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Showing posts with the label violence

Quote of the Week: ‘Content With Watching Atrocities and Suffering From Afar’

  Western collective consciousness has long been socialised with the assumption that the non-West is naturally a place of unrest, deprivation, violence and, all in all, of inescapable backwardness. This thinking was proliferated in the earliest writings by the “founding fathers” of various disciplines as a matter of scientific fact. Take the case of my own discipline: international relations. It is meant to educate the future politician, diplomat, public intellectual or policymaker on how states interact in the international political system. Yet, its first textbooks are rooted in “Darwinist ideas”, that imagined a racially hierarchical global order and placed white Europeans at the top and all the darker peoples of the world at the bottom. This hierarchy, they insisted, was justified due to white people’s natural intellectual and cultural superiority. Over the years, the ways in which these hierarchies are perpetuated have changed and we started to use different lingo. But be it fragi

Culture Can’t Explain the Arab Revolts

Although Challand is right to address the use of cultural activities in supporting political messages and mentions some of the positive achievements of the period, he is insufficiently critical of the weaknesses of the programs and policies militants proposed for the future. Revolutionary leadership was missing: the negative slogan of getting rid of the existing political system required a positive vision about the kind of society and polity with which demonstrators wanted to replace it. As many of Challand’s ideological references are Marxist, the absence of any discussion of the major issue of the movements’ lack of alternative economic programs, and in particular the fact that there was no explicit challenge to dominant neoliberal economic policies, is surprising. In other words, there is little reference to the economic structures that determine political choices and constrain outcomes. Helen Lackner reviews Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprising Related The Arab Thermido

Public Health and Medical Protest in China

“ The threat of violence and instability impels the Chinese state to absorb and resolve disputes through legal and bureaucratic channels in which the state has a monopoly on decision-making and space for interest representation. The criminalisation of yinao reflects such state efforts to maintain social stability. However, the adverse impact of this criminalisation [...] suggests that the inability of formal institutions (for example, laws, courts, dispute mediation commissions) to resolve disputes could give rise to more social unrest.”

What Would Malcolm X Say About Gaza and Black Resistance in the US Today?

“There are other times when I seek out the wisdom of those human beings who refused to turn their faces from forms of social terror and found strength to endure.” A good and stimulating interview . Contrary to the title though, the treatment of the relevance of Malcolm X’s ideas in the exchange between Yancy and Sawyer are marginal.  

Documentary: Frantz Fanon – Black Skin White Mask

 But why a British actor as Fanon? Related A review of Concerning Violence

France: Économie générale de la violence

Frédéric Lordon : «   Terrorisme   » est un mot impasse. Concéder «   terrorisme   », c’est annuler que ce qui se passe en Israël-Palestine est politique. Au plus haut point. Même si cette politique prend la forme de la guerre, se poursuivant ainsi par d’autres moyens selon le mot de Clausewitz. Le peuple palestinien est en guerre – on ne lui a pas trop laissé le choix. L’acharnement à faire dire «   terrorisme   » ne satisfait que des besoins passionnels – et aucune exigence intellectuelle. «   Terrorisme   » a une irremplaçable vertu : donner une violence pour dépourvue de sens. Et de causes Les tragédies israéliennes sont incarnées en témoignages poignants, les tragédies palestiniennes sont agglomérées en statistiques. Le bloc bourgeois quand il fait bloc derrière Israël à l’extérieur saisit surtout l’occasion de faire bloc contre ses ennemis à l’intérieur. Le bloc bourgeois français est plus israélien que les Israéliens : il refuse qu’on dise «   apartheid   » alors que  des offici

Fanon’s Conception of Violence Does not Work in Palestine

 A very realistic approach “Whatever catharsis this constitutes, it is not one that will lead to victory over an Israeli society that has been using violence against Palestinians as its own traumatic catharsis for 75 years, in a world that has a very high tolerance for Palestinian civilian casualties, with most people in the West still supporting Israel whenever there is a high level of Israeli Jewish casualties. If Palestinians are to defeat Zionist colonialism, it will likely take a much different sort of analysis of its violence and power than Fanon offered three-quarters of a century ago, and it will probably require a paradigm shift in the core concepts of what a nation, freedom and independence are at a moment when the entire world, not just Palestine/Israel, is heading towards conflagration.” Israel’s settler colonialism is much more than ‘violence in its natural state’ and thus will require far more than ‘greater violence’ to defeat

On the Western Media and the Erasure of Palestine

“The fact that the Western media only uses the register of violence to speak on Palestine feeds on a co lonial, racist, patriarchal, and capitalist discourse that aims to justify the Israeli settler colonial erasure of Palestine. While violence against the Palestinians is specific, it does not occur in isolation from what is happening elsewhere in the world. Black and brown people are racialized everywhere in Europe and North America, and that racialization contributes to the demonization of Palestinian people.” What ‘the West’, and its media, work tirelessly to hide

Eqbal Ahmed: Terrorism – Ours vs. Theirs

Against Amnesia The experience of violence by a stronger party has historically turned victims into terrorists. That's what happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back. State terror very often breeds collective terror. –Eqbal Ahmed, 1998 [Ahmed though does not explicitly include the state terrorism of Western states. He merely talks about the how US ‘promotes terrorism’, for instance.] From a transcript of a talk by Eqbal Ahmed University of Colorado, Boulder, on 12 October 1998 “By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy with the Jewish people had built up in the Western world. At that point, the terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly started to be described, by 1944-45, as 'freedom fighters.' Then from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, occupied the center stage as the terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat has been described repeatedly by the great sage of American journalism, Willi

How the US Fueled the Spread of Islamophobia Around the World

A long interview with Beydoun , author of  American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear  and   The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. My selection: “ We live in the United States of Amnesia, and we forget the explosion of bigotry, hostility, nationalism, and militarism that happened instantaneously.” “The neoconservative government which presided over the Bush administration had catapulted the likes of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis. The best way to think about them is these are Neo-Orientalists who believe that the West is sort of this monolithic, aligned, geographic/civilizational entity, and as a consequence of 9/11—even before 9/11— was on this predictable path towards perpetual war with the Muslim world…  I think there were always Muslim boogeymen before 9/11. What’s really troubling about the response with the War on Terror is that it conflated an entire faith group or an entire global population of 1.7 billion people with the very h

The War on Migrants: The Mellila Massacre

Official figures from that day indicate that of the roughly 1,700 migrants who attempted to cross the border, 133 were able to claim asylum; 470 individuals, like Basir, entered Spanish territory, but were forcibly returned to Morocco. At least 37 people died, and 77 people remain unaccounted for. The event quickly came to be known as “ the Melilla massacre ”. “I suppose we weren’t human any more, we were just like animals.” —Basir, a 24-year-old Sudanese man

Darning the Planet

D’Eramo is good as usual.  As far as I remember the constant emphasis on your role as an individual in mitigating the environmental crisis has been on for at least 15 years. I was bombarded by the likes of the BBC and the areas where I have worked and lived of messages urging us to take individual actions. Here is the latest example, but it is a French one. Climate crisis and the ‘political class’

Tunisia Migrant Attacks

"There was a wave of racist videos on social media. I was seeing such disgusting posts. So I was already worried such an upsurge of anger could only result in violence …  What was shocking was finding myself in the minority, defending basic principles against violence and racism," says Ms Bribri. Not a single hint to the EU’s responsibility  and as if such a violence was disconnected from another violence.

The Insult

  “In foreign reporters’ postcards there is a banalization of Iraqis’ agony, a mockery of their intelligence, a minimization of their grievances to corruption and poor services. … a horde of diaspora ‘scholars’ from Washington DC to London are committed participants in the normalization of the  abnormal  and the concealment of  ruination .” A very good reflection by Nabil Salih

Modi in the US: Whitewashing India’s Far-Right Violence

“For all its rhetoric around ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights,’there is an inexcusable free pass given to Modi’s violence by the Biden administration and American liberals. This selective attention is inextricable from a robust  defense relationship : over $4 billion in arms sales to India in the past decade, along with FBI-run trainings for police in Indian-occupied Kashmir, the world’s most  militarized  region… Liberals and conservatives alike will glorify the unity between the “world’s largest” and the “world’s oldest” democracies. Violence, repression, and authoritarianism will be ignored in the name of friendship, progress, and security.” Biden’s tacit endorsement of repression, authoritarianism, and religious intolerance