have drawn the line. It has a responsibility to its citizens. The real choice, after all, lies not with Greece, but with Europe."
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Already in the lead-up to Syriza's election several months ago, Sachs <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/21/greece-profit-german-history-1953-debt-relief">wrote</a>: "The leftwing party Syriza is no anomaly; it is telling the financial and political truth in the runup to Sunday’s elections, however unpleasant that may be to politicians in Berlin and Brussels."
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What is becoming increasingly clear, given the near-consensus of eminent international economists - Nobel laureates and esteemed economic thinkers all - on the utter fallacy of the Eurozone creditors' position, and the correctness of Syriza's demands, is that Syriza is really not very <i>radical</i> at all. As Slavoj Zizek put it in a <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/07/Slavoj-Zizek-greece-chance-europe-awaken">recent article</a> in <i>New Statesman</i>, "if one looks closely at the proposals offered by Syriza, one cannot help noticing that they were once part of the standard moderate social-democratic agenda (in Sweden of the 1960s, the programme of the government was much more radical). It is a sad sign of our times that today you have to belong to a 'radical' left to advocate these same measures..." The label 'radical left', as I've said before, only has meaning in a charged political context where the 'centre' has become the technocratic neo-fascism currently gripping the imaginations of many eurozone leaders. If Syriza are radical, it is only as radically rational pragmatists.
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In light of all this, <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/07/yanis-varoufakis-full-transcript-our-battle-save-greece">the account given in a recent interview</a> by Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, of the past few months of negotiations, makes a lot of sense:
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<i>...[T]he inside information one gets...to have your worst fears confirmed...To have “the powers that be” speak to you directly, and it be as you feared – the situation was worse than you imagined! the complete lack of any democratic scruples, on behalf of the supposed defenders of Europe’s democracy. The quite clear understanding on the other side that we are on the same page analytically...To have very powerful figures look at you in the eye and say "You’re right in what you’re saying, but we’re going to crunch you anyway."
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It’s not that it didn’t go down well – it’s that there was point blank refusal to engage in economic arguments. Point blank...You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on – to make sure it’s logically coherent – and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken.
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Schäuble was consistent throughout. His view was "I’m not discussing the programme – this was accepted by the previous government and we can’t possibly allow an election to change anything..." So at that point I had to get up and say "Well perhaps we should simply not hold elections anymore for indebted countries," and there was no answer.
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My constant proposal to the Troika was very simple: let us agree on three or four important reforms that we agree upon, like the tax system, like VAT, and let’s implement them immediately. And you relax the restrictions on liqiuidity from the ECB. You want a comprehensive agreement – let’s carry on negotiating – and in the meantime let us introduce these reforms in parliament by agreement between us and you...And they said "No, no, no, this has to be a comprehensive review. Nothing will be implemented if you dare introduce any legislation. It will be considered unilateral action inimical to the process of reaching an agreement." And then of course a few months later they would leak to the media that we had not reformed the country and that we were wasting time! And so... [chuckles] we were set up, in a sense, in an important sense.</i>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3SiAifM98CZXww14BOOOG5V-hPRIFXjwR4eKRZeCvL6_BKfdnphA4HvnuimHctPpnLIsIEu6xPbnEuTX1r_8-TVyW2GKUdPDv7mZcBKeOEJytqkLkZz6xkrd70-AzBiugnRVQ1kG7rlyE/s1600/romans.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3SiAifM98CZXww14BOOOG5V-hPRIFXjwR4eKRZeCvL6_BKfdnphA4HvnuimHctPpnLIsIEu6xPbnEuTX1r_8-TVyW2GKUdPDv7mZcBKeOEJytqkLkZz6xkrd70-AzBiugnRVQ1kG7rlyE/s320/romans.jpg" /></a>
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The palpable hysteria with which European elites met Syriza's mere election a few months ago, with talk of markets tumbling and predictions of general mayhem, is reminiscent of <a href="http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=119&cat=1">C.P. Cavafy's famous poem</a>, 'Waiting for the Barbarians', in which he describes a 'civilized' society in decline, preparing for an imminent invasion by barbarians who never, in the end, turn up - and ends with these lines:
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<blockquote>Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?<br />
(How serious people’s faces have become.)<br />
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,<br />
everyone going home so lost in thought?<br /><br />
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.<br />
And some who have just returned from the border say<br />
there are no barbarians any longer.<br /><br />
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?<br />
They were, those people, a kind of solution. </blockquote>
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The eurogroup's disappointment with and consequent resentment of Syriza amounts precisely to this - Syriza are the barbarians who never materialized, who turned out to be in fact the rational, pragmatic and moderate antidote to the irrational, German-led neo-fascist economic extremism driving the poorer European economies into debt servitude - Syriza made them look bad, simply put. Syriza as extremist barbarians would have been 'a kind of solution' - they would have justified harsh measures, in the eyes of creditors. When Chancellor Merkel talks about 'trust', this is probably what she is getting at, or where these sentiments come from. As some commentators have pointed out, the Germans have shown themselves to be less trustworthy than anyone - but they are nonetheless fanatically, obsessively, hysterically convinced that behind these rational, pragmatic moderates in Syriza, the barbarians still lurk, in wait.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA_EKqcB7pWoBUzKLzLJ7AiiiCveLDHmxkRWIE7DxyVoKqSNsxHhyphenhyphenvZJCoiTEKJUWkSc8_jZehCeHM-kuWKfz-fmQmYnSqcpm5kOYuglyzKGhtRtvq35r0_yBkhQ1mQ90BqMdHN2v7D-HO/s1600/1401081958110.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA_EKqcB7pWoBUzKLzLJ7AiiiCveLDHmxkRWIE7DxyVoKqSNsxHhyphenhyphenvZJCoiTEKJUWkSc8_jZehCeHM-kuWKfz-fmQmYnSqcpm5kOYuglyzKGhtRtvq35r0_yBkhQ1mQ90BqMdHN2v7D-HO/s400/1401081958110.jpg" /></a>
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What is also clear is that, even if Syriza has lost the political battle - for now - it has clearly won the rational argument. The forces of Reason and Rational Economic Policy are clearly on its side. And the development of science, even economic science, isn't subject to socio-political fluctuations, market movements, and special interests quite as much as the political field is.
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During negotiations in Brussels yesterday, it emerged that one of the creditors' demands (specifically a German idea), as a condition of the Greek bailout, was to transfer 50 billion euros of 'valuable Greek assets' as collateral to a shady Luxembourg-based 'Institution for Growth'. This entity, as later reported, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of German KfW, chaired by none other than <a href="https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/620357444649287681">Germany's finance minister Wolfgang Schauble</a>. Quite apart from the cronyism and conflicts of interest - this, dear reader, is tantamount to me giving you a loan to help you repay your debts, but in return demanding that you, say, sign over the mortgage on your house to me as collateral - which in the long run makes you poorer, as you are giving up an asset that will appreciate in value, and less likely to be able to repay your debts, including your debts to me. This is just another example of how fantastically stupid the austerity regime imposed on Greece for the past 5 years has been, and goes a long way in explaining why economists around the world are railing against it. Even if this idea was watered down in the latest form of the agreement - the assets now will be transferred to an entity based in Athens - the principle is the same: the Greek government is somehow expected to achieve major budget surpluses while at the same time making itself <i>poorer</i> in the long run (by selling off assets), <i>and</i> growing the economy, <i>and</i> repaying its debts, <i>and</i> making those debts more sustainable.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj91dMaMpQKTmmOM0r6Ol9LSVAkmOLZoaP9ys2zNH22RifYzNEDa_H2HSkc1xgWHFp3xIdUME0YUb-Kjes8Uzdvv7d48ft3vlVx4U0sbtBPqk9Gv4idT0EkZPaQOi69IMxeoMCIOp_x_LTY/s1600/0%252C%252C15938808_303%252C00.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj91dMaMpQKTmmOM0r6Ol9LSVAkmOLZoaP9ys2zNH22RifYzNEDa_H2HSkc1xgWHFp3xIdUME0YUb-Kjes8Uzdvv7d48ft3vlVx4U0sbtBPqk9Gv4idT0EkZPaQOi69IMxeoMCIOp_x_LTY/s320/0%252C%252C15938808_303%252C00.jpg" /></a>
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As for the cronyism and conflicts of interest in the suggested version of the plan, we should remember that Schauble, Germany's finance minister and chief EU moralizer in the Greece debt crisis, resigned from office as party chairman back in 2000 due to his role at the centre of a <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/scandal-sinks-schauble-162255">massive corruption scandal</a> in Germany involving illegal campaign financing and "a labyrinthine network of secret slush funds fed by millions of Deutsche marks in undeclared - and therefore illegal - campaign contributions." Schauble, by his own admission "personally ran the slush-fund system during his 25 years as party chairman...At first the chairman insisted that he had only briefly met Karlheinz Schreiber, the fugitive weapons dealer who regularly handed bags of cash to CDU officials. Then last month Schauble was forced to admit that he had personally accepted a 100,000 Deutsche mark donation from Schreiber - in cash."
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Well, I guess that makes it kind of easy to stay solvent and lecture others about financial responsibility, when you get regularly handed personal 'donations' of millions in cash by dodgy weapons dealers on the run from the law. And then, to have the cheek to talk about 'trust'…With this in mind, I suspect that Schauble hates Syriza so much precisely because they have no links to previous Greek governments, to the corrupt political elites with whom he did deals in the past and who, like him, had a penchant for failing to declare moneys (received or spent), which ultimately led to their demise, and the demise of the Greek economy once Wall Street imploded. Schauble, in other words, prefers to deal with corrupt neo-fascist stooges like himself. With his wheelchair and irrational intransigence that leads to disaster, he actually seems a great fit for the role of latent Nazi Dr Strangelove, director of weapons research and development in Kubrick's epic film - a man willing to risk everything, including the fate of the world, for the sake of his own misguided intellectual obsessions...
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<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-mUCLHzWiJo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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In the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2015/jul/12/greek-debt-crisis-eu-leaders-meeting-cancelled-no-deal-live"><i>Guardian</i>'s reporting</a> on the talks in Brussels last night, there was mention that the Eurogroup, among other things, wants "rigorous review of collective bargaining" - as if collective bargaining rights and unions caused the financial crisis, not corrupt banks propped up by the same corrupt politicians who are now trying to get rid of Greece's first non-corrupt government in at least a decade. Nice try. This clearly has nothing to do with constructive, rational economic policy. In negotiations <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/12/greek-crisis-surrender-fiscal-sovereignty-in-return-for-bailout-merkel-tells-tsipras">described by one senior EU official</a> as an "exercise in extensive mental waterboarding" of the Greeks (for those unaware this is a form of torture favoured by CIA interrogators), the new terms reached "are much stiffer than those imposed by the creditors over the past five years." This, said the senior official, was payback for the emphatic no to the creditors’ terms delivered in the Greek referendum last week. “He was warned a yes vote would get better terms, that a no vote would be much harder,” said the senior official.
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Greece, in other words, is being collectively punished for voting 'no' in the referendum. Quite literally - punished. This really is terrorism, as former Greek finance minister Varoufakis put it. According to <a href="http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/greece-crisis-europe-turns-screw/4145">the BBC's Paul Mason</a>, "in Greece large numbers of people – on all sides of politics – believe the Europeans are trying to force the elected government to resign before a deal is concluded." I'd say that's been pretty clear for a while now.
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So here's hoping that the Greeks will have the courage to resist, and perhaps take the plunge out of the euro zone themselves. There are some signs of fierce opposition to the latest deal from within Syriza itself, not least the President of Parliament, Zoe Konstantopoulou, who delivered <a href="http://analyzegreece.gr/topics/greece-europe/item/288-zoe-konstantopoulou-n-to-ultimatums-n-to-the-memoranda-of-servitude">these blistering words</a> to Greek legislators yesterday:
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<blockquote>After the Second World War, Germany enjoyed the greatest remission of debt [in history], so as to allow it to get back on track. This was done with the generous partnership of Greece...And yet Germany is behaving as if history and the Greek people owe a debt to her, as if she expects to receive a historic payback for her own atrocities…
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The artificial and deliberate creation of conditions of humanitarian disaster so as to keep the people and the government in conditions of suffocation and under the threat of a chaotic bankruptcy constitutes a direct violation of all international human rights protection treaties, including the Charter of the United Nations, the European treaties, and even the statutes of the International Criminal Court. Blackmail is not legal. And those who create conditions that eliminate freedom of the will may not speak of "options." The lenders are blackmailing the government. They are acting fraudulently, since they have known since 2010 that this debt is unsustainable. They are acting consciously, since their statements anticipate the need for humanitarian aid in Greece. Humanitarian assistance for what? For an unexpected and inadvertent natural disaster? Is it an unpredictable earthquake, flooding, a fire?
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No.
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Humanitarian aid [would be required] because of their conscious and calculated choice to deprive the people of the means of survival, closing the tap of liquidity in retaliation for the democratic choice of the government and the parliament to call a referendum and to turn to the people to decide their own future...
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NO to blackmail
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NO to ultimatums
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NO to the Memoranda of servitude
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NO to the repayment of a debt they did not create and that is not attributable to them
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NO to new measures of impoverishment and exhaustion
</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgivVRs_48MdQTjGJXCkLDPdCbJlbVp8b1TqU-_FWX_Q6LZFf-4c1X378No84tVVrMliLEzxKeUHbQmONxAh83nKQUPxrw2azXWsWFLzKcr6u9rdwwrkn0Knp6emmPICVONkc_0uDprfBln/s1600/419577fcf74b5d056d0f6a706700d81e-kQzE-U430604023845788NE-1224x916%2540Corriere-Web-Sezioni-593x443.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgivVRs_48MdQTjGJXCkLDPdCbJlbVp8b1TqU-_FWX_Q6LZFf-4c1X378No84tVVrMliLEzxKeUHbQmONxAh83nKQUPxrw2azXWsWFLzKcr6u9rdwwrkn0Knp6emmPICVONkc_0uDprfBln/s320/419577fcf74b5d056d0f6a706700d81e-kQzE-U430604023845788NE-1224x916%2540Corriere-Web-Sezioni-593x443.jpg" /></a>
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. . .
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It is important to keep reminding ourselves in all this that the global financial crisis that started in 2007-08, and which reverberates to this day in Greece, at its root has nothing to do with 'lazy Greeks' or the welfare state (as Paul Krugman pointed out many times) or poor people living beyond their means, and very little to do with Greece - it is the direct result of catastrophic incompetence, greed and corruption among top executives in the biggest banks in the richest country in the world - the United States - who were bailed out unconditionally with funds many times greater than the money merely funneled through Greece (and back to foreign banks in the form of loan payments). Some of the reasons why Greece is suffering to this day:
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</p>
<ul>
<li>In a global financial crisis, the weakest economies are hit hardest (especially in a common currency zone, which goes back to the argument why Greece should never have joined the euro); </li>
<li>Years of mismanagement by <i>previous</i> Greek governments (i.e. hiding their debts), made up of the same corrupt politicians favoured and propped-up for years by equally corrupt foreign (mainly French and German) banks, and today supported by corrupt Eurozone and Troika officials who want to get rid of Syriza; they were effectively hiding structural weaknesses in the Greek economy which were exposed when global financial markets slid into recession;</li>
<li>Failure by Troika and Eurozone officials to acknowledge their failures and follow rational economic policy in relation to Greece, making the crisis there far worse through austerity measures that led to record unemployment levels and even deeper recession since 2010…</li>
</ul>
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As one commentator notes <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/12/germany-doesnt-want-to-save-greece-it-seems-to-want-to-humiliate-greece/">in the Washington Post</a>, "This latest melodrama playing out in Brussels as European finance ministers meet to discuss whether or not to approve a new Greek bailout, appears so nonsensical that it can be hard to believe these people are deciding the future of Europe."
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I would even go so far as to say, we have here an entire currency union run by a cabal of incompetent, sadistic, fanatical neo-fascist buffoons and stooges - instead of obsessing about cutting Greek pensions, these people should be pensioned off and locked up in a care home somewhere where their senile babble will be muffled behind sound-proof doors instead of shaping policies that affect millions of people.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim88cjDxevkUo51JugN7_1qqlh1RBzgCIA37zfGSiE9yMhS-6B6AhVGJALorysqPyPwmHtRH3TIzj93ASB3TxxgZJHY9G7vcBnkB3tiwOSOTgvjwq-JvtXUqGEvNjKEaZAe8wrGsSmR8zN/s1600/hqdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim88cjDxevkUo51JugN7_1qqlh1RBzgCIA37zfGSiE9yMhS-6B6AhVGJALorysqPyPwmHtRH3TIzj93ASB3TxxgZJHY9G7vcBnkB3tiwOSOTgvjwq-JvtXUqGEvNjKEaZAe8wrGsSmR8zN/s320/hqdefault.jpg" /></a>
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I have coined a new word: Oxi-mandias. In reference to the Greek 'Oxi' in the referendum, and <a href="http://www.potw.org/archive/potw46.html">Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem</a> 'Ozymandias' - this is the impending fate of the European project, so long as it remains in the hands of its current fanatical, irrational, neo-fascist architects:
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<blockquote>
And on the pedestal these words appear: <br />
"My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings. <br />
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!" <br />
No thing beside remains. Round the decay <br />
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, <br />
The lone and level sands stretch far away.</blockquote>
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Or, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
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<blockquote>We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late."</blockquote>
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When asked about the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/13/athens-and-eurozone-agree-bailout-deal-for-greece">Versailles analogy</a>, German Chancellor Angela Merkel responded: “I never make historical comparisons.”
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How ironic, cynical, and loaded a statement for a German head of state to make. As Louis Armstrong 'Satchmo' put it, "Denial ain't nothin' but a river in Egypt." And indeed, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. If Karl Marx is to be believed - that history repeats itself, "first as tragedy, then as farce" - this one could well end in tragedy. A Greek, or Greco-German tragedy, no less.
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</p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-33443882316841197492015-07-07T03:20:00.003-07:002023-10-17T02:19:21.994-07:00Economics 101: Greece and the Financial Crisis<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<i>A friend asked me to explain what's happening in Greece "in a nutshell"...So as a more practical follow-up to my previous post on this blog, here is a slightly edited version of what I wrote to her, in case anyone else needs a primer (pretty accurate nutshell summary I think) -
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In a nutshell? How about, an epic struggle between inhuman, irrational, world-destroying neoliberal capitalism and an authentic, democratic politics of hope? I don't know how much you know, but it all goes back to the 2008 financial crisis and the subprime mortgages in the U.S., which caused the Great Recession. Greece, like other European countries, had a lot of debt, due to years of mismanagement by corrupt governments backed by equally corrupt French and German banks. But what made things worse was that, in order to keep the government budget deficit within eurozone limits (to be able to join the euro currency), starting in the 1990s Goldman Sachs helped them 'cook the books' by hiding part of their debt. Keeping the debt off the books basically allowed them to keep borrowing without growing the budget deficit. When a new government was elected in 2010, they revealed this hidden debt, and revised deficit figures - the budget deficit effectively skyrocketed from around 6% to 15% of GDP overnight. As this meant that any further borrowing (and financing the government) was going to be very difficult, Greece was about to default on its debt. So in 2010 the Troika of creditors - the European Central Bank, the IMF and Eurozone countries (represented by the European Commission) - loaned all this money to Greece, in order to help them keep paying their debt - but most of the bailout money went right back into French and German banks in the form of loan payments, not into the Greek economy. And in return for those loans, the creditors demanded 'austerity' cuts from Greece, which were ostensibly meant to bring the deficit back down and make Greece's economy more efficient, but in reality (as many economists predicted) caused an even deeper recession because it reduced the amount of money going into the economy and therefore the amount of revenue (due to pension cuts, lowered wages, unemployment due to public sector job losses, etc), which led to three general trends:
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1. more debt for Greece to repay
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2. less revenue/income for repaying that debt
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3. even less growth, income, productivity, deeper recession, etc
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Greece effectively merely <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/greece/2015-07-07/pain-athens?cid=soc-fb-rdr">functioned as a conduit</a> for European taxpayers' money to be funneled into French and German banks, who were the real target of the bailout. From the viewpoint of sound economics, this is either a colossal policy failure on the part of the EU and Troika, or a cynical conspiracy against the public on an equally colossal scale. It's kind of like if I were to lend you a bunch of money so that you can keep making interest payments on your debt to my friend Jeremy, but in return I demanded that you close your small business selling oysters because you're spending too much money on it (in my opinion), and take a minimum-wage job instead, and use most of the money I gave you to pay Jeremy - meaning you now owe more money (to me and Jeremy) and have less income from which to repay it - and less opportunity for growth and financial stability/sustainability.
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What's happening now is that the creditors - Eurozone leaders, ECB and IMF - are essentially demanding that Greece continue in more-less the same fashion as it has for the past 5 years, and even implement <i>further</i> austerity cuts - against the advice of virtually every credible economist in the world - in exchange for further loans/credit from the creditors. The Greeks, who a few months ago elected a left-wing anti-austerity government unconnected to the previous corruption, are saying no - we need to grow our economy, we need debt relief (i.e. part of the debt to be forgiven), job creation, we need to get on a sustainable path that will allow us to actually repay our debt, which means stimulus spending, not further cuts... The irony is that back in 2012, there was a <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9098559/Whats-the-Greek-debt-crisis-all-about.html">leaked report</a> suggesting that the Troika's own internal review believed that “even under the most optimistic scenario, the austerity measures being imposed on Athens risk a recession so deep that Greece will not be able to climb out of the debt hole.”
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Since they couldn't come to an agreement, the current programme expired, and Greece was about to default on its debt again as the ECB refused to provide emergency funding to Greek banks - and they cannot print their own money (in euros), being part of the common currency - some of the creditors were insisting that if the Greeks reject the bailout terms (further austerity cuts with no debt relief) in the referendum, they would have to leave the Euro (currency), meaning start printing their own money, or drachmas, which was the Greek currency before they joined the euro.
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Bear in mind also that in both Europe and the US, it wasn't just struggling economies but the banks themselves - the ones who caused the global crisis in the first place - that were bailed out with taxpayers' money...But no structural reforms or 'austerity' cuts were demanded of the banks in exchange for those bailouts, which in some cases were even greater than the bailouts received by Greece or Ireland, amounting to trillions of dollars. In one notable case, AIG executives were reported to have received bonuses of up to a million dollars (per head) a year or two after the bailouts, taxpayer-funded...
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Varoufakis, the controversial but in my view awesomely cool former Greek finance minister (he resigned right after the referendum as a tactical move), explaining some of the issues:
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jH5Yv7iwfhs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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</p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-65171220052422984372015-07-06T07:20:00.002-07:002023-10-17T02:19:32.368-07:00Either/Or: the Greek Democratic Pharmakon in the Age of Austerity<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM_PJ6TO9Djbv_lXVyt1-rBj9MFdDpgXUQTq2BirCDoU9mm_ETvm9JUMBqkFlWohJa7JhbaakyMJ_FpFkCyttbBmcUn_g0xj6nRyMcuraC8SB4XYNgawldfng6FHDw-h6GMRQKBsE_wdYc/s1600/o-SYRIZA-22-900.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM_PJ6TO9Djbv_lXVyt1-rBj9MFdDpgXUQTq2BirCDoU9mm_ETvm9JUMBqkFlWohJa7JhbaakyMJ_FpFkCyttbBmcUn_g0xj6nRyMcuraC8SB4XYNgawldfng6FHDw-h6GMRQKBsE_wdYc/s400/o-SYRIZA-22-900.jpg" /></a>
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In a seminal essay titled 'Plato's Pharmacy', Jacques Derrida engages in an extended discussion of one of Plato's less well-regarded dialogues, the <i>Phaedrus</i>, expounding on the ambiguity of one word - <i>pharmakon</i> - which is repeatedly used as a metaphor in the text. Often translated simply as 'drug' or 'medicine', to the ancient Greeks pharmakon could in fact mean either medicine and/or poison:
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<blockquote>Pharmacia (<i>Pharmakeia</i>) is also a common noun signifying the administration of the <i>pharmakon</i>, the drug: the medicine and/or poison. "Poisoning" was not the least usual meaning of "pharmacia." (p. 70)
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But the ambiguity evoked here is not merely linguistic or semantic - it goes to the very heart of nature itself, and distills to its very core the famous slogan attributed to the ancient Greeks - 'everything in moderation'. Every medicine can be a poison at a given dosage or formulation, and vice versa - some of the deadliest venoms on the planet are today the subject of <a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/125-venom/holland-text">ground-breaking research</a> into a wide range of potential therapeutic uses, for instance - new drugs derived from venom for everything from heart disease and diabetes to autoimmune diseases, cancer, and pain could be available within a decade. “We aren’t talking just a few novel drugs but entire classes of drugs,” according to one researcher. And the properties that make venom deadly are also what make it so valuable for medicine.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg10qg0PeZfT6uMHK4GsP2UwEnNIQd-GmMzWpehtfk_PRLYXXU48Z1cvASZKgpGM7Rwayep67_ScuaVRVfdnQFdExDiUbQ3onBCULFmMZDUe7wQAFFuG5ZMdlGbaA829l83GhdG-D-toknI/s1600/1f97e-demeter5.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg10qg0PeZfT6uMHK4GsP2UwEnNIQd-GmMzWpehtfk_PRLYXXU48Z1cvASZKgpGM7Rwayep67_ScuaVRVfdnQFdExDiUbQ3onBCULFmMZDUe7wQAFFuG5ZMdlGbaA829l83GhdG-D-toknI/s320/1f97e-demeter5.jpg" /></a>
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Taken metaphorically in the economic arena, fiscal discipline is a <i>pharmakon</i>; fiscal austerity, on the other hand, is fiscal discipline taken to a level where it becomes poison - where it kills, rather than heals. When fiscal discipline becomes an ideological end in itself, rather than a means to an end, it becomes toxic. And it becomes all the more dangerous when those who administer it, failing to distinguish between the divergent effects of this <i>pharmakon</i> at different dosages, are utterly, fanatically convinced of the purity of their cause.
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Contrary to the widely propagated (in the West, at least) perception of 'lazy Greeks' living off the welfare state and so forth (more on that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/opinion/krugman-greece-as-victim.html">here</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/opinion/paul-krugman-greece-over-the-brink.html?smid=fb-share">here</a> - Greeks work longer hours than Germans and the Greek welfare state takes up a smaller percentage of GDP), a closer examination shows that it is in fact the Troika and the Eurozone finance ministers who are the epitome of intellectual <i>laziness</i> and incompetence, and ideological fanaticism - like a doctor who fanatically believes in a particular drug or form of therapy and administers it recklessly with no concern for dosages or formulations and no interest in the finer points of fine-tuning treatment, in the process <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/greece-economy-collapse-close-food-medicine-shortage?CMP=fb_gu">killing or seriously harming his patients</a>. Or as Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Krugman <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/opinion/paul-krugman-ending-greeces-bleeding.html?smid=fb-share">put it</a>, "Europe’s self-styled technocrats are like medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more bleeding." Greece didn't even get a real bailout or any kind of stimulus in exchange for being forced to undercut its own growth (and hope of recovery) through austerity measures - as <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/greece/2015-07-07/pain-athens?cid=soc-fb-rdr">economist Mark Blyth points out</a>, most of the bailout money ostensibly loaned to Greece simply went right back into French and German banks, who were the real target of the bailout - Greece merely served as a conduit for European taxpayers' money to be funneled into European private banks. This is either a colossal policy failure or a cynical neoliberal conspiracy against the public on an equally colossal scale.
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By contrast, it is precisely the Greek Syriza government, and perhaps most of all its controversial finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, that emerge as thoroughly modern (or even post-modern) proponents of intellectual rigour, method, and rational economic discipline - insisting on precise policies that produce the right outcomes, and which are supported by measurable evidence as well as a democratic mandate. Varoufakis' economic background is in cutting-edge academic game theory, and he has worked for several years as a consultant for Seattle-based video game developer Valve Corporation (incidentally, on scaling up virtual economies and linking multiple economies together on the Steam digital delivery platform, looking at exchange rates and trade deficits). And he has, <a href="http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/yanis-varoufakis-economist-play-politics/4081">according to BBC's Paul Mason</a> "templated a style of politics that may be equally adaptable for the right as on the left, for those with the will to try it: operating from principles, being as open as possible with information, engaging the public in language they can understand, and putting his entire persona on the line." Last but not least, the Greeks have been more adept than any current European political figure at <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/01/greek-government-twitter-tsipras-varoufakis-eurozone-crisis-greece-social-media?CMP=share_btn_tw">using technology and social media</a>.
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Even Varoufakis' resignation, following the insistence of Eurozone finance ministers and despite Syriza winning the popular mandate by a landslide in the Greferendum, is not only a brilliant tactical move (unsurprising given the game theory background), but shows just how serious Greece's new government is about doing right by its people. They understand the momentum of the crowd, the dynamics of the herculean task in front of them, and the discipline required to complete it - Varoufakis is like the star football player who has scored a potentially game-changing goal (in calling the referendum) but must now be sent off the pitch in order to preserve the lead as he is disliked by the petty referees. He walks off the pitch smiling and upbeat, having served his purpose - no arguing with coach Tsipras - and <a href="http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2015/07/06/minister-no-more/">writing on his blog</a>: "I shall wear the creditors' loathing with pride."
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<iframe src="https://embed.theguardian.com/embed/video/world/video/2015/jul/06/yanis-varoufakis-resign-greece-finance-minister-video" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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And it is interesting to consider where this loathing comes from. I cannot help thinking that there must be a component of jealousy involved - seething, burning jealousy. Syriza enjoy popular support of a kind that most European politicians can only dream of - and I don't mean simply that they won an election. They walk into packed crowds on busy public squares to heartfelt hugs and kisses from throngs of supporters. They are for the people, of the people. And despite their casual attire, which only makes them that much cooler and more approachable, <i>they</i> are in fact the rigorous, methodical, rational moderates - there is nothing especially radical about what they are pushing for - while the eurozone finance ministers and the Troika are the incompetent, petty, bumbling ideological fanatics in suits and ties, advocating policies that virtually every credible economist in the world has declared unsustainable and lacking economic sense - and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/jun/05/imf-underestimated-damage-austerity-would-do-to-greece?CMP=share_btn_fb">admitting at the 11th hour</a> before the referendum that they were, after all, mistaken. We should not be misled by Syriza's name, either - Coalition of the Radical Left - which only has meaning in a specific historical and political context where the 'centre' has become a morbid and inhuman techno-capitalist normativity. And anyway - moderation, after all, in the sense in which the ancient Greeks meant and practiced it, is less about substance and more about form - it is not about your choice of <i>pharmakon</i> so much as how you take it, in what dosage, and how it relates to the symptoms you are treating.
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But Syriza is about chemistry in <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/29/greece-chaos-syriza-gamble-banks-closed-referendum?CMP=share_btn_fb">more ways than one</a> - it is "a coalition whose colours are red for socialism, green for ecology and purple for feminism." It is a united left front that has managed to rally over 61% of Greek voters in the referendum behind it, in a leap of faith into an uncertain future, in a country in crisis, on the brink of collapse, experiencing food and medicine shortages, caught between a rock and a hard place - no mean feat, given the internal fractiousness of leftist movements in general, and the external pressures acting against this one in particular. To accomplish this kind of synthesis, and go on to win an election, and a referendum (by a landslide) in a maverick negotiating move, and quite possibly overcome overwhelming odds against an army of international creditors led by hard-line pro-austerity conservative governments to win a better deal for Greece, and without actually compromising one's political ideals - this requires a very delicate yet bold balancing act.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuGXgf2LPY9SU7RMIsg91E5538XSC_ucjme0Yq8kQgFrHkvDE6gp0biDVimVaZ0-GCxIhUfKY6nL2CR6N_L96LPGanwTeTrApXbJ2Enfy6-KC9TKiDhXcCSzfNQom9wiQckMlS7QYsoJdw/s1600/Feb.-2015-Syriza-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuGXgf2LPY9SU7RMIsg91E5538XSC_ucjme0Yq8kQgFrHkvDE6gp0biDVimVaZ0-GCxIhUfKY6nL2CR6N_L96LPGanwTeTrApXbJ2Enfy6-KC9TKiDhXcCSzfNQom9wiQckMlS7QYsoJdw/s320/Feb.-2015-Syriza-1.jpg" /></a>
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In the wake of the Greferendum, the latest word from London-based bookmakers William Hill (as reported on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme this morning) is that they have 'closed their market' on whether Greece will leave the Eurozone before 2016 - a spokesman for the company said that "in such a volatile situation, in which events can move very quickly, it is very difficult to be confident that our odds are accurate."
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In other words, all bets are off - quite literally. The Greek referendum has introduced a genuine state of exception, something genuinely new into politics, where 'what comes next' is so unpredictable that even the world's biggest bookmakers, seasoned professionals who make a living from betting and setting odds on everything under the sun - from sports matches and horse races to election outcomes and royal weddings - are holding their breath. This is a ball balanced on a knife edge, a chemical reaction at the quantum level that calls to mind the Heisenberg uncertainty principle - it could go either way.
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"Syriza does not have a mandate to take Greece out of the eurozone, nor does it have a mandate to apply unworkable austerity," says Euclid Tsakalotos, Syriza's <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/18/euclid-tsakalotos-greeces-secret-weapon-in-credit-negotiations?CMP=share_btn_tw">new finance minister</a>. Everything hangs in the balance, and something's gotta give. But despite his posh British accent and Oxford training, creditors and Eurozone finance ministers <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11720907/Greece-creditors-will-gain-nothing-from-toppling-Europe-lover-Yanis-Varoufakis.html">will be disappointed</a> if they expect this man to be a pushover - unlike Varoufakis, he is from the more radical Marxist branch of Syriza and a bit of a Euroskeptic. (Also, he was drawn to the euro-communist left during his student days at Oxford largely on account of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/30/athens-1944-britains-dirty-secret">Britain's bloody postwar betrayal of the Greek left</a>, their wartime allies.)
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It is worth remembering here that the Greeks have a long tradition of questioning the <i>status quo</i> and arguing the exception, going back to the ancients. As classics scholar Edith Hall, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/20/classics-for-the-people-ancient-greeks">writing in the Guardian</a>, reminds us (in a piece unrelated to the current political situation):
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<blockquote>The Greeks, more even than the Romans, show us how to question received opinion and authority. The earliest myths reveal mankind actively disputing the terms on which the Olympian gods want to rule them, and the philanthropic god Prometheus rebelling against Zeus in order to steal fire – a divine prerogative – and give it to mortal men. Sophocles’ Antigone refuses to accept her tyrannical uncle’s arbitrary edict, draws crucial distinctions between moral decency and contingent legislation, and buries her brother anyway. Aristophanes, in his democratic comedies, subjected politicians who wielded power to satire of eye-watering savagery. Socrates dedicated his life to proving the difference between the truth and received opinion, the unexamined life being, in his view, not worth living. No wonder Hobbes thought that reading Greek and Roman authors should be banned by any self-respecting tyrant, in <i>Leviathan</i> arguing that they foment revolution under the slogan of liberty, instilling in people a habit "of favouring uproars, lawlessly controlling the actions of their sovereigns, and then controlling those controllers".
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Whatever happens next, unpredictable as it is, even if Greece buckles under and bows to the demands of creditors - for Greek history is rife with both victories and heroic defeats against vastly superior opponents (one never can tell), fought by vastly outnumbered Greeks - this is surely an exceptional moment, which may well signal decisively the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/jul/07/this-endless-quest-for-growth-will-see-greece-self-destruct">beginning of the end of capitalism</a>, in the long run. Perhaps as some on the French progressive left have been saying, <i>nous sommes tous des Grecs européens</i>.
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Everything in moderation, as the ancients had it - even a dose of Varoufakis, antagonizing and divisive as he may be for some, has its place and time, like every good good-cop-bad-cop routine. And in all things we must - in the words of Walter White of <i>Breaking Bad</i> fame (a.k.a. Heisenberg) - 'respect the chemistry.'
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwTOVW5Yb_86GjLs6droVHU4Y0p808BprJ40bi96c4gj4_LnsY1X4gsHc2ZiqZ8oduW938lDPoHZtSSMyYts2_hygdPYDwb7zwggXKfQ3UP0SktTwl9WeVIKHwP4L4nqRVPNZK-u3X_yuq/s1600/heisenberg-breaking-bad-realistic-cg-portrait.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwTOVW5Yb_86GjLs6droVHU4Y0p808BprJ40bi96c4gj4_LnsY1X4gsHc2ZiqZ8oduW938lDPoHZtSSMyYts2_hygdPYDwb7zwggXKfQ3UP0SktTwl9WeVIKHwP4L4nqRVPNZK-u3X_yuq/s200/heisenberg-breaking-bad-realistic-cg-portrait.jpg" /></a>
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</p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-28340084329580820872015-02-25T03:56:00.003-08:002023-10-17T02:19:42.576-07:00#Rehash/Unfollow<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<p>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_UvT0Ikz6K5X53JIKzPBmc8XvuxLfpH3u7q5FXRNz8gC56z2fKdNo90RHMlpt0rON7Cn4FhC0_XtbYRSONvXoLCeJ-6tEvVrmhi_m1LpNFwJg8TYd9LB3Ph0Lf8a1hoadP2doDuOtGA08/s1600/b6wzoy8cmaa_b6v.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_UvT0Ikz6K5X53JIKzPBmc8XvuxLfpH3u7q5FXRNz8gC56z2fKdNo90RHMlpt0rON7Cn4FhC0_XtbYRSONvXoLCeJ-6tEvVrmhi_m1LpNFwJg8TYd9LB3Ph0Lf8a1hoadP2doDuOtGA08/s320/b6wzoy8cmaa_b6v.jpg" /></a>
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<b>I. The 'China price' on Freedom</b>
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There is a certain kind of inertia that leads people to rehash old tropes and repeat worn-out formulas of political thought, applying stale or long-past-expiry date cookie-cutter critical approaches to new and emerging political problems. In the wake of the tragic shooting of <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> cartoonists in Paris a few weeks back, a range of responses emerged on the left. Some simply condemned the shootings, some condemned the shootings but expressed some concern about <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>'s allegedly 'racist' cartoons, suggesting that perhaps there should be some limitations on free speech or that we should use our rights 'responsibly', while some condemned the shootings unconditionally but nonetheless felt the need to invoke any number of things as a possible 'explanation' - the history of colonialism, 'Western' foreign policy and involvement in the Middle East, French racism and the marginalized status of French Muslims, and so on. And of course they all express concern about the far-right backlash against Muslim populations in Europe and the West.
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The thing that strikes me about leftist or critical school constructions of 'The West' and 'The Muslim World', such as <a href="http://criticallegalthinking.com/2015/01/11/not-afraid/">this one</a>, is that they are no different from the ones that underpin contemporary right-wing and neoliberal political thinking. All the while that leftists decry the 'war on terror' and the grand narrative of 'a clash of civilizations', many of them subliminally incorporate its basic assumptions into their thinking - that there even are monolithic cultural entities such as 'the West' or 'the Muslim world', for instance. Thus even in leftist thought the battle here is between 'Western' liberal values of 'free speech' and democracy on the one hand, and the religious sensibilities of the 'Muslim world'. Because, naturally, all the people living under despotic regimes in that 'Muslim' world, from Malaysia to Saudi Arabia and Morocco and Mali, presumably have no interest in free expression and other 'Western' values and human rights. It's their culture.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQp-feP0HIzSu0Onglr-uwf1ObzUHArhvmU3bZAuHqJzovnBZg0WEARYfJ0IPpX4OFbphQm9WGR-Wq1OgRCQxOTHFmScFoFBvdZQWsUMuUEO886CCouWUvcTts7j4thz5phPEYofHFX5sN/s1600/Ryuichi-Hirokawas-best-sh-001.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQp-feP0HIzSu0Onglr-uwf1ObzUHArhvmU3bZAuHqJzovnBZg0WEARYfJ0IPpX4OFbphQm9WGR-Wq1OgRCQxOTHFmScFoFBvdZQWsUMuUEO886CCouWUvcTts7j4thz5phPEYofHFX5sN/s320/Ryuichi-Hirokawas-best-sh-001.jpg" /></a>
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Meanwhile, a Muslim Saudi blogger recently received a sentence of 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashings for the crime of 'insulting Islam', Boko Haram <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/09/boko-haram-deadliest-massacre-baga-nigeria">slaughtered another 2,000 people</a> in Nigeria (their deadliest massacre to date), journalists are routinely sent to jail in Egypt, and a Saudi cleric just <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/12/saudi-arabia-snowmen-winter-fatwa?CMP=fb_gu">issued a fatwa against building snowmen</a>. (In addition to 'idolatry', the crimes punishable by death in Saudi Arabia include apostasy, blasphemy, homosexuality, sorcery, witchcraft, adultery, and drug use.) In Afghanistan, as a <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2015/01/love-crimes/">folio in last month's Harper's magazine</a> reports, women routinely run away from their families to escape being forced into arranged marriages, as well as abuse including facial disfigurement by acid or severed lips and noses, forced prostitution, and honour killings. And in Bangladesh this week, an atheist writer was <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/27/bangladeshi-protests-over-of-atheist-writer-avijit-roy">hacked to death by a group of machete-wielding extremists</a> who took exception to his views on religion - he wasn't drawing or mocking the Prophet, he was Bangladeshi (so it's not like this is about the history of colonial repression), and his attackers weren't members of a marginalized ethnic minority in Bangladesh - just a bunch of fascist whackjobs.
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Also, let's not forget that the most famous fatwa ever issued was against Salman Rushdie, an Anglo-Indian writer born to Muslim parents in India, for writing <i>The Satanic Verses</i> - a novel seen as a grave insult to Islam, punishable by death. This is not a coincidence.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7iFQjqhGzQsubkI5AcZwWYJylci-XNFFTpNpelZrpz20s_B_3YDzkwrA7-ITKe0hTFukQpO4dTaZtm_tp9QMmqtJsBDCcTv1BIYQl8PNMSJiIhzWfYLKMmX2jBpvlBkQUL_tgynfJhBPb/s1600/tumblr_ljd7qelmNH1qao1j1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7iFQjqhGzQsubkI5AcZwWYJylci-XNFFTpNpelZrpz20s_B_3YDzkwrA7-ITKe0hTFukQpO4dTaZtm_tp9QMmqtJsBDCcTv1BIYQl8PNMSJiIhzWfYLKMmX2jBpvlBkQUL_tgynfJhBPb/s320/tumblr_ljd7qelmNH1qao1j1.jpg" /></a>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRTbUUa5r3dN9Rkd_q-INmqxdqp_cSk2vB8z8srJQgQoLRNBKcd8QNfCOk3Iash0LEsg77JkJhrvxdSnOlq9kuH54HIcpslr0pOlvdVo0-k260NNd-yVTRP_1SlEbrzi3C4ZxHZNGbEVWX/s1600/article-2560683-14F63E20000005DC-790_306x423.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRTbUUa5r3dN9Rkd_q-INmqxdqp_cSk2vB8z8srJQgQoLRNBKcd8QNfCOk3Iash0LEsg77JkJhrvxdSnOlq9kuH54HIcpslr0pOlvdVo0-k260NNd-yVTRP_1SlEbrzi3C4ZxHZNGbEVWX/s320/article-2560683-14F63E20000005DC-790_306x423.jpg" /></a>
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But even more to the point, one of the most significant events in the world in the past decade, if not the most significant, has been the wave of spontaneous uprisings and revolutions throughout the Arab world collectively known as the Arab Spring, which has seen governments forced from power in Tunisia, Egypt (twice), Libya, and Yemen; civil uprisings in Bahrain and Syria; as well as major protests in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Israel and Sudan, along with minor protests in Mauritania, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Western Sahara, and Palestine. Primary motivating factors have included dictatorship and state repression, human rights violations, political corruption, and economic inequality. Many of these movements were notable in their effective use of social media to organize uprisings, in the face of state attempts at repression and censorship.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhJd4BMKJr_7GrLG6874hRmygmul5HnFTGDrUr0KtkeAySiHaq3Bcdjq0KuDUudGs-95WpU_eR3e3qnh7sEcqbPoySp_WmAI52kqoMvtbM2uD0L7hQDI8OqamMJIR5bcRCm8g5BxDf6yr0/s1600/sign_2066490b.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhJd4BMKJr_7GrLG6874hRmygmul5HnFTGDrUr0KtkeAySiHaq3Bcdjq0KuDUudGs-95WpU_eR3e3qnh7sEcqbPoySp_WmAI52kqoMvtbM2uD0L7hQDI8OqamMJIR5bcRCm8g5BxDf6yr0/s320/sign_2066490b.jpg" /></a>
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So, what about all that?
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Some responses on the left seem to be on the right track, pointing to the hypocrisy of 'Western' states in selectively protecting free expression, but they too somehow miss the bigger point here - or fail to make one at all. For just as they ascribe (or condemn) free expression to the pantheon of 'Western' values, they seem to disown it in a way, guardedly, as leftists - with some absurd outcomes on occasion, such as a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/22/letters-student-political-protest-under-threat-free-speech">recent petition</a> in a debate between two feminist camps, under the banner 'Student political protest is under threat, not free speech' - as if these are two totally separate things. Formulating a discourse that sees the 'right to protest' as an independent right, not derived from the right to free speech, the left thus undermines its own prospects - in the long run, any official limitation on free speech will wind up being used to clamp down on protest, as one of the most 'outspoken' forms of speech.
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So what is the point exactly, of those who emphasize that 'this isn't about free speech' or that Western governments don't consistently protect free speech? Does this mean that we should give up fighting for freedom of expression? That we should allow free speech to be curtailed in cases such as that of <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>, even insist on it, since the position of Western governments is inconsistent? Why should the behaviour of governments influence my position at all, other than to oppose any and every curtailment or infringement of fundamental rights, by government or by terrorists?
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Surely, the point here is that these aren't simply 'Western' values we are talking about at all. Of course Western governments routinely attack freedom of expression, there is nothing surprising or <i>categorically</i> hypocritical about this. These are not rights that somehow culturally belong to us 'Westerners', or that our governments impose on us. It is all too easy to forget that even in the so-called West these are hard-won political rights, the product of bloody and violent struggles, the result of revolutions and fierce battles <i>against</i> the state, and they still have to be protected and watched and fought for at every turn, at all costs. Giving up one inch can cost us all dearly.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkejbPXJqr8_nEAPJtfxFzIgvJ7ZhS3q4PAD3HUxeBROifsPsEeNP2H5K06HRurOQDHq6w2466y559gn8GjackCrbLu05GtTu2eu_a_Nnk4tgJUw7JKlEgMSzHz8Olqy1OY3HBdiKFd-Z-/s1600/Shields.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkejbPXJqr8_nEAPJtfxFzIgvJ7ZhS3q4PAD3HUxeBROifsPsEeNP2H5K06HRurOQDHq6w2466y559gn8GjackCrbLu05GtTu2eu_a_Nnk4tgJUw7JKlEgMSzHz8Olqy1OY3HBdiKFd-Z-/s320/Shields.jpg" /></a>
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It is no coincidence that, for instance, France, which happens to be the home of this most outrageous and offensive satirical magazine, is also the country that most vocally opposed the US war in Iraq, a war fought against the will of the majority of people in the nations involved. This is not to the credit of the French government, but the French people above all. This is the legacy of May '68. How, one might ask? Or even better, what was May '68?
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGTxnNIwMV7wxqQz4ONbvSkrF-vVIMSDySjiHQ3JIkojWMF_eExB3zZ-qzlQhWC5AzVG_Snu0S8-tP5fRnjxCylDgKWpbqlm9GhREdRRJ65VAmGDhEyWggRtwrds6SPgEiY80C4-A3MDlh/s1600/22873407.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGTxnNIwMV7wxqQz4ONbvSkrF-vVIMSDySjiHQ3JIkojWMF_eExB3zZ-qzlQhWC5AzVG_Snu0S8-tP5fRnjxCylDgKWpbqlm9GhREdRRJ65VAmGDhEyWggRtwrds6SPgEiY80C4-A3MDlh/s320/22873407.jpg" /></a>
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Of course, there were protests around the world in 1968. But the level that they reached in France is unprecedented in history, and dwarfs even the largest popular mass movements today. A protest that began with a few students occupying the Sorbonne, it culminated in the largest general strike in history, with a wildcat walkout of 10 million workers - two-thirds of the entire French labour force at the time - the occupation of universities and factories across the country, and so on, bringing the French economy to a standstill, and a government to its knees. This movement may not have achieved all its political goals in the immediate aftermath, but it was a turning point that resonates in French politics to this day. Its legacy means that any French government will think twice before going head-to-head with the will of its people. And <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>, whether anyone likes it or not, is a part of that legacy.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzYHPEda8T3hcuGx1UIMjuD_yCD43m2mOofu7Pa5AInBjTZbqk8YAjRNFfWSB4ooXwsW8beGfkc-1oGMUc_tRL_7DUDTNE2gX9w33fxGasjIph1t2qMKMyLxvXDX2RvL5HiGKKrr1L-Pr3/s1600/Archdezart-France-May-68-Photos_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzYHPEda8T3hcuGx1UIMjuD_yCD43m2mOofu7Pa5AInBjTZbqk8YAjRNFfWSB4ooXwsW8beGfkc-1oGMUc_tRL_7DUDTNE2gX9w33fxGasjIph1t2qMKMyLxvXDX2RvL5HiGKKrr1L-Pr3/s320/Archdezart-France-May-68-Photos_1.jpg" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeIyfDLwdwPdCX6hd810B1hYHJ7vNUNWC9D2-b5WTY9-neBfIBtgwB_msNm712qKhjWKy51c-Hr7dX0dI-F9ZkBH7K_NDUYG2q8-CTB5MgY2rO1y-mXEvVplIYStTrhb3kGKTRwmkEkKCo/s1600/May-68.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeIyfDLwdwPdCX6hd810B1hYHJ7vNUNWC9D2-b5WTY9-neBfIBtgwB_msNm712qKhjWKy51c-Hr7dX0dI-F9ZkBH7K_NDUYG2q8-CTB5MgY2rO1y-mXEvVplIYStTrhb3kGKTRwmkEkKCo/s320/May-68.jpg" /></a>
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Greece's new leftist finance minister, Yannis Varoufakis, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist">writing in the guardian </a>about how he became an 'erratic Marxist', reminds us of this tension in leftist political discourse - the leftist movements of the 20th century, in his view, "failed, to their detriment, to follow Marx’s lead in a crucial regard: instead of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and organising concepts, they opted for equality and justice, bequeathing the concept of freedom to the neoliberals. Marx was adamant: The problem with capitalism is not that it is unfair but that it is irrational…"
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"Having failed to couch a critique of capitalism in terms of freedom and rationality, as Marx thought essential, social democracy and the left in general allowed the neoliberals to usurp the mantle of freedom and to win a spectacular triumph in the contest of ideologies."
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGHIXU8je3SMhyjaqNKmm8xJSrNQNmjGCF9ZIZbWFmFceigCHPOHfGXN_FLqB6PrGCUDtMrae9H_Kwii_r-2vRoPdOFOVeFOL9-8d1CqRq1c2taKqd0ffTSgSzQuJuzgtUP7ud99G0nbL8/s1600/capcal.gif" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGHIXU8je3SMhyjaqNKmm8xJSrNQNmjGCF9ZIZbWFmFceigCHPOHfGXN_FLqB6PrGCUDtMrae9H_Kwii_r-2vRoPdOFOVeFOL9-8d1CqRq1c2taKqd0ffTSgSzQuJuzgtUP7ud99G0nbL8/s400/capcal.gif" /></a>
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In Marx's (and Engels') own words, from the <i>Communist Manifesto</i>: "in a communist society, the <i>free development of each </i>must be the condition for the free development of all."
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The emphasis (with or without my italics) is clearly on 'free' and 'each' - individual freedom. Collective freedom, the free development of the whole, cannot but be premised on this backbone - the free development of each individual unit. It is, after all, precisely neoliberal capitalism, despite all the sermonizing and lip service to freedom and individual rights by its acolytes, that in practice demands the sacrifice of individual <i>and</i> social interests for the abstract notion of the market and its needs, which in reality means the interests of the wealthy few - those who appropriate surplus value and accumulate capital.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid1QMTuglaVwQuHUgoD2tNqsFBcAffMXOC9gPPDyP354YbNQTWK85Y_O8A2WBCAR-IlVOMFgNMjZ-7zosxwuLsLYRaV9rLVj25_vRTEq4Ym1pP9FLCi3YC7ekwNyC7e0t0co3lnuBx5ICP/s1600/fishing_-_capitalism_0.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid1QMTuglaVwQuHUgoD2tNqsFBcAffMXOC9gPPDyP354YbNQTWK85Y_O8A2WBCAR-IlVOMFgNMjZ-7zosxwuLsLYRaV9rLVj25_vRTEq4Ym1pP9FLCi3YC7ekwNyC7e0t0co3lnuBx5ICP/s400/fishing_-_capitalism_0.jpg" /></a>
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It is worth remembering that in the early 20th century, the term 'libertarian' - today associated broadly with fringe right-wing anti-statism - was broadly applied to a range of left-wing anarchist and communist movements, especially in Europe. What many leftists seem to have forgotten, somewhere along the way, is that even communism only truly comes into its own as the state 'withers away', as societies become more capable of direct democracy or self-governance, and that the state form known as 'socialism' only marks the transition from the capitalist state to a communist society.
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It is in this sense that Soviet and Chinese constructions of 'communism' rely precisely on a neoliberal conception of freedom and equality, coupled with authoritarian politics and some vaguely socialist ideas about the redistribution of wealth. In today's increasingly globalized and yet ever more restrictive world, this divergence is becoming even more clear - the global 'free' market means the free movement of capital, not of human beings. And China, communist or not, is more eager than most to take advantage of this situation, imposing restrictions on the freedom of its citizens while allowing capital to flow across the border in all directions.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj0J-oU_z0laPeZqJwmK1aWtJMnpiTtp_zOjYSNVJStvHDmiOSI-50RxzFdWtvr8Qcb9j-ntXMhVz0yqwlzCWTJOGB26KoPuMHLTtmM0RrsxCBcQytTfK9DUwUieLcfgRLj7yxDtjTq6rl/s1600/images.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj0J-oU_z0laPeZqJwmK1aWtJMnpiTtp_zOjYSNVJStvHDmiOSI-50RxzFdWtvr8Qcb9j-ntXMhVz0yqwlzCWTJOGB26KoPuMHLTtmM0RrsxCBcQytTfK9DUwUieLcfgRLj7yxDtjTq6rl/s320/images.jpg" /></a>
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There are however glimmers of hope, and other enlightened responses have emerged on the left - again, if not to Charlie Hebdo specifically, then to the broader issue(s) of human rights and freedom - even among committed Marxists, such as a <a href="http://www.redpepper.org.uk/defending-rights-against-the-right/">recent piece by Nina Power</a>.
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(I would only add a couple of points or 'derogations' to her contribution, on my part - individual rights as discussed by Marx are not human rights in the modern sense, strictly speaking - private property rights, for instance, are legal rights but not typically mentioned or universally recognised in international human rights documents, as fundamental human rights. Even international instruments such as the <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CESCR.aspx">ICESCR</a> which protect 'economic rights' as human rights don't mention property rights as such, at all, to my knowledge, but rather the right to decent work, housing (for all, not as an individual property right, but in the sense of 'having a roof over one's head'), social security, healthcare, forming/joining a labour union, etc. Such distinctions are important, and formulating a truly Marxist or leftist approach may be a bit more complex. Also, rights aren't only against the state (i.e. union organising), nor are they strictly speaking 'part' of the state as Power's piece seems to suggest. What has always made human rights both problematic and enduring is precisely their claim to the status of 'natural' or universal rights that exist independently of any legal mechanism or document.)
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<b>II. 'You're with us or against us'</b>
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Still, my question to those on the left who continue to regurgitate the aforementioned worn-out 'critical' tropes on the hypocrisy of the West is - what do you <i>want</i>? Because that other long-standing problem with leftist discourse seems to be very much in play here - formulating demands. What is your point? These things are never made clear. One big mistake in all this 'monolithic' circle jerk groupthink on the left is the refusal to take an absolute, unequivocal stance against Islamic extremism, or Islamo-fascism, for instance. It's as if you can't do that on the left, it's just not the done thing, because, well, it would be taking sides with this mythical, monolithic 'West' we hear so much about. It's an imperial war. Best not to get involved.
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But isn't this precisely the type of neocon-Bush-'war on terror'-type thinking that leftists supposedly abhor? Doesn't this amount to forcing us into a neutral or at best mildly critical stance towards something we should absolutely and unequivocally oppose - what amounts to Islam's version of far-right fascist politics - simply because certain 'imperial' powers are also involved in that fight? It's the old 'you're with us or against us' type of thinking, or alternately 'the enemy of my enemy isn't really my enemy'?
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAFaGKvqzG_KnSCjh75Uh9-DS39qqWtG04Xjn0uKaGK477qJ1cvUWIMJu8LzZ0N9zud7jiCbQK28GSZTQuDzJNUjik_jk7ST7usqGDOoqbrqFH7rtsUGRTZclolwDpKK_CiQji013Z6UgB/s1600/92603780.gif" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAFaGKvqzG_KnSCjh75Uh9-DS39qqWtG04Xjn0uKaGK477qJ1cvUWIMJu8LzZ0N9zud7jiCbQK28GSZTQuDzJNUjik_jk7ST7usqGDOoqbrqFH7rtsUGRTZclolwDpKK_CiQji013Z6UgB/s320/92603780.gif" /></a>
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Yet if we struggle against this religio-fascism does it really have to be as 'Westerners', rather than as human beings, as Muslims, as Kurds? Isn't their struggle also our struggle? And isn't our struggle also their struggle? Aren't the same or similar forces at play here?
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Recognizing with Deleuze that the greatest difference is always internal to a system - to an Idea - allows us to establish the proper relation here - the real fight is never between systems, between Ideas, civilizations, but between versions of one and the same, between different actualizations of the same Idea, between the Idea and representation, between a system and its shadow.
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Or as Freud suggests, the struggle between 'civilization' and 'barbarism' is internal to civilization itself. The choice we are continually forced into - between, for instance, saying that the crimes committed by Islamic fundamentalists 'have nothing to do with Islam' on the one hand (as the liberal left insists), and on the other hand <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/11/jk-rowling-condemns-murdoch-tweet-charlie-hebdo-harry-potter-news-corp-muslims-christian?CMP=share_btn_fb">holding Muslims in general somehow 'responsible'</a> for these crimes (as some on the right claim) - is a false choice. Both of these claims are wrong. Of course this Islamo-fascism has 'something to do' with Islam; but this does not mean that Muslims in general are <i>in any way</i> 'responsible' for it, any more than liberal democracy or Christianity or Science or any other discourse is responsible for its appropriation by fascists, or its excesses.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcE5pTqH6i8SSvpU0mEXRR_QuTnNm5wlzMSbKYF5qgU0pjgSFwbm7bwgvkl4YFDYB7QicQLRos9J7RayxM_xZexv7IyOz_g81LGF_Ug9veCn6Db9oaYUXKDssi1Sq1a95KSY8z1Ka6AN_K/s1600/birth-of-civilization.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcE5pTqH6i8SSvpU0mEXRR_QuTnNm5wlzMSbKYF5qgU0pjgSFwbm7bwgvkl4YFDYB7QicQLRos9J7RayxM_xZexv7IyOz_g81LGF_Ug9veCn6Db9oaYUXKDssi1Sq1a95KSY8z1Ka6AN_K/s320/birth-of-civilization.jpg" /></a>
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The discourse of 'political correctness' on the left is itself a kind of proto-fascist 'thought police' that panders to a disguised, latent racism. Leftists, in their barely disguised apologia for Islamofascism, perpetuating the narrative of victimhood that the extremists themselves use to drive recruitment, end up being ‘circle jerk’ apologetics for the very things they claim to hate the most - racism, sexism, fascism, oppression, and the slaughter of civilians. Or they simply fail to take up a coherent position on the issue - and this plays very neatly into the hands of the far right, the military-industrial complex, and our neoliberal oligarchs. But especially the racist far right, as <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/26/tackle-extremism-understand-racism-islamism?CMP=fb_gu">an account in the Guardian</a> by a formerly radicalised Muslim suggests.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigKefNefsGT_sg5YJnfe-Fwy95yyTOFt9RTqTFDW67tN5p9FEbigI2shrHrA3QIQjGzN_rN1jRNW6pSblwDuUNqb8iz_sJfc4gEKpCalTMLXeQr3FF8efBHTTmlPDKnxA2oSJbaV-esy-N/s1600/clash-of-civilizations.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigKefNefsGT_sg5YJnfe-Fwy95yyTOFt9RTqTFDW67tN5p9FEbigI2shrHrA3QIQjGzN_rN1jRNW6pSblwDuUNqb8iz_sJfc4gEKpCalTMLXeQr3FF8efBHTTmlPDKnxA2oSJbaV-esy-N/s400/clash-of-civilizations.png" /></a>
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So I don't quite follow the logic of those who say that the Paris shootings were "totally unjustifiable, but…let’s talk about how the shooters are part of a marginalized group dealing with French racism, etc". If the killings are totally unjustifiable, then what exactly is the point here? Well, since it's being thrown around, let's talk about racism and marginalized groups. As a kid I lived for several years in Egypt, where I witnessed first-hand the racism of Egyptians toward African black people - incidentally, most of my friends at school were black. And this is not a fringe phenomenon, it was rife. Imagine if the sentiments felt by the very fringe far-right in Europe towards minorities and immigrants were seemingly felt by the majority of people, and more pronounced. Systemic. That's what it's like to be black in Egypt, and most Arab countries.
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And let's not even talk about sexism, homophobia, and anti-semitism. Anti-semitic cartoons, for instance - not the <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> 'equal opportunity satire' variety but rather more of the Nazi <i>Der Sturmer</i> type, exploiting a range of racist myths about Jews like the 'blood libel' - are a regular feature in <i>mainstream</i> media throughout the Arab world. It is common, it is seen as totally acceptable by vast numbers of people, and nobody does a damn thing about it. As may be obvious from previous posts on this blog, I am a staunch supporter of Palestinian rights, for instance, and opposed to militant Zionism - but racism and racist myths have no place in that debate. While it may be understandable for Palestinian rage to turn racist on occasion, it isn’t quite so for those who aren’t exactly suffering under the yoke of Israeli occupation.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu6ZSBzZw_hIYnJuV_Yw50w8mWcq5HS1uSg-zWn0cMbfW2VzQisETOLo-Au5fCwNooT_SjJOFfVI3Vy4HPW98kWTvVGACRDVeyboou6gRSHeIEIfgIXD7V-5B0jIDT4-AXzaFWA2IIDOgp/s1600/Separation-wall-Israel13.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu6ZSBzZw_hIYnJuV_Yw50w8mWcq5HS1uSg-zWn0cMbfW2VzQisETOLo-Au5fCwNooT_SjJOFfVI3Vy4HPW98kWTvVGACRDVeyboou6gRSHeIEIfgIXD7V-5B0jIDT4-AXzaFWA2IIDOgp/s400/Separation-wall-Israel13.jpg" /></a>
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What it comes down to is that there is a lot of hypocrisy here all around. And while most Muslims would certainly distance themselves from the violent extremists who brutally killed the French cartoonists in Paris, there <i>is</i> a broader problem of racism in the Arab world that the whole community needs to recognize and deal with, just like Europe has to deal with its own racism.
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<b>III. The Menagerie of Civilization and its Contents</b>
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There is also a historical reality that adherents of the 'clash of civilizations' idea and leftist cultural relativists alike seem to have missed - the way in which these civilizations that are supposedly clashing are actually far more intertwined than many today suppose, and form a continuity in fact - a sort of Moebius strip.
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Long before the modern era and the means of sharing information we have today, before the Renaissance and Enlightenment, Europe went through the Dark Ages - ruled by the Church and by Christian kings who enforced their faith by the sword. Freedom of thought and expression was at such a low that the bulk of what we see today as the heritage of 'Western civilization' - the literature, philosophy, and science of Greek and Roman antiquity - was deemed contraband by the Church, and lost to history. For a time, at least - a good several centuries longer than our modern age has lasted, to put things in perspective. Books were burned and banned (as well as people), and the only way to get an education at all was through the Church.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgapwRoQEedxRykwCec8KVKuc1IhH3cY8oGMj2yull6oUmUz8Sw-djDU8sSxKw7QlUI6TXYhD-pHBdKtx_WlGfgoODKPM0BVMg1KdU5-KoTKj8NTG7C7Y3cxKvp7Lz7IiFfXYwAXJ6qd4iI/s1600/life-in-the-middle-ages-21.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgapwRoQEedxRykwCec8KVKuc1IhH3cY8oGMj2yull6oUmUz8Sw-djDU8sSxKw7QlUI6TXYhD-pHBdKtx_WlGfgoODKPM0BVMg1KdU5-KoTKj8NTG7C7Y3cxKvp7Lz7IiFfXYwAXJ6qd4iI/s400/life-in-the-middle-ages-21.jpg" /></a>
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It turns out, however, that many of the 'pagan' texts from European antiquity long thought lost in the Dark Ages were in fact preserved - by Muslim and Arab scholars who acquired their own copies from the Greeks and Romans, translating and expanding upon them during what is commonly known as the 'Islamic Golden Age' - an era of scientific, economic, and cultural flourishing that lasted for about 500 years, from the 8th to the 13th century.
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Starting with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad in the 8th century, where scholars from all over the world sought to gather all the known world's knowledge into Arabic, Islamic scholars built upon Persian and Indian mathematical systems, astronomy, algebra, trigonometry and medicine. This is why, for instance, along with our Latin alphabet, we use a numeric system based on Arab numbers, rather than the cumbersome Roman numerals. It is also why we use algebra - the name itself comes from the Arab word 'al-jebr', meaning "reunion of broken parts". Symbolic, that.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmo0EHFI2M1tE820KLftLqq2wwEPMzHlqBs8VxB6oiY3zBwbhw4ZwYqf4ev7kfV4PLI0DSV8jIEB_xmR6zl9Vzm2dx_W39-R-OgqtrLPxRjoLV9PBmE49QPZ8_YNoNb6qen_Zq6PMkB8Rk/s1600/Ibn_al_Shatir.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmo0EHFI2M1tE820KLftLqq2wwEPMzHlqBs8VxB6oiY3zBwbhw4ZwYqf4ev7kfV4PLI0DSV8jIEB_xmR6zl9Vzm2dx_W39-R-OgqtrLPxRjoLV9PBmE49QPZ8_YNoNb6qen_Zq6PMkB8Rk/s320/Ibn_al_Shatir.jpg" /></a>
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Later, as Europe emerged from the Dark Ages, Arab traders and scholars brought this knowledge back to Europe, in works of their own along with copies of the Greek and Roman originals. And in Europe, the rediscovery of this ancient heritage ushered in the Renaissance, and later the Enlightenment.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMRTR6eRFHBCdIdrqeq2_hEUrMRyPY0krr_UgUfoPOGHaqGRg4YJs0CqUaXaizdxI7pn0fYdUVigQ1-iw1EbXz_oKoiwSaIVz5UPcDRUEKbeIdwSPmH2hpdQ5720lzXl4bMEyChvx5K9Vc/s1600/lib.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMRTR6eRFHBCdIdrqeq2_hEUrMRyPY0krr_UgUfoPOGHaqGRg4YJs0CqUaXaizdxI7pn0fYdUVigQ1-iw1EbXz_oKoiwSaIVz5UPcDRUEKbeIdwSPmH2hpdQ5720lzXl4bMEyChvx5K9Vc/s320/lib.jpg" /></a>
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Today, sadly, it seems it is ISIS militants who are <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-burns-thousands-of-rare-books-and-manuscripts-from-mosuls-libraries-10068408.html">looting libraries</a>, and burning the very same ancient texts that their ancestors preserved while they were being burned by the Christian Church in the Middle Ages. The only upshot here is the suicidal nature of such acts, as one might expect from extremists, I suppose - in the long run, as history has shown time and again, any political movement or institution that destroys knowledge undermines its own credibility and viability. The most successful empires in history, for better or worse, and for all their faults and crimes, thrived in large part thanks to their multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.
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Incidentally, one work of ancient philosophy particularly reviled by the Church fathers in the Dark Ages and long thought lost in Europe (its story partly dramatized in Umberto Eco's <i>The Name of the Rose</i>), though preserved and later brought back by the Arabs, was Aristotle's <i>Poetics</i> - a work in which the famed Greek philosopher discusses, among other things, comedy and laughter. In the same way in which modern Islamic fundamentalists don't like being ridiculed, not to mention having their Prophet portrayed in any way, the Church fathers of old considered laughter itself immoral. Comedy was contraband - as was Aristotle's work on the subject, for merely suggesting that it had a legitimate role in human intellectual life.
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As a matter of fact, it is very likely that Aristotle and Plato would be totally unknown to us today, were it not for the work of one Averroës (his name is the Latinized form of Ibn Rushd), an influential 12th-century Andalusian Muslim thinker who wrote on a range of scientific and philosophical subjects, including logic, Aristotelian and Islamic philosophy, theology, psychology, music theory, geography, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and physics.
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Avicenna (Ibn-Sina), another one of the most important thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age, was an 11th-century Persian scholar who has been described as the "Father of Early Modern Medicine".
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQUA60jOD0XwKTaujy7pacHM1gdHUvYjkT7XIAr0L8dxPXPfmkclxkp7_TkbG1I6dbGuZRf9nCfvBn26CJE3ZDFIouEwQFsCLVihZ_4Y2cCHIfS4yXqKeG-xgL3AauRHtwzJb9DqpAt_dg/s1600/photo_02_big.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQUA60jOD0XwKTaujy7pacHM1gdHUvYjkT7XIAr0L8dxPXPfmkclxkp7_TkbG1I6dbGuZRf9nCfvBn26CJE3ZDFIouEwQFsCLVihZ_4Y2cCHIfS4yXqKeG-xgL3AauRHtwzJb9DqpAt_dg/s320/photo_02_big.jpg" /></a>
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Most interesting of all perhaps (for the present discussion), Averroës sought to reconcile Islamic philosophy with Aristotelianism and Platonism, along with a form of proto-humanism - among other things, he was a proponent of women's equality with men, going so far as to suggest that women should be educated and allowed to serve in the military, and could even become philosophers or rulers. This from an influential 12th-century Muslim scholar, writing long before the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and women's suffrage - centuries before gender equality was even mentioned in the West, let alone considered a valid political discourse.
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And Averroës certainly wasn't importing 'Western' values or ideas on gender here, either, in any meaningful sense - Aristotle and Plato both held fairly conventional views on the subject, typical of patriarchal ancient Greek societies, while the status of women varied widely between Greek city states. Among the ancient Greek schools of thought, only the Stoics and the Cynics were known to espouse gender equality, but few of their writings survived and there is no indication that they had any influence on Averroës.
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Of course, the views of a philosopher by no means reflect those of his social milieu, and many are in fact lone voices in the wilderness. Nonetheless, even if Averroës is merely an early harbinger of modern liberal humanism - a voice that inspired and predated Voltaire and Montesquieu by several centuries - it is telling that this voice is of an Arab Muslim scholar.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXcsH-jOzhyxBrznxsDt6A7MLfco-u75JPjmkxOrGmvb21qfA8UaDjReKm2jqTOnKT6-coSpr2Guocsj4e3uIfUO7UIDa4DywcY_10bYd9C_WSeqQED21P5HdM_xh_hRiZg3N5-6NAaRNp/s1600/Averroes_3072.jpg_1306973099.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXcsH-jOzhyxBrznxsDt6A7MLfco-u75JPjmkxOrGmvb21qfA8UaDjReKm2jqTOnKT6-coSpr2Guocsj4e3uIfUO7UIDa4DywcY_10bYd9C_WSeqQED21P5HdM_xh_hRiZg3N5-6NAaRNp/s320/Averroes_3072.jpg_1306973099.jpg" /></a>
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It is however also notable that, even after the Islamic Golden Age was over, Arab and Muslim societies as a whole were nonetheless far more progressive when it came to religious and racial tolerance. When Jews, Muslims, and Christian heretics were driven out of Europe during the Spanish Inquisition - those who weren't forcibly converted or burned at the stake, that is - they all found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, of all places, where they thrived and freely practiced their religion. Some made it to my hometown Sarajevo in Bosnia, then part of the Ottoman Empire.
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But it hardly stops, or begins there. If we go far enough in time and space, we find that these so-called 'Western' values - of modern liberal humanism - are rooted in traditions and schools of thought that span the globe. Early European humanist thinkers drew on or were influenced by a whole range of ideas, from Averroës to the Stoics, from Taoism and schools of Buddhist thought to the Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia.
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It should be clear that the broader historical context allows us to view the modern-day schema of 'civilizations' in a totally different light. Iran in the 1950s, for instance, was a far more progressive society than today, where women didn't wear the veil and achieved greater gender equality than many European societies at the time - before their democratic socialist government was overthrown with the help of British and American agents who installed the Shah. The Iranians weren't simply adopting 'Western' attitudes, and even surpassed much of the West in terms of social progress - and as already pointed out, they discovered the ancients centuries before the West did. The return of Islam several decades later was precisely that - a return, a reactionary force that sprung up as a result of British and American meddling in the region.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMvVHN_5sYzz5OV1J5DSIVuIuz7YkajcqHee9Js9efmipUmijxhYHYfVnSmbLlzpIZujE5cihDSV0UT7-P_tXHT8n1fU9hKcYbPHG8ozJzOtEq_8-yVRHW21ZlL6zthHtEOntIxO1JijMB/s1600/persepolis.gif" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMvVHN_5sYzz5OV1J5DSIVuIuz7YkajcqHee9Js9efmipUmijxhYHYfVnSmbLlzpIZujE5cihDSV0UT7-P_tXHT8n1fU9hKcYbPHG8ozJzOtEq_8-yVRHW21ZlL6zthHtEOntIxO1JijMB/s640/persepolis.gif" /></a>
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Even today, there is rumour that among the Iranian Ayatollahs there are adherents of various 'Western' schools of thought, including at least one Kantian. It is perhaps precisely the distortion of Hegelian dialectics in our 'Western' thinking, combined with historical ignorance, that leads to the conceit of Western uniqueness and progress, and a linear view of history. Forgetting, as it were, that history is full of throwbacks, regressions, cul-de-sacs, diversions, digressions, schisms, and that these sometimes last centuries, like the Dark Ages.
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<b>IV. The Internal Contradictions of Politically Correct Fundamentalism(s)</b>
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Of course, it is not enough to say that liberal humanist values are not uniquely 'Western', historically or philosophically. We should also recognize the inverse - the historic contingency of the despotism, extremism, sexism, mysogyny and other ills commonly associated with the Muslim world. Just like the 'clash of civilizations' discourse, the leftist cultural relativism that speaks of 'Western values', merely disguises a latent cultural racism under the banner of political correctness and cultural sensitivity: it is a racism that, deep down, thinks 'let them have their different (read: 'backward') culture, why should we impose on them our 'Western' values of democracy and humanism, equality and rights? It is a cultural racism that, despite its best intentions, deep down sees the autocratic, fascist, misogynist Islamism of a state like Saudi Arabia as somehow representative of the Islamic 'other' in its own historic milieu - when it is in fact representative of nothing more than one form of Islamic <i>modernity</i>, informed by patriarchal misogynist fascism - a thoroughly modern, atavistic fascist monarchism. Which just happens to have, in this case, instrumentalised the Muslim faith for its establishment - a religion no more susceptible to such appropriation, on its face, than any of the main monotheistic faiths.
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It is an open secret, for instance, that the very Saudi elite who maintain this Islamic regime at home - who forge ties with the neocons and Bushes in America while funding terrorist organizations, who own prime real estate across the globe and control major multinational corporations - make regular trips to less restrictive neighbouring countries like Egypt, where they do their whoring and boozing. All under the eyes of their Prophet. Which is not to say that they don't do these things back home, too - child sex slaves, often trafficked from neighboring countries or Africa, are common among the Saudi elite. And even ISIS (with whom the <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> attackers are apparently affiliated) recently published a magazine, which appears to <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/10/13/islamic-state-have-a-magazine-out-and-it-justifies-sex-slavery_n_5976996.html">justify taking women and children as sex slaves</a>.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0frsPML_1ihyphenhyphen1OPcJsa53BNeW8IeyKPasKoU1tZTh5Lj3HbsAJwuNbbG539_YP_vzZEFthcSHb0qkXK-Eoftl1txyw-46wYZLD_IHyoObZ1fi4cNtAbMscukcGD72h8DuKxljynI8sF1R/s1600/Peaceful_religion.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0frsPML_1ihyphenhyphen1OPcJsa53BNeW8IeyKPasKoU1tZTh5Lj3HbsAJwuNbbG539_YP_vzZEFthcSHb0qkXK-Eoftl1txyw-46wYZLD_IHyoObZ1fi4cNtAbMscukcGD72h8DuKxljynI8sF1R/s400/Peaceful_religion.jpg" /></a>
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The nuance, subtlety and complexity of well-crafted and provocative political or social satire often gets lost in the turmoil of political violence. In the wake of the Paris massacre, much has been made of <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>'s latest literary cover star, Michel Houellebecq, and his latest work, <i>Soumisson</i>, a satirical novel about an Islamic party winning presidential elections in France in 2022, and instituting Sharia law across the country. Many people assumed, without reading the book or even a substantial review, that it was an 'islamophobic' tract that panders to far-right fears of an Islamic takeover.
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Yet a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/09/soumission-michel-houellebecq-review-charlie-hebdo">review in <i>The Guardian</i></a>, of all places, suggests that something very different is at work here. "The real target of Houellebecq’s satire – as in his previous novels – is the predictably manipulable venality and lustfulness of the modern metropolitan man." There is no violent takeover, but a thoroughly democratic one, and many French happily go along with the new Sharia system - including the narrator, a middle-aged academic who looks forward to his own conversion and a future of endless sexual gratification through polygamy, with wives of varying ages.
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What Houellebecq is suggesting, in other words, quite apart from any criticism of Islam or religion, is that the lecherous misogyny on display here is by no means limited to Muslims. As to what really lurks beneath the surface in the psyche of some 'Western' men, real-life examples abound - from the white American college frat boys we see in Sacha Baron-Cohen's <i>Borat</i> film, making racist and sexist remarks and yearning for the days of slavery and women's subordination to men, to American televangelist Pat Robertson advising a man whose wife 'refuses to submit to [male] authority' to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoHdO2rwGwE">move to Saudi Arabia</a>, among other things.
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Far from pandering to right-wing fears, Houellebecq's fiction very much seems to furnish Borat's project, suggesting that the European far-right and Islamic religious extremists have far more in common than they realise. And once you strip away the cultural veneer, what's left, really?
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It is interesting to contemplate Houellebecq's work alongside another novel where a fictional religious regime comes to power in a Western country, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's <i>The Handmaid's Tale</i>. In this far more dystopian work of speculative fiction, it is a totalitarian Christian theocracy that overthrows the United States government. It is far more brutal, and Atwood's target is primarily fundamentalism and religion. Her plot is arguably even more far-fetched, as it involves a <i>coup d'etat</i> (rather than a democratic election) and, despite some fundamentalist leanings in the U.S. political establishment, no Christian theocracy exists in the world today - modern Christianity has not quite found its political dimension the way Islam has, most notably in the form of wealthy and powerful states like Saudi Arabia.
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Despite all this, the book has made its way around the world and into high school reading lists, even in god-fearing Texas, despite being frequently challenged as 'anti-Christian' and 'pornographic'. Ironically, it has even at times been challenged for portraying brutality towards and mistreatment of women, and alternately, for being 'anti-Islamic'. (The Christian theocrats in the novel mandate women to wear the veil, and allow polygamy).
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<b>V. Cartoonish Racism</b>
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As to the alleged racism of <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>, it seems many people here missed the point. For starters, out of the two or three cartoons bandied around the internet as examples of <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>'s 'racism', one of them is a cover published in 1980 - 35 years ago - satirizing a papal visit to France. That fact alone is telling - that even to find an example of a non-racist cartoon that in today's context is being misrepresented as racist, <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>'s accusers had to search far and wide, all the way back to 1980. And what does the cartoon say? It shows the pope greeting his French supporters, with the headline: "The Pope in Paris: The French are Cunts Just Like Negroes." It just so happens that the pope's historic visit to France in 1980 came on the heels of an extended tour of Africa - thus the words are presumably <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>'s take on what the pope might be thinking.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlhJCQ-N-731nU0fmCrH352d51Onde039wfCONBrPvR1SRELRt_NosGTEQoj4L3DdIuuTbnIxn7b0CorkNd4W4KmK81uGVgfrR8OjHLoPWmJDDXza_zgmAaob0G5jI07AfLyF6lw6g_Tsv/s1600/ROD0070497.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlhJCQ-N-731nU0fmCrH352d51Onde039wfCONBrPvR1SRELRt_NosGTEQoj4L3DdIuuTbnIxn7b0CorkNd4W4KmK81uGVgfrR8OjHLoPWmJDDXza_zgmAaob0G5jI07AfLyF6lw6g_Tsv/s320/ROD0070497.jpg" /></a>
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Another of the handful of allegedly racist <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> cartoons portrays Boko Haram kidnap victims as French welfare queens saying 'Ne touchez pas nos allocs!' ('Don't touch our welfare payments!') This is clearly a jab at the anti-Muslim rhetoric of right-wing politicians who actually see French Muslim women in this light. By taking the claim to an absurd extreme - suggesting the same of Boko Haram kidnap victims/sex slaves (who are neither French nor on welfare) - <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> is satirizing this view point, in much the same manner as Baron-Cohen's Borat (who has been sued and/or accused both by minority groups and by the racist misogynists he exposed); or, even better, Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report. Colbert, in fact, was not only accused of racism on various occasions, but numbered among his fans, at least in the early days of the show, many conservatives or right-wingers who didn't quite catch on to the satirical aspect of his talk show.
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Another example in the English-speaking world, perhaps more relevant because it also involves cartoons, is the TV cartoon series <i>South Park</i> - which has itself been involved in a number of controversies over the years due to its particular brand of 'equal-opportunity' satire. A running theme of the show, apart from ridiculing everyone and everything under the sun (including Canadians), is that one of the main characters, 4th grader Eric Cartman, while repeatedly making racist statements, has a particular penchant for calling out and casually insulting his friend and fellow 4th grader Kyle as a Jew. Also, the only black kid in their school is named 'Token' - another frequent target of Cartman's casual racism, rage and fear.
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I have no doubt that the thought police of political correctness would see much of <i>South Park</i> as racist - but to me it seems a fairly obvious jab at the deeply ingrained and institutionalized racism of Middle America in all its whiteness, its pretense to racial equality, its political correctness (which only serves to disguise racism and white privilege), and the struggles of four ordinary fourth-graders in coming to terms with all this in small-town Colorado. We cannot confront institutional racism - in fact we only affirm it - by pretending it doesn't exist. And that is precisely what 'political correctness' amounts to - a ruse, a disappearing act that masks and affirms latent institutional racism by purging our language and cultural production of its forms, satirical and otherwise.
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As for depictions of Muhammad, it should be noted that aside from any explicitly offensive content, the prohibition in Islam relating to any depictions of the Prophet (positive or negative) is by no means universal. It is primarily a precept of Sunni Islam, it does not actually appear anywhere in the Quran, and - like similar prohibitions in ancient Judaism or Christianity (pertaining to 'idolatry' or the 'making of graven images') - it is addressed to believers of the faith, mainly Sunni Muslims. (Images of the Prophet are quite common in Iran, I am told, where the majority of Muslims are Shia. Yep – Iran.)
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At its radical origin, this commandment is not about forbidding anyone depicting the Prophet, it's about believers themselves not making or worshipping images ('false idols') because it taints or weakens true faith. In principle, there is no reason why a Muslim should be offended by any and every depiction of the Prophet by a non-Muslim, any more than they should be offended by a non-Muslim eating pork, or violating any other religious rule. So this relatively modern and extremist take on it, where the prohibition becomes absolute and applies to all non-Muslims too, crosses the line between practising faith and imposing one's religion on others. And that is especially the case if in the process of imposing your religion on others, you violate someone else's belief system, which in this case includes freedom of expression, pluralism, and the right to life as fundamental tenets. As the slogan goes, freedom of religion also means freedom <i>from</i> religion.
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Let’s also not forget, as we affirm the complexity in all this, that the very point of the cross-cultural dialogue, the insight that no community is monolithic, that there are violent extremists of all stripes – that it is precisely for this reason we cannot see these particular killers simply as members of a disadvantaged minority group. They are not killers because they are Arab, and they are not killers because they are Muslims, so by extension they are not killers because they are members of a disadvantaged minority in France. If you want to distance their extremism from the larger community, then don't rationalize their act as in any way expressing the marginalized status or the interests of that community. If anything, their group affiliation is primarily with the likes of ISIS (a recent target of <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> cartoons and likely motivation), which in those parts of the world where it operates is certainly not a repressed minority, but an oppressive scourge on the face of the earth – primarily oppressing other Muslims. Throughout history, fanatical religious extremism has taken many forms, from the Spanish Inquisition to modern-day cults – and its motivation or driving aim, more often than not, is some form of domination over others, not liberation from oppression.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2-0zJiDxHDXQ0r8hs_2LLylgn-hV_DcpOST8fYO4I4VDjUak_-UdaTZqKvgz4esyJMk0jQRkM1WQRT1F3rHnC3BptVTc_scuAnrwd5qwMYozqwhWd0lmSmKL7bKgfMevDM5iBh4TFD2OO/s1600/Charlie+Brown.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2-0zJiDxHDXQ0r8hs_2LLylgn-hV_DcpOST8fYO4I4VDjUak_-UdaTZqKvgz4esyJMk0jQRkM1WQRT1F3rHnC3BptVTc_scuAnrwd5qwMYozqwhWd0lmSmKL7bKgfMevDM5iBh4TFD2OO/s400/Charlie+Brown.jpg" /></a>
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</p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-69130173920848153542014-07-20T16:51:00.007-07:002023-10-18T11:09:41.818-07:00All You Need Is Kill: From Pre-Emptive Warfare in Iraq to 'PreCrime' in Gaza<p>
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<b><font size="3">I. The Inception of 'Precrime'</font></b>
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In a widely discussed and disseminated <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/16/witness-gaza-shelling-first-hand-account">eyewitness account of a recent strike on Gaza by a Guardian journalist</a> present at the scene, four Palestinian children are murdered by Israeli artillery fire. The first shell hits near where several children are playing on a beach. Four of them are seen running away. As they reach a group of tents used by bathers during peacetime, a second shell hits and kills them, the gunner having apparently adjusted aim to target the fleeing survivors. "Even from a distance of 200 metres, it was obvious that three of them were children," the reporter states.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKDROJjM3GE8MFWdjyaPBwYMqnLRFMh1kO8PSDTIxPV4H5BRgpu2UPkH4d3Xu5Ny6SSgXLcp8o8icvQQs08AlkSAJi2y0PuZvApb7Ko8OnHOSXXWzrXdPT7Z8DMHCeAPyq5z1YBmCZS3DW/s1600/Smoke-billows-from-a-beac-009.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKDROJjM3GE8MFWdjyaPBwYMqnLRFMh1kO8PSDTIxPV4H5BRgpu2UPkH4d3Xu5Ny6SSgXLcp8o8icvQQs08AlkSAJi2y0PuZvApb7Ko8OnHOSXXWzrXdPT7Z8DMHCeAPyq5z1YBmCZS3DW/s1600/Smoke-billows-from-a-beac-009.jpg" /></a>
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Incidents like this are by no means isolated, as reported widely by a range of media outlets, from the <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.605869/1.605869">liberal Israeli paper Ha'aretz</a> to <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/wars-high-price-children-caught-crossfire-259938">Newsweek</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWdD95S5T_I">CNN</a>. They might not all agree about the motives, but I think that anyone would be hard pressed to deny that, at least in the incident reported by the Guardian, the targeting appears to be deliberate. As Jon Snow suggested in a BBC interview of Israeli defence minister Mark Regev, it is indeed hard to believe in a lot of these cases that, with all this sophisticated technology the Israelis supposedly have, they would not know they were shooting at children.
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Why would Israel be deliberately targeting children? One might ask. The answer may well be in an excellent, well-researched, and suprisingly <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2532528/">Oscar-nominated documentary</a> by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, entitled <i>Dirty Wars</i>. (There is also a <a href="http://dirtywars.org/the-book">book</a> by the same title.)
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Scahill investigates, among other things, a 2011 US <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/7/inside_the_us_dirty_war_in">drone strike in Yemen</a> - far from any war zone - ordered (naturally) by President Obama, and apparently targeting a group of teenagers sitting in a restaurant. Their only crime - one of them was apparently the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, a prominent Muslim cleric (and US citizen) whose only crime, in turn, was apparently that his views were repugnant to the US administration, and that he had urged Muslims to fight against the USA. (Not a crime under any US law or constitution that I'm aware of, by the way, especially given how much Americans pride themselves on their constitutional tradition of 'free speech', even as compared to Europeans.)
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmU-zSv7ZyRyWusAu1AsuRBl6VVs5vlchikvpjyyyqcLcj8sMMwDytdv-LJCdz6JuJ7S0_v9gFDrSErYHFqePGHCFNz_9KzdXCQBLVYIjlqkazZUdgkmhX5m_PmMoSvGKPf8KkxYobkJzQ/s1600/al-awlaki-abdulrahman.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmU-zSv7ZyRyWusAu1AsuRBl6VVs5vlchikvpjyyyqcLcj8sMMwDytdv-LJCdz6JuJ7S0_v9gFDrSErYHFqePGHCFNz_9KzdXCQBLVYIjlqkazZUdgkmhX5m_PmMoSvGKPf8KkxYobkJzQ/s320/al-awlaki-abdulrahman.jpg" /></a>
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<span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, once future terrorist as deemed by US Presidential decree, aged 16, killed by US drone along with several teenage friends while sitting in a restaurant</span></span>
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By the time this happened, the father - Anwar - had already been killed by another US drone strike and confirmed dead, two weeks earlier. Now they were after the son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old posing no apparent threat to anyone, and himself also a US citizen, born in Denver, Colorado, with aspirations of going to college in the USA. He, along with several teenage friends and scores of other people from his ancestral village, was apparently extrajudicially executed by a drone strike while sitting in a restaurant, on the direct orders of the President of the United States - without trial or charge - not for anything he'd done, or even said for that matter; but for what he might one day become, as Scahill puts it. There is more than a whiff of self-fulfilling prophecy to this, I might add, given that the cycle of revenge is perpetuated precisely through acts of indiscriminate slaughter such as this.
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According to an <a href="http://www.esquire.com/features/obama-lethal-presidency-0812-5">Esquire article</a>, "it was initially reported that an Al Qaeda leader named Ibrahim al-Banna was among those killed, but then it was reported that al-Banna is still alive to this day. It was also reported that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a twenty-one-year-old militant, until his grandfather released his birth certificate." To muddy things even more, Scahill reports that US Attorney General Eric Holder claimed Abdulrahman was "not specifically targeted." Multiple inconsistent excuses, proffered by the White House - suggesting what in Freudian psychoanalysis is known as the informal fallacy of the 'borrowed kettle' or 'kettle logic' - indicate precisely the very truth of what they attempt to deny.
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Think <i>Minority Report</i>. Precrime. You thought that was just science fiction? Well, it's already here and in full swing - foreign policy aspiring to global authoritarian police control at its purest and most perfect, coming at you straight from the home of 'freedom' and 'democracy'. And all the more perfect for the fact that most people have no idea any of this is happening.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjliDv8KX_lggIhQMWBBuujJ09HSpVuj_gU6Hhy8mc5SC2FmrhkFumw1mv-7_ZePD-3bFkYiabMQ6Jty4YT1HM3Olrv4V75rYm6i885YsNKIq_B82E7_iMece3z3XXpJ9l3N_44sj-8gEF3/s1600/justice-for-nonwhites.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjliDv8KX_lggIhQMWBBuujJ09HSpVuj_gU6Hhy8mc5SC2FmrhkFumw1mv-7_ZePD-3bFkYiabMQ6Jty4YT1HM3Olrv4V75rYm6i885YsNKIq_B82E7_iMece3z3XXpJ9l3N_44sj-8gEF3/s320/justice-for-nonwhites.jpg" /></a>
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This is indeed the stuff of science fiction. And it is the general drift of US foreign policy under President Barack Obama. Once you have designated your enemy as evil incarnate, even their offspring are a legitimate target. This is a rationale typical of any genocidal army, from the German Nazis to the Serbs in Bosnia.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOfX9RhGkj_mITy4KWI_GXB3rOG-7-f03tTrZGJjSjNJKEsPQBeeAlX1iWCzs5a0jbEiT0fzryd87tI3YshKWG-WuYvBsiVy21sKIzTUMWZLkD0r6SKBO_3NzlED1dIo0RG0pN3Ucujd7b/s1600/minority-report-precrime-cops.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOfX9RhGkj_mITy4KWI_GXB3rOG-7-f03tTrZGJjSjNJKEsPQBeeAlX1iWCzs5a0jbEiT0fzryd87tI3YshKWG-WuYvBsiVy21sKIzTUMWZLkD0r6SKBO_3NzlED1dIo0RG0pN3Ucujd7b/s1600/minority-report-precrime-cops.jpg" /></a>
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So if you find yourself incredulous at the suggestion that Israel may be deliberately targeting Palestinian children with impunity, think again. If you think this is somehow "too crazy" to believe - read <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/why-im-on-the-brink-of-burning-my-israeli-passport-9600165.html">here</a> about recent public statements made by Ayelet Shaked, a prominent member of the Israeli Parliament, who advocates the view that all Palestinians are enemies, including and especially Palestinian mothers, who should be seen as legitimate military targets for breeding "little snakes" as she put it. In the lead-up to the ground invasion, none other than the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset urged the military to <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/cut-power-gaza-dialysis-patients-knesset-deputy-speaker-urges">cut power to Gaza before going in</a> - regardless of the threat to the lives of, among others, kidney dialysis patients in Gaza hospitals - this in order to minimize the risk to the invading Israeli soldiers.
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Back in colonial times, these were the kinds of approaches and policies that openly racist European colonists and intellectuals applied to colonized populations. According to an international law scholar named Joseph Hornung (quoted in Sven Lindqvist's excellent '<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n16/patrick-wright/dropping-their-eggs">History of Bombing</a>', p. 48): “Among civilized states, warfare is limited to states and their armies. But the civilized states deem such considerations unnecessary in warfare against the so-called inferior nations. In those cases the entire nation must be punished.”
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In the last few days there have been reports of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israel-using-flechette-shells-in-gaza?CMP=twt_gu">Israel using flechette shells</a> in Gaza - artillery rounds that spray out thousands of tiny pointed steel projectiles, designed to maximize casualties. So much for 'pinpoint strikes' and limiting damage to the civilian population. And according to Mondoweiss, a progressive Jewish publication, Israeli forces have also apparently <a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/military-destroyed-hospital.html">destroyed el-Wafa hospital despite knowing there were no weapons inside</a>. The latest reports suggest that today Gaza saw the bloodiest assault by Israeli forces yet (in this conflict), with close to 100 Palestinians killed in <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israeli-attack-suburb-gaza-city-palestinians-shujaiiya">scenes of utter devastation</a>.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW5RxCU2zVgBeYk89NHnGIBUpmLei5dq8OOdDwn-_Fqaa32z9UbYtoY_OOZLo4HNtssG87ZJcQwJVwN59jAoyL1FL_UPQ0s45bLwBeuua47u54MoWCcxU1dSGr05daQyFTcS2k1KA7ORnK/s1600/Palestinian-al-Deira-hote-009.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW5RxCU2zVgBeYk89NHnGIBUpmLei5dq8OOdDwn-_Fqaa32z9UbYtoY_OOZLo4HNtssG87ZJcQwJVwN59jAoyL1FL_UPQ0s45bLwBeuua47u54MoWCcxU1dSGr05daQyFTcS2k1KA7ORnK/s320/Palestinian-al-Deira-hote-009.jpg" /></a>
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Those who accuse the Hamas of using civilians as 'human shields' are clearly not only clueless about Israeli tactics, but have no conception of what it means to fight a war in a densely populated urban area - an area that is moreover densely populated, at least in part, because its population lives under an occupation which has over decades squeezed it onto a smaller and smaller parcel of land.
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But even more to the point, there is no independent investigation by any credible authority on the subject that ever provided any evidence for this. The only sources of these allegations are the Israeli Defence Forces and the Israeli Government. As a matter of fact, a report by Amnesty International following the 2008-09 Gaza conflict specifically said that, although Hamas committed some human rights violations, Amnesty "found no evidence Palestinian fighters directed civilians to shield military objectives from attacks, forced them to stay in buildings used by militants, or prevented them from leaving commandeered buildings".
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On the contrary - a whole range of independent investigations over the years by major human rights organizations and media have found that <i>Israeli forces were in fact using Palestinians - and Palestinian children - as human shields.</i> This includes reports by <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE15/015/2009/en/8f299083-9a74-4853-860f-0563725e633a/mde150152009en.pdf">Amnesty International</a>, <a href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/11/26/israel-soldiers-punishment-using-boy-human-shield-inadequate">Human Rights Watch</a> (also <a href="http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/israel3/israel0502-06.htm">here</a>), <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/mar/23/israel-gaza-war-crimes-guardian">The Guardian</a> (also see <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/mar/23/israel-gaza-war-crimes-guardian">this</a>), the <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/20/us-palestinian-israel-children-idUSBRE95J0FR20130620">UN Committee on the Rights of the Child</a>, the <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/u-n-human-rights-council-endorses-gaza-war-crimes-report-demands-israel-hamas-investigate-article-1.382138">UN Human Rights Council</a>, the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6554487.stm">BBC</a>, <a href="http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_5644167">Associated Press</a>, and even the <a href="http://www.btselem.org/human_shields/20060720_human_shields_in_beit_hanun">Israeli human rights group B'Tselem</a>. Most if not all of these reports are based in part on video footage, as well as testimony from former IDF soldiers. According to the testimonies of Israeli soldiers documented in the Amnesty report on the 2008-09 Gaza conflict, for instance, "Israeli forces used unarmed Palestinians including children to protect military positions, walk in front of armed soldiers; go into buildings to check for booby traps or gunmen; and inspect suspicious objects for explosives."
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnNaQCc-3LqaVabuGPbsO87k68R56zNUeaWBySTrpKsXH8aXqBBm5QNbtenrRaD-5-wSz7AoGjbtuIhtuEHePNMwdmaRSdBtdLwqKJoPCsbS4C4F6Ph2cSTPutE458DGs7b5Y0Uv7n4hkN/s1600/Flechette-shell-darts-009.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnNaQCc-3LqaVabuGPbsO87k68R56zNUeaWBySTrpKsXH8aXqBBm5QNbtenrRaD-5-wSz7AoGjbtuIhtuEHePNMwdmaRSdBtdLwqKJoPCsbS4C4F6Ph2cSTPutE458DGs7b5Y0Uv7n4hkN/s400/Flechette-shell-darts-009.jpg" /></a>
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<span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Flechette projectiles</span></span>
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Going back to the current conflict, Human Rights Watch has investigated 8 Israeli air strikes, including the one that killed four Palestinian boys on a beach as initially reported by the Guardian, and found <a href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/22/gaza-airstrike-deaths-raise-concerns-ground-offensive">no evidence of a military target in many cases</a>. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, for its part, said on Sunday that <a href="http://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/occupied-palestinian-territory-gaza-emergency-situation-repo-9">43% of Gaza's territory has been affected </a>by Israeli evacuation warnings or declaration of "no-go zones". The implication that almost half of Gaza is somehow a legitimate target beggars belief.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtKhUkzrt3baiQadiLS1jqTsCmXomd80UXAt5rNQIT-OABnPHEkBvgn0WdcpnQ6ADDnUJWvlm-duJcw7MgQEcYnn3L2iib29B7wipRaLDPeA6Bo16Rr8-YYmk8rTpqWCdMzyZLBF0LHXkx/s1600/BtPyQ3CCYAEk1S2.jpg-large.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtKhUkzrt3baiQadiLS1jqTsCmXomd80UXAt5rNQIT-OABnPHEkBvgn0WdcpnQ6ADDnUJWvlm-duJcw7MgQEcYnn3L2iib29B7wipRaLDPeA6Bo16Rr8-YYmk8rTpqWCdMzyZLBF0LHXkx/s400/BtPyQ3CCYAEk1S2.jpg-large.jpg" /></a>
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<span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">View of Gaza from space, photo by <a href="https://twitter.com/Astro_Alex">Alexander Gerst</a>, 'my saddest photo yet'</span></span>
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In this context, I can't help agreeing with Hamas's contention that Israeli forces are using the evacuation warnings as psychological warfare, as Gazans flee from one neighbourhood and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/22/gaza-displaced-palestinians-not-safe?CMP=fb_gu">into the path of more bombs</a>. Is this what the Israelis mean by 'pinpoint precision' - destroying an <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-28428019?SThisFB">entire half of a 10 or 11-story building</a>, which housed refugees from another part of Gaza, previously bombarded by Israeli forces?
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm-_t7NGrUEqRZx3NXQPPZ0PyrcAnSllsTSgK0vQKmVKAAWmpkPNacdkbccaUdV_qlVo1AybX7DaYOfIc-Zam72rFjmhFIiLf_dj8w9TFvgtJBjYnni_j0nvphNZ80D073i-RYHt00jw1V/s1600/Exhausted-Gazans-outside--006.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm-_t7NGrUEqRZx3NXQPPZ0PyrcAnSllsTSgK0vQKmVKAAWmpkPNacdkbccaUdV_qlVo1AybX7DaYOfIc-Zam72rFjmhFIiLf_dj8w9TFvgtJBjYnni_j0nvphNZ80D073i-RYHt00jw1V/s400/Exhausted-Gazans-outside--006.jpg" /></a>
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“Where do we go to?" Asks a Palestinian refugee <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israelgaza-conflict-the-myth-of-hamass-human-shield-9619810.html">interviewed by the Independent</a>. "Some people moved from the outer edge of Khan Younis to Khan Younis centre after Israelis told them to, then the centre got bombed. People have moved from this area to Gaza City, and Gaza City has been bombed. It’s not Hamas who is ordering us in this, it’s the Israelis.”
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So yes, it would appear that the Israelis are deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians, and in particular children - not for anything they've done, but for what they might, perhaps, one day become. They are gathering on hillsides to <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israelis-cheer-gaza-bombing">watch and cheer on the bombardment</a>, to boot. They are taking their cues from US foreign policy, and taking it to the next level. In case anyone thought that there is something particularly or uniquely repugnant about, say, the Boko Haram in Nigeria abducting 200 schoolgirls - the military tactics and aims of the USA or Israel are not much different. So who are the extremists now?
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVDEngxhI9h2-oXakYaSzaPOl__4gKol40z92ClohTDnReY6zozCKHgKz-ifktFn7ZeWDHsodDAxh0_kNc3zWX7vKYdToPoHXd-LYfZwRHQyAdUAF2N6RqsURCR_zOHhJc8nYFdIcECzxy/s1600/Israelis-watch-bombings-o-011.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVDEngxhI9h2-oXakYaSzaPOl__4gKol40z92ClohTDnReY6zozCKHgKz-ifktFn7ZeWDHsodDAxh0_kNc3zWX7vKYdToPoHXd-LYfZwRHQyAdUAF2N6RqsURCR_zOHhJc8nYFdIcECzxy/s400/Israelis-watch-bombings-o-011.jpg" /></a>
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All this shouldn't, in the end, be all that surprising - didn't the US military emerge from the Vietnam War, after all, with the phrase 'baby killer' as a common epithet for the American soldier? The key difference being, of course, that there is no question or suggestion here of the US or Israeli military's experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, or of individual soldiers going berserk on the battlefield. It is now a matter of policy at the highest level.
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Do you feel safer, my American and Israeli friends? If I were you, I wouldn't.
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<b><font size="3">II. From Occupation to Concentration Camp</font></b>
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In this context it is no wonder that Ilan Pappe, a prominent Israeli historian (and former Zionist himself, author of <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/1117-the-idea-of-israel">The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge</a>), stated in a recent <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b049nksn">interview on BBC Hardtalk</a> that in his view Israel is <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1652-this-is-about-human-suffering-created-by-people-who-are-immune-from-international-condemnation-ilan-pappe-interviewed-by-bbc-hardtalk-on-the-israel-palestine-conflict">"founded on a deliberate programme of ethnic cleansing."</a> “This is about human suffering," Pappe claims, "created by people who are immune from international condemnation." Indeed, just the other day the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset was reported as saying that Israel should <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/expel-palestinians-populate-gaza-jews-says-knesset-deputy-speaker">expel the Palestinians, and populate the Gaza strip with Jews</a>.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb-UcodGW6RSkJERAI067X5LngIYvrFOYvNM2F5qB800S_gR0Nl4Xyud0KCezQbuwHAURrFsSRkFGZJXePg30x2nh1wX1QX_5XYVgf52JRq3Rt1iLgu6KCmxaW_lJLS4xX3tKGfuhmP0KR/s1600/elite-daily-gaza-bombing-36f721ab5310cb78b8cd6205c22da7be.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb-UcodGW6RSkJERAI067X5LngIYvrFOYvNM2F5qB800S_gR0Nl4Xyud0KCezQbuwHAURrFsSRkFGZJXePg30x2nh1wX1QX_5XYVgf52JRq3Rt1iLgu6KCmxaW_lJLS4xX3tKGfuhmP0KR/s320/elite-daily-gaza-bombing-36f721ab5310cb78b8cd6205c22da7be.jpg" /></a>
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Given that the current round of escalation and assault on Gaza began with Israel's military response to what should have been a homicide investigation (for the murder of three Israeli teens), it would not be far-fetched to suppose that the whole thing was a pretext for a campaign of ethnic cleansing. As Mouin Rabbani put it in a <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/07/09/mouin-rabbani/institutionalised-disregard-for-palestinian-life/">recent article for the London Review of Books</a>, "The current round of escalation is generally dated from the moment three Israeli youths went missing on 12 June. Two Palestinian boys were shot dead in Ramallah on 15 May, but that – like any number of incidents in the intervening month when Israel exercised its right to colonise and dispossess – is considered insignificant."
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Much is made of the fact that Hamas refused an Egyptian ceasefire proposal. And yet, demanding an end to the long-standing blockade of Gaza - not to mention the occupation, although they are not even demanding that at this stage - as a pre-condition for any ceasefire, is hardly unreasonable on their part. It's not as if the killing stops when there is a ceasefire - the killing goes on, but it is usually only Palestinians who get killed, in incidents such as <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/25/palestinian-territories-ramallah-nadeem-suwara">this</a>. It's just that most of the time we don't hear about it in the news, and most of the time it's not caught on CCTV. Whenever the Palestinians attempt to retaliate, any time a single Israeli is killed, Israel escalates the conflict to full intensity warfare, the world's attention is back on the region, and the genealogy of the conflict is traced only to the latest Israeli killed - in retaliation. And another few hundred Palestinians are murdered, in retaliation for the retaliation.
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As one might expect, the Israeli army claims the CCTV footage - of Israaeli soldiers killing two unarmed Palestinian boys - was faked or edited, despite an Israeli human rights organization <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/22/footage-palestinian-boys-shot-genuine-btselem">vouching for its authenticity</a>. In other words - nothing, no evidence will suffice. Even if the whole world stood and watched - nothing will cause even a chink in the armor of Israel's vaunted moral superiority, guaranteed absolutely and for all time, and indemnified against any loss, no matter what the State of Israel does.
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And again, the Israeli occupation, and the blockade of Gaza (from both Israel and Egypt) continues with any unconditional ceasefire (which is what the Egyptian proposal amounts to).
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"Life inside the Gaza Strip is hellish even when there is no war," according to a <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/wars-high-price-children-caught-crossfire-259938">Newsweek report</a>. "Aside from immobility — no way out and no way in — there is, on average, 12 hours of power cuts a day...Even before the current fighting began, over 57 percent of the Gaza population was suffering from 'food insecurity' — UN-speak for not having enough to eat. Gaza has 41 percent unemployment and 80 percent of the population are refugees. Nearly 95 percent of the water is not fit for human consumption. Sewage spills into the sea."
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPovvIPnuV-fQlGUftW6J2w8Ohgix9LC5U3IeA6UNwiIUX4cA9LG-Y_ezCSHpgyEfnJxHgnGD7_4lF8YlEj7FERd6LmAxowYuFkP4QSf18_1G8hSbD-kLVaUt9V7qvt2YUyhandAKwszxh/s1600/09-gazans-fix-donkey-cart-670.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPovvIPnuV-fQlGUftW6J2w8Ohgix9LC5U3IeA6UNwiIUX4cA9LG-Y_ezCSHpgyEfnJxHgnGD7_4lF8YlEj7FERd6LmAxowYuFkP4QSf18_1G8hSbD-kLVaUt9V7qvt2YUyhandAKwszxh/s400/09-gazans-fix-donkey-cart-670.jpg" /></a>
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Jewish-American writer Lawrence Weschler is among many who compare Gaza to a <a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/concentration-delusion-recognize.html">concentration camp</a>. Even British Conservative PM David Cameron has stated that since the beginning of the Israeli blockade in 2006, conditions in Gaza had come to resemble a "prison camp", according to a <a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/12/gaza-tunnels/verini-text">National Geographic story on the tunnels of Gaza</a>. The tunnels - far from being solely of military significance - have for years been Gaza's only lifeline, used for importing everything from essential medicines and food, to construction materials for rebuilding.
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The Israeli blockade, for that matter, was introduced in response to Hamas's 2006 election win - immediately following the election Israel simply "closed ports of entry and banned the importation of nearly everything that would have allowed Gazans to live above a subsistence level. Egypt cooperated." In addition, Israel responded to the electoral result by arresting scores of Palestinian legislators, many of them moderates, some even from within Hamas, and many of whom, according to the Carter Center (which monitored the election) "were <a href="http://www.cartercenter.org/news/pr/palestine-012412.html">guilty of nothing more than winning a parliamentary seat in an open and honest election.</a>"
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinj17m8ofTpEvA_zdQ2YH7I6pK_X0GI4YW3p_xksp5D-ZYWN3Pk_bQyS26rKPtrECp4eeFWJAWYYf17u5C-b9ufkO11pzV_ZRzbiCQfZZcld6qKRD4YzE0LxxQXQOJtyKf17xBWlbbjE_p/s1600/gaza-tunnel-worker-615.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinj17m8ofTpEvA_zdQ2YH7I6pK_X0GI4YW3p_xksp5D-ZYWN3Pk_bQyS26rKPtrECp4eeFWJAWYYf17u5C-b9ufkO11pzV_ZRzbiCQfZZcld6qKRD4YzE0LxxQXQOJtyKf17xBWlbbjE_p/s400/gaza-tunnel-worker-615.jpg" /></a>
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Making the situation even more sinister, it was the Israeli leadership itself, along with US allies, who deliberately undermined Yassir Arafat's moderate and secular Fatah and <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB123275572295011847">helped spawn Hamas</a> back in the day - only to later impose a punitive economic blockade that turned Gaza into a veritable concentration camp when Gazans voted for Hamas.
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So much for democracy. This blockade, not to mention Israel's current military assault, clearly has the aim of bludgeoning the citizens of Gaza into voting the way the Israeli leadership would prefer them to vote. This is how USA and Israel are bringing democracy to the Middle East. Even the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories, Richard Falk, declared earlier this year that Israeli policies bore "unacceptable characteristics of <a href="http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/israel-guilty-ethnic-cleansing-apartheid-says-un-rapporteur-1441350">colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing.</a>"
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So I have to ask, in what kind of demented moral universe do Israel supporters get all up in arms when someone suggests boycotting Israel? In what way does the above <i>not</i> suggest Nazi tactics? Only inasmuch as Israel has not yet gone for the all-out Final Solution - so far they are content to keep the Palestinians ghettoized, and only exterminate them little by little (relatively speaking), whenever they rebel against their imprisonment.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEUi8ZMmk4sC0PEBqseKzgq_oUHoTQqC3fTTpLZNBONc6yEfCfuIMyVz_Wsb1getc3jvAS3rIBQN7myW6N60odjFfNhPV70bfUvzHHFKr0HqdjYp_YRARL7Vlpso4Ff8-QOfx0eTPmK4C9/s1600/b264c5ce-b332-4286-85a4-2077102c49e2-460x276.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEUi8ZMmk4sC0PEBqseKzgq_oUHoTQqC3fTTpLZNBONc6yEfCfuIMyVz_Wsb1getc3jvAS3rIBQN7myW6N60odjFfNhPV70bfUvzHHFKr0HqdjYp_YRARL7Vlpso4Ff8-QOfx0eTPmK4C9/s400/b264c5ce-b332-4286-85a4-2077102c49e2-460x276.jpg" /></a>
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In sum, the Israeli approach to the conflict seems to be - <i>tighten the long-standing blockade of Gaza that has already brought its citizens to their knees for years, destroy tunnels and escape routes, order all Palestinians to evacuate - with nowhere to evacuate - bomb the fuck out of Gaza with heavy artillery, including so-called flèchette shells that spray thousands of tiny steel projectiles in all directions, and then blame Hamas for using civilians as 'human shields' when they are hit by Israeli fire. </i>
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By the way, this might seem like stating the obvious but, I can tell you from personal experience, dear reader, that the natural human instinct under bombardment and under siege, when you find yourself between four walls, is to stay put, duck, lay low, seek cover - <i>not</i> run outside and evacuate, and risk getting killed out in the open. So all this Israeli propaganda about how they are trying to avoid civilian casualties reflects nothing more than the legalistic mindset of a 21st century army trying to evade liability. What they are saying is - <i>hey, if you sign your own Death Warrant when we put a gun to your head, it's OK for us to murder you. </i>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiit38ZC2Bdz2pnzIxPNgKBsG4j2sIvYaxHRInRDi9pnHzA-rntLLm_r0Msws5dRO7vu0mymDkWDvA3_ewj9RjTmEhrLb3Lhve0KvO3S1zgF-aDg9JxQXJSsElUVVpyqa8ssrJNk4T6AeSg/s1600/07-gaza-city-apartments-rise-above-beach-670.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiit38ZC2Bdz2pnzIxPNgKBsG4j2sIvYaxHRInRDi9pnHzA-rntLLm_r0Msws5dRO7vu0mymDkWDvA3_ewj9RjTmEhrLb3Lhve0KvO3S1zgF-aDg9JxQXJSsElUVVpyqa8ssrJNk4T6AeSg/s400/07-gaza-city-apartments-rise-above-beach-670.jpg" /></a>
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There has also been increasing hostility towards journalists from Israelis and Israel supporters (such as virtually every media outlet in the US). A CNN reporter was removed from Gaza following an incident in which Israelis cheering strikes on Gaza from a hilltop <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/18/cnn-diana-magnay-israel-gaza_n_5598866.html">threatened to destroy her car</a> if she 'said a word wrong'. An NBC reporter whose reporting was praised for its even-handedness (in contrast to the usual pro-Israel propaganda in US media which is mistaken for impartiality), was nonetheless <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/17/nbc-news-ayman-mohyeldin-gaza_n_5596268.html">inexplicably removed</a>, only to be reinstated the next day. The IDF <a href="http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/gaza-crisis-israeli-military-fire-warning-shots-into-al-jazeera-office-1457698">fired warning shots</a> into Al Jazeera offices, following statements by Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman which suggest that the targeting may have been intentional. And a BBC reporter was apparently <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/07/22/bbc-arabic-reporter-feras-khatib-attacked-by-angry-israeli-live-on-air_n_5609764.html">attacked on air</a> by an angry Israeli. Even before Israel's military campaign was in full swing, the IDF apparently launched a <a href="http://en.rsf.org/palestine-violence-escalating-against-08-07-2014,46605.html">series of attacks on Palestinian journalists</a>, confiscating equipment worth millions of dollars, according to Reporters Without Borders.
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As George Orwell put it, "the further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it."
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Another groundbreaking and informative work by an Israeli academic is Eyal Weizman's <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/1107-hollow-land">Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation</a>. Weizman, a London-trained Israeli architect, provides a multi-faceted exploration of all the sinister methods used by Israel in its militarization of the Israel-Palestine landscape in order to encroach ever further on Palestinian land, destroy homes and economic infrastructure, and make life in Palestine generally unbearable, laying bare "the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation." From the tunnels of Gaza to the militarized airspace of the Occupied Territories, Weizman "unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and its transformation of Palestinian towns, villages and roads into an artifice where all natural and built features serve military ends. Weizman traces the development of this strategy, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon's reconceptualization of military defence during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to the contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare and airborne targeted assassinations."
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCLIlBNYJcoE18fsE2nXyTaGz8ULHtZ1ZPWwBPpLqrQGLPkfNJR4jmmqHzpOTMRmYb36vxIVeLhwLT-PkmOEgLLtAvmzUaSBC6QK_32cpmI917hGQgCXFGmKstxN4riHr9SnGoGvo51lV6/s1600/9781844678686_Hollow_Land-131a036e4e5db107ee8520dcea0ea32e.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCLIlBNYJcoE18fsE2nXyTaGz8ULHtZ1ZPWwBPpLqrQGLPkfNJR4jmmqHzpOTMRmYb36vxIVeLhwLT-PkmOEgLLtAvmzUaSBC6QK_32cpmI917hGQgCXFGmKstxN4riHr9SnGoGvo51lV6/s320/9781844678686_Hollow_Land-131a036e4e5db107ee8520dcea0ea32e.jpg" /></a>
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Yet another thing that occurs to me in light of Hamas's refusal to accept Egypt's unconditional ceasefire - we recently saw the anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica. A Dutch court also recently decided that Dutch UN troops were partly responsible. Srebrenica is a good reminder of the potential dangers for occupied/besieged populations of putting too much faith in institutions of international law and order, agreeing to internationally-brokered ceasefires, and giving up weapons without having demands met first.
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Once once accepts the moral equivalence of occupier/occupied, one also accepts the occupying colonising force's higher valuing of its own human losses. If the genealogy of a conflict doesn't matter - if the background of occupation and blockade is irrelevant - then there's no problem in killing 200 Palestinians in retaliation for 1 Israeli. You ignore the history, and then it appears as if, well, Hamas started with their rockets. But the whole point is that one side kills more people precisely because they are in control from the outset, because they are the occupying force, because they are far superior militarily, and they can afford to prolong the situation indefinitely causing untold damage and loss of life while suffering minimal losses themselves, despite all the drama. In fact it is in their interest to prolong the status quo as long as they are in control.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCWK2xEJUWyDT-sTW-9W8XDR8i8JdpdPJquXTsRNSifVu8dsWLgghyphenhyphenfDYeKsX1Hbb9vwoZVqJu3fn_qkXllvNzYygNBso2RQskjv3EOYWlXwWcEnbQQETW7gTr3_BdOxyMaZSorL5Ezba9/s1600/palestinian.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCWK2xEJUWyDT-sTW-9W8XDR8i8JdpdPJquXTsRNSifVu8dsWLgghyphenhyphenfDYeKsX1Hbb9vwoZVqJu3fn_qkXllvNzYygNBso2RQskjv3EOYWlXwWcEnbQQETW7gTr3_BdOxyMaZSorL5Ezba9/s400/palestinian.jpg" /></a>
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For the record, I once refused to sign a petition supporting Palestinian statehood, even though I support it in principle. Why? Because I read through the comments by petition signers, and noted some openly racist, anti-semitic comments expressing blatantly neo-Nazi sentiments, anachronistic quotes attributed to Adolf Hitler, etc. And I know they were for real because I have encountered people with similar viewpoints in this world. So I did not and could not sign the petition because I am after all the grandson of Yugoslav Partisans, anti-fascists, members of a generation who gave their lives fighting for freedom and against fascism, nationalism, and Nazism. I could not in good conscience have my name associated in any way with such people, and such statements. So yes, the Palestinians need to get their shit together and dissociate themselves from such people, but murder is murder. And even every attempt at non-violent resistance by Palestinians is continually thwarted by Israel and its supporters - the example in the Guardian story I posted earlier is a case in point. The two Palestinian boys shot by Israeli troops last month (as captured on CCTV, before the current escalation) were at a protest against the occupation, posing no threat to the Israeli soldiers - for one of them, it was his first time. And that is one incident among many.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3W2iplvGs0ko1wWyCChhyphenhyphenmnsOAnWUlIJ7h6duViLxd3uQ3lLhsPkzTfoPbKZcvU5iIgUrceVUNYEdmYyw44IDTj82cPedgNp_Su7X0vuIvasBSDWVx664SBA6tNDUg_c7ezm-8dCo9PPO/s1600/israel-shooting-palestinian-teenager.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3W2iplvGs0ko1wWyCChhyphenhyphenmnsOAnWUlIJ7h6duViLxd3uQ3lLhsPkzTfoPbKZcvU5iIgUrceVUNYEdmYyw44IDTj82cPedgNp_Su7X0vuIvasBSDWVx664SBA6tNDUg_c7ezm-8dCo9PPO/s400/israel-shooting-palestinian-teenager.jpg" /></a>
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Not to mention the BDSM movement, which advocates worldwide for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel - they are continually under heavy criticism, and there is a messianic uproar from Israel supporters at any proposed boycott, such as the one implemented a few years ago by the co-op food store in Olympia, WA, where I lived at the time. Why? It worked against Apartheid South Africa. What gives Israel the special right to illegally occupy a territory for forty years, slowly kill, maim, and brutally harass its population, gradually encroach on its land by building walls and settlements and uprooting olive groves, drain the economic lifeblood out of it bit by bit, and then - get all indignant even when that population turns to non-violent means of protest? Again, what kind of moral bizarro world do these people live in?
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For all that, Israel's Ambassador to the US believes that Israel should be given the Nobel Peace Prize, for their efforts to avoid civilian deaths. Well, Obama got one - despite specifically targeting and killing innocent children with drones - so why the hell not? I hope that this also means I can get a Nobel Prize for Chemistry, even though I haven't done any work in that area since I left high school about 16 years ago.
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<b><font size="3">III. Masters of War</font></b>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtyGqL92-8kdlk5G-64V0J58FUWMjqunNy7BUUYM-zXFMDvBp6Qk2T98cMWWc3FTyAci6vzZn0ITKndYLW7RmTqZZBzZ4asM9jNsxOh4X6CYR8wn7GvVoK_5XXpVxahYOAR1Bp6NHacEdb/s1600/Dirty-Wars-Film-Still-Jeremy-Scahill-in-Somalia.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtyGqL92-8kdlk5G-64V0J58FUWMjqunNy7BUUYM-zXFMDvBp6Qk2T98cMWWc3FTyAci6vzZn0ITKndYLW7RmTqZZBzZ4asM9jNsxOh4X6CYR8wn7GvVoK_5XXpVxahYOAR1Bp6NHacEdb/s320/Dirty-Wars-Film-Still-Jeremy-Scahill-in-Somalia.jpg" /></a>
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"You know when you are fighting the enemy, any option is open. No mercy," says US-backed Somali warlord Mohamed Qanyare, interviewed in <i>Dirty Wars</i>. Aside from drone strikes and US ground troop deployments, one of the ways that JSOC or the Joint Special Operations Command - described by an insider as the 'paramilitary arm of the White House' - targets individuals and groups on its 'kill lists' in over 75 countries worldwide, is by outsourcing kills to local warlords.
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"America knows war," Qanyare goes on. "They are war masters. They know better than me. So when they funding a war, they know how to fund it. They don't even need to touch to tell them. They know very well. They are teachers. Great teachers."
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG5Opwty4d7v1TMKBjJv9jxMq8QmUte5Pq0PY60M3r1MAatZy1h-l5wHrJOKHwusU59TDwFGyCOxpI1OAY_MgYdiUFGh2lkKTrC8yDNQ7hygIREXT5uElvQiSZUZC5E9jOnO__Fx_Mq5Jp/s1600/1371507855-dirty_wars.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG5Opwty4d7v1TMKBjJv9jxMq8QmUte5Pq0PY60M3r1MAatZy1h-l5wHrJOKHwusU59TDwFGyCOxpI1OAY_MgYdiUFGh2lkKTrC8yDNQ7hygIREXT5uElvQiSZUZC5E9jOnO__Fx_Mq5Jp/s400/1371507855-dirty_wars.jpg" /></a>
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According to the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/29/drone-attacks-innocent-civilians_n_1554380.html">New York Times and Huffington Post</a>, the Obama administration's drone strike policy counts "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent." Simple - just redefine the term 'combatant' and make any human being fair game, guilty unless proven innocent (posthumously) and liable to execution by drone, as long as they are the right age. In many countries, this would include 15 or 16-year-olds.
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In effect, individuals at the highest level of the US government, including President Obama, are directly and without doubt responsible for ordering acts that unequivocally constitute not only war crimes, but crimes against humanity, extrajudicial executions, torture, intimidation of witnesses, silencing journalists (in one case the Obama administration explicitly asked the Yemeni government to keep journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye in jail for reporting on a US drone strike) - in the full knowledge of what was being done as it was being done, and full knowledge of the consequences.
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Under President Obama, JSOC has taken the Bush administration's already repugnant doctrine of 'pre-emptive war' to the next level - 'precrime'. Murdering children who may one day become 'terrorists'. This puts a whole new spin on Kurt Vonnegut's description of war as 'a children's crusade'.
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This takes even the idea of 'precrime' to a new level. 'Precrime' as originally conceived (in the Philip K. Dick story and Spielberg film) involves arresting (not killing) people when they are about to commit a crime, by a kind of 'thought police' guided by 'precogs' - mutated human beings with 'precognitive' abilities, who are able to see the future. However the precogs predictions do not overlap one hundred percent most of the time, and are usually combined into a 'majority report'; which suggests the existence of a 'minority report', predicting a different time path.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJbuwl551P6tNShuhaDJdfp1Wv4Ka3RBaDjIBut-NpkQBXjw05bOXtviVJg1x9jNqjZ9_2-myUXUZ8RXvUyUfNje7Wdgl2OPUxQJNKvrXYLxvFxM4j0iWsQ4qtJyafc_OhiJ5rughM4BuZ/s1600/precogs.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJbuwl551P6tNShuhaDJdfp1Wv4Ka3RBaDjIBut-NpkQBXjw05bOXtviVJg1x9jNqjZ9_2-myUXUZ8RXvUyUfNje7Wdgl2OPUxQJNKvrXYLxvFxM4j0iWsQ4qtJyafc_OhiJ5rughM4BuZ/s320/precogs.jpg" /></a>
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This raises some interesting ethical dilemmas, and it is on the existence of this 'minority report' that the drama hinges on. It could be argued that 'precrime' is in fact closer to the Bush-era policy of 'pre-emptive warfare' than to the Obama administration's drone/strike/raid/kill policy, perhaps falling somewhere in-between.
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But for all its sinister implications, 'pre-emptive war' now seems almost a bit quaint in retrospect. In the nightmarish maze of a moral universe suggested by JSOC operational policy under President Obama, all this reaches a whole new level, a crescendo fever-pitch - we now have an absolute, total, fundamental disregard for things like innocence, guilt, due process, civil rights, and so forth. All these categories become irrelevant. Anyone deemed a future <i>potential</i> terrorist - for undisclosed reasons - is a legitimate target for extrajudicial execution by presidential decree.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS2XLDg33tqsc5toB9bZgutkHzruwqotfsgRVPEIbDIXMqfHM2B25MSgjbQndazkl1tFhjq610omi1TqsapdsJJt4w-aHoR2JtryJlyAyST_O0JlnpCBMKkFCih2X7VzYVLAmHhA4lSD6D/s1600/precrime.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS2XLDg33tqsc5toB9bZgutkHzruwqotfsgRVPEIbDIXMqfHM2B25MSgjbQndazkl1tFhjq610omi1TqsapdsJJt4w-aHoR2JtryJlyAyST_O0JlnpCBMKkFCih2X7VzYVLAmHhA4lSD6D/s400/precrime.jpg" /></a>
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In the post-Snowden era, I cannot help but wonder how exactly the byzantine surveillance apparatus amassed and operated by the NSA (which as we learned monitored the phone calls of no less than 20 million Germans, for instance) plays into these mysterious drone strikes and night raids where most or all of the victims turn out to be innocent civilians, as documented in <i>Dirty Wars</i> - innocent men, women, and children - although the strikes supposedly target suspected militants. And I can't help but wonder who is next, or by what depraved algorithms and morbid analyses people end up on these 'kill lists'.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIqnZrqlnZ7GhV_EzATiPptseaFVdoh2jpQi9Qt38-n8lQYl0UgnAtoWLH8ttDNxL-r1FZNJ2EArD0hyphenhyphenPxPCjft-Qs20cFeI6LW0wLSEG0LEaM3ScLejJHfwcVan12ugueKYwqg-HTZFw0/s1600/Digital-Eye-Spy-Surveillance.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIqnZrqlnZ7GhV_EzATiPptseaFVdoh2jpQi9Qt38-n8lQYl0UgnAtoWLH8ttDNxL-r1FZNJ2EArD0hyphenhyphenPxPCjft-Qs20cFeI6LW0wLSEG0LEaM3ScLejJHfwcVan12ugueKYwqg-HTZFw0/s320/Digital-Eye-Spy-Surveillance.jpg" /></a>
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There is a boundless, profound cynicism at the core of such policies. It suggests a complete and unwavering rejection of human agency and individual autonomy, of free will. I probably don't even need to explain why all this is a flagrant and fundamental violation of any and every moral and ethical principle or code that holds any validity in human history, of international law, of the US Constitution, of so many things that enlightened human beings hold sacred. This new foreign military policy practiced by Israel and the USA can appropriately be summed up by the title of a Japanese military sci-fi novel: All You Need is Kill.
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Yet if there is a lesson to be learned from Minority Report, it is that this disturbed logic can easily turn against those who put it into practice. The hunter can become the hunted. By redefining innocent human beings as legitimate targets, you redefine yourself as a legitimate target.
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The minority report - the alternate time-path that signifies free will and human agency - seems to be our only hope, the only chance of redeeming humanity. We can never lose sight of this lest we become sub-human - we always need the 'minority report'.
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To make matters so much worse, the aforementioned crimes have been perpetrated by the wealthiest nations in the world against some of the poorest and most underprivileged citizens of some of the poorest and most underprivileged nations in the world - in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and now Gaza. This is what I would call the quintessence of criminal brutality. None of this would be terribly surprising if it came from the playbook of someone like Vladimir Putin - but given that it comes from the 'land of the free' and 'home of the brave', and a US President who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (!), this is some pretty demented shit. And this is the kind of world we live in.
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Given the predominant reaction to the conflict in Gaza from world leaders across the political spectrum and especially those in the West (in support of Israel, or critical for all the wrong reasons), and the predominant reaction among the peoples of the world (opposing the occupation and Israeli assault), I think it's clear where the real divisions lie. Governments sympathize with other governments, generally speaking. They first and foremost recognize Israel's "right to defend itself." From what? I wonder. Given that most of Israel's casualties are soldiers involved in the assault on Gaza (the toll now stands at 12), this sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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A good portion of the people who run the world, it seems, the people who run the governments of the most powerful nations in the world - are clearly out of their minds. In a murderous, racist mood and certifiably insane.
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Masters of War, I just want you to know I can see through your masks.
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I will end with a contribution from my friend <a href="https://www.facebook.com/MaxHaiven">Max Haiven</a>, posted the other day on Facebook:
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<blockquote>As Israelis cheer on Gaza's pulverization and watch it like theatre from hillsides, as far-right gangs hunt down and beat up the few tenacious Israeli peace activists who remain, as Western politicians and pundits line up to defend this berserk state, as my fellow Jews in the diaspora remain silent or (worse) force silence on others, I recall Aimé Césaire's words of 1955, in his famous indictment of the violently dying French colonial regime "Discours sur le Colonialisme":
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"We must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and 'interrogated', all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery."</blockquote>
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</p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-89921230155655633242014-04-29T17:58:00.001-07:002023-10-17T02:20:06.089-07:00The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Gnosis as 'Dark Precursor'<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<p>
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<b>[idolatry and repetition: from simulacrum to gnosis]</b>
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In one of his poetic turns, Heidegger rejects the dichotomy of word and image, which in the German tradition was understood as meaning that images required space in order to be perceived, while words required time. To Heidegger, the truth of language - poetry - <i>is</i> image and therefore space par excellence; images, in turn, incorporate time in the form of the invisible - the truth of an image is not in the representation of the seen as conventionally understood, but in invoking what is outside itself, the 'thingness' of things, the hidden part - perhaps what Barthes calls <i>punctum</i>.<br />
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The reference to what is outside the immediate field of vision yet implicated in the image finds an inverse counterpart in Baudrillard's comments on photography as 'exorcism': "If something wants to be photographed, that is precisely because it does not want to yield up its meaning; it does not want to be reflected upon. It wants to be seized directly, violated on the spot, illuminated in its detail. If something wants to become an image, this is not so as to last, but in order to disappear more effectively."
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbNOV8qPmuwC4RSmhFrjZ7XdByfcAAEH2ftoY6PVGUj2rvM5hl-2nsfj96cklsw9DrY0GyaCKniZZjp06PMgumNTjsTQK41khwaCc_rd3C9XbR6R4mbMxxLMqbapbOzeq93y2vf47xL-Xm/s1600/images.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbNOV8qPmuwC4RSmhFrjZ7XdByfcAAEH2ftoY6PVGUj2rvM5hl-2nsfj96cklsw9DrY0GyaCKniZZjp06PMgumNTjsTQK41khwaCc_rd3C9XbR6R4mbMxxLMqbapbOzeq93y2vf47xL-Xm/s1600/images.jpg" height="175" width="400" /></a>
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Kafka, in a similar vein, equates this to writing: "We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes." The image at hand, whether a visual image or a sentence-image (to use Ranciere's term), is a fixed or bare repetition, the Platonic repetition of the same, the copy which is always haunted by the spectre of an original but which, precisely for this reason, is false, and can never truly repeat the Idea (per Deleuze), the 'thingness' of a thing. As Baudrillard puts it, "to make an image of an object is to strip the object of all its dimensions one by one: weight, relief, smell, depth, time, continuity and, of course, meaning". To this Deleuze counter-poses the <span style="font-style: italic;">simulacrum</span>, the real repetition of the Nietzschean eternal return which is never repetition of the same. Real repetition is where the <i>new </i>emerges in nature.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzsNrIIJF-3nzWJU4waMkhIxGojycPwNg9x3WPWySJms0NOyVEbUkZ6GIxmSulfRGr9KqpVdcuGZ4ojmBOu8zApcJVC70mYY5UGsnHYrkIfY2v4oZRFXkiMULvgVwaTSnGiHEO6ixDIdP7/s1600/kafka_trio.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzsNrIIJF-3nzWJU4waMkhIxGojycPwNg9x3WPWySJms0NOyVEbUkZ6GIxmSulfRGr9KqpVdcuGZ4ojmBOu8zApcJVC70mYY5UGsnHYrkIfY2v4oZRFXkiMULvgVwaTSnGiHEO6ixDIdP7/s320/kafka_trio.jpg" /></a>
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Far from empty theoretical posturing, what this broadly evokes borders on the atavistic: in virtually every major religion there is some kind of prohibition or taboo related to visual representation - idolatry, the making of graven images, the depiction of the prophet, etc. The fact that such norms are rarely observed, at least in the strictest terms, by the mainstream forms of institutionalized religions is evidence of a tension - an internal difference - at the heart of religious traditions. The Heideggerian poetics taken up by Baudrillard and Kafka hints at an ancient gnostic principle abandoned by theologians and organized religions in their gradual transition to rationalist modernity.<br />
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Even Heidegger's rejection of the split between word and image can be accomodated within a gnostic framework. The prohibition on 'taking the Lord's name in vain', or even more explicitly, the Hebrew prohibition on writing it down at all, alternately insisting that the name, if written, be stripped of vowels (YHWH), aims precisely at this. What is holy cannot be imagined, represented or fixed in any way, and this applies to visual image and text alike. In order for it to be present, it must remain immanent. The gnostic God, to put it in Deleuzian terms, is the ultimate 'dark precursor', the differenciator of differences, the object=x which ensures the communication between disparate series by never being in its proper place, remaining a void.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrPOTri1X3GeAJVuN6iNKT86oNpw7KMdN_N6eT_D_jtnY69G9sJKYJ67pPbJOhUQgKtS18atCD3_yeDo_dm_UXiaMitAtgugbcOsHZNhohhdkvgWNfAgFZYTn4CJpvsN2WuU8vGdCBvfek/s1600/1969817_orig.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrPOTri1X3GeAJVuN6iNKT86oNpw7KMdN_N6eT_D_jtnY69G9sJKYJ67pPbJOhUQgKtS18atCD3_yeDo_dm_UXiaMitAtgugbcOsHZNhohhdkvgWNfAgFZYTn4CJpvsN2WuU8vGdCBvfek/s320/1969817_orig.jpg" /></a>
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An exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris a few years ago explored this very aspect of the visual image - entitled Voids, the exhibition was a retrospective of empty exhibitions over the past 50 years, starting with Yves Klein's 1958 exhibition of an empty gallery space at the Galerie Iris Clert. Empty space features as a platform for envisioning the invisible, for contemplating space in time, opening our eyes to the 'thingness' of things, their absence. It is a way of repatriating the exorcised content of the captured image, releasing the violated image back into the void, redeeming the holy.<br />
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It it this dimension again that is activated in Chinese artist Zhang Huan's "Berlin Buddha" - a performance-art piece in which a buddha sculpture made of concrete was ripped apart and reduced to dust in front of the gallery audience. This reference to the buddhist notion of 'killing the buddha' also hints at a shared element of gnosis that traverses a whole range of philosophical and religious traditions - from the Pagan ritual of the 'May King' or 'killing the god' to the Adonis myth (which echoes the earlier Sumerian 'Tammuz' and a number of other ancient myths of death/rebirth), the Crucifixion of Christ, etc. The very existence (as opposed to Being) of 'God' in any sense - as statue, flesh-and-blood, even ghost or spirit - is an imaging, a fixation, and therefore sacrilege.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQfx438ybJpjGVgK813YX1_sBVrLjOwx1EDDAQdcSj6Gjs4IO6XPDfpx6B_d206Ko-JGeXcJW-kM0SVW9XFIKkHXKkJLx8-adrDmi6rK1ZsEIefcgHQ3Zh1O5gdCYyS9PlAbLjwb0UKSxc/s1600/pic_2007_05_04s.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQfx438ybJpjGVgK813YX1_sBVrLjOwx1EDDAQdcSj6Gjs4IO6XPDfpx6B_d206Ko-JGeXcJW-kM0SVW9XFIKkHXKkJLx8-adrDmi6rK1ZsEIefcgHQ3Zh1O5gdCYyS9PlAbLjwb0UKSxc/s1600/pic_2007_05_04s.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a>
<br />
<br />
Where the Kafka/Baudrillard gnostic indictment of the image and Heidegger's poetics part ways is in that Heidegger does not exclude the possibility of an authentic image. In Baudrillard's gnostic vision, the image is by necessity representation and therefore loss. But this seems too easy a dismissal for Heidegger - it is possible for an image to evoke the thingness of things, to show without <i>representing</i>.<br />
<br />
It may be precisely this that makes Diane Arbus' photographs unique: it seems all too simple to say that she portrayed 'freaks'. Her uniqueness is that in her photographs, 'freaks' - giants, dwarves, transvestites, circus performers, those on the fringe of ordinary society - appeared normal, at home with themselves, ordinary; whereas the 'normal' people (i.e. couple with child strolling down 5th avenue) appeared unsettled, out of place, weird, plastic.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9KQjUpTYDiOwA-NgeKNoYDWUjqVk0N-wQc_asKmx9eggeJ6qtqA1XV9ttBNG-xLXcMlqZrZNPSiRKMCLGbg9N5Pje0wyrhll97jiZUnzZbMWhzJB0EuRaBDdfSQK8UoLZPUiqQGxf9PKk/s1600/tumblr_m0w57mWNbf1qg5meno1_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9KQjUpTYDiOwA-NgeKNoYDWUjqVk0N-wQc_asKmx9eggeJ6qtqA1XV9ttBNG-xLXcMlqZrZNPSiRKMCLGbg9N5Pje0wyrhll97jiZUnzZbMWhzJB0EuRaBDdfSQK8UoLZPUiqQGxf9PKk/s1600/tumblr_m0w57mWNbf1qg5meno1_1280.jpg" height="256" width="256" /></a>
<br />
<br />
One shouldn't mistake this overarching theme in Arbus' work as a gesture of equation: the photographs form two distinct series. The common term between them, repeated in each series - 'freak' for lack of a better term - far from being an identity or similarity between them, is precisely what grounds their difference, what distinguishes the two series. It is the object=x, the 'dark precursor', the differenciator of differences. It establishes a point of contact between them, differenciates them, while remaining invisible, or outside the frame and without any positive content: one cannot locate it ('freakishness') precisely or explain its meaning, but it is there nevertheless, running silently througout each series. Through this displacement and repetition Arbus' photographs evoke something truly new, carving out a unique territory among images.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW9GRi2e0fSNL3Vnov_W0myRaw6SI3U3nG7BO5U9ge6VcV9gD0HTv340ukSy6_TeQQhMv-GBulvfsQL9ClfTBKBihoxun-pu3ocf0T0ZdDys7LUSlMf1gEKdyWNXricNC0Zy0qcMDZRUn1/s1600/foto_diane_arbus_34.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW9GRi2e0fSNL3Vnov_W0myRaw6SI3U3nG7BO5U9ge6VcV9gD0HTv340ukSy6_TeQQhMv-GBulvfsQL9ClfTBKBihoxun-pu3ocf0T0ZdDys7LUSlMf1gEKdyWNXricNC0Zy0qcMDZRUn1/s200/foto_diane_arbus_34.jpg" height="192" width="256" /></a>
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<br />
It is no surprise that, in her senior high school yearbook where each student was asked to provide, as a caption for their graduation photo, a statement about their goals in life upon graduating, among all the boring statements by her fellow students on career and marriage aspirations, Arbus stood out like a sore thumb with these words: "To shake the tree of life and bring down fruits unheard of."<br />
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<br />
<b>[common humanity and resistance: <i>quo vadis, domine?</i>]</b>
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<br />
The first time Christ is crucified, he is merely a holy man who gives up his life for the sake of another, only one among many Judeans killed by the Romans in this gruesome manner. It is only with the second crucifixion - the repetition - that the truly new emerges, and the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth is transformed into Christ, the redeemer - it is only the second time, with a second death, that 'God' truly dies on the cross.<br />
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The dark precursor is thus constituted retroactively (per Deleuze), and 'God' - the object=x - emerges as the invisible differenciator between the series, establishing a point of communication between them but without an identity or similarity; 'God' is the pure difference between series that repeat one another, the new that emerges in each repetition. It is the 'esoteric word' that ensures communication, while establishing against the background of the 'same' the difference between each series: the spiritual 'killing of the Buddha', the pagan ritual of spring ('killing the May King'), the crucified flesh-and-blood God of Christianity.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9BpLSbosSZnutlKa2SiZgfVYzK8aGkuisMQVxD2YZKZAdkLqv1vGDLAsnbH99WBkAQqKer2irddmmgtKH-yaOH-79ufIkRCP91K9E8uOo5yQjiOQ-yiOTv9Ffa_zDLgo21eU8Hs6zb0Ue/s1600/egypt1.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9BpLSbosSZnutlKa2SiZgfVYzK8aGkuisMQVxD2YZKZAdkLqv1vGDLAsnbH99WBkAQqKer2irddmmgtKH-yaOH-79ufIkRCP91K9E8uOo5yQjiOQ-yiOTv9Ffa_zDLgo21eU8Hs6zb0Ue/s320/egypt1.jpg" /></a>
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<br />
In this sense, the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring and Iranian revolts - in opposing state/religious authority from a position of faith (in many cases), referencing religious tradition - set out from the position of Antigone/Jesus. Rather than simply resistance, Antigone's position in ethical terms circumvents state authority (Creon) to establish a direct relation to a higher authority beyond the state ("the unwritten laws of heaven…"); in much the same way, Jesus opposes the Roman empire by appealing to the 'Kingdom of God'.
<br />
<br />
This is perhaps the result of Walter Benjamin's insight that state authority rests not on a 'rule of law' but on rule by 'exception' or whim, disguised by concepts such as 'the rule of law'. If the 'rule of law' can be suspended whenever it proves inconvenient to those in power, it becomes questionable whether it ever was an authentic principle or <i>modus operandi</i>. Within these parameters, the form that an authentic resistance must take, rather than operating within this farcical system of rules and rights granted by the state, is to invoke an <i>authentic</i> exception, as Benjamin puts it - an 'unwritten' authority beyond the state - and destroy the law as such, clean the slate.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghexzzCSjQVeGe9VOnb0419V5gGwAUAAN9qROqMOQmzpjuuuZgDSiFh-e5gICBN0KROnIldXL6thg2cuj1eNgQD4CopzXF6Bdb262aMUnI0Y3Vz46Udj9NbwZ7pgies_YdG6udp3EsCT0T/s1600/arabspring3.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghexzzCSjQVeGe9VOnb0419V5gGwAUAAN9qROqMOQmzpjuuuZgDSiFh-e5gICBN0KROnIldXL6thg2cuj1eNgQD4CopzXF6Bdb262aMUnI0Y3Vz46Udj9NbwZ7pgies_YdG6udp3EsCT0T/s1600/arabspring3.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a>
<br />
<br />
This theological dimension cannot be underestimated in the context of the struggle in the Arab world, for what may be obvious reasons: by invoking the internal difference, the Egyptian or Iranian protesters' insistence on <i>faith</i>, far from indicating a 'lesser evil' or reformist moderation, radically lays bare the real struggle - not between Western liberal democracy and Islam, but between the authentic personal faith of gnostic populism on one hand, and the inauthentic authoritarian faith of those in power, on the other. They share a term - <i>Allah </i>- but this shared term is an emptiness that in fact differenciates them and splits them apart, their 'dark precursor'. It is the same struggle that goes on worldwide, traversing systems and religions. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinR9upbbg4CJ9sNnJQlUSb07M7rj6U0mTP2SOcArnCDXrv9mNJE1R5eEl46EFnV_t4HJzer_DsHBXRI4m0ZE5BG7CSZJ4aFkbvyDo2vLZHl-E6omqsOILT8NraZ4nPRorka0KXjWdENyVi/s1600/arab-spring.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinR9upbbg4CJ9sNnJQlUSb07M7rj6U0mTP2SOcArnCDXrv9mNJE1R5eEl46EFnV_t4HJzer_DsHBXRI4m0ZE5BG7CSZJ4aFkbvyDo2vLZHl-E6omqsOILT8NraZ4nPRorka0KXjWdENyVi/s1600/arab-spring.jpg" height="164" width="320" /></a>
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<br />
In her essay on Hegel and Haiti, Susan Buck-Morss relates the story of a contingent of French soldiers sent by Napoleon to put down the slaves' revolt; upon hearing a group of former slaves sing the Marseillaise (which in one verse denounces "l'esclavage antique"), the Frenchmen decide not to ambush the rebels, laying down their own weapons and wondering aloud if they aren't fighting on the wrong side. Their <i>faith</i> - in the ideals of the French Revolution - is authentic. "Common humanity appears at the edges," Buck-Morss concludes. Power comes from below.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLaPbRhszImvE3x7BOE5eKVp2qyhw5qiPHAgMyaNaZuf7JQf2kE4QnPHPZNd6vIrI21-mIJK4dpoF4mOeqE3pIb5XF3X3IJmqDt6GAHqj7WB2TcDHRympcNzDWVsOmB5Hyh_emCTOg1hK6/s1600/chaines_esclaves.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLaPbRhszImvE3x7BOE5eKVp2qyhw5qiPHAgMyaNaZuf7JQf2kE4QnPHPZNd6vIrI21-mIJK4dpoF4mOeqE3pIb5XF3X3IJmqDt6GAHqj7WB2TcDHRympcNzDWVsOmB5Hyh_emCTOg1hK6/s1600/chaines_esclaves.jpg" height="169" width="200" /></a>
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<br />
If I may digress a little, to quote at length from Tolstoy, <i>War and Peace</i>: "in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power - the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns - should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes."
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Asserting further that the major historical players are in the end far more caught up in the inertial momentum of history than the people they command, Tolstoy concludes, "A king is history's slave."
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By contrast, in the words of Salvador Allende, "La historia es nuestra y la hacen los pueblos." It is the people who make history, whether they know it or not.
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The fundamental opposition here - between the unwritten and the written, between the sacred/holy and the concrete/fixed, between the raw, volatile will of the people and established state authority - invokes what Deleuze refers to as the only real opposition in nature: between the Idea and representation. Real difference is always internal, and it goes all the way down - this is precisely the consequence of Heidegger's insight that words, through poetry, can create images, and that images in turn can express absence; like the wave/particle duality in quantum physics, the split between word and image is internal to both word and image. In the words of Walt Whitman, "I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes; We convince by our presence."
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Or as Louis Armstrong - jazz gnostic - put it, when asked how he would explain to the uninitiated what jazz music was all about: "some people, if they don't know, you just can't tell 'em."
(The idea of <i>jazz</i>, beyond even the boundaries of genre or music as an art form, embodies in the purest sense the notion of repetition=difference.)
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<br />
Not to miss out on a more contemporary pop culture reference when it rears its pretty little head - I've never found the song 'Royals' that interesting, despite its appropriation by Bill de Blasio in his progressive campaign for New York Mayor - musically and lyrically, 'Team' is Lorde's real gem, with this lyric especially:
<br /><br />
We live in cities <br />
you'll never see on the screen<br />
Not very pretty, but we sure know <br />
how to run things<br />
Living in ruins <br />
of a palace within my dreams<br />
And you know<br />
we're on each other's team
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It's those cross-connections again, that cut across cultures and make visible the real differences, and real allegiances - like the French soldiers and Haitian slaves singing the Marseillaise, the Syrian rebels and Bostonians exchanging messages of solidarity, or the Tahrir Square protesters in Egypt holding signs saying 'we stand with the people of Wisconsin' in the middle of Governor Scott Walker's union-busting campaign. We're on each other's team. We live in cities you'll never see on the screen - the revolution will not be televised, as Gill Scott-Heron famously put it.
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* * *
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"What becomes established with the new is precisely not the new," (Deleuze) and this is one of the pitfalls of any revolutionary struggle. A revolution can never <i>establish</i> itself or insinuate itself in laws and institutions, let alone state organs; it cannot make an <i>image</i> of itself - the revolution will not be televised. It is in this sense that effective resistance to state authority, by invoking an authentic exception, must rely on Benjaminian 'divine violence' - divine because it is 'unwritten', because it cannot inscribe itself in (written) law. In order to remain vital, revolution must remain a threatening presence, a force of nature, a pure momentum poised against organs of authority as such; its function - and its everlasting hope - can only ever be to set in motion a wheel of critical mass when necessary, to produce complex repetitions out of which emerge authentic differences, to perpetually "shake the tree of life and bring down fruits unheard of."<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRl-pBuSrsfw_pO6dhXWphiXikC9YrwR2hxAxkeYJQw4E4-SUUsRYlCt2LYwcKReL9mfSd8fCU9Gb7Cm9vWV_53Us6c_Zsii4Limqh_sUbUJtuJD2vhvA25z4CeZo2F9yub49ebMXj8aHf/s1600/3141.jpg" ><img border="0" align="middle" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRl-pBuSrsfw_pO6dhXWphiXikC9YrwR2hxAxkeYJQw4E4-SUUsRYlCt2LYwcKReL9mfSd8fCU9Gb7Cm9vWV_53Us6c_Zsii4Limqh_sUbUJtuJD2vhvA25z4CeZo2F9yub49ebMXj8aHf/s1600/3141.jpg" height="180" width="200" /></a><br />
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</p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-76334553693878303592014-01-08T02:14:00.001-08:002023-10-17T02:20:17.224-07:00Democracy is Coming to the USA: Kshama Sawant, the New Face of Socialism in America<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<br />
Following on my closing comments in the last post about the election of Bill de Blasio as Mayor of New York, on a somewhat related note, a somehow even more promising ray of hope in US politics is the recent <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/seattle-socialist-kshama-sawant-council-member" target="_blank">election of Kshama Sawant to the Seattle City Council</a>.
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It's not just that she unapologetically describes herself as a socialist in a country where 'socialism' has become a bad word, nonetheless winning a surprise victory over a well-funded, business-friendly Democrat incumbent. And it's not just her articulate, direct, no-nonsense, cut-straight-to-the-chase public speaking style; or her experience as an organizer and campaigner for OWS and raising the minimum wage. And it's not just that she says all these things we want politicians to say but that they never say - even the most promising ones - for fear of upsetting their corporate sponsors, or being perceived as radical. It's that she does all these things, bucking all the trends and received wisdom of US electoral politics, changing the game as it were - running a low-budget campaign with no big business support, with less than half the campaign funding of her incumbent opponent - and succeeds in the most grass-roots way possible: by getting the voters' attention.<br />
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"There will be no backroom deals with corporations or their political servants," she proclaims in her <a href="http://kuow.org/post/socialist-kshama-sawant-delivers-blistering-speech-inauguration" target="_blank">inauguration speech</a> yesterday, and I believe her. "There will be no rotten sell-out of the people I represent."<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="360" scrolling="no" src="http://www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=5011401&file=1" width="480"></iframe>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Skip to 29:30 for Kshama's swearing-in and speech.</span><br />
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"A completely dysfunctional Congress does manage to agree on one thing," she says emphatically, "regular increases in their already bloated salaries…Yet at the same time allowing the federal minimum wage to stagnate, and fall further and further behind inflation…We have the obscene spectacle of the average corporate CEO getting seven thousand dollars an hour, while the lowest-paid workers are called presumptuous in their demand for just $15."
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This is sexy stuff, people.
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Sawant's response to Boeing's threat to move jobs out of Washington state if they don't get tax breaks and wage concessions? She calls their tactics 'economic terrorism', urging state leaders to reject "blackmail" and tell Boeing's CEOs, if you want to go, you can go - we don't need you. "The machines are here, the workers are here. Let us take this entire productive activity into democratic public ownership and retool the machines to produce mass transit."<br />
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Fuck yeah. This is what I've never understood about even some of the more progressive, left-leaning folks I know around here - they never seem to see a way out of this type of situation but to give in to corporate demands. This is why the unions are weak, and why the political establishment is for sale to the highest bidder - because there isn't enough of this type of thinking. Because people are naively afraid of taking risks, taking or even contemplating radical measures - like taking over factories - in response to what I will argue are just as radical threats and measures, macroeconomic blackmail and terrorism, such as the outsourcing and wholesale transfer of entire production systems to locales where workers can be more easily exploited. They did it in Argentina with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaSinPat">FaSinPat</a> and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers'_self-management#South_America">fabricas recuperadas</a>, why not here? If Big Business has you by the proverbial balls, you grab them by the balls.<br />
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This lady is pretty convincing, and she clearly means business. She could go much further than Seattle City Council. I really hope she does. And I hope there will be more like her.
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="225" src="http://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2014/1/6/a_socialist_elected_in_seattle_kshama" width="400"></iframe>
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It just might be that, as Leonard Cohen put it, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5rQAGDehWI">democracy is coming to the USA.</a><br />
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<p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-9578903482523138862014-01-04T16:47:00.002-08:002023-10-17T02:20:28.377-07:00Universal History in The Dark Knight Rises: A Tale of Two (or More) Cities<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<br />
I finally saw <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i> a few weeks ago, and have been mulling over some ideas ever since.<br />
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First off, I don't see the 'Occupy' reference at all - certainly not a criticism or indictment of Occupy Wall Street. I mean, seriously? Just because someone attacks the New York Stock Exchange, it's a reference to the Occupy movement? Are people really that hysterical nowadays? Did the Occupy movement have anything to do with using high-tech weaponry to take over an entire city's infrastructure and capture an atom bomb in order to blow up the city and kill everyone? Anywhere in that ballpark? Nope. I don't see it. Frankly, any suggestion that this is a criticism of the Occupy movement is plainly, on its face stupid. Or hysterical. Or both.<br />
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Yes, yes, I know - the rhetoric. When Bane blows up the tunnels and takes over Gotham City, capturing the entire police force underground, in his speech at the stadium he proclaims <i>'We come not as conquerors, but as liberators.'</i> He then proceeds to talk at length about how he is giving the city 'back to the people', ridding them of their corrupt leaders who have been telling them a pack of lies all these years. I get it.<br />
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However the thing about that is, there is a pretty blatant, neatly spelled-out and virtually <i>literal</i> historical reference here, which it seems virtually everyone who has commented on and written about this film has entirely missed. The words spoken by Bane in the stadium speech are almost verbatim the words spoken to the Iraqi people by one General Stanley Maude in the <a href="http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/The_Proclamation_of_Baghdad" target="_blank">Proclamation of Baghdad</a>, on the occasion of the British occupation of Iraq, way back in 1917:<br />
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"Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators."<br />
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<iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/h9xNy5z8PIA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<br />
After which the British army proceeded to maim and murder a large part of the civilian population of Iraq, quelling revolt with one of the very first documented uses of air-to-ground artillery against a civilian population in recorded history, decades before Guernica - a kind of Guernica before Guernica. (As related by Sven Lindqvist in <i><a href="http://thenewpress.com/index.php?metaproductid=1110&option=com_title&task=view_title" target="_blank">A History of Bombing</a></i>)<br />
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One British officer on the scene, Arthur 'Bomber' Harris (later responsible for the firebombing of German cities in WWII; and in particular notorious for choosing to target civilians rather than, say, railway transport links, including those used to transport Jews to the death camps, despite pressure from Jewish groups in Britain) reported with enthusiasm the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/apr/19/iraq.arts">remarkable effect that mowing down scores of Iraqis </a>with heavy air-to-ground artillery had on the surviving population. Talk about state-sponsored terrorism.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU6uzpnkAlxYb8JcIZDlN8_fmyI5gujNITX71lwdoOOvVOTxuRflSOGZ82x1iwTcSau095Glg6Nn-A2gV42TWYlRFEA7D2LBDoGrHhGOfuWxZDa7jxt_K0kuymKYQZXLY2atoDUnZuiU2H/s1600/Baghdad+1917+-+British+Army+marches+in.jpg"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU6uzpnkAlxYb8JcIZDlN8_fmyI5gujNITX71lwdoOOvVOTxuRflSOGZ82x1iwTcSau095Glg6Nn-A2gV42TWYlRFEA7D2LBDoGrHhGOfuWxZDa7jxt_K0kuymKYQZXLY2atoDUnZuiU2H/s400/Baghdad+1917+-+British+Army+marches+in.jpg" width="400" /></a>
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Needless to say, the same rhetoric also blatantly echoes that deployed in Iraq 80-something years later, this time by the Americans. Wasn't it all about "winning hearts and minds" and "we're here to free you from your corrupt regime", and so on, and so forth? Anyone remember all the talk of 'regime change'? before they started all the torturing and murdering, that is - resulting in the death of over <a href="http://wikileaks.org/irq/" target="_blank">100,000 people in a useless war started on false pretenses.</a> Bane, too, is on a mission to rid Gotham city of its corrupt, lying leaders and 'give it back to the people'.<br />
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Paul Wolfowitz, one of the key neocon ideologues, notoriously <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/leadup-iraq-war-timeline" target="_blank">told a congressional hearing</a>: "I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators…"<br />
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<iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tzK97Aaj_U8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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The fact that Bane, along with Ras al-Gul, seems to have a vaguely middle-eastern or central Asian origin further reinforces this link. The entire story could be seen as a complex role-reversal scenario - we are shown in vivid detail what it might look like if a foreign power occupied a major American city saying 'we're here to liberate you from your corrupt leaders' and then proceeded to commit unspeakable crimes. Gotham is Baghdad, Bane is any old US or British general in Iraq, and the underlying message is: this is how they see us, the so-called liberators...<br />
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Given that the writing/directing Nolan brothers team are a couple of well-educated Brits (Christopher is an alum of my alma mater, UCL) is a reliable indicator that this cannot be a coincidence. They even suggest as much in the script, when Commissioner Gordon tells Blake: "You're a detective now, son. You're not allowed to believe in coincidence anymore."<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip_2q8BI0Ea8HTq0kMbcS9HOgRoYzXX5QbLQ9g5In1SflpQXUj_WKY7DzeIh0dFkx1lOyE_lbr1SsOochDr5KBtmOEORg6-kCWvhGHSxI1K_O9LzjXK2JzH1Nat35Wqy1eRKagHrjhCZus/s1600/images.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip_2q8BI0Ea8HTq0kMbcS9HOgRoYzXX5QbLQ9g5In1SflpQXUj_WKY7DzeIh0dFkx1lOyE_lbr1SsOochDr5KBtmOEORg6-kCWvhGHSxI1K_O9LzjXK2JzH1Nat35Wqy1eRKagHrjhCZus/s320/images.jpg" title="" width="320" /></a>
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One could of course view the referential whole of the story as ambiguous - it could be a reference to <i>both</i> Occupy and the empty liberation rhetoric of imperialist overlords with ulterior motives, along with the ambiguity of revolutionary language that unites them. Nolan is reported to have acknowledged the influence of Dickens' <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i> on the writing of <i>The Dark Knight Rises - </i>a story of the French Revolution, which unlike Occupy certainly involved plenty of revolutionary violence. Bane, then, is a figure in the cast of Robespierre, though undoubtedly far more extreme or fanatical, given that his commitment to revolutionary goals is nonexistent and his aim is ultimately extermination - destruction of the city. The revolutionary rhetoric is deployed purely to create chaos and buy time.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC2bBstUQIizrCy7Wa1h6hkZ7KyyESRv2mNSI9wCUybL2QKrkBz-FLZRftoJDsuKd3VCMDGW13VPbysEtz4WBefdftBYQ7lm4k6FfHP5XGnD5ExJdyydaFCXr3VhF9wptmWlhqDZkHsElM/s1600/tale_of_two_cities.jpg"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC2bBstUQIizrCy7Wa1h6hkZ7KyyESRv2mNSI9wCUybL2QKrkBz-FLZRftoJDsuKd3VCMDGW13VPbysEtz4WBefdftBYQ7lm4k6FfHP5XGnD5ExJdyydaFCXr3VhF9wptmWlhqDZkHsElM/s320/tale_of_two_cities.jpg" width="320" /></a>
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In a <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/christopher-nolan-dark-knight-rises-isn-t-political-20120720" target="_blank">Rolling Stone interview</a>, Nolan denied any intent to vilify the Occupy movement, stating "If the populist movement is manipulated by somebody who is evil, that surely is a criticism of the evil person. You could also say the conditions the evil person is exploiting are problematic and should be addressed...You don't want to alienate people, you want to create a universal story."<br />
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Right, so - legitimate concerns, genuine need for social change, exploited by a villain with ulterior motives. And we have a 'universal story' - one that speaks to different contexts, time periods, different points of view. Role reversal is precisely at the heart of this historically-grounded universality - an intersubjective collective empathy accessed by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrC_yuzO-Ss" target="_blank">walking in someone else's shoes</a>, or for that matter <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp43OdtAAkM" target="_blank">swapping places</a>. If this is a tale of two cities, it could just as well be Gotham/New York and (the spectre of) Baghdad, for instance.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxqpkz3p23zzOL_p7FxKl5Q-YtI7gisKqowN0S2RvwzOON833NiJufkh58hPg7ZOlMcFbYPwY61zdjGebW51coIGKEONCdNQjGnKzV_fMXdtVfJFFvXCOmGtKXbXNWU-b1MFOxpgNV-pJY/s1600/french-revolution.jpg"><img border="0" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxqpkz3p23zzOL_p7FxKl5Q-YtI7gisKqowN0S2RvwzOON833NiJufkh58hPg7ZOlMcFbYPwY61zdjGebW51coIGKEONCdNQjGnKzV_fMXdtVfJFFvXCOmGtKXbXNWU-b1MFOxpgNV-pJY/s320/french-revolution.jpg" width="320" /></a>
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When asked whether Bruce Wayne would vote for Mitt Romney, Nolan replies "Before or after Bruce goes broke?" He is clearly hinting at a fairly materialist message about how economic circumstances dictate one's political perspective. And the implicit lesson - the moral of the story - is a variation on the old biblical 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. Or to put it in Game Theory terms, it suggests the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat" target="_blank">'TIT FOR TAT' strategy </a>, which has been <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation" target="_blank">shown to be the simplest and most successful</a> in cooperative games such as the iterated prisoner's dilemma - demonstrating that over the long term, altruism and cooperation are (paradoxically, perhaps) closely linked to self-interest, and more beneficial to the individual as well as the whole of society than selfishness and 'dog eat dog' mentality.<br />
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"What's the worst thing our villain Bane can do?" Nolan asks. "What are we most afraid of? He's going to come in and turn our world upside down...That has happened to other societies throughout history, many times, so why not here? Why not Gotham? We want something that moves people and gets under the skin."<br />
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My thoughts exactly. The liberal hysteria about the supposed reference to Occupy seems, perhaps despite best intentions, fairly self-centered and myopic, confined to the relatively simple coordinates of recent American history and binary politics of Republican/Democrat. To me it seemed pretty obvious while watching <i>The Dark Knight Rises </i>that the story was an attempt to re-imagine an experience relatively foreign to Americans - a foreign military occupation by villains utilizing the same duplicitous rhetoric deployed by colonial/hegemonic forces worldwide, throughout history - on contemporary American soil, as if to say "this is what it would look like if this type of thing happened here."<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCzz7eZgxB4VZZ8Pu1U8ZNJF4Bo_Z76r6z7_d9rmCAZdhQsBDyTSM3OiBagpnKqegEDkO3BWsFZ0txQtJdnds8P7s4WtaYphvD4HYcOZpvqROTfh4EbC89gBA-enNgCvDabwtV9QeU5I1U/s1600/Aerial_view_of_the_Pentagon_during_rescue_operations_post-September_11_attack.jpg"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCzz7eZgxB4VZZ8Pu1U8ZNJF4Bo_Z76r6z7_d9rmCAZdhQsBDyTSM3OiBagpnKqegEDkO3BWsFZ0txQtJdnds8P7s4WtaYphvD4HYcOZpvqROTfh4EbC89gBA-enNgCvDabwtV9QeU5I1U/s320/Aerial_view_of_the_Pentagon_during_rescue_operations_post-September_11_attack.jpg" width="320" /></a>
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And that's the important point, the key transposition. If so many critics and commentators missed it, that is rather their failure, an index of that same 'failure of imagination' that people talked of in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. It is all too easy to see the horror of Gotham in ahistorical terms, as pure fiction/fantasy, or at best a narrative that panders to xenophobic right-wing fantasies, and miss the clearly historical reference, the whiff of chickens coming home to roost. The failure to genuinely imagine and internalize the possibility that 'this could happen here' - with all its consequences, political and social - is a typical conceit stemming from the myth of American/Western uniqueness and exceptionality. But even more significant is the failure to recognize in the horrors wrought upon Gotham by Bane the very horrors that American or British troops have wrought on distant lands in military campaigns christened with poetic names such as 'Desert Storm' and 'Shock and Awe'. With the same empty rhetoric. And with similarly sinister and self-serving motives.<br />
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Even Slavoj Žižek, in a somewhat surprisingly positivist <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/2012/08/people%E2%80%99s-republic-gotham" target="_blank">critique of <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i>,</a> is unable to answer the key question:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The prospect of the Occupy Wall Street movement taking power and establishing a people’s democracy on the island of Manhattan is so patently absurd, so utterly unrealistic, that one cannot avoid asking the following question – why does a Hollywood blockbuster dream about it? Why does it evoke this spectre? Why does it even fantasise about OWS exploding into a violent takeover?</blockquote>
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One can only be baffled by this question, again, if one fails to see the historical reference(s), the role reversal. The echoes of OWS are purely incidental - and the ambiguously revolutionary rhetoric should only alert us to the way in which the language of revolution is appropriated by figures like Bane, just like the British colonial prelates of yore, or the modern-day military-industrialists of American empire. To view this as a criticism of Occupy is to ignore context - to heed words and ignore actions; to make the mistake of taking seriously the hypocritical American rhetoric of "spreading freedom and democracy".<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifqluFphl2UWySX6Od129eFS026ByTZ3kjW9OZIc3xcdG_6QhTSRmJ_y_iCcEpFh4oQDYTK6zLi6gqnO2uWecZhHpdkt67d190ZwjNKXxLCMYrMfVrEoTLo-_s8XsCtiN4yplzLR70TKyk/s1600/iy0vae.jpg"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifqluFphl2UWySX6Od129eFS026ByTZ3kjW9OZIc3xcdG_6QhTSRmJ_y_iCcEpFh4oQDYTK6zLi6gqnO2uWecZhHpdkt67d190ZwjNKXxLCMYrMfVrEoTLo-_s8XsCtiN4yplzLR70TKyk/s320/iy0vae.jpg" width="320" /></a>
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Among the first to sound the liberal hysteria alarm about the allegedly conservative politics behind <i>The Dark Knight Rises </i>was a <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2011/12/19/the_dark_knight_rises_trailer_is_batman_part_of_the_1_percent_.html" target="_blank">blog post on Slate</a>, which asks the insidious question: is Batman part of the 1 percent? And this only on the basis of a preview, prior to the film's release.
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Where Nolan's vision perhaps encounters a kind of cognitive dissonance in the commentariat is that the structure of political organization evoked in the film is the inverse of that in the <i>Wizard of Oz</i>, a cultural milestone that may go some way in explaining American foreign policy of the past few decades. In the <i>Wizard of Oz</i>, the moment Dorothy accidentally kills the Wicked Witch, the Witch's subjects, freed from her spell, suddenly become good. This type of 'magical thinking' perhaps explains in part why many Americans, including (perhaps) Paul Wolfowitz, may have genuinely believed that the Iraqis would welcome their murderous, racist troops as liberators, once they got rid of the 'evil leader'.<br />
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<i>The Dark Knight Rises</i>, by contrast, gives a far more realistic portrayal of a flawed proto-revolutionary moment, which even Žižek might agree with on second thought - suggesting that revolutions are necessarily violent, and that the removal of even a corrupt leader by a foreign power imposing its will, in the absence of any indigenous revolutionary program, is bound to create a power vacuum and lead to a bad end - a decidedly un-revolutionary one at that. It is in this respect that another criticism of Zizek's is mistaken - Nolan's point is not the typical conservative one, that society needs a strong central state authority to preserve law and order; rather, it is the lack of an organized indigenous revolutionary or reformist initiative of any kind, the imposition of a revolutionary program and removal of authority from the outside, by a foreign agent, that guarantees chaos.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKz9vJuups0rKOqECHNb8V0jY5SHYR1ea-u6Pppovfc5r30imFdJos945x2sUI6BhVz8pB2L95Zzlg-MsaZw4jk8UhUZG3zHm3AapTLqUAVVVzru-g-4MOru1_QfdSxfUFNGTDgZo-RFQz/s1600/Military-Industrial-Complex12.jpg"><img border="0" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKz9vJuups0rKOqECHNb8V0jY5SHYR1ea-u6Pppovfc5r30imFdJos945x2sUI6BhVz8pB2L95Zzlg-MsaZw4jk8UhUZG3zHm3AapTLqUAVVVzru-g-4MOru1_QfdSxfUFNGTDgZo-RFQz/s320/Military-Industrial-Complex12.jpg" width="320" /></a>
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What Žižek seems to be getting at but not quite getting, in the concluding paragraphs of the above-cited piece, is the subversive core of this spectacle - how easily the society of Gotham crumbles when key figures of authority are removed; how easily the people take up Bane's bidding and sack the palaces of the rich, turning the city upside down. This is clearly not an indictment of OWS, or of 'people power', but a fairly subversive suggestion that an unequal society, in which the maintenance of law and order depends on a few figures of authority who can easily be removed or manipulated, a society heavily reliant on a state monopoly over the use of violence, is in fact a weak society - filled with discontent waiting to be unleashed and/or manipulated. That the rule of law, along with all the lofty ideals of a progressive, democratic society, is useless if it is not, as Rousseau put it, 'in the hearts of men'.<br />
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Another interesting echo of Nolan's reference to <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i> is the recent campaign for Mayor of New York. Bill de Blasio, the challenger from the progressive Left and eventual winner (a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/04/bill-de-blasio-new-york-mayor-inaugurated">true Lefty</a> for once) has <a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/new-york-new-york-from-bloomberg-to-de-blasio-it-s-a-tale-of-two-cities-1.1643695" target="_blank">vowed to put an end to New York's 'Tale of Two Cities'</a> - one super-rich, the other abjectly poor.
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It's probably a safe bet that Bruce Wayne, if he's around, voted for de Blasio.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1c3boQ_GoG2oMuLIO7AdC599x-4fle0gnjmmCeTDqBSWDvk987FT6f3BSnju1xxj4toTy1BEYOZKOQdfRMypoqW-YWuy6DxsPQt42ZUgEv9r-xJYbjOGAvW9EZIel29yd-vTpg6nF3BiC/s1600/Bill+de+Blasio.jpg"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1c3boQ_GoG2oMuLIO7AdC599x-4fle0gnjmmCeTDqBSWDvk987FT6f3BSnju1xxj4toTy1BEYOZKOQdfRMypoqW-YWuy6DxsPQt42ZUgEv9r-xJYbjOGAvW9EZIel29yd-vTpg6nF3BiC/s320/Bill+de+Blasio.jpg" width="320" /></a>
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<br />deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-18039143906117742822013-09-26T14:16:00.004-07:002023-10-17T02:20:41.462-07:00Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Only 'Slightly Fundamentally Wrong'<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<p>
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In the wake of the Boston bombings this summer, it is worth remembering that such massacres, and even worse, are a regular occurrence in places like Iraq or Syria. The Syrian rebels themselves drove the point home, expressing condolences to the Boston victims through a touching banner displayed at a protest in the city of Kafranbel:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS7Xm1zA_xTJFOzbXHlGQg-6T5wA_Q7a6VGAwLzpcZ9HPx5vjIwyk9UqKuYrOj-UU1pSpALoew3TEDCPXqoBJyeoPn4CRmLkh_CZR304jelIRIecs-JjcdE-nM_bOwI_0npD4_F-jI8eI0/s1600/image4-400x266.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS7Xm1zA_xTJFOzbXHlGQg-6T5wA_Q7a6VGAwLzpcZ9HPx5vjIwyk9UqKuYrOj-UU1pSpALoew3TEDCPXqoBJyeoPn4CRmLkh_CZR304jelIRIecs-JjcdE-nM_bOwI_0npD4_F-jI8eI0/s1600/image4-400x266.jpg" /></a>
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A group of Bostonians <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/23/boston-syria-messages-of-support/2107517/" target="_blank">replied</a> with their own banner:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgacjjSHVcfEGL-Wt_xEhab1csoyQbtYDdYfg3HBXBK9I3hN2Qck47HRHuWJqKKqMgMnh7nWijyO0AH8hlVIpro3ZL3asRXB-PmwObMELLw2coSC5cNVdy3de-NXTow87dmETUzTsmJfuXW/s1600/to-syria-from-boston-4_3.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgacjjSHVcfEGL-Wt_xEhab1csoyQbtYDdYfg3HBXBK9I3hN2Qck47HRHuWJqKKqMgMnh7nWijyO0AH8hlVIpro3ZL3asRXB-PmwObMELLw2coSC5cNVdy3de-NXTow87dmETUzTsmJfuXW/s1600/to-syria-from-boston-4_3.jpg" /></a>
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The beauty of these reciprocal gestures is that despite the apparent incongruity, neither minimizes the other's tragedy. They contextualize one another in a way that transcends the global political game that their respective governments are involved in, authentically approaching a kind of collective intersubjectivity. To paraphrase C.G. Jung, the closer together the individuals, the weaker the state, and vice versa. This works across national boundaries, too. True communal/collective spirit is not and should never be about negating the individual, but on the contrary - it is about making the collective, and each individual within it, stronger. Individualism, as commonly understood in the sense of 'each man for himself' - weakens and alienates us, isolating and exposing each individual to the whims of state authority.<br />
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This Syria-Boston exchange of solidarity is not an isolated instance, either - during the Egyptian protests against Mubarak, while the people of Wisconsin were in the streets protesting against Governor Walker's all-out assault on unions, there were reports of Egyptian protesters holding signs in solidarity with Wisconsin. And it is not far-fetched to imagine that the domino effect that may have played a role in the 'Arab Spring' uprisings goes well beyond the Arab world, as discontent with governments worldwide grows and protest movements are spawned, from Spain to Greece to Turkey, Brazil, Israel, just to name a few of the bigger ones.
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Vladimir Putin may be a total crony proto-fascist, but it's always amusing to see crony politicians/states <a href="http://rt.com/news/putin-boston-bombing-terrorists-381/" target="_blank">calling out one another over each other's doublespeak.</a> In particular, this: “I was always appalled when our western partners and the western media called the terrorist, who did bloody crimes in our country, ‘insurgents’, and almost never ‘terrorists’,” Putin explained, in reference to the fact that Russian authorities had alerted US authorities to Tamerlan Tsarnaev's activities and links to fundamentalist groups, long before the Boston bombings.<br />
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This reminds me of the film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0233812/" target="_blank">'Good Kurd, Bad Kurd'</a> - which explores the baffling incongruity of the Kurds in Turkey being on the CIA list of terrorist organizations (Turkey is a NATO ally), while the Iraqi Kurds are 'freedom fighters', even though they are both part of the same national liberation movement and fighting for the same thing.<br />
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It would be trite to criticize the US media for devoting more coverage to a tragedy closer to home - however another incongruity is worth noting. On the heels of the Boston bombings, two days later in fact, an explosion at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, claimed far more casualties - at least 15 killed and more than 160 injured, with more than 150 buildings damaged or destroyed - registering as a 2.2 richter scale tremor.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEAh6sobdyU9OfDFDxwmn8ckKrvlR_Y9xjOb4aURzUzfisM1lUw4Wn8xj183AtpmGFgsPFIaGoObohl7kQXy25VgO7b6KeBR9UrbNOnI9m9qFBcRv5LcLJ_CfP5nON_ZiH8pu84mbsVKWW/s1600/Firefighters-check-a-dest-011.jpg"><img border="0" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEAh6sobdyU9OfDFDxwmn8ckKrvlR_Y9xjOb4aURzUzfisM1lUw4Wn8xj183AtpmGFgsPFIaGoObohl7kQXy25VgO7b6KeBR9UrbNOnI9m9qFBcRv5LcLJ_CfP5nON_ZiH8pu84mbsVKWW/s400/Firefighters-check-a-dest-011.jpg" width="400" /></a>
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According to an <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/22/texas-explosion-workplace-safety-cuts" target="_blank">article in the Guardian</a>, this is largely attributable to austerity cuts to agencies such as OSHA as part of the right's war on 'big government'. Greater reliance on self-reporting following the de-funding of government enforcement is "just one more part of a cycle that began in this country with the collapse of collective bargaining, an institution that at one point created workplace safety committees, which took the place of both expansive state regulation and whistleblowing as a means of securing safe places to work...It's no coincidence that many of the worst such incidents occur in states affected by both austerity cuts and low or declining union membership."<br />
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Indeed, OSHA had not made a site visit to the West, Texas plant since 1985, despite occasional complaints.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg025BsUGcqsd15VzdwxUV6XkOMqVggphpqLqBmlwAJrMovca8mhD3f4wazpKaE2RUcF1eOuyXQWpAf1_s__QuEIp4WenlXa4DBRfB0xzGRD6KwtBtQFZ3VPhWCre6N1B_G34NhhMYEB77J/s1600/Remains-of-fertilizer-pla-010.jpg"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg025BsUGcqsd15VzdwxUV6XkOMqVggphpqLqBmlwAJrMovca8mhD3f4wazpKaE2RUcF1eOuyXQWpAf1_s__QuEIp4WenlXa4DBRfB0xzGRD6KwtBtQFZ3VPhWCre6N1B_G34NhhMYEB77J/s400/Remains-of-fertilizer-pla-010.jpg" width="400" /></a>
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And yet - industrial accidents in remote, rural areas are just not sexy stuff, like terrorism. You can't make spy stories or exciting terrorist-hunting flicks like Zero Dark Thirty out of that.<br />
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So the US government pours billions of taxpayer dollars into spying on the entire world and fighting a 'terrorist' threat that, according to the <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications" target="_blank">FBI's own statistics</a>, claims less lives globally every year - <u>12,533</u> in 2011, virtually none in the US - than there are <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-1" target="_blank">gun homicides in the United States alone</a>. (<u>14,612</u> in 2011)<br />
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The threat from terrorism was never particularly significant in comparative terms, even if you take an anomaly year like 2001, and factor in the <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terror/terrorism-2000-2001" target="_blank">deaths on September 11</a>. The total number of deaths from terrorism in the United States, from 1980 to 2001, including September 11? <b><u>2,993</u>.</b> In 2007, the highest year on record since 2001? <u><b>15,732 </b>deaths from terrorism globally</u>, of which <u>only 33 Americans, 21 of those in Iraq</u>. Tom Diaz, until recently a senior analyst at the Violence Policy Center, gives <a href="http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-killed-by-guns-than-by-terrorists/" target="_blank">similar figures</a>: "In 2010, <u><b>13,186</b> people died in terrorist attacks worldwide; in that same year, in America alone, <b>31,672</b> people lost their lives in gun-related deaths.</u>" That's a global rate of 0.23 per 100,000 population for 2007 (or 0.00023%), and 0.19 per 100,000 population for 2010.(0.00019%)<br />
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By contrast, here are some interesting bullet points:
</p>
<ul>
<li>According to OSHA, there were <a href="https://www.osha.gov/oshstats/commonstats.html" target="_blank">4,609 fatal industrial accidents</a> in the USA in 2011 - an improvement compared to 20 years ago, but a slight increase on 2009. That's a rate of 1.4 per 100,000 population, about <u>6 times greater than the global rate of deaths from terrorism</u>, according to the FBI's 2007 figures, and <u>139 times greater than the rate of Americans killed by terrorists, worldwide.</u></li>
<li>Over <a href="http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/transportation/motor_vehicle_accidents_and_fatalities.html" target="_blank">30,000 Americans die in motor vehicle accidents</a> each year. That's 9.6 per 100,000 population, about 48 times greater than the global rate of deaths from terrorism, and <u>900 times greater than the number of Americans killed by terrorism every year.</u></li>
<li>According to a <a href="http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-finds-45000-deaths-annually-linked-to-lack-of-health-coverage/" target="_blank">Harvard study</a>, over <b><u>44,789</u></b> Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance. That's 14.4 per 100,000 population, about <u>60 times greater than the global rate of deaths from terrorism</u>. That's also an annual rate about <u>15 times greater than the number of Americans killed by terrorism in 2001 (the year of September 11)</u>, and 1,357 times greater than the number of American deaths from terrorism in 2007, the highest year on record since 2001. Let me rephrase that, just to make sure it sinks in - <u>Americans die from lack of health insurance, every year, at a rate about one thousand three hundred and fifty-seven times greater than the rate at which they are killed by terrorists, worldwide.</u> Talk about death panels. </li>
<li>In summary, far more Americans die <u><i>every year</i></u> from any one of these causes than have died from terrorism in the <u><i>33 years since 1980</i></u>. In the case of annual healthcare-related deaths, based on the Harvard study figures, about 10 times more Americans die from lack of healthcare - every year - than the number of Americans killed by terrorists in the last 30+ years - according to FBI figures.</li>
</ul>
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Driving a car or working in heavy industrial labour jobs in America - or for that matter, just being here, especially without health insurance - poses far greater risks than global terrorism, from a purely statistical point of view.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjofE3SxS3E838Faq0vpldZ6Lp7owDu3oT8N4OCUjLbUw4Z8Li4QKzkZL2y1hhWPPHfaugz-NmI42nJs5EiIQo69AU7kzE7_ElIksa965JbvXE7RKCIhec31x9_5tjD4bWfpSrGRflT21v0/s1600/Honkey.jpg"><img border="0" height="146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjofE3SxS3E838Faq0vpldZ6Lp7owDu3oT8N4OCUjLbUw4Z8Li4QKzkZL2y1hhWPPHfaugz-NmI42nJs5EiIQo69AU7kzE7_ElIksa965JbvXE7RKCIhec31x9_5tjD4bWfpSrGRflT21v0/s320/Honkey.jpg" width="320" /></a>
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And it's not as if all the military/intelligence spending is what's keeping anyone safe from terrorism - on the contrary, the highest annual death toll from terrorism on record since 2001, as I mentioned, is 2007, which saw the most intense fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are wars started by the US, the latter as we know on completely false pretenses, and moreover fueled by an official and secret US policy of 'divide and conquer' - courtesy of one <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Steele_(US_Colonel)" target="_blank">Colonel Steele</a>, a veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America in the 1980s who was sent to Iraq precisely for the purpose of organizing paramilitary Shia militias and uniformed death squads, along with interrogation/torture centers, inciting sectarian violence. (explored in a BBC documentary, <i>James Steele: America's Mystery Man in Iraq</i>)
Of the 100,000+ killed in the Iraq war, at least 30,000 - <a href="http://wikileaks.org/irq/" target="_blank">according to leaked documents included in the Wikileaks Iraq war logs</a> - were innocent civilians killed by US troops. In other words, <u>US troops have murdered at least 6 or 7 times more innocent men, women and children in Iraq than the number of Americans killed by terrorists in the 30+ years from 1980 to today, including those killed on September 11, 2001.</u> The United States government may still be, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/_ca1HsC6MH0" width="480"></iframe>
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Furthermore, deaths from terrorism worldwide, comparatively insignificant as they were to begin with, have declined since Bush left office, and since the 'war on terror' ceased to be as much of a policy priority. Which is a good reminder of Foucault's dictum on how law enforcement breeds its own monsters, <u>where a given 'vice' - [insert "terror" or "drugs"] - "may have been designated as the evil to be eliminated, but the extraordinary effort that went into the task that was bound to fail leads one to suspect that what was demanded of it was to persevere,</u> to proliferate to the limits of the visible and the invisible, rather than to disappear for good. Always relying on this support, power advanced, multiplied its relays and its effects, while its target expanded, subdivided, and branched out, penetrating further into reality at the same pace." (The Will to Knowledge, 42) In much the same way as Wall Street bankers are said to turn to Karl Marx for instructive tips on the functioning of the capitalist economy, this passage from Foucault easily sounds like a page from Colonel Steele's field manual.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHGnU2mr_faqTvavLH_s8PwQfb3DturqnFdsbfzK6jt3a2wYqV62vyfUOdbEsjlq-xSJOThVmgaiLz375VLdfiAh3fux3BtUruaVbFhnM85XNsKys7KfTqHjrEcBaXCbDX5w-z4UX6bLB5/s1600/1984.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHGnU2mr_faqTvavLH_s8PwQfb3DturqnFdsbfzK6jt3a2wYqV62vyfUOdbEsjlq-xSJOThVmgaiLz375VLdfiAh3fux3BtUruaVbFhnM85XNsKys7KfTqHjrEcBaXCbDX5w-z4UX6bLB5/s400/1984.jpg" /></a>
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The vast state surveillance apparatus devoted to fighting terrorism (or drugs, for that matter) is basically a bunch of grown-up kids with technology and guns living out their sick, violent fantasies, snooping on the whole world, and leaving it to the rest of us to solve the world's real problems, including the ones they create.
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<br />
A quick browse through my notes on <a href="http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine" target="_blank">Naomi Klein's <i>The Shock Doctrine</i></a> is a good reminder that neoliberal economic policies will kill far more of us than global terrorism. They already have. Far more people die every year from the combined effects of hunger, treatable diseases, industrial accidents, pollution, malnutrition, mismanaged natural disasters, etc - or from any one of these causes - than from terrorism. In other words, from the effects of deregulation, post-colonial economic imperialism, austerity cuts, the hypocritical enforcement of patent regimes on pharmaceuticals in the developing world (see my <i>Medicine, Ethics and Law</i> paper on the left), and so forth. Not to mention state-sponsored violence - war, terrorism, drone strikes - which in the case of Iraq, basically comes down to one big, disastrous experiment in neoliberal/neoconservative free marketeer nation-building, given what we know of the motivations that drove the Straussian Milton-Friedmanite Chicago School devotees in the Bush administration.
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<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/EuyRdJupbvU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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So while more billions are being poured into fighting 'global terrorism' with its relatively negligible casualties worldwide, and military aid to corrupt third-world regimes, a single industrial accident this summer, the last in a series of similar accidents - the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/25/bangladesh-building-collapse-40-alive" target="_blank">building collapse in Bangladesh</a> - killed more than 230 sweatshop workers and left hundreds trapped under the rubble. Gotta keep those cheap goods comin'. As reported in the Guardian:<br />
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</p>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'...police ordered an evacuation of the building after deep cracks became visible in the walls, officials said. But factories based there ignored the order and kept more than 2,000 people working.<br />
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Dilara Begum, a garment worker who survived the accident, said supervisors had told them to return to work on Wednesday, saying the building had been inspected and declared safe.
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"We didn't want to go in but the supervisors threatened to dock pay if we didn't return to work."</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVWJeypXjGMoNQFVF0I59K0NCHYlo1Fy7PySBS093hEf5nBALxUagCCWo5EB8eTFm0n_TQcxtCy7OF2YoClINOTyicI62Zo_q0CtQOvxREeplAgjxJLLpWx02KntTbn7NJATHse91w2jpY/s1600/A-collapsed-building-in-B-009.jpg"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVWJeypXjGMoNQFVF0I59K0NCHYlo1Fy7PySBS093hEf5nBALxUagCCWo5EB8eTFm0n_TQcxtCy7OF2YoClINOTyicI62Zo_q0CtQOvxREeplAgjxJLLpWx02KntTbn7NJATHse91w2jpY/s400/A-collapsed-building-in-B-009.jpg" width="400" /></a>
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More recently, another Guardian article reported on the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/25/revealed-qatars-world-cup-slaves" target="_blank">deaths of dozens of Nepalese migrant workers</a> due to brutal labour conditions in Qatar, where employers routinely confiscate workers' passports and hold back wages to keep labourers from running away. Thirty Nepalese recently took shelter in their embassy to escape working conditions:<br />
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"The overall picture is of one of the richest nations exploiting one of the poorest to get ready for the world's most popular sporting tournament."<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/e5R9Ur44XV8?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe>
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This might, I suppose, sound ironic to someone still labouring under the illusion that wealth in capitalist societies is accumulated through hard work rather than theft, lies, luck, and plunder. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the exploitation of migrants in Qatar is not news - this has been going on for years. The difference is that the World Cup preparations have drawn the world's attention to it, and perhaps exacerbated the situation somewhat.<br />
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In a recent episode of the Colbert Report, featuring Thomas Herndon, the UMass grad student who discovered the infamous 'spreadsheet error' in Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhardt's highly influential pro-austerity paper (incidentally, Herndon did his undergraduate study at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, where I live), Stephen Colbert eloquently and cheekily summed up the twisted logic of austerity: "we need to keep cutting the government budget, and keep laying people off until those people get jobs."
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<embed allowfullscreen="true" allownetworking="all" allowscriptaccess="always" bgcolor="#000000" flashvars="autoPlay=false" height="247" src="http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:video:colbertnation.com:425749" style="display: block;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="288" wmode="window"></embed>
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And the schtick goes on: "an academic paper by Harvard economists Rogoff and Reinhart, that fiscal conservatives worldwide used to argue for austerity, was recently refuted by a UMass grad student just because it had a few simple spreadsheet errors, and a couple of little staggering omissions, that made it slightly fundamentally wrong."<br />
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That's right. Only slightly fundamentally wrong. We don't need to worry about getting the numbers right - about the industrial accidents, gun homicides, car accidents, lack of access to healthcare, the economic stupidity of suicidal austerity cuts, corporate welfare, bank bailouts, foreclosures, exporting of jobs overseas, deregulation, drones, disaster response, starvation, malnutrition, foreign wars, state-sponsored violence, torture - as long as the borders are secure and we're safe from terrorists. <br />
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</p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-69722891937603304352013-09-11T23:57:00.005-07:002023-10-20T09:00:20.496-07:00La historia es nuestra y la hacen los pueblos.<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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Today, on the 12th anniversary of September 11th, is the 40th anniversary of "the other September 11th" - the Chilean coup that overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Allende, in favor of the US-backed fascist Pinochet. It took place on September 11, 1973. Here is a great short film about it, by Ken Loach.<br />
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"St. Augustine said: Hope had two beautiful daughters - Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to change them."
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And let's not forget the words of Allende: La historia es nuestra y la hacen los pueblos. ¡Viva Chile! ¡Viva el pueblo! ¡Vivan los trabajadores!
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Check out the complete text of Allende's last speech <a href="http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/allende110906.html" target="_blank">here.</a>
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</P>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-19625587780241740132009-08-30T03:19:00.028-07:002023-10-17T02:21:02.111-07:00Healthcare reform in the USA: Biggie Size it<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<p><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.tiltyourhead.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/China_health_care_reform.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 117px; height: 135px;" src="http://www.tiltyourhead.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/China_health_care_reform.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />For weeks I have been putting off writing about the health care reform debate in the US. This is an issue that has interested me deeply for some time, and in the past I have done a lot of research on health care spending globally, some of it for a course on Medicine, Ethics, and Law, and some out of personal interest. A recent discussion in a stream of comments on a Facebook status update finally sparked the writing of this post.<br /><br />In response to an anti-insurance rant by an American friend of mine comparing insurance giants to Big Brother, someone else commented "...I might become Big Brother. If I'm paying, it is going to totally hack me off to see the 250 pounders on their scooters buying sodas, ho hos, cigarettes and beer. I'll be following them through the store, 'nope sorry honey, none for you!"<br /><br />Now I won't even get into all the moral complexities brought into play when well-off Americans (such as the commenter) complain about the unhealthy lifestyles of the millions of uninsured poor whose real incomes have not budged since the 1960s even as the economy and prices have grown, who are effectively the economic and social victims of the deregulation that has brought prosperity to the middle classes, and the associated fast-fooding and automobile-dependency of the American lifestyle; the fact that Mississippi is both the poorest and the fattest state in America (the fattest nation in the world) should give you an idea. (Yes, I am saying that the rich got rich on the backs of the fat and poor they complain about.) Nor is it necessary to inquire extensively here into how those unhealthy lifestyles developed on the ground level - for anyone interested in how America came to be the fattest nation on the planet, watch Morgan Spurlock's 'Super Size Me' - it's a good start. (hint: it does have something to do with aggressive marketing strategies and corporate profit margins)<br /><br />If you want to think in such inhuman terms, the simple statistical truth is that people with unhealthy lifestyles (i.e. smokers) are actually much less of a burden on the health system, because - surprise!! - they die younger. It just so happens that a grossly disproportionate amount of money - even here in the UK, on the much-maligned NHS - is spent on the last few decades of life for those who, due to their extremely healthy lifestyles, get past 65. And no, there are no 'death panels' on the NHS, contrary to what has been reported in the American press. (As an aside, if obesity is the complaint, cigarettes have the added benefit of reducing the burden even further, given that tobacco is an appetite suppressant and most chain-smokers are highly unlikely to be obese. ) So in all fairness, the fat-asses my interlocutor complained about might be equally if not more justified shoving cigarettes down her throat to save the public the expense of keeping her alive well into her 70s and 80s...<br /><br />But thank God that most people in countries with national health insurance schemes don't think that way, and neither does anyone follow fat-asses through the store and tell them what to eat, nor do old people get cut off when they get past a certain age.<br /><br />The cost of end-of-life care and old-age care for that matter is disproportionately high anywhere, except where a policy choice is made to have so-called 'death panels', but I have not heard of such a country. Conservatives like to point to well-publicized cases of, say, the NHS refusing to fund a particular trial of an experimental cancer drug or something of the kind. You think that HMOs on private insurance don't refuse to fund treatments? Of course they do, all the time, and even more so - I can confirm this from experience as a patient on both sides. And think of the economic incentive - the only difference is that with private insurance, such decisions are made first and foremost for the sake of corporate profit margins rather than the public interest or absolute budget limits. In a national health care system - no profit margin means more money to spend on health care.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://newspirates.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/universal-health-care-cartoon.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 382px; height: 231px;" src="http://newspirates.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/universal-health-care-cartoon.png" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />And whether you're insured privately or on a national insurance scheme, you always have the option to pay for treatments not covered on the insurance out-of-pocket - but that's got nothing to do with what system you're in. In fact, if anything, in such cases you'd be better off being in the UK, than in the US, where no price caps and sparse market regulation mean that treatments paid out-of-pocket would cost several times more.<br /><br />The disproportional cost of old-age care is even greater in the US. When I last looked at the WHO statistics on public health spending, the US government's <span style="font-style: italic;">per capita health spending</span> - the <span style="font-style: italic;">public</span> funds spent on healthcare - was higher than in any European country besides France. Public health spending in the US is basically Medicare and Medicaid. What that means is that Americans are <span style="font-style: italic;">already</span> paying more than most Europeans in taxes and other public spending <span>per capita</span> to fund a government-run healthcare system - but they only benefit from that money if they are over 65 or very poor and fulfill certain criteria.<br /><br />One major reason as mentioned is that caring for seniors (i.e. the Medicare program) is very expensive, and the more so the older they get. But another reason is that the US healthcare system is way overpriced - i.e. no price caps - drug companies can charge whatever the hell they want, which is why congress tried to pass a bill a few years back to buy drugs from Canada, from the same companies, the same brands.<br /><br />Factor into the public spending all the out-of-pocket costs (even Medicare isn't totally 'free'), the private insurance spending which is even greater per capita, both insurance premiums and co-pays, and you get a health system that is priced way above what its actual performance deserves, taking into account the standard of living and price index, which are greater in many European countries.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.reversemortgageguides.org/news/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/medicare-comic-smaller.gif"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 351px; height: 279px;" src="http://www.reversemortgageguides.org/news/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/medicare-comic-smaller.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Do you get a better healthcare system for all that money? Don't think so. Last time I looked at WHO's health performance indicators, the US was middle-range, sharing the same infant mortality rate as Cuba - one of the poorest countries in the word, but one which alleviates that poverty with a health system that performs well beyond its means. I can't imagine what the NHS would be like, or the Cuban health care system for that matter, if they spent the amount of money per capita that the US already spends on Medicare and Medicaid.<br /><br />Yet another reason for the high cost of healthcare in the US is precisely that it is too cumbersome compared to single payer healthcare systems. That is the argument <span style="font-style: italic;">against</span> private insurance and in favour of something like the NHS - which precisely has the benefit of making things simpler, cuts out a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork. (Again, I can confirm this from experience as a patient on both sides)...<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.census.gov//did/www/sahie/"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 376px; height: 280px;" src="http://www.incontext.indiana.edu/2005/september/images/health_insurance_fig1_large.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Another type of scare story cited by pro-corporate Americans (such as <a href="http://freestudents.blogspot.com/">this</a> blog) is that a national healthcare plan would 'victimize' immigrants and other vulnerable populations. One story cited is of an immigrant spouse of a New Zealander who is denied care due to rules that do not allow immigrants to be a 'public burden'. It is irrelevant whether the story is true or not. And let's not even discuss the blanket assumption that an immigrant in New Zealand would have access to health care through private insurance were things otherwise. The simple fact is that any American who buys this argument is unfamiliar with their own immigration system. (No surprise there, most likely they've never been through it) Under current rules, a legal 'green card' immigrant in the US is not allowed to become a 'public burden'; any American citizen with an immigrant spouse is required to sign an affidavit to this effect, declaring that they will be financially liable in the event that their spouse becomes a 'public burden' (i.e. by claiming social security).<br /><br />Obviously, the issue at stake is not the humane provision of a health service for all New Zealanders or Americans, but the inhumane immigration rules which exclude non-citizens. When I signed up for the health service here in the UK, I didn't have to prove anything except my address, and even that only for the purpose of ensuring I am with the right GP for my area. Aside from my medical history the past few years, the only thing the NHS knows about me is my name and address. They don't know or care what my legal status is here - and I am not even a permanent resident, but a student now on a two-year post-study work visa. Once, a friend who lives in Italy contracted a kidney infection while on a brief visit here - she has a chronic condition - she was able to get phone advice over a 24-hour help line the same evening without even giving her name, and treatment from our GP the next morning, no fuss.<br /><br />I can imagine what the next complaint would be, and I have heard that one too - 'medical tourism'. What people seem to forget is that going to the doctor is no fun for most people. I sure as hell put it off even when I should go to the doctor, even when I can do it for free. You don't need the disincentive of co-pays, let alone going to another country to get it. We're not talking government-sponsored tickets to the theater. When people go to the trouble of going to another country specifically to get medical treatment, most likely they really need it badly, and they can't afford it or obtain it otherwise. Anyone who's got a problem with that is sick in the head.<br /><br />Yet another thing to consider is that it works both ways - the fact that someone visiting the UK from another country can get medical treatment here without a problem, and without charge, should they fall ill during their visit, is something we should be grateful for as human beings; just as much as the fact that I can similarly travel worry-free in some countries. If some people do abuse the system and come here for free treatment on purpose even when they could get it otherwise, or for treatment not medically necessary, there is really very little you can do about it without harming the majority of people who don't abuse the system, but it doesn't really worry me that much. You can't ever totally avoid people pissing in public parks, yet the fact that it happens is no argument for keeping them closed.<br /><br />If you want to compare costs, I would advise anyone in the US lucky enough to have a health insurance plan to take a good look at their paycheck; and calculate what they pay in income tax, and add to that the health insurance premiums, social insurance, out-of-pocket costs, take it all out. And then calculate what you get in return. I guarantee that they will find that on average, contrary to the perception that Europeans pay a lot of taxes, Americans are the ones getting screwed over. Not by the government, however - but by the insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/medicare3.gif"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 378px; height: 282px;" src="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/medicare3.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Because ultimately, any health insurance money comes out of your paycheck, even if your health insurance is 'employer-funded'. The higher the insurance premiums, the less money there is for you to negotiate over. This is something that annoys me about some union bargaining strategies - in 2002, the AFL-CIO officially opposed a ballot initiative in Oregon to provide a state-wide health-coverage plan, on the grounds that the tax that would be imposed to finance it took up to 8% income tax (with as low as 2% for lower incomes) and up to 11% payroll tax. The employer, the AFL-CIO held, should bear a greater portion of the cost. But this is a bogus argument, as some local unions who favoured the plan realized - the tax money taken together would amount to much less than what is doled out on private insurance plans; in reality it doesn't matter who finances the health care on paper - whether it is payroll or income tax, the more money it costs, the less there is to negotiate over for pay rises and other benefits. The goal should be to cut health care costs, and one big way to do it is to eliminate insurance companies and corporate profit margins. The rest we can squabble over later.<br /><br />Also, while medical malpractice is certainly another major contributor to the cost of healthcare in the US, that should have no impact on the extraordinarily high cost of Medicare, which is driven largely by drug prices and old-age care, which rarely involves malpractice.<br /><br />Moreover, the highly litigious, adversarial culture of high payouts in damages that has developed in the US is precisely the result of a privatized system. When you pay for something, when health is a commodity rather than a public service, you have different expectations of it, even if those expectations are entirely misguided - i.e. relying on the misguided notion that if you pay doctors more they are less likely to make mistakes.<br /><br />My only major criticism of Obama's health care package would be that it does not go far enough. In order to truly address all the problems with the US healthcare system without creating new ones, what needs to be dealt with is not just the cost of health insurance premiums, but the cost of health care itself - down to the root. If you simply move to a single payer system without imposing price caps (especially on pharmaceuticals), without investing in lower-cost medical education (recognizing foreign medical school diplomas would be a start), or investing in preventive care and patient education, even with all the savings achieved by cutting out the insurance companies (see Paul Krugman's <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/opinion/13krugman.html">article;</a>) operating the system may prove to be simply too expensive. The system may be headed for insolvency, just as Medicare is at the moment.<br /><br />Not to mention the need to address the shocking amount of disinformation and ignorance among Americans regarding this issue. As Krugman notes in a more <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/opinion/31krugman.html">recent piece</a>, some Americans who benefit from Medicare don't even know that it is a government-run program.<br /><br />Going back to the obesity issue, rather than complaining about it, perhaps my interlocutor should have considered whether the 250-pounders buying soda and ho hos are precisely why America needs national health insurance. Most people like them most likely don't even have health insurance, or regular access to a doctor, or anyone to tell them - before it is too late - that their enormous weight is something they should see a doctor for, that it is the product not so much of the quantity they eat, but the kind of food they eat. But bear in mind that if their lifestyles do change and their life expectancy goes up, they will cost the health care system - public or private - more, not less.<br /><br />If as Morgan Spurlock puts it, "everything's bigger in America", then the healthcare plan needs to be too. America needs one super-sized biggie McWhopper of a public health insurance scheme in order to sort out all its problems.<br /><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/V168xofxgu0&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/V168xofxgu0&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-19341414145749005352009-06-27T16:23:00.009-07:002023-10-17T02:21:15.903-07:00Zizek on Iran: will the cat above the precipice fall down?<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<p><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">[This is an unpublished piece on Iran by Slavoj Zizek, which the mainstream media are apparently not interested in publishing. It was e-mailed to me by an Iranian friend and has appeared on the </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://supportiran.blogspot.com/">Support for the Iranian People 2009</a><span style="font-style: italic;"> blog. The argument is pretty much the same one made by Zizek in one of the lectures I attended at Birkbeck last week (in which he mentions my friend Ali by name, should anyone dispute the authenticity of the article). There is some audio of Zizek's lecture on the above-mentioned site, as well as </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/category/academic-service/academic-service-archive/">here</a><span style="font-style: italic;">, in part IV, I believe.]</span><br /><br /><span>Slavoj Zizek</span><br /><br />When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…<br /><br />In <span style="font-style: italic;">Shah of Shahs</span>, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now?<br /><br />There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel, plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of the war with Iraq.<br /><br />Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% - can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough - they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.<br /><br />Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime? Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true nature of the protests.<br /><br />The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.<br /><br />There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country).<br /><br />Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular groups. Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution, with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the Khomeini revolution.<br /><br />And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.<br /><br />The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.<br /><br /></p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-162882192446431612009-06-27T16:20:00.004-07:002023-10-17T02:21:25.250-07:00people reloaded: why mass protest in iran is true politics worth supporting<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<p><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">by Morad Farhadpour and Omid Mehrgan </span>[translators and philosophers based in Tehran]<br /><br />[This piece is copyright-free. Please distribute widely.]<br /><br />In the past two weeks, the majority of people in Tehran and other cities in Iran (including Shiraz, Ahwaz, Tabriz, Isfihan) have been on the streets, protesting against the theft of the presidential election by a handful of state’s agents at the top level. It was not a rigging in the usual western sense, no added votes or replaced ballot boxes, the election went on properly, the votes were taken and probably even counted, the figures transmitted to the ministry of interior, and it was there that they were totally disregarded and replaced by totally fictitious figures. That is why all the opposition forces (Sazman-e-Mojahedin-e-Enghelab, Mosharekat party...) together with people called it a coup d’état.<br /><br />Global public opinion and, especially, the body of (leftist) intellectuals, Inspired by recent events in the middle Asia and east Europe, mostly regard this Iranian mass protest as another version of the well-known, newly invented, neo-liberal, U.S.-sponsored, colour-coded revolutions, as in Georgia and Ukraine. But is it the case in Iran? This article intends to clarify the issue, to reveal the properly political essence of current mass movement, and to demonstrate that this movement has the potentiality of a self-transcendence, of surpassing its actual demands, of traversing its current phantasy. To do this, we shall first examine the contemporary tradition of radical politics in Iran. Without these references, the current movement, which truly deserves this title, can not be understood correctly.<br /><br />People, whether consciously or not, are frequently recollecting the 1979 Revolution and the 1997 Reform Movement. Many of their slogans are transformed slogans of the '79 Revolution. The paths of demonstrations are symbolically significantly, the same as those against Shah. But this does not mean that people are imitating the '79 Revolution: there are many new possibilities and creativities, many formal and thematic inventions. As for the 1997 Reform Movement, and its aftermath (the crushing of student protest in 1999), the affinities are even more obvious. Khatami, along with Mir Hossein Mousavi, is one of the most significant leaders and supporters of the protest. It is as if people are trying to redeem the 2nd of Khordad (May 23, 1997), to revive the unfinished hopes and dreams of those days. But this time, the protest is by no means limited to students and intellectuals. Although Khatami in 1997 was elected with 20 million votes from the most varied sections of the nation, the movement was characterized by the political and cultural demands of the middle-class, of students and educated people. But, apart from this, what is the true significance of the 2nd of Khordad Front for politics in Iran?<br /><br />On the 2nd of Khordad, for the first time since Iranian Revolution, we were encountering a dichotomy between the state and the total system of Islamic Republic of Iran, known as Nezam (System, which is based on the principle of Velayat-e-Faghih, the supreme authority of high-ranked Mullahs). This duality was partly due to the fact that the leader of the opposition, Khatami, was at the same time the chief of the state. It was the only occasion where this duality, which is, in a sense, one between the development of productive forces and cultural, political backwardness, between secular democracy and religious fanaticism, could be revealed. Before and after that period, the state and Nezam have been basically in accordance, as it had been in the Shah's Regime. One of the reasons, if not the main reason, why elections in Iran are of such importance for democratic movements, despite trends to boycott them, lies precisely in the significance of this very duality. Seen from a classical-Marxist perspective, in order to pave the way for the development of productive forces, in order to accomplish the ‘civilizing mission’ of capitalism, there must emerge a bourgeois state capable of carrying out the process of democratization and modernization. Whenever the state has been in full accordance with Nezam, this process fails to go on. Besides this, we deal with yet another duality, one between the capital and the state, the former as the means of development (with all its discontents, aptly and righteously exposed by the Marxist tradition), and the latter as the organ of regression and anti-modernism. So, the progressive and socialist opposition in Iran are faced with the unprecedented, hard task of fighting in two fronts: against religious fanaticism and the authoritarian factions in a semi-democratic government, and simultaneously against global capitalism and its hegemony by means of the production of wars. In a sense, intelligentsia in Iran are very similar to that of Russia and Germany of 19th century. We are a handful of schizophrenics who are, at one and the same time, against and for progress, development, capitalism, state management and so on. In other words, for us, the Faustian problematic, his tragedy, is formulated in a typically Hamletian way. This ambivalent attitude (to western civilization) can be characterized by the dialectic of state and politics. We are neither dealing with a pure politics a la Alain Badiou, nor with a classical Marxist politics, exhausted in class struggles, nor with the liberal-democratic politics of human rights, which was, by the way, the dominant discourse of opposition in Iran before Mousavi. Our supposedly radical politics consists of every one of these elements, but is not reducible to any of them. To deploy Agamben’s terminology, it is a politics of people against People, i.e. voiceless, suppressed people, against People officially constructed by the state. The current movement materializes, in many respects, this very politics.<br /><br />But the question, which has confused the western (left) intelligentsia and has caused the most varied misunderstandings regarding Iran, is whether Ahmadinejad is a leftist, anti-imperialist, anti-privatization, anti-globalization figure. The common answer is a positive one. That is why certain misguided western leftists tend to regard the current mass movement in support of Mir Hossein Mousavi and against Ahmadinejad as the struggle of liberalism against anti-imperialism, of privatization, liberal-democracy against the enemies of global hegemony of America. The main aim of this article is to expose, to expel this widespread illusion. As regards the other confused camp, the Western, more or less, Islamophobic liberals, who are inclined to identify Ahmadinjad with Al-Qaeda, who refer to Mousavi, because of his Islamic-Republican career in 80’s, as another version of Islamic, anti-democratic Ideology, one could say that they too are caught up in an illusion based on easy Euro-centrist generalizations and lack of familiarity with the Iranian historical context. We should thus answer the simple question: what is actually at the stake? Apart from the triad of French Revolution, the triad of modern emancipatory politics, liberty, equality, fraternity, one could maintain that the main bone of contention in this struggle is precisely politics itself, its life and survival. Our government is called the Islamic Republic of Iran. Now the republican moment, which has always been downgraded by the conservatives, is presently being annihilated. It is precisely through this very outlet that any popular politics, from social movement of dissent and class politics to the defence of human rights, might survive.<br /><br />Another common approach, no matter how radical, supportive, or conservative, to mass protest in Iran is the following: it is a youth movement, at its best, similar to 68’s student protests. New young generation in Iran, armed with Internet, socialized by social networking sites, tired of Islamic ideology, has awakened, claiming its own way of life, and so on. According to this attitude, which is evoked by a number of journalists, it is only the middle-class intellectuals, students, feminists, and other educated people in large cities who are rallying on the streets, communicating with each other thanks to the internet. What is striking is that the state discourse in Iran widely promotes this very attitude. The ruling elite, based on a populist rhetoric, tends to single out a certain section of the nation and call it the People. The state television, Seda-va-Sima, is the main place where this People is represented, indeed constructed, mostly through the usual populist tactic of one nation versus the evil external enemy who is the cause of all trouble. It presents a unified, pure, integrated image of People, all devoting themselves to Nezam, all law-abiding, religious, etc. This image of People is daily imposed on the masses and inscribed onto the body politic. Against this formally constructed People, with the state as its formal face, there has come out another people, a subaltern, muted people, claiming its own place, its own part in the political scene. June 2009 Election was a decisive opportunity for this people to declare itself, in the figure of Mousavi, who from the beginning insisted on people’s dignity as a true political right. But why him? Why not, say, Karroubi, the other reformist candidate? Has Mousvai, now the leader of the mass movement, appeared on the scene in a purely contingent way? Has he by mere chance, by force of circumstances, as it were, become the leading figure, the reform-freedom-democracy incarnate? The answer is positively negative. To elucidate this, we have to draw attention to the tradition from which he has emerged and to which he has repeatedly referred during his electoral campaign. As we said before, this tradition is rooted in 1979 Revolution and has been revived in the 2th of Khordad Movement -- whereas, Karroubi’s ‘politics’ was based on a subjectless process in which different identity groups would present their demands to the almighty state and act as its passive, divided, depoliticized supporters. In fact, Karroubi’s campaign, with its appeal to Western media, using the word ‘change’ in English, and profiting from celebrity figures, was the one that could be called a Western liberal human-rights-loving, even pro-capitalist movement. The fact that millions transcending their identity and immediate interests joined a typically universal militant politics by risking their lives in defence of Mousavi and their dignity, should be enough to cast out all doubts or misguided pseudo-leftist dogmas.<br /><br /><br /></p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-74282670596126397812009-06-18T10:24:00.027-07:002023-10-17T02:21:34.402-07:00This is what democracy looks like<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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The turmoil in Tehran over the past few days manifests precisely the 'minimal difference' that belies the line of confrontation in the so-called 'clash of civilizations'. What was always missing in this simple dichotomy is the actual struggle, the actual tension. The real clash is neither between Western democracy and Islam, nor between democracy and authoritarianism, nor simply between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. In the context of stolen elections, one should always remember that in the "world's greatest democracy", the Republican party stole at least one, possibly two elections - this with a flourish, and deploying a variety of tactics ranging from racially-targeted voter fraud (50,000 alleged ex-felons fraudulently purged from the register in one case, most of them black) to voter intimidation, orchestrated at various levels nationwide but most notably in Florida, by ex-president George W's dear old brother, Governor Jeb.<br />
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So what is the difference between a stolen election in the "world's greatest democracy" and a stolen election in Iran? Well, for starters, the Americans never took to the streets in revolt, never rose up in anger against the political system that cheated them. In the 2000 election it was Al Gore himself who was behind the final, 11th hour betrayal, when about 20 members of the Congressional Black Caucus filed objections to the Florida results, demanding a full recount; Gore, as President of the Senate, ruled them out of order, one by one.<br />
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But beneath all the concrete acts of betrayal, what took place in the US election was a betrayal of democracy by itself. Americans, ironically enough, betrayed democracy because they believed too much in democracy, or in the institutions of democracy - they lacked a healthy dose of cynicism. Living in a state of collective denial for 8 years, leaving it up to democratic institutions to correct themselves, was preferable to revolt. "Denial ain't nothin' but a river in Egypt," as Louis Armstrong put it.<br />
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What all this should tell us, I think, is that real democracy - the 'will of the people' - cannot be guaranteed by any system. The very notion of 'democratic institutions' or 'democratic government' is already a contradiction of terms, of sorts - something to be watched over carefully. The only guarantee of democracy is the willingness of the people to revolt. A government is only 'democratic' as a function of the people's preparedness to wipe it out at the slightest whiff of corruption - by any means necessary. Democratic legitimacy can be vested in institutions and formal procedures only so long as the threat of collective violence persists, even if it is never realized.<br />
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What is amusing in all this is the bewilderment of western journalists who see Iranians as a people 'ruled by fear', now all of a sudden taking to the streets and taking up an open struggle. Well, under the circumstances, and given the odds against them, they appear to be far less fearful than anyone thought. They have slightly more corrupt and less democratic institutions than some countries in the west, and face greater state/police brutality; yet despite this, as a people they are clearly more capable of exercising a collective will, with or without institutions.<br />
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The real struggle in all this is not between Iran and the USA, or Islam and the West, or authoritarianism and democracy: it is a struggle between collective will and state/institutional authority as such - 'democratically' legitimated or not. It is a struggle that takes place <i>within</i> democracy, <i>within</i> a political system of any sort, within an institutionalized religion even - rather than between 'different' nations, religions, or political systems. It comes down to what Deleuze calls 'internal' difference - real differences are always internal. The USA in fighting Islamism or communism was always fighting its own demons: in the case of China it eventually reconciled not only with communism but with authoritarian rule (i.e. China was granted permanent 'Most Favoured Nation' status in 2000 by the U.S Congress). Communism became palatable for US politicians once it eliminated any trace of collective will or 'people rule' - becoming, effectively, state capitalism.<br />
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Which explains why some right-wing US politicians and commentators are tacitly or ambiguously supporting Ahmadinejad (while the liberals are just shrugging their shoulders). The real threat to their agenda, as they well know, comes not from Islam but from any expression of collective will, from popular revolt as such. It just never seems to go their way, that's all.<br />
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Parallels to the 1979 revolution are apt, most of all because what is at stake is a repetition, in the Deleuzian sense: in 1979, the revolutionaries lost in the end, as the critical mass was hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists firmly on the side of state authority. What is needed is a repetition - authentic repetition is never repetition of the same, but the repetition of a possibility; and it is only with repetition that the truly new emerges. It is time to return to that fork in the road.<br />
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Slavoj Zizek recently criticized the left's stance toward Iran, pointing out among other things that Mousavi's opposition movement has activated an emancipatory dimension within Islam itself, rather than pandering to Western liberal ideology. That is precisely it - internal difference. One divides into two. This is the only path to true universality: <span style="font-style: italic;">nous sommes tous Iraniens</span>.* Mousavi is within Islam the emancipatory voice that the Left should be within neoliberal capitalism - not to mention the American brand of neoliberal capitalism, which happens to be paired with a fundamentalist Christian faith not all that different from the Iranian mullahs.<br />
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The ambivalence of the US political establishment is most likely due to the embarrassing realization that what is happening in Iran is "Iraq, the way it should have happened," as Zizek put it. I would only add that the irony is double: it's not just about the failure in Iraq, it's also the failure in Iran itself - some fifty-odd years ago. One reason why Western democracy never took root in Iran in the first place is because, when the Iranians tried to build a progressive democratic society on their own, one where women were more emancipated than they were in most Western nations at the time, and certainly more than they would be in Switzerland for decades**, their dream was crushed by the very same hegemonic powers now rooting for war on Iran. The Iranians elected a socialist government in 1951, which proceeded to enact a range of popular social reforms, including the denationalization of Iranian oil, at the time controlled by British interests under a 100-year concession granted under duress by a previous unconstitutional government; the British and Americans, prompted by a dispute in which the International Court of Justice ruled itself incompetent - effectively ruling in Iran's favour - removed Iran's democratically-elected government and installed the Shah as dictator.<br />
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Similarly, Iraq today after a dose of US democracy is more religiously conservative than most Arab countries - more than it has ever been in history. The thing about western democracy is it's a bit like the ridiculously overpriced pharmaceuticals peddled by multinational corporations, where the side effects seem to reproduce the symptoms they are meant to cure. The common side effects of antidepressants, for instance, include "urinary retention, blurred vision, constipation, sleep disruption, weight gain, headache, nausea, gastrointestinal disturbance/diarrhea, abdominal pain, inability to achieve an erection, inability to achieve an orgasm (men and women), loss of libido, agitation, anxiety" - couldn't all that make one a little depressed? (Conveniently enough, if the side effects do appear, it's impossible to tell whether it is the drug or the disease any more.)<br />
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Or take for instance the common side effects of antihistamines: "drowsiness, headache, blurred vision, constipation, dry mouth, dizziness, difficulty passing urine, confusion" - are we talking homeopathy here?<br />
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A lesson we should draw from history: the most common side effects of 'spreading freedom and democracy' include "authoritarianism, religious dogma, fundamentalism, outbursts of violence, political repression, economic depression, mass killings, imprisonment of political opponents, war, etc...<br />
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The Iranians, left to their own means, are off the medication and are fixing things themselves. One should only hope that they don't give up. And that those outside Iran who take the idea of free self-determination seriously will look past Mousavi's beard.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;">*in the wake of September 11, 2001, a French newspaper headline proclaimed 'Nous sommes tous Americains' ("we are all Americans"). I agree, but in the sense of 'universality as struggle'; many of us were the skeptical Americans who did not sheepishly buy into their government's rhetoric.<br />**incidentally, I was recently shocked to find out that one Canton in Switzerland only granted women the right to vote in 1990, after a decision by the Swiss supreme court; at the federal level, women's suffrage was granted only in the 1970s.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUCsUyTA1_OsUePwc0c4kcBx60tIdKhb_gcTyy6hwmAvlVEVGrweoQTCWQbm1TePtYm7rT5y2kw85-tpNq6AeErmxwjFnSIH9tsbLq54JTxSz08JCj2uNHhVdzWfAYxEMkhjEyg4gJ1aEY/s1600-h/vote.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUCsUyTA1_OsUePwc0c4kcBx60tIdKhb_gcTyy6hwmAvlVEVGrweoQTCWQbm1TePtYm7rT5y2kw85-tpNq6AeErmxwjFnSIH9tsbLq54JTxSz08JCj2uNHhVdzWfAYxEMkhjEyg4gJ1aEY/s400/vote.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5348794352709736850" style="cursor: pointer; height: 134px; width: 294px;" /></a>
</p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-74791858052547180042009-06-18T10:23:00.004-07:002023-10-17T02:21:46.045-07:00Why are the iranians dreaming again?*<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<p><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The following is a guest post from Ali Alizadeh, Researcher at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University. You can also see him discussing the situation in Iran </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00l7ll6/Newsnight_15_06_2009/">here </a><span style="font-style: italic;">on BBC's Newsnight.</span><br /><br />[This piece is copyright-free. Please distrbute widely.]<br /><br />Iran is currently in the grip of a new and strong political movement. While this movement proves that Ahmadinejad’s populist techniques of deception no longer work inside Iran, it seems they are still effective outside the country. This is mainly due to thirty years of isolation and mutual mistrust between Iran and the West which has turned my country into a mysterious phenomenon for outsiders. In this piece I will try to confront some of the mystifications and misunderstandings produced by the international media in the last week.<br /><br />In the first scenario the international media, claiming impartiality, insisted that the reformists provide hard objective evidence in support of their claim that the June 12 election has been rigged. But despite their empiricist attitude, the media missed obvious facts due to their lack of familiarity with the socio-historical context. Although the reformists could not possibly offer any figures or documents, because the whole show was single-handedly run by Ahmadinejad’s ministry of interior, anyone familiar with Iran’s recent history could easily see what was wrong with this picture.<br /><br />It was the government who reversed the conventional and logical procedure by announcing a fictitious total figure first – in four stages – and then fabricating figures for each polling station, something that is still going on. This led to many absurdities: Musavi got less votes in his hometown (Tabriz) than Ahmadinejad; Karroubi’s total vote was less than the number of people active in his campaign; Rezaee’s votes were reduced by a hundred thousand between the third and fourth stages of announcement; blank votes were totally forgotten and only hastily added to the count when reformists pointed this out; and finally the ratio between all candidates’ votes remained almost constant in all these four stages of announcement (63, 33, 2 and 1 percent respectively).<br /><br />Moreover, as in any other country, the increase in turnout in Iran’s elections has always benefitted the opposition and not the incumbent, because it is rational to assume that those who usually don’t vote, i.e. the silent majority, only come out when they want to change the status quo. Yet in this election Ahmadinejad, the representative of the status quo, allegedly received 10 million votes more than what he got in the previous election.<br /><br />Finally, Ahmadinejad’s nervous reaction after his so-called victory is the best proof for rigging: closing down SMS network and the whole of country’s mobile phone network, arresting more than 100 leading political activists, blocking access to Musavi’s and many other reformists’ websites and unleashing violence in the streets...But if all this is not enough, the bodies of more than 17 people who were shot dead and immediately buried in unknown graves should persuade all those “objective-minded” observers.<br /><br />In the second scenario, gradually unfolding in the last few days, the international media implicitly shifted its attention to the role of internet and its social networking (twitter, facebook, youtube, etc). This implied that millions of illiterate conservative villagers have voted for Ahmadinejad and the political movement is mostly limited to educated middle classes in North Tehran. While this simplified image is more compatible with media’s comfortable position towards Iran in the last 30 years, it is far from reality. The recent political history of Iran does not confirm this image. For example, Khatami’s victory in 1997, despite his absolute lack of any economic promises and his focus instead on liberal civic demands, was made possible by the polarization of society into people and state. Khatami could win only by embracing people from all different classes and groups, villagers and urban people alike.<br /><br />There is no doubt that new media and technologies have been playing an important role in the movement, but it seems that the cause and the effect are being reversed in the picture painted by the media. First of all, it is the existence of a strong political determination, combined with people becoming deprived of basic means of communication, which has led the movement to creatively test every other channel and method. Musavi’s paper was shut down on the night of election, his frequent request to talk to people on the state TV has been rejected, his official website is often blocked and his physical contact with his supporters has been kept minimum by keeping him in house arrest (with the exception of his appearance on the over a million march on June 15).<br /><br />Second, due to the heavy pressure on foreign journalists inside Iran, these technological tools have come to play a significant role in sending the messages and images of the movement to the outside world. However, the creative self-organization of the movement is using a manifold of methods and channels, many of them simple and traditional, depending on their availability: shouting ‘death to dictator’ from rooftops, calling landlines, at the end of one rally chanting the time and place of the next one, and by jeopardizing oneself by physically standing on streets and distributing news to every passing car. The appearance of the movement which is being sold by the media to the western gaze – the cyber-fantasy of the western societies which has already labelled our movement a twitter revolution, seems to have completely missed the reality of those bodies which are shot dead, injured or ready to be endangered by non-virtual bullets.<br /><br />What is more surprising in the midst of this media frenzy is the blindness of the western left to the political dynamism and energy of our movement. The causes of this blindness oscillate between the misgivings about Islam (or the Islamophobia of hyper-secular left) and the confusion made by Ahmadinjead’s fake anti-imperialist rhetoric (his alliance with Chavez perhaps, who after all was the first to congratulate him). It needs to be emphasized that Ahmadinejad’s economic policies are to the right of the IMF: cutting subsidies in a radical way, more privatization than any other post-79 government (by selling the country to the Revolutionary Guards) and an inflation and unemployment rate which have brought the low-income sections of the society to their knees. It is in this regard that Musavi’s politics needs to be understood in contradistinction from both Ahmadinejad and also the other reformist candidate, i.e. Karroubi.<br /><br />While Karroubi went for the liberal option of differentiating people into identity groups with different demands (women, students, intellectuals, ethnicities, religious minorities, etc), Musavi emphasized the universal demands of ‘people’ who wanted to be heard and counted as political subjects. This subjectivity, emphasized by Musavi during his campaign and fully incarnated in the rallies of the past few days, is constituted by political intuition, creativity and recollection of the ‘79 revolution (no wonder that people so quickly reached an unexpected maturity, best manifested in the abstention from violence in their silent demonstrations). Musavi’s ‘people’ is also easily, but strongly, distinguished from Ahmadinejad’s anonymous masses dependent on state charity. Musavi’s people, as the collective appearing in the rallies, is made of religious women covered in chador walking hand in hand with westernized young women who are usually prosecuted for their appearance; veterans of war in wheelchairs next to young boys for whom the Iran-Iraq war is only an anecdote; and working class who have sacrificed their daily salary to participate in the rally next to the middle classes. This story is not limited to Tehran. Shiraz (two confirmed dead), Isfahan (one confirmed dead), Tabriz, Oroomiye are also part of this movement and other cities are joining with a predictable delay (as it was the case in 79 revolution).<br /><br />History will prove who the real participants of this movement are but once again we are faced with a new, non-classical and unfamiliar radical politics. Will the Western left get it right this time?<br /><br />* The title is a reference to Michel Foucault’s 1978 writing on Iran’s revolution: “What are the Iranians dreaming about?”<br /><br /></p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-77273768928796025192009-04-20T06:30:00.018-07:002023-10-17T02:21:56.814-07:00Constructivism and the Future<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<p><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://londoncontemporaryart.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/p39963-6225_4.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 207px; height: 245px;" src="http://londoncontemporaryart.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/p39963-6225_4.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>
<br /><br />Far more refreshing than the 'Altermodern' Triennial at the Tate Britain, the special exhibition at the Tate Modern, 'Rodchenko and Popova' provides a comprehensive but by no means nauseating retrospective on the art of the revolution, as it flourished before the thermidor of Socialist Realism. If any 20th century art movement should be revived and rethought, I say, it should be Russian Constructivism.<br /><br />In fact if, as Zizek says, the future will be either socialist or communist - 'socialist' meaning the kind of nanny-state capitalism practised by Western governments in the wake of the financial crisis - for the art world this must mean that the future will be either Altermodern or Constructivist. Art will either remain more or less what it is, a distinct sphere of rationality backed up by specific forms of cultural practices and modes of communication, or it will be sublated in a multidisiplinary network within an overall revolutionary dissolution of separate social spheres and disciplines.<br /><br />
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<br /><br />'Altermodern' is clearly the tendency to be opposed, but not so much for the content of the art it takes under its wing - a lot of which, as discussed earlier, can be described as 'postmodern', in spite of its curator Nicolas Bourriaud's proclamation that 'postmodernism is dead' (kind of like Leonard Cohen's lyric... "I fought against the bottle/but I had to do it drunk..."). What should be opposed is not the art but the critical tendency - the mentality of 'out with the old, in with the new' - exemplified in equal measure by buzzwords like 'Altermodern' and by the spectre of Wall Street's return to Marx. ('retro' is now the 'in' thing...)<br /><br />
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://images6.cafepress.com/product/311038426v8_350x350_Front.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 217px; height: 217px;" src="http://images6.cafepress.com/product/311038426v8_350x350_Front.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>
<br /><br />The issue is not that these are mere 'surface effects' but precisely that they exhibit the opposite or inverse tendency of 'depth without breath', of getting to the bottom of a problem but only after the fact, only when the damage is already done. Why did we need a complete breakdown of the system in order to correct its course, if it is at all a correction? (I personally don't find the idea of bankers reading <span style="font-style: italic;">Das Kapital</span> very convincing.) Or why did we need a total degeneration of the art world into a commercial meat market in order for someone to suggest something is wrong?<br /><br />What is needed is not merely a new form of art - let alone a new buzzword, a new name, a new way forward or into the depths - but a new way of thinking about the very production process of art and its social function, something which the constructivists, unlike most art movements, sought to do. What is needed is precisely not more depth, nor a different kind of depth, but more breadth: the extension of art into other realms. Let's face it: to what extent does Bourriaud's theorizing really exhibit the traces of a 'universal language'? Isn't the work of "translation" at stake in this 'altermodern' phenomenon merely the transcription of a myriad of untranslatable cultural phenomena into one non-universal and even somewhat esoteric language particular to the foofy contemporary art circuit, and largely unintelligible to the majority of society globally?<br /><br />
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://laboca.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/17402w_popovapainterlyarchi2.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 260px; height: 334px;" src="http://laboca.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/17402w_popovapainterlyarchi2.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>
<br /><br />The language of lines and forms, on the other hand, is a universal language - if for no other reason than what one could call its 'primitivism'.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/about/images/x24414.bmp"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 159px; height: 192px;" src="http://www.tate.org.uk/about/images/x24414.bmp" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >Constructivist design for a cup and saucer</span><br /><br />But even more so, an art that rejects the notion of "art for art's' sake", an art that believes art must be put to use - in addition to the promise of social change built into its very core and fibre, must speak a universal language in order to exist. It can only exist on condition of extending its breadth, of its expansion into 'non-art'.<br /><br />At the same time, the constructivist egalitarian rejection of the term 'artist' in favour of 'constructor', the simplification of the process of creation, to demistify art, etc - hints at the postmodern 'death of the author'; in both cases the aim is to undermine the privileged position of the speaker/author/artist as the arbiter of meaning or aesthetic value in favour of a configuration where the very dichotomy of author/consumer becomes false. Art for the people.<br /><br />In this context the reference to 'modern' in 'altermodern', and the call "death to postmodernism" can be read as the thermidorian gesture of restoring order, repeating Stalin's gesture of outlawing constructivism and proclaiming Socialist Realism as the only acceptable form of art.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://xenia.media.mit.edu/%7Ewsack/readings2.gif"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 259px; height: 345px;" src="http://xenia.media.mit.edu/%7Ewsack/readings2.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Constructivist clothing design: clearly the future</span></span><br /><br />Another thing worth thinking about is the constructivists' involvement in advertising, and their insistence on not rejecting it as a capitalist consumerist ploy. There is something to this: for how can one confront the phenomenon of advertising at all, if not with advertising itself - either in the form of subversive re-production (i.e. <a href="http://www.adbusters.org/gallery/spoofads">Adbusters</a>) or in the form of counter-advertising, advertising for the right causes?<br /><br />The Adbusters slogan for what they have dubbed 'Buy Nothing day', November 22, has a distinctly constructivist ring: MAKE SOMETHING - BUY NOTHING.<br /><br />From now on, I am no longer the author of this blog, but its chief constructor.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW54mp5iM1YETUfWCNg68tq-p_v-859xwIJhgazktw3DnJQzmQ8uCWon2teqxw1_TDWJE94_19d2H3BBGq35jyrmwVhF0qUPfBtw_1vdTa4UqTaxmtPtMbeD-9YBfWEC09brzWSFPzaio/s400/AbsolutImpotence.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 228px; height: 308px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW54mp5iM1YETUfWCNg68tq-p_v-859xwIJhgazktw3DnJQzmQ8uCWon2teqxw1_TDWJE94_19d2H3BBGq35jyrmwVhF0qUPfBtw_1vdTa4UqTaxmtPtMbeD-9YBfWEC09brzWSFPzaio/s400/AbsolutImpotence.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /></p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-35408627521928760822009-04-15T09:32:00.066-07:002023-10-17T02:22:04.957-07:00Punkstmodernism is not dead: notes from behind the irony curtain<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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I hate it when people declare something 'dead' when it's actually not.<br />
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Scratch that. I hate it when people say that an Idea is dead, period. Sure, there are dead ideas; but that's because they never were real Ideas, because they were born dead. Just like "manuscripts don't burn" - Ideas don't die. In the world of Ideas, the only things that can ever legitimately be declared 'dead' are those that never were - the many false starts, misapprehensions, misdirections in the history of human thought. Ideas do not oscillate between the living and the dead; they oscillate between the living and the stillborn. Confusion slips in when the latter go on 'living', Zombie-like, 'undead' - until centuries later some rare, clear-sighted specimen of our blundering race sees through the folly, and tells it like it is.<br />
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<a href="http://www.celebratingeinstein.com/images/einstein.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.celebratingeinstein.com/images/einstein.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; height: 240px; width: 321px;" /></a><br />
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Sadly enough, Nicolas Bourriaud - art critic, curator, and co-founder of the <a href="http://www.palaisdetokyo.com/fo3/low/programme/">Palais de Tokyo</a> - is no such gent, and he doesn't tell it like it is. Postmodernism is not dead. It is alive and kicking, and there is nothing radically new here. Postmodernism, like every great idea, has been declared dead before - most notably after September 11, when neoliberal apparatchiks excitedly whispered that the 'age of irony' was over. In fact, Derrida's strain was even declared 'dead on arrival', years ago, before the term 'deconstruction' embedded itself in the vocabulary of art and philosophy to the point of becoming a cliche.<br />
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The thing about irony is that - like dialectics - it just never goes away. It's worse than cancer. The more you 'excise' it, the more it multiplies - the more ironic the irony gets.<br />
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When people do declare an idea to be dead, this does signal a change, but it is often not the change they are counting on - it is very often the contrary. Just when Francis Fukuyama announced the 'end of history' in the Final Age of liberal democracy, he himself soon withdrew the proclamation. Just when it looked like Global Capitalism was going to be the only game in town for good after the fabled 'fall of communism' in the 90s and the various proclamations that the 'age of ideologies' was over, the financial system collapsed and people started reading Marx again.<br />
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And just as Nicolas Bourriaud proclaimed that 'postmodernism is dead', postmodernism reared its little head all over the very exhibition that Bourriaud curated this Spring at Tate Britain to signal the death of postmodernism and the birth of what he has dubbed 'altermodern'. Isn't that, like, ironic?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUnmgR7_Q4gu0GzkA8e34J3ETOcKJlFYIG7PmQ26HnHNXvkOvqE9pp35P-UeOvunq8mSOQs0zGOhAEwhOp8jhPKPo0fjvW9xTXDiIOv96LKjKRMdUja0yGKEybdOLlMzZSZxuDm6Yrvd2C/s1600/sewing+machine-umbrella.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUnmgR7_Q4gu0GzkA8e34J3ETOcKJlFYIG7PmQ26HnHNXvkOvqE9pp35P-UeOvunq8mSOQs0zGOhAEwhOp8jhPKPo0fjvW9xTXDiIOv96LKjKRMdUja0yGKEybdOLlMzZSZxuDm6Yrvd2C/s320/sewing+machine-umbrella.jpg" /></a>
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I did like some of the works I saw, but I didn't find the show as a whole especially refreshing as against the contemporary art scene today. But rather than comment on the merits here, I will only address a few examples in relation to ('postmodern') theory. All quotations addressing the works and artists in the Triennial are from the exhibition guide.<br />
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Tacita Dean's work 'The Russian Ending' 2001, one of the highlights of the exhibition, is inspired by an early twentieth century custom in the Danish film industry where each film was produced in two versions: a happy one for the American market, and an alternative with a depressing or tragic ending for the Russian market. Taking images of disasters from original postcards purchased in flea markets, Dean uses handwritten notes that suggest the storyboard of a film to provide "imagined endings to imagined films."<br />
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What Dean is clearly getting at is the ambiguity of meaning in text and narrative that this reference to the Danish film tradition evokes; she inserts, for instance, coy double entendres such as 'man's laughter/manslaughter' - play, irony, reversal of signs. How is this in any sense <span style="font-style: italic;">not </span>postmodern? Decontextualizing/recontextualizing images to imbue them with a meaning unimagined by their authors, through writing - palimpsest - and moreover suggesting "imagined endings to imagined films", is this not post-modernism <span style="font-style: italic;">par excellence</span>? A perfect example of - whatchamacallit - <span style="font-style: italic;">deconstruction</span>?<br />
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Similarly, Peter Coffin's work 'Untitled (Tate Britain)' 2009, projects animations with soundtracks onto existing artworks from the Tate's collection. The works "remain both in their conventional habitat and simultaneously become mobilised as fictitious characters in a new narrative scenario which...opens up a web of associations." In this way, Coffin "charges existing artworks <span style="font-style: italic;">with a life and mind of their own</span>."<br />
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Oh, you mean that whole thing about the "death of the author" - how the 'meaning' of a work/text/utterance does not reside simply in the mind of the original speaker/author? Yep, nothing new there. Derrida again, right? And a bit of Barthes?<br />
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Rachel Harrison "splices together found objects, images, and hand-sculpted abstract forms to create installations that possess the iconoclastic energy of Punk...presents all her material on an equal footing and wilfully flattens out any cultural hierarchies." If that doesn't sound 'postmodern' enough, her work in the exhibition, 'Voyage of the Beagle, 2007', a "pantheon of fifty-eight portraits of figures and sculptures, from ancient artefacts to shop mannequins" - including a pelican, a buddha statue, a bear, an Elvis mannekin, a bear, a superman blow-up doll, all shot and framed identically and hung in a series - "functions as a sort of <span style="font-style: italic;">anti-taxonomy, mocking ideas of progression or systems of classification and otherness</span>."<br />
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<a href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3424/3258574408_a22981bbf7.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3424/3258574408_a22981bbf7.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; height: 250px; width: 333px;" /></a>
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This anti-taxonomy is what Michel Foucault would refer to as a 'heterotopia' - an impossible place where all the unclassifiable junk is secluded in order to make a 'utopia' of order and reason (and taxonomy) 'possible'. Except that in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Order of Things - </span>a work emblematic of precisely Foucault-the-poststructuralist - he goes even further. Harrison's work is just not radical or probing enough. A major inspiration for Foucault, cited in the famous introduction, was a short story by Jorge Luis Borges - a 'modern' writer (more on that below) - in which he mentions a "certain Chinese encyclopedia" which divides animals into<br />
<br />
"(a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies."<br />
<br />
<a href="http://web.utk.edu/~misty/foucault.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://web.utk.edu/%7Emisty/foucault.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; height: 155px; width: 156px;" /></a>
<br />
<br />
This passage, to Foucault<br />
<br />
"shattered thought...breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things...to <span style="font-style: italic;">disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other</span>...Moreover, it is not simply the oddity of unusual juxtapositions that we are faced with here...like the umbrella and the sewing machine on the operating table. The monstrous quality that runs through Borges's enumeration consists, on the contrary, in the fact that the common ground on which such meetings are possible has itself been destroyed...A vanishing trick that is masked or, rather, laughably indicated by our alphabetical order...What has been removed, in short, is the famous 'operating table'."<br />
<br />
<br />
Another work, Simon Starling's 'Three White Desks', is made up of three copies of a no longer existing desk designed by Francis Bacon for Australian writer Patrick White. Only the first desk is a copy of it in fact, made by a cabinet maker after the only surviving photo. The second one, made after an identical photo of the first desk, is a copy of a copy, and is in turn photographed...you get the picture. The third desk is a "copy of a copy of a copy."<br />
<br />
<a href="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45446000/jpg/_45446896_triennial_starling.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45446000/jpg/_45446896_triennial_starling.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; height: 214px; width: 333px;" /></a>
<br />
<br />
The disavowed reference is clear - Warhol only did it better, with more <span style="font-style: italic;">umph</span>. The added dimension in Starling's 'altermodern' approach is having each copy made by a different cabinet-maker in a different country, each in a city relevant to the story of the original desk. But this unnecessary step, which makes for an 'interesting story', only obscures the key point - that repetition <span style="font-style: italic;">alone </span>produces change, without any added input. If one artist alone makes copies of a thing, by the same method, in the same medium - after a sufficient number of repetitions the copy becomes a <span style="font-style: italic;">simulacrum</span>. Each repetition brings about a change, however minuscule. This work, then, tells us nothing significant about 'cultural exchange' and 'translation' between cultural milieus or mediums - every copy, every repetition is a 'translation', every work - every copy in fact - a 'cultural milieu' unto itself on a microcosmic scale.<br />
<br />
Here's Deleuze, one of the, you know, key dudes of postructuralist/postmodern philosophy, writing about Warhol circa 1968, p 366, <span style="font-style: italic;">Difference and Repetition</span> [my italics]:<br />
<br />
"Each art has its interrelated techniques or repetitions, the critical and revolutionary power of which may attain the highest degree and lead us from the sad repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory, and then to the ultimate repetitions of death in which our freedom is played out...the manner in which, within painting, Pop Art pushed the <span style="font-style: italic;">copy, copy of the copy, etc., to that extreme point at which it reverses and becomes a simulacrum</span> (such as Warhol's remarkable "serial" series, in which all the repetitions of habit, memory and death are conjugated)..."<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.danielyang.com/images/warhol.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.danielyang.com/images/warhol.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; height: 228px; width: 322px;" /></a>
<br />
<br />
<br />
I rest my case.<br />
<br />
Reading Bourriaud's introductory text I find myself baffled - it oscillates between totally meaningless commercial art-world jargon with no apparent relationship to most of the works in the exhibition, other than what could be said of any contemporary art ("the figure of the artist as homo viator, a traveller whose passage through signs and formats reflects a contemporary experience of mobility"); and a schoolboy's highly simplified rendition of precisely <span style="font-style: italic;">postmodern</span> philosophy, i.e. Deleuze - "lines drawn both in space and time, materializing trajectories rather than destinations, expressing a course or a wandering rather than a fixed space-time"; the term 'altermodern', he tells us, "suggests a multitude of possibilities, of alternatives to a single route."<br />
<br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Très chic</span>. Yet this somehow means that the "historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end"? Not with these kinds of contradictions to play with.<br />
<br />
Derrida can be read into this discussion as a kind of arch-Marxist: where Marx saw internal contradictions in capitalism, Derrida saw internal contradictions everywhere. Deconstruction is internal to things - and this is what bugs me when people throw these words around without grasping them, and write stuff like 'Artist so-and-so uses conceptual approaches to such-and-such to deconstruct notions of this-and-that with reference to narratives of something-or-other', and so forth. People don't deconstruct anything - deconstruction is a passive process, a force of nature. It can only be shown - one can only draw attention to the self-deconstruction of, say, a text. Things deconstruct themselves, break down into their constituent components, expose their own contradictions, generate their own opposites and internal differences. Language deconstructs itself through repetition. Ideas deconstruct themselves. Modernity, too, deconstructs itself; and Bourriaud's 'Altermodern' triennial is a case in point.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpBruhcPFaLeeZBsjMMxPJF6-thxGJquI5RJSF_B3E4rin9t22LO4CyCAWcS9QgreSE7sk4bvA3ChUK4yJZYVLlHCU3q8OPj3mXZc1wQo6Wtrti9kq-9pjo0yxvuFBl-70IgWj69MBtr3r/s1600/06_LS_under-siege-630x473.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpBruhcPFaLeeZBsjMMxPJF6-thxGJquI5RJSF_B3E4rin9t22LO4CyCAWcS9QgreSE7sk4bvA3ChUK4yJZYVLlHCU3q8OPj3mXZc1wQo6Wtrti9kq-9pjo0yxvuFBl-70IgWj69MBtr3r/s320/06_LS_under-siege-630x473.jpg" /></a>
<br />
<br />
'Altermodern' decomposes, ironically enough, into a poor copy of 'postmodern'. And by 'poor' I don't mean artistic merit or 'faithfulness to original', but quite the contrary - poor in the sense that it falls short of its own mark, that within a history of thought, it doesn't represent a development in the way in which 'postmodernity' was a development of 'modernity'.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://newsgrist.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c66f153ef0111684a0635970c-500wi" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://newsgrist.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c66f153ef0111684a0635970c-500wi" style="cursor: pointer; height: 183px; width: 305px;" /></a>
<br />
<br />
One of the great lessons of one of the key philosophers of modernity, Hegel, was this: something that appears to be refuted - annihilated - in the progression of thought, is merely sublated. (<i>Aufhebung</i>) One of Hegel's favourite metaphors was that of a flower springing from a bud, appearing to destroy the bud in the process; the flower blooms, the bud disappears. Nevertheless, without the bud there would be no flower - it is the bud that gives birth to the flower, and remains sublated within it.<br />
<br />
Postmodernity is a moment in the history of thought - one of its key realizations as against modernity being that meaning and language are inherently unstable; that identity is unstable; that concepts themselves are unstable and their meanings shift, evolve. Even terms like 'modern' and 'postmodern' or 'poststructuralist' are themselves inherently unstable, and were rarely - if ever - self-applied by those thinkers usually corralled under them by high-minded critics concerned with fads and fashionable phrases.<br />
<br />
We cannot simply retreat from that, abandon that moment in thought, pretend it didn't happen. In Deleuze, the dialectic exemplified in Hegel's metaphor translates into <span style="font-style: italic;">becoming</span>. But <span style="font-style: italic;">becoming</span> - what Bourriaud might call "trajectories rather than destinations" - encompasses more than Hegel's dialectic because Deleuze, among other things, had Darwin and evolutionary science behind him. <span style="font-style: italic;">B</span><span style="font-style: italic;">ecoming</span> takes account not only of a process of growth in the sense of a single living organism (even as a microcosm of world spirit), but the whole process of genetic development and actualization, which adds complexities - is more in the vein of 'rhizomatic'. It can move and split in any direction and does not follow any clear, determinable path to 'Progress' but only adaptation, neither up nor down, neither forward nor back; and it is dependent precisely on processes of repetition - the copy of a copy of a copy, etc - which over time generate the truly new in nature.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/uploaded_images/Gilles_Deleuze_2_H-737107.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/uploaded_images/Gilles_Deleuze_2_H-737107.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; height: 223px; width: 325px;" /></a>
<br />
<br />
To Deleuze, the very suggestion that there is an opposition (real or apparent) between 'bud' and 'flower' as distinct identities, and that one annihilates or even appears to annihilate the other, would be false: this is the field of the <span style="font-style: italic;">negative</span>, the 'false problem' or 'the fetish in person'. The one, rather, <span style="font-style: italic;">becomes </span>the other, morphs into it. Together they form a 'trajectory' rather than two 'destinations' or 'points'.<br />
<br />
In this vein, I find Bourriaud's notion of 'altermodern', at least from what I have so far seen in practice, very <span style="font-style: italic;">un</span>-becoming.<br />
<br />
Altermodernity hasn't come up with any truly new problems in relation to postmodernity. To use Bourriaud's own terminology, what he has missed is that the relation modern-postmodern is precisely that - a relation, in which neither is a fixed point in space/time - the two form a trajectory in which neither can be reduced to simply itself, or disengaged from the other.<br />
<br />
Ideas - real ideas, generating real problems - don't die; and many of the pieces in the 'altermodern' exhibition demonstrate that the Idea in question here - the 'postmodern' one - is very much a real Idea, embodied in actual objects, even ones whose authors or curators claim that that same idea is 'dead'. Irony is indeed alive and well.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwAOAjQBzwE9kGXSt9CgCCuGa-Q2KlCJ2X1M_I7qNkur0Bxm065uVgvv3c3hPe3B_1KVGrZSh-BEvSwz3-pTmiFqmhno9jYKqyWASYM3Nd-0BmydHPPafpycZyIfYr7OT0SJ2fY1JJdazS/s1600/471_irony-bird.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwAOAjQBzwE9kGXSt9CgCCuGa-Q2KlCJ2X1M_I7qNkur0Bxm065uVgvv3c3hPe3B_1KVGrZSh-BEvSwz3-pTmiFqmhno9jYKqyWASYM3Nd-0BmydHPPafpycZyIfYr7OT0SJ2fY1JJdazS/s320/471_irony-bird.jpg" /></a>
<br />
<br />
The thing is, writers and poets always 'got it' before art critics and historians did. Rimbaud's famous remark in a letter to a friend - Je est un autre ('I is another') - has long been mulled over as a herald of postmodernity. Jack Kerouac's "it ain't whatcha write, but the way 'atcha write it" hints at the notion of <span style="font-style: italic;">différance</span>. Yet another great poet once wrote<br />
<br />
Do I contradict myself? Very well then<br />
I contradict myself.<br />
I am large, I contain multitudes.<br />
<br />
Now that sounds pretty damn post-modern to me. When was it written? 1855. Walt Whitman.<br />
<br />
In the case of some writers, who stand in the margins and evade easy pinning down, such as the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa, people have debates and ask: was s/he modern or postmodern? And I say to that: does it matter? Only the Ideas matter in the end. Where 'modern' stops and 'postmodern' begins is a matter of pointless pedantry.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Walt_Whitman_edit_2.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Walt_Whitman_edit_2.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; height: 260px; width: 212px;" /></a>
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Walt Whitman - clearly postmodern</span></span><br />
<br />
These writers - Foucault included - themselves embody that trajectory in thought, the discovery - the transition from 'modern' to 'postmodern'.<br />
<br />
I am tempted to speculate here that Bourriaud may in fact have a point, however not the one he figures - that perhaps the rise of fads and buzzwords like 'altermodern' in today's global financial capitalist world does signal a new era, but one which is still postmodern, even <span style="font-style: italic;">ultra</span>postmodern rather than 'altermodern'. What we may be faced with here is a stripped-down version, a 'bare repetition' of postmodernity without self-awareness, or with a kind of false consciousness - a thoroughly unhinged postmodernity unaware of its own historical moorings, under a different name, a different guise. An even more postmodern postmodernity, precisely because it doesn't call itself that. (very much in line with Zizek's remark that one of the dangers of today's global capitalism is that it 'no longer calls itself capitalism.') Postmodernity, in other words, is Altermodernity's unnameable core - its Big Other - the elephant in the room.<br />
<br />
So, there - deconstruct that.<br />
<br />
As another modernist poet - whose words also have a distinctly post-modern/Taoist ring at times - T.S. Eliot, put it:<br />
<br />
<sp><sp><sp><sp><sp><sp><sp><sp><sp><sp><sp>And what you thought you came for<br />Is only a shell, a husk of meaning<br />From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled<br />If at all. Either you had no purpose<br />Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured<br />And is altered in fulfilment.<br /><br />Alternatively, one could say that just like Marx is only now, 150 years later, in the midst of a financial crisis, coming into his own; postmodern thought, too, has yet to come into its own. 'Altermodern', on the other hand, in the world of Ideas may well be of the stillborn/undead variety.<br /><br />Therefore in keeping with this fashion of inventing interesting buzzwords, I have come up with my own: AlterpostpunkAnarchoMarxistModernism. Whatever straw dummy Bourriaud in his out-of-touch world takes postmodernism to be may be 'dead', but this surely ain't. This, I claim, is the true 'sign of the times'; but alas, I haven't the time to elaborate on it here.<br /><br /><br /><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" fs="1" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/WIXg9KUiy00&hl=" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425"></embed></sp></sp></sp></sp></sp></sp></sp></sp></sp></sp></sp>
</P>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-13280468993779938022009-04-13T11:44:00.019-07:002023-10-17T02:22:14.613-07:00Tamil sit-in at Parliament Square and the Bug of Colonial Cynicism<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<p><br /><object height="255" width="420"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZxxxB3BHRJ8&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZxxxB3BHRJ8&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="255" width="420"></embed></object><br /><br />It seems every time I go see an exhibition the past few days, I run into a Tamil protest. This time it was the Altermodern triennial at Tate Britain (of which I will write more later), and my Tamil friends were staging a sit-in at Parliament Square. I shot some more photos, but concentrated mostly on video footage this time, which I have edited into a short film, posted above through Youtube. (I shot in high-definition, but unfortunately it has gone through various conversions for upload...hm. something to work on. I am quite fond of the last shot, with the Churchill statue looming over the crowd as the clock of Westminster Cathedral stikes seven.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_xX7AfUslLXbPetbopilsRVhiWssRm3GYSRZrNXEQGOSoNCfuQaSPLDjQD3aO0jYXFlGB2kiwtrvyXFCFm9AyUFyJX4BzE6aFH2VCU3j-pvKLvyOdgpOeHzGeNtCithY63ayKyVtWqi3z/s1600-h/P1430019.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 334px; height: 250px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_xX7AfUslLXbPetbopilsRVhiWssRm3GYSRZrNXEQGOSoNCfuQaSPLDjQD3aO0jYXFlGB2kiwtrvyXFCFm9AyUFyJX4BzE6aFH2VCU3j-pvKLvyOdgpOeHzGeNtCithY63ayKyVtWqi3z/s400/P1430019.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324506768006742130" border="0" /></a><br /><br />These protests have been going on for several days and have blocked streets in central London, the one on Saturday drawing a crowd of 100,000 according to official police figures; yet it has hardly made the headlines. (Partly explainable by the Sri Lankan government's ban on foreign journalists.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYGZUqD0s7fNteTjgXiaZHk8lKXRTIIz1-MoqC6y8VTb4t2HTrBMwWF1N1zkXOlIMo6pZiGjD41eZVTQxS_S3yXVjsMzSmpsxNqMrcKfjtNeACavVtXsY8yx66hMBs3WU91QOiypW-nv_F/s1600-h/P1430031.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 345px; height: 258px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYGZUqD0s7fNteTjgXiaZHk8lKXRTIIz1-MoqC6y8VTb4t2HTrBMwWF1N1zkXOlIMo6pZiGjD41eZVTQxS_S3yXVjsMzSmpsxNqMrcKfjtNeACavVtXsY8yx66hMBs3WU91QOiypW-nv_F/s400/P1430031.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324506771521546146" border="0" /></a><br /><br />One key thing to note is that although Tamil communities worldwide have been staging protests and sit-ins, there is an added significance here. Unsurprisingly, the root of the conflict in Sri Lanka is one of many British colonial leftovers - the creation by Crown mandate, on the departure of the British from Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon), of an artificial statelet - without regard to pre-existing regional demographic differences and related claims to autonomy, in this case the Tamil minority who were left in a repressive majority-Sinhalese statelet.<br /><br />I am tempted to come up with a jibe here on the likelihood that all this had something to do with preserving the supply - and of course the impeccable flavour - of English tea.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.teacaddy.czi.cz/images/caddies/Lip1179bb.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 180px; height: 277px;" src="http://www.teacaddy.czi.cz/images/caddies/Lip1179bb.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />It also strikes me that almost any existing armed conflict in the world today, now, that I can think of is rooted in some mess left by European colonialists - usually British - upon their departure; and in almost every single case, the root cause is a cynical disregard of demographic, political, and ethnic differences in carving out artificial statelets, power usually being doled out to the most loyal or cooperative of colonial subjects. Palestine, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, East Timor, Somalia, Ethiopia, you name it - case after case, the map of armed conflict in the world today is almost invariably a series of variations on a theme.<br /><br />Just look at a map of Africa - look at all those perfectly straight lines. I mean, sure, desert and savanna is pretty straightforward territory if you're drawing borders. But who drew them? Do you think they largely reflect the migratory patterns of Bedouin tribes, or the whims of colonial prelates of yore?<br /><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFj3oufOjSrB2oRuodA87mZnwXObK7YCMoZBbGFn8OSap5TLUnkJm8J6MlbNQQn2YdfdXBjDeyeuUweevc_gXkv4UqzLBCOh1q1cGj2V6vd9uOOuVhjVtaNLyOkCEjYXIUFb7RtINy6U3G/s1600/africa_map_split-3e1746648b2ee24e5773f9d7afeb3121.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFj3oufOjSrB2oRuodA87mZnwXObK7YCMoZBbGFn8OSap5TLUnkJm8J6MlbNQQn2YdfdXBjDeyeuUweevc_gXkv4UqzLBCOh1q1cGj2V6vd9uOOuVhjVtaNLyOkCEjYXIUFb7RtINy6U3G/s320/africa_map_split-3e1746648b2ee24e5773f9d7afeb3121.jpg" /></a>
<br /><br />And then they blame the mess in the world on the genetic proclivity of 'darker races' to engage in violence. (I have personally witnessed a member of the liberal British upper classes - a Guardian-reading, public school-educated PhD student in urban development at UCL - quietly elaborate this point to me once on a bus chock-full of local immigrants in Dalston, in relation both to the causes of the high crime rate in Hackney and the violence in the world in general; it was one of my first cultural shocks in Britain, and I shall never forget my initial disbelief that he was indeed suggesting - indeed, in a very British, understated manner - what I was indeed hearing...)<br /><br />To be fair, the British certainly aren't the only ones to blame, and one should also take into account places like Vietnam and Korea - the product of a similar colonial bug, albeit of a more modern, Soviet-American-Franco-Chinese variety. (interestingly enough, both countries were split between a communist north and a pro-Western south, in both cases reflecting no known actual demographic divisions, but rather the balance of power between the occupying forces.)<br /><br />And yet it seems to me that almost all the key hotspots brewing right now - Palestine, Iraq, Sri Lanka - can be traced back to British colonial rule. Sure, it's complicated. Sure, there is a situation on the ground and there is no simple solution - not anymore at least. But is it just that the British are unlucky, and happened to take on the most difficult places with the most complicated histories under their domain, or is it that there is something particularly cynical about their methods of colonial government? An example much closer to home - Ireland - might be instructive, since it poses similar dilemmas and complications.<br /><br />The British government's way of washing its hands clean of the mess in Sri Lanka at present is to dismiss the Tamil Tigers, as other governments have, following Sri Lanka's cue, as a terrorist organization. The best indication of the cynicism of such policies, in light of what is known about the conflict, is the double standard applied by the USA and other governments to the kurds, as documented in the film <a href="http://www.kevinmckiernan.com/FilmReviews.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Good Kurds, Bad Kurds</span></a> : the Iraqi Kurds, who are useful, are treated as 'freedom fighters'; the Turkish Kurds, who are essentially part of the same movement, have the same goals and deploy the same methods, are 'terrorists', because Turkey is an ally.<br /><br />It is for this reason that the Tamil protesters' slogans include 'Tigers are our freedom fighters'.<br /><br />In light of all this, it is commendable that they still wave the British flag at their protests, instead of burning it, as I surely would in their shoes.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxCWs50LdfYz5P0Pfim7QAewC0G9dNdY-2su5gByymFv1aQKfOVfW07tS5GxJE7L11OE1vGwaJIsUqcpZ4gwbCQo4wdO7h4IDfIq9-XgF5XUL-dGd17InRdlTUm6NeLrOIBB991ZULKJZj/s1600-h/P1430041.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxCWs50LdfYz5P0Pfim7QAewC0G9dNdY-2su5gByymFv1aQKfOVfW07tS5GxJE7L11OE1vGwaJIsUqcpZ4gwbCQo4wdO7h4IDfIq9-XgF5XUL-dGd17InRdlTUm6NeLrOIBB991ZULKJZj/s400/P1430041.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324506780238030370" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /></p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-88696154989274219522009-04-12T08:04:00.015-07:002023-10-17T02:22:26.462-07:00G20 and the rise of disciplinary power: the bankruptcy of justice<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<p><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Qrpdrn5kb0s&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Qrpdrn5kb0s&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />The Guardian has posted <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/11/g20-protest-witnesses-police-actions">stories of mistreatment of civilians by police </a>during the G20 protest, along with a version of the video (above) showing the police assault Ian Tomlinson, who later suffered a heart attack, as he was making his way home. The Guardian edit of the original video (the first one to surface, shot by a bystander) includes a slow-motion replay and action highlights.<br /><br />This, along with the thousands of other such stories that go unreported with every protest because they do not result in deaths (take the use of harassment legislation to curb protests, discussed in an earlier post), is a good index of the rise of disciplinary power in contemporary Western society.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/ffximage/2008/04/29/470x400king.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 345px; height: 293px;" src="http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/ffximage/2008/04/29/470x400king.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The fact that no major riots or anti-police actions have broken out is a measure of the effectiveness of that power, even when it exceeds its bounds. (Think of the Rodney King riots in LA) An individual officer may get reprimanded; but the overall effect is a success, the message hit home. Just as the rhetoric of freedom and democratic values in the age of the 'war on terror' and the 'clash of civilizations' has heated up, the police on this side of the fence are getting more brutal. (Incidentally, an <a href="http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/04/0082444">item </a><a href="http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/04/0082444">in the Readings section</a> of this month's issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">Harper's</span> details a lawsuit filed by the family of a 12-year-old black girl in Texas who in 2006 was brutally beaten by police officers on her parents' lawn for resisting arrest on charges of being a prostitute. The family "eventually learned that the dispatch call the officers were responding to reported three white female prostitutes soliciting men half a block from the family’s home.")<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.quangtruong.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/panopticon_large.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 316px; height: 346px;" src="http://www.quangtruong.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/panopticon_large.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />This split in Power theorized by Foucault - between the conventional form it takes in the West in the sovereign legal right, and its modern form in disciplinary power, is perhaps more real than ever. Even when police actions are questioned, they are not questioned on the basis of right, but on the logic of necessity - i.e. was it reasonable under the circumstances, were security measures that led to this shooting or that beating necessary in view of the threats, etc (who gets to measure such things?).<br /><br />Even when rights are infringed (think of the De Menezes shooting), this is irrelevant so long as the measures taken are deemed to have been necessary, and the innocent casualty becomes simply the victim of an 'unfortunate accident'. Rights only come into play to cover up the bare bones of disiplinary mechanics.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://strategyunit.blogsome.com/images/parisriots03.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 380px; height: 253px;" src="http://strategyunit.blogsome.com/images/parisriots03.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />In other words, disciplinary power is questioned only on its own terms, on the logic of necessity. The only question that can be asked of it is: 'is it necessary to take such measures in order to produce the desired effects/goals?' One is not allowed to question the effects/goals themselves, or their justification. One is not allowed to suggest that a particular measure is illegitimate because it may or is bound to infringe on a particular political/natural/legal right.<br /><br />Yet it is clear that the real 'necessity' behind the techniques of discipline is not security from terrorism or from particular threats - this can never be achieved one hundred percent as proto-fascist security barons would believe - but the disciplining of the population, the deployment of techniques of discipline and 'normalization' without popular or democratic oversight. It is no surprise that the recent crackdown on supposed Pakistani terrorists using student visas came on the heels of the police brutality at the G20 protest - the timing was no doubt arranged to downplay police brutality and conflate the threat of 'terror' with the threat of the protesters - something which New Labour politicians have attempted to do explicitly, making statements that liken anti-globalization protesters to Bin Laden, etc. It was just oh-so-convenient that Bob Quick misplaced a memo and they had to crack down early.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.lostweekend.tv/EU_liquid_ad.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 239px; height: 246px;" src="http://www.lostweekend.tv/EU_liquid_ad.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />With each new crackdown and ensuing security measures, i.e. no bottled water, taking off one's shoes at airports, one lighter per passenger (what is it that can be done with one but not with two?) - the 'terrorists' try something else because, of course, they won't try bottled liquid explosives or shoe explosives again; and the possibilities are endless when one is willing to give one's own life up in the process. Yet the retrospectively enacted measures stay in place, however useless they are in the long run, after the fact; because their ultimate target is the population at large; and their aim is teaching discipline and obedience to authority, regulating and corralling the mass of ordinary citizens, teaching them to execute commands without asking questions. We're all in the army now.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.flights.com/pics/airport-security.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 278px; height: 278px;" src="http://www.flights.com/pics/airport-security.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />No doubt there will soon be new restrictions on student visas and entry clearances, allegedly for security but in reality with a view to organizing a 'reasonable racism' or 'reasonable xenophobia', to borrow a formulation used by Slavoj Zizek in recent lectures.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://twolia.com/blogs/the-perpetual-tourist/files/2008/03/airport-security-line.jpg?file=2008/03/airport-security-line.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 251px; height: 332px;" src="http://twolia.com/blogs/the-perpetual-tourist/files/2008/03/airport-security-line.jpg?file=2008/03/airport-security-line.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />It is notable that in the torture debate of recent years, even those liberals who maintained their principled opposition to torture for the most part found it necessary to assert that anyway, the intelligence obtained by torture is unreliable, that people will say anything you want them to under torture. It is insufficient, in other words, to assert that torture is unethical, that 'we are becoming like them', that it infringes the legal or natural rights of suspects, etc. One must always also engage the technical point; one must question disciplinary power on its own terms, on the issue of necessity and efficiency.<br /><br />And the power of disciplinary mechanics is ultimately the only real power, or as Foucault put it, the 'mode in which power is actually exercised...power at the point of its application to bodies' ; as opposed to vague or abstract notions of sovereignty and autonomy and democracy and legal right. Disciplinary power constrains and subordinates any recourse to legal action or legal right, rather than being constrained by it.<br /><br />It is this same power that is at the bottom of the financial meltdown and the ongoing recession, in the form of economic disciplinary power. The goal of neoliberal economics from Milton Friedman onwards has been nothing less than to wrest economics from the domain of political sovereignty and right, and bring it fully within the scope of discipline, within disciplinary power. Disciplinary power, as Foucault shows in his analyses of various social domains (prisons, hospitals, schools, etc) is constituted by what he calls the 'medicalization' of knowledge: this is where the notion of economic 'shock therapy' fits in neatly - a term that Naomi Klein in her critique of neoliberal economics did not coin but borrowed from Milton Friedman, the neoliberal shock doctor in person. (at a time when, of course, 'shock therapy' was still believed to be valid medical science; nonetheless, it is a good example of self-incriminating statements, however unwittingly made)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/upload/2007/07/lobotomy.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 333px; height: 266px;" src="http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/upload/2007/07/lobotomy.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />And it is through the 'medicalization' - one could say de-politicization - of economic knowledge that the neoliberal 'shock doctors' were able to take key economic decisions regarding deregulation of markets and other economic reforms outside the political and democratic sphere, and into the scientific/technical sphere. There is no room in the edifices of modern government to question economic policy, because economic policy has become a matter of science, of mechanical necessity, of technical knowledge - not political decision. We are meant to take it on faith that state assets, utilities, schools, prisons and the like <em>must</em> be privatized or turn to private sources of funding, that taxes <em>must</em> be lowered, that credit interest rates <em>must</em> be set to suit the banks, that there just isn't enough money to cover the cost of social security and other benefits even as taxes are being lowered for the benefit of the super-rich or when - even during a once-in-a-century recession - billions are given away in a massive 'benefits package' to banks, and so forth. What should be political decisions take the form of unconditional demands, mechanical necessities.<br /><br />The only good answer to this is to say, as Martin Luther King did in the march on Washington, that "we refuse to believe that the Bank of Justice is bankrupt." We must cash our cheque. Our demands too must be unconditional.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://aapf.org/focus/images/martin%20Luther%20King%202.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 335px; height: 289px;" src="http://aapf.org/focus/images/martin%20Luther%20King%202.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />This is a point where it is no longer even that the ends justify the means - in the Machiavellian schema one still has to justify the ends, promote a 'just' end. In the sinister logic of neoliberal capitalism, the ends are taken to be self-evidently just and fully identified with the means chosen. The relation between ends and means cannot be questioned, since it is the mechanical result of 'economic science'.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ces/journal/v49/n1/images/8100182f5.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 237px; height: 192px;" src="http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ces/journal/v49/n1/images/8100182f5.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></p><p><br />Two articles also in this month's issue of Harper's provide the most incisive critique I have yet seen of the current economic crisis and its roots in several key moments of deregulation of the US economy over the past several decades - in particular, the deregulation of interest rates and wages.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">INFINITE DEBT: How unlimited interest rates destroyed the economy</span> details how the elimination of the right to form unions in key sectors of the economy and the subsequent union-busting led to an effective pay freeze - no real increase in the minimum or average wages over 40 years, even as the economy grew - driving millions of people into levels of debt unfathomable to their parents; this, coupled with the constitutional legalization of usury - i.e. unlimited credit card interest rates - promising supernormal profit margins, drove all the capital out of manufacturing (a strong union sector but with lower profit margins) into banking and finance, lining up the key elements to ignite the crisis. This is what ensured the decline of Detroit and the rise of Wall Street since the mid-1980s.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Usury country: Welcome to the birthplace of payday lending </span>is a more documentary account of an industry that, with its beginnings in the state of Tennessee, has effectively come into being as an industry and exploded across the USA since the early 1990s. Payday lending - as in dodgy businesses that lend people an advance on their monthly salary at six-figure annual interest rates when they can't pay the bills (no kidding) is rightly referred to by the author as a modern-day form of sharecropping. Or in Foucauldian terminology, another one of those techniques of disciplinary mechanics.<br /><br /><br /></p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-36504567806030680672009-04-12T04:27:00.030-07:002023-10-17T02:22:35.417-07:00Tamil protest; Picasso, repetition, and being-in-the-world<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<p><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRMqwgOR8Ta-2X2KCxl2KNehtAKiKkqi4TRO6npj5vKHbzA6xq6dEPEchSEtK9n_VxsB7PiW0QTMQoItYBeY95IYk1v3DqgNWtnRSOoCN8ijMSuVekPeybsFxUi6Gs9L_bOjI4r1Vx-ANu/s1600-h/P1420971.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRMqwgOR8Ta-2X2KCxl2KNehtAKiKkqi4TRO6npj5vKHbzA6xq6dEPEchSEtK9n_VxsB7PiW0QTMQoItYBeY95IYk1v3DqgNWtnRSOoCN8ijMSuVekPeybsFxUi6Gs9L_bOjI4r1Vx-ANu/s400/P1420971.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324497364593871954" border="0" /></a><br /><br />On my way to see the Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery yesterday (more on that below) I stumbled on the <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hVIXEkCDD_wE1BygpFzeB6BWxwfgD97GFP2O0">Tamil protest against the Sri Lankan government</a>. As I was cycling down from Bloomsbury the car traffic was stalled for miles all the way up Charing Cross Road, at an almost complete standstill. Just as I was scanning the columns of cars weaving my way around lanes of traffic reciting my cyclist mantra - 'you fucking idiots, you fucking idiots, you fucking idiots...' - I reached Trafalgar square and noticed some commotion along the southern rim. At first it looked like there were a lot of English and British flags; and I thought this must be some BNP or UKIP follow-up to the G20 protests. As I got closer it became clear that something very different was afoot.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1l3CDuaoHnNnKW701X1I-5nZZi32rSnKS-gyAmkVqEsrJodTQKa4_QFiZ_CryZvsuvYqTUYMRJaj9tnB2RHvJTtfGUeTZ66SxMJzMCehy-07h6aC1zb-F40ldj71aKXtw2f5cxQUdmI-n/s1600-h/P1420972.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1l3CDuaoHnNnKW701X1I-5nZZi32rSnKS-gyAmkVqEsrJodTQKa4_QFiZ_CryZvsuvYqTUYMRJaj9tnB2RHvJTtfGUeTZ66SxMJzMCehy-07h6aC1zb-F40ldj71aKXtw2f5cxQUdmI-n/s400/P1420972.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324497367353798050" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQjM-jnjnnOOTgVdccBLGoCab8nWnim6_AcDHxlFKvu0jnz4OyCh4sdp3-aUnTlcI3IRh5Vzd6Lng_XGQMzBTVafGEjKyfdrapWoeuUnxp785ryl0ztwzIkfevS0Kvld5-CutBsbf0pnvm/s1600-h/P1420973.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQjM-jnjnnOOTgVdccBLGoCab8nWnim6_AcDHxlFKvu0jnz4OyCh4sdp3-aUnTlcI3IRh5Vzd6Lng_XGQMzBTVafGEjKyfdrapWoeuUnxp785ryl0ztwzIkfevS0Kvld5-CutBsbf0pnvm/s400/P1420973.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324497373411082914" border="0" /></a><br /><br />There were quite a few Tamil flags, but perhaps because there were so many, they were less conspicuous than the larger and more ominous Union Jacks and St George's crosses, which at first stood out against the sea of red and yellow.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcBne7bSZeMi1yEVVwzEGzut3_W4e-fYx3fjzST8xIYtCbhnNFAv5MrAjlqB8dS2wW4C8-WyrmPK5JXIQZKWg_elch9dndBETjj-mhewGEYu40QjR_nkEJKiBI5YZY3XX8fl-riS9T5XFU/s1600-h/P1420974.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcBne7bSZeMi1yEVVwzEGzut3_W4e-fYx3fjzST8xIYtCbhnNFAv5MrAjlqB8dS2wW4C8-WyrmPK5JXIQZKWg_elch9dndBETjj-mhewGEYu40QjR_nkEJKiBI5YZY3XX8fl-riS9T5XFU/s400/P1420974.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324497378312016306" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuM_MnxRqMrT9Q2UkVIFXbzhKrKfIgfox21xMear2BJmAc7623S3kz7_qUeyoZAg955LqX2tN3BezTeK2bKRjT8iILi5Vz7j5HiiwlZHoOaixJVG1lw99g8bqOZKTPwONl1Z_4jeVonZsq/s1600-h/P1420993.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuM_MnxRqMrT9Q2UkVIFXbzhKrKfIgfox21xMear2BJmAc7623S3kz7_qUeyoZAg955LqX2tN3BezTeK2bKRjT8iILi5Vz7j5HiiwlZHoOaixJVG1lw99g8bqOZKTPwONl1Z_4jeVonZsq/s400/P1420993.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324504051285423762" border="0" /></a><br /><br />There were men, women, young and old, children, even parents pushing prams...<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC2tZu0x7KTu7ZW2Lu8LJHq3Oj5KyjEb6DxORUbzzKaxuo2mcV4QK3B_SJ4bD1smP0YAzc_Q5HvEUJoNdIOPbFdpnVqUItg4qU90-lb1EDlGQSqZ1Y1p6HCuOYF7Nv5S19H7MUcDAfzgk9/s1600-h/P1420976.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC2tZu0x7KTu7ZW2Lu8LJHq3Oj5KyjEb6DxORUbzzKaxuo2mcV4QK3B_SJ4bD1smP0YAzc_Q5HvEUJoNdIOPbFdpnVqUItg4qU90-lb1EDlGQSqZ1Y1p6HCuOYF7Nv5S19H7MUcDAfzgk9/s400/P1420976.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324499072933395858" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The whole thing was pretty well orchestrated, with official march coordinators in bright yellow vests (not fluorescent, as that might offend the bobbies) reading 'FREE TAMIL EELAM' on the front and 'STOP Genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka' on the back.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzjW86zhUyZbz869YK7V8oW_JNByHY-iLMSYxcxmfV4YUMVGq1aisEYsWjFRMBKHen6v94gA2i2ssyJiDel0FE2aW7lUYM2SNXREx6AKjA9nSa7ITk_kM6YqM2LBP1vkkpvTuUQvEouvCF/s1600-h/P1420978.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzjW86zhUyZbz869YK7V8oW_JNByHY-iLMSYxcxmfV4YUMVGq1aisEYsWjFRMBKHen6v94gA2i2ssyJiDel0FE2aW7lUYM2SNXREx6AKjA9nSa7ITk_kM6YqM2LBP1vkkpvTuUQvEouvCF/s400/P1420978.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324499080086711794" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-GoSEwEaX02YUMJujtwwbZeOXxPHFiuebO2pDKRG37R_E_T9UsI9kawt0PYJ0HAX2FyaaMiI2twFaBvudh3uZMh-t2QNxiF142h6vwYnit5CqlESaYXG6mu1kiEsvcZvE8JjDnqpVrQbA/s1600-h/P1420988.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-GoSEwEaX02YUMJujtwwbZeOXxPHFiuebO2pDKRG37R_E_T9UsI9kawt0PYJ0HAX2FyaaMiI2twFaBvudh3uZMh-t2QNxiF142h6vwYnit5CqlESaYXG6mu1kiEsvcZvE8JjDnqpVrQbA/s400/P1420988.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324499096611090786" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The Sri Lankan government has <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j1e4H88kKwyc8rXvUls7gLOMzt9Q">kept foreign journalists and aid workers out</a> of the war zone, and made a comprehensive effort to ensure that, if the conflict is reported in foreign media at all, only its own side of the story is heard.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiChbVs4NTdu2XSCXSTQQfubyIjGK0gTyf380-bJEr8ze0wI1Y2cD5ZxjEwgTu0jJXOaaGz7pwS5TBWdKPyr9Mtu4eKHaFXyehev2iOB67ioRVlO2Sqg1l1_moQHPfIZwuEBH5B7zg8RnFY/s1600-h/P1420982.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiChbVs4NTdu2XSCXSTQQfubyIjGK0gTyf380-bJEr8ze0wI1Y2cD5ZxjEwgTu0jJXOaaGz7pwS5TBWdKPyr9Mtu4eKHaFXyehev2iOB67ioRVlO2Sqg1l1_moQHPfIZwuEBH5B7zg8RnFY/s400/P1420982.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324499083534342194" border="0" /></a><br /><br />According to a Human Rights Watch report, the government has <a href="http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/03/23/sri-lanka-no-let-army-shelling-civilians">indiscriminately shelled civilian "no-fire" zones</a>. Some investigators did get in, apparently. Read more about it in Arundhati Roy's <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/01/sri-lanka-india-tamil-tigers">piece for the Guardian</a>.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzUcCY6rcYhyphenhyphenON_xH0saUwT0KIifwbh16_1xTfqpSEZZ8mYces79HjZ0N38Zhyx0qhFQC-fY1ZwgU1NU_9bhK9kZDEk7_tNC9eSHtMcoH6sZQymrW2Y-py_6Aj4lur6CqQzY9UHcFXKzBI/s1600-h/P1420983.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzUcCY6rcYhyphenhyphenON_xH0saUwT0KIifwbh16_1xTfqpSEZZ8mYces79HjZ0N38Zhyx0qhFQC-fY1ZwgU1NU_9bhK9kZDEk7_tNC9eSHtMcoH6sZQymrW2Y-py_6Aj4lur6CqQzY9UHcFXKzBI/s400/P1420983.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324499084600470098" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Bobbies looking inconspicuous as always.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnwy_mlwQxkVmCRL1orCmRc3bnkdKyhayc_lMOi7BZ7fCdQyLuAqkyArNSa08iCtMCtzfv_r-mvVPZhxJw8RQDjaz6DyBby3yskoawMBdd8eOZJ3ma1xAkm1yxxz8QbIDiacadF4fBt-GY/s1600-h/P1420975.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnwy_mlwQxkVmCRL1orCmRc3bnkdKyhayc_lMOi7BZ7fCdQyLuAqkyArNSa08iCtMCtzfv_r-mvVPZhxJw8RQDjaz6DyBby3yskoawMBdd8eOZJ3ma1xAkm1yxxz8QbIDiacadF4fBt-GY/s400/P1420975.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324497381226984258" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdy4x5H_optLcMelf7QeV2M98hWf2BP17foM8zxN5Tw-R_dEc-BhL2h1jZC8bnQxSlofQwB3d_3R393y6NynoswokqYTdd0hLfDQfBB96y66Y4JRzLXsoWWFnJs7W6w4BStaWuSPfNKUFG/s1600-h/P1420995.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdy4x5H_optLcMelf7QeV2M98hWf2BP17foM8zxN5Tw-R_dEc-BhL2h1jZC8bnQxSlofQwB3d_3R393y6NynoswokqYTdd0hLfDQfBB96y66Y4JRzLXsoWWFnJs7W6w4BStaWuSPfNKUFG/s400/P1420995.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324504055232677650" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Back on Trafalgar Square, the current incarnation of the Fourth Plinth, Thomas Schütte's <em>Model for a Hotel 2007 </em>, a 5-m by 4.5 m by 5 m architectural model made of coloured glass. It was originally titled <span style="font-style: italic;">Hotel for the Birds</span> (presumably before the artist got wind of Ken's ban on pigeons in the square).<br /><br />I did eventually make it to the Picasso exhibition, which was also well organized.<br /><br />Most refreshing and thought-stimulating were some of the perhaps less well-known or at least less clichéd works, such as the late variations on Velazquez, Monet, Van Gogh, and others.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/picasso/slideshow/img/7.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 353px; height: 262px;" src="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/picasso/slideshow/img/7.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />'Imitation as the source of creativity' - it occurred to me - is only the art historian's clichéd sublimation of Deleuze's far more subversive proposition: that the truly new only ever emerges in repetition. Newness is by definition an effect of repetition, of return, of grasping an 'old' thing from a different angle: which is why only repetition produces the truly singular, and no two grains of sand are ever the 'same', cannot be reduced to the same thing - this one is this one and that one is that one - even if their molecular structure is identical.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.weareprivate.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/picasso-le-dejeuner-sur-lerbe-1963.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 344px; height: 267px;" src="http://www.weareprivate.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/picasso-le-dejeuner-sur-lerbe-1963.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Rather than being a return to the classical tradition (as suggested by some of the accompanying material), Picasso's explorations of his later years are only a more explicit way of stating what the underlying message was all along: neither a break with the past nor simply a continuation of it, but an incessant search for the new - the excess of innovation - through more and more radical forms of repetition.<br /><br />It is not enough to say that if we do not know history, we are doomed to repeat it; or the inverse, 'you can't repeat the past'. Nor is it simply the opposite, the ancient wisdom of <em>repetitio est mater studiorum</em>. Each of these propositions falls short. Much more subversively, one must repeat in order not simply to learn but to transform and overcome the existing. One must repeat, in order to avoid replication: repetition is never repetition of the same. To repeat is always to repeat a problem, a possibility, a fork in the road. No wonder the most original artists and improvisers in any discipline are also the greatest imitators.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/picasso/slideshow/img/1l.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 229px; height: 306px;" src="http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/picasso/slideshow/img/1l.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Some of Picasso's morbid imagery (cubist or otherwise) throws up a related problem: what Heidegger calls the 'hiddenness' of things. The cut-up and mix of objects and perspectives - the simultaneous presentation of profile and frontal views of faces, the back and front of a torso - is an index of the impossibility of seeing things in their completeness; not a 'cubist' or 'abstract' <span style="font-style: italic;">representation </span>of reality but the marker of a representational void.<br /><br />A part of things always remains hidden from view; and even the multiplication by a mirror remains only that - a multiplication of two-dimensional perspectives which never merge in a single perspective.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.iran-goftogoo.com/forums/uploads/post-10-1152536741.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 251px; height: 347px;" src="http://www.iran-goftogoo.com/forums/uploads/post-10-1152536741.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />What makes these images morbid is their emphasis on the tension between a three-dimensional space and the impossibility not only of representing it, but of even seeing more than two dimensions; the suggestion being that the world would probably look very different, morbid even, in three dimensions. As Picasso himself put it, "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth."<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBuZdHE8SvQaZwVEA8sPokEgmMkwJtQKCA9ZZk5bPtOr7JMAUvAwhpP0p25x1Y5zeUCVLTWMRUnodUWesvNbCYn7JjKd0BJjVVxO5_Cmy0HxryqqH98b6CGUclPIpXN91HgT7VQeoMbig/s400/hp_scanpica6+DS_9332363011.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 321px; height: 243px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBuZdHE8SvQaZwVEA8sPokEgmMkwJtQKCA9ZZk5bPtOr7JMAUvAwhpP0p25x1Y5zeUCVLTWMRUnodUWesvNbCYn7JjKd0BJjVVxO5_Cmy0HxryqqH98b6CGUclPIpXN91HgT7VQeoMbig/s400/hp_scanpica6+DS_9332363011.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-35961127133274554172009-03-31T09:42:00.010-07:002023-10-17T02:22:43.388-07:00The polypill and the purple pill<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<p><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45618000/jpg/_45618163_polypill.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 203px; height: 152px;" src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45618000/jpg/_45618163_polypill.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />More proof that what's good for health - and society as a whole - is bad for business, in today's <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/health-news/the-polypill-medicines-magic-bullet-1658027.html">Independent headline</a>. Fie on you, Big Pharma.<br /><br />The standard rationale for the patenting and high pricing of pharmaceuticals - i.e. that the poor, struggling multinationals need money to fund research - makes no mention of the fact that they spend about twice as much on marketing as they do on research, or that the very people proposing it earn six-figure (and up) salaries. In other words, given that producing the actual chemicals costs next to nothing, about two-thirds of every pill you take pays for advertising and promoting that pill to you, paying lobbyists, paying the media, paying politicians, paying doctors and clinics to prescribe that particular pill to you over another one.<br /><br />Nor do they mention the fact that the money they do spend on "research" mostly goes to developing and marketing stuff like Prozac and Viagra, given that treatments for things like AIDS and Hepatitis just aren't profitable <span style="font-style: italic;">enough </span>- precisely because the people who suffer from these illnesses can't afford the treatments that Big Pharma offers, at the prices at which they are offered.<br /><br />And when no research is necessary, and the (unpatented) ingredients are cheaply available, and treatments can be cheaply produced at a profit? Nah, who needs that. Public health, improving the lot of humanity? Who cares. If we can't dig real deep in people's pockets and hold a knife to their throat, why bother?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/images/prozac.gif"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 387px;" src="http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/images/prozac.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /></p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7519193547451473150.post-60825480455025006562009-03-24T05:48:00.012-07:002023-10-17T02:22:53.394-07:00Night wraps the sky<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
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<p><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://media.us.macmillan.com/jackets/500H/9780374281359.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 210px; height: 274px;" src="http://media.us.macmillan.com/jackets/500H/9780374281359.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and About Mayakovsky</span> (ed. Michael Almereyda) uniquely intersperses Mayakovsky's poetry and other writings (diary entries, excerpts) with others' writings about him, fictional and non-fictional, some fairly recent.<br /><br />"In <span style="font-style: italic;">150,000,000</span>, a poem written during the American intervention in the Russian Civil War, the collossal peasant Ivan, who has 150,000,000 heads, an arm as long as the Neva River, and heels as big as the Caspian steppes, wades across the Atlantic to fight a hand-to-hand battle with a Woodrow Wilson resplendent in a top hat as high as the Eiffel Tower."<br /><br />Why didn't anybody think of that during the Iraq war? Hm...<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.sovlit.com/bios/mayaposter1.gif"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 299px; height: 306px;" src="http://www.sovlit.com/bios/mayaposter1.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /></p>deleuzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07815446993233261073noreply@blogger.com0