"Let There Be Light"

Interesting piece by Nebojsa Seric Shoba commenting on the startling presence of the United States in geopolitics, and its capacity to illuminate in contrast to the dark world over which it can illuminate, from which it derives the resources to illuminate:

Planned Palestinian City, Argument for Sovereignty?

Peter Hallward, quote of the day:

Peter Hallward, writing a diatribe on the politics of "recognition" as insufficiently political, but rather cultural, from Absolutely Postcolonial:

"Mere appreciation of the fact that 'everyone is different and special in their own way' belongs o such sophisticated institutions as Sesame Street and McDonald's Corporation as much as to postcolonial theory" (41).  

(I'll admit that I burst into laughter after reading this line).

Never Forget...

Of all of the 9/11 memorialization hysteria, Vladimir Lenin would remind us, cui prodest?:

"In politics it is not so important who directly advocates particular views. What is important is who stands to gain from these views, proposals, measures.

For instance, “Europe”, the states that call themselves “civilised”, are now engaged in a mad armaments hurdle-race. In thousands of ways, in thousands of newspapers, from thousands of pulpits, they shout and clamour about patriotism, culture, native land, peace, and progress—and all in order to justify new expenditures of tens and hundreds of millions of rubles for all manner of weapons of destruction—for guns, dreadnoughts, etc."

Let's remember, in the case of Iraq:

"There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with al-Qaida or with the September 11 attacks.

Wall Street Journal, right after 9/11: “Few U.S. officials believe that any real alliance between Iraq and al-Qaida ever emerged… The two groups share few aims and have very different motivations.”(Sept. 19, 2001)

BBC, Feb. 5, 2003: “There are no current links between the Iraqi regime and the al-Qaida network, according to an official British intelligence report seen by BBC News.”

New York Times (Oct. 11, 2001) reported that intelligence officials from Jordan, Israel, and Saudi Arabia do not believe there is any serious Hussein-bin Laden connection.

On Sept. 11 itself, top government officials decided to use the airliner attacks to justify war with Iraq. “CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq–even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.” (Sept. 4, 2002)

In October 2002, the New York Times reported that Rumsfeld created a Pentagon operation “to search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists”–despite CIA reports saying there were none.

Shortly afterward, Rumsfeld announced that he had “solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaida members” (Seymour Hersh, May 28, 2003). Soon other officials of the U.S. government were presenting what he said as “evidence.”

When examined, these U.S. government claims have no basis in fact. Their “evidence” relies on a bogus McCarthyite method of linkology– If A is linked to B, and B is linked to C, then D must be backing terrorists, and anyone who questions that is probably also linked to terrorists."

And also, there is always the fact that the Taliban seems to be making some gains.

War/Art/Machines

A fascinating piece by artists duo Allora & Cazadilla featured in the U.S. pavillion at the Venice Biennial:

An innocent performance laced with political themes is what audiences will experience in Venice. The tank, from 1945 and used in the Korean War, will sit outside the pavilion. There, a USA Track & Field athlete in uniform will run for about 45 minutes on the treadmill above its right track. The associations are many: militarism, national identity, competition.

Also, check out their interview with on PBS' Art 21 show. Here is an excerpt from an interview with the couple discussing another war themed piece entitled 'Clamor:'

"What triggered this piece was our interest in how people use music or sound as a weapon—how you can have a gun made of sound that can immobilize you. Then we started getting interested in the relationship between sound or music and war. Our research opened up an enormous quantity of material related to this idea, an incredible archive of sounds related to war—from actual combat, where music was historically used to command and control troops, to more contemporary uses such as propaganda to instill patriotism.

[...]

Interestingly enough, in the history of military music, one of the ways they describe the instruments’ function on the battlefield is to create a clamor. They’d create a noise that was so unbearable for the opponent that it would actually distract them and keep them from being able to effectively fulfill their job of fighting.

It’s described by one Crusader as comprising trumpets, clarions, horns, pipes, drums, cymbals, a prodigious array creating a horrible noise and clamor. And he says they did this to excite the spirit and their courage—for the more violent the clamor became, the more bold they were for the fray.

We’re trying to reinvigorate this word, to redirect it to a new end in this exhibition. We want to talk about the global state of war of today—something that resonates with contemporary experience."

Alain Badiou on the Libyan Interventions

Writing back to Jean-Luc Nancy's support for the "coalition's" actions:

Dear Jean-Luc, in circumstances of this kind it makes no sense for you or me to go with the grain of the Western consensus that says: ‘we absolutely have to remain in charge of everything happening'. We have to make a stand against the grain, and demonstrate that the real target of Western bombers and soldiers is in no way the wretched Gaddafi, a former client of those who are now getting rid of him as someone in the way of their higher interests. For the target of the bombers is definitely the popular uprising in Egypt and the revolution in Tunisia, it is their unexpected and intolerable character, their political autonomy, in a word: their independence. To oppose the destructive interventions of the powers means supporting the political independence and the future of these uprisings and revolutions. This is something we can do, and it is an unconditional imperative.

Twitter Didn't Produce The Uprisings in the Middle East or in Northern Africa

Modernization theory is wrong, here's why.

From Al Jazeera:

To listen to the hype about social networking websites and the Egyptian revolution, one would think it was Silicon Valley and not the Egyptian people who overthrew Mubarak.

Via its technologies, the West imagines itself to have been the real agent in the uprising. Since the internet developed out of a US Defense Department research project, it could be said the Pentagon did it, along with Egyptian youth imitating wired hipsters from London and Los Angeles.

[...]

But neither version is particularly useful for organising resistance to the local dictatorship. In any case, the internet was turned off at decisive moments in the Egyptian uprising, and it was ordinary Egyptians, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, who toppled the regime, not the hybrid youth of the global professional classes.

Globalisation is also coming to awareness of the situations of other peoples, such as those similarly oppressed by local and faraway powers. Of particular interest are those moments when these peoples rise up, when they devise forms of revolt and struggle. Defeats provide lessons, and victories give hope. These revolutions need not be on satellite TV to effect their instruction. Revolutionaries in France and Haiti in the 1790s received news of one another''''s activities by the regular packet ship that plied between Jamaica and London.

Sailors, slaves, and workers circulating in the Atlantic between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries shared and improved upon their repertoires of revolt and resistance, bringing the good news to ports from Rio to Boston, Bristol to Havana.

Race-baiting in Congress Somewhat Unsuccessful

Though the fact that it is occurring in the first place is troubling as well as telling. From Colorlines.com:

Last week’s congressional hearings on the Muslim community didn’t go quite the way Rep. Peter King hoped and expected. Their content turned out to be more of a referendum on whether such hearings themselves were a good idea, interrupting the fear mongering political theater that King had set up.

[...]

Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to be elected to Congress, stole the show by crying as he told the story of 23-year-old paramedic Mohammed Salman Hamdani, who became the subject of speculation that he’d collaborated with the hijackers after he disappeared on 9/11. It turned out that he was actually among the first responders who died in the towers. Hamdani’s mother, Talat, went to D.C. several weeks ago with other family members of 9/11 victims for a scheduled meeting with Peter King, but he stood them up.

King argued that Muslims have a greater responsibility to turn each other in than other Americans, as he thinks that every Mosque has a bomber hiding in its basement. King refused to broaden the hearing to include other groups, asserting that there is no equivalent between Muslim extremism and, say, neo-Nazis. But of course there was the case of Byron Williams, who was intercepted by California Highway Patrol on his way to shoot up the ACLU and the Tides Foundation last year. And just last week, police arrested Kevin Marpham (a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance) for appearing to construct a bomb with which to greet marchers at Spokane’s MLK Day rally. In a recent report, Charles Kurzman notes that in 2010, there were more than 20 terrorist plots by non-Muslims. A certain segment of white men appear to be very, very angry.

[...]

But there is some room for change. While most polls, taken ahead of the hearings, showed just over 50 percent support for King’s effort, that broke down heavily along political lines, with Republicans at about 70 percent and Democrats at around 40 percent. Seven in 10 people polled by the Public Religion Research Institute said King should expand the scope of the hearing to other groups. In a Gallup poll, most people said that Muslims are not too extreme in their religious beliefs or supportive of Al Qaeda. Importantly, a good 10 percent were undecided, and that represents a large number of people.

Žižek on the Great Egyptian Revolt

Here, in a op-ed for the Guardian, Slavoj Žižek appears to be affirming a point made by Tariq Ali, in an earlier issue of The New Left Review, but takes it a bit further with regards to Egypt:

"The inevitable conclusion to be drawn is that the rise of radical Islamism was always the other side of the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries. When Afghanistan is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country, who still remembers that, 40 years ago, it was a country with a strong secular tradition, including a powerful communist party that took power there independently of the Soviet Union? Where did this secular tradition go?

[...]

In order for the key liberal legacy to survive, liberals need the fraternal help of the radical left. Back to Egypt, the most shameful and dangerously opportunistic reaction was that of Tony Blair as reported on CNN: change is necessary, but it should be a stable change. Stable change in Egypt today can mean only a compromise with the Mubarak forces by way of slightly enlarging the ruling circle. This is why to talk about peaceful transition now is an obscenity: by squashing the opposition, Mubarak himself made this impossible. After Mubarak sent the army against the protesters, the choice became clear: either a cosmetic change in which something changes so that everything stays the same, or a true break.

Here, then, is the moment of truth: one cannot claim, as in the case of Algeria a decade ago, that allowing truly free elections equals delivering power to Muslim fundamentalists. Another liberal worry is that there is no organised political power to take over if Mubarak goes. Of course there is not; Mubarak took care of that by reducing all opposition to marginal ornaments, so that the result is like the title of the famous Agatha Christie novel, And Then There Were None. The argument for Mubarak – it's either him or chaos – is an argument against him.

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong's old motto is pertinent: "There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent."

Where, then, should Mubarak go? Here, the answer is also clear: to the Hague. If there is a leader who deserves to sit there, it is him."