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Showing posts from May, 2018
Capitalist criminality and imperialist philanthropy: the two sides of the same coin Like USAID, Gates Foundation, and others, the aim is to portray the capitalist system as having a "human face, "defender of human rights, propagator of "liberal values," and like NATO, IMF and the World Bank, they are tools of Western imperialist domination through debt, exploitation, plunder and military power. Anyone who opposes this global mission, is labelled "nationalist" and "infected by populism." George Soros
Here is an antidote to those missionaries like Soros, Jolie and Gates  "If anticapitalist revolution is where identity politics began, it has since become something quite different, and is now invoked by certain liberals and leftists to serve distinctly non-revolutionary ends, Haider argues. It involves members of marginalised groups demanding inclusion, recognition, or restitution from above – a seat at the table. These demands are made in response to very real injuries endured by those groups. But their method, he says, ends up strengthening the structures that produced those injuries in the first place." Asad Haider And in the comments on the review I like this one by Nada89:  " ID [identity politics] helped people turn a blind eye to the fact Clinton is a corrupt political figure. Same with Obama - people cut him slack for being 'the first black American president' yet he was complicit with the usual pattern of international crimes inherent in US f
Lithuania and Romania complict in CIA toture? So what? Haven't they helping the West protect its way of life from "Islam and its war on us?" Haven't they helping us keep those barbarians away so that they don't blow us in our cities? Look how successful "the war on terror" has been. And these two states, like others, have probably got some handouts from the US.
"I despair at the way American and British movie-makers feel they have every right to play fast and loose with the facts, yet have the arrogance to imply that their version is as good as the truth. Continental film-makers are on the whole far more scrupulous. People are more likely to want [made to want] to see something they think is very close to the truth, so they can feel they are learning as well as being entertained. In a post-literate society, the moving image is king, and most people’s knowledge of history is regrettably based more on cinematic fiction than archival fact. The real problem is that the needs of history and the needs of the movie industry are fundamentally incompatible. Even movies ostensibly showing corruption and criminality in the heart of the CIA and the Pentagon have to end on a nationalistic note, with a tiny group of clean, upstanding American liberals saving democracy." "The greatest war movie ever, and the ones I can't bear&qu
In “Mistaken Identity,” Asad Haider argues that contemporary identity politics is a “neutralization of movements against racial oppression” rather than a progression of the grassroots struggle against racism. Haider, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, puts the work of radical black activists and scholars in conversation with his personal experiences with racism and political organizing. He charts out the process through which the revolutionary visions of the black freedom movement — which understood racism and capitalism as two sides of the same coin — have been largely replaced with a narrow and limited understanding of identity. How identity politics has divided the Left
What does Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson have in common? Very little and a lot. "Churchill had strong views on Gandhi. Commenting on the Mahatma's meeting with the viceroy of Indian, 1931, he had notoriously decalred: 'It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay in equal terms with the represnetative of the Emperor-King.' (Gandhi had nothing in common with fakirs, Muslim spiritual mendicants, but Churchill was rarely accurate about India.) 'Ghandi-ism and all what it stands for,' declared Churchill, 'will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.' In such matters Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their time
Novecento, Bernardo Bertolucci's epic Part 1 Part 2
What kind of political discourse, with what social and po­ litical effects, is contemporary tolerance talk in the United States? What readings of the discourses of liberalism, colonialism, and impe­rialism circulating through Western democracies can analytical scru­ tiny of this talk provide? The following chapters aim to track the so­ cial and political work of tolerance discourse by comprehending how this discourse constructs and positions liberal and nonliberal subjects, cultures, and regimes; how it figures conflict, stratification, and dif­ ference; how it operates normatively; and how its normativity is ren­dered oblique almost to the point of invisibility. Part of the project of this book, then, is to analyze tolerance, espe­ cially in its recently resurgent form, as a strand of depoliticization in liberal democracies. Depoliticization involves construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and
After Obama has "liberated" Malala Angelina Jolie, a woman coming from the heartland of the West and imperialism, is on a mission to "save and rescue" girls and women who are "unfit and cannot help themselves". She is also urging young people to "promote tolerance ." Tolerance ? Where was that "tolerance" when US imperilaism was invading Iraq and Afghanistan, and droning weddings, using torture and rendition, and orphaning girls and women?  Didn't she and her ilk tolerate those criminal actions?
Pinker is, after all, an intellectual darling of the most powerful echelons of global society. He  spoke to the world’s elite  this year at the World’s Economic Forum in Davos on the perils of what he calls “political correctness,” and has been named one of  Time  magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”  His new book is Bill Gates' favourite book of all time! Pinker claims to respect science, yet he blithely ignores fifteen thousand scientists’ desperate warning to humanity.  It should be added that Pinker is an apologist of the US imperialist violence and he is Islamophobic. The grim takeaway ... is that racist violence against African Americans has not declined at all, as Pinker suggests. Instead, it has become institutionalized into U.S. national policy in  what is known as  the school-to-prison pipeline. Pinker  unquestioningly propagates one of the great neoliberal myths of the past several decades: that “a rising tide lifts all the boats”—a phr
The criminal Tony Blair has refused to personally apologise to the Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who was tortured in a jail in Libya following a rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 ... Compare that with this: "When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust. There were hardly any Jews left in Poland, and Brandt, who as a socialist* [sic] was persecuted by the Nazis, was completely innocent of the crimes for which he was apologizing. But in doing so—with his historic kniefall von Warschau (Warsaw Genuflection), he was recongnizing the moral responsibility of the German people, whom he led as chancellor... Of course not everyone agrees that even atonement is due. Historian John Keay put it best: 'The conduct of states, as of individuals, can only assessed by the standards of their age, not by today's litigious criteria. Otherwise, we'd all be down on t
A "literary giant"! He might have been a good novelist, with a shocking and funny style. Howver, a good novelist is also judged by his/her integrity and principles as well by as his/her relationship to power and justice. Like Harper Lee, Roth accepted a medal from Obama, a criminal, an imeprialist and who, with others, laid the conditions which spawned Trump.

Iraq

"Does 'populism' actually mean anything in this discourse, other than whatever may be inconvenient to Anglo-American liberalism?" No, you blithering idiots, Muqtada al-Sadr is not the Iraqi Trump
"Our values" Dear liberal feminists, How shall we remember the victims of the Manchester attack of last year? By having a highly sexualised, commodified celebrity . .
At the heart of it is the bourgeois liberal notion of justice—wherein equal and unequal people must be treated equally. It is equalizing the violent acts of the conqueror with those of the conquered. It is neither the Aristotelian nor the Marxist notion of justice—wherein justice means treating equal people equally and unequal people unequally.
 Those who have kept silent or supported the Syrian regime's killing of around 400,000 civilians are now condemning Israel! 
UK turns blind eye to dirty Russian money, say MPs Mafia Expert Roberto Saviano Denounces London As 'The Most Corrupt Place On Earth'
Please, accept our apologies. Sorry for using labour strikes when we should have worked; sorry for using suicide bombing when we should have used fireworks and partied in your nightclubs; sorry for using hunger strikes when we should have thanked you for the food and shelter; sorry for stabbing you with knives when we could have cuddled you with pillows; sorry for being in residential areas when you dropped your smart bombs; sorry for threatening your borders and throwing ourselves at your bullets when all you wanted was to defend yourself. Sorry for all the trouble we have caused you, the "international comunity", the UN, and all your friends. The victim must apologize to the killers 
"The most urgent priority is not for Europe to understand its alters better, but rather itself and its own history —for it is within Europe's own longstanding structures of self-definition that pluralism in general, and the Islamic presence in particular, have been rendered into nightmares. If so, it is Europe itself which stands in urgent need of therapy. But as yet the patient is still in denial, and as any spychotherapist would confirm, those who refuse to acknowledge the seriousness of their self-generated plight find it far easier to engage in a process of transference. Rather than confronting the illusory character of their own mental construction, they prefer to ascribe the very behavior which they refuse to acknowledge in themselves to those whom they believe are harassing them." — Roger Ballard , quoted by Jospeh Massad in Islam in Liberalism , 2015, p. 311
" Ever since  the Gezi Uprising in 2013, Turkey has witnessed a whirlwind of events: popular upsurges, a coup attempt, pivotal elections, changes in the political system, war within the country, war in Syria, bombing attacks. The country has been under an official state of emergency since a failed coup in July 2016, and the country’s economic model hit the fan in 2013. Erdoğan and his ruling clique have responded to these various crises in the same way: by holding ever tighter onto power and using increasingly oppressive and brutal means to consolidate their standing — a process of outright  fascization , if a very fragile one. The upcoming snap elections are just latest attempt by Erdoğan to stabilize his dominance, this time by quasi-democratic means." The Turkish elections
K for Karl – machine [episode 5]
"I’m not a very passionate republican – many things bother me more than the monarchy. But as principles go it is unwavering. We have a  class problem in Britain  and the monarchy exemplifies it. If it’s a guilty pleasure I’m after, I don’t turn to betrothals in real-world feudal dynasties: I have Netflix. The political scientist Benedict Anderson  described countries as imagined communities . Call me a misery guts, but I’d rather imagine one in which I am born a citizen, not a subject, and others are not born to govern me." "The royal wedding" Note: Imagined Communities is a seminal book. It is an essential reading.
Revisiting the Idea of an Anthropology of Islam 
A bit old, but I think it still very relevant, for many who oppose Trump, for example, lament a loss of "a tolerant order". Tolerance?
Because it is not Manchester or Nice. "Palestinian men, women, and children, slaughtered in their own homeland for the crime of wanting independence and sovereignty over their own country. The Western media will present no face to those murdered, no name, no age, no background, no hospital images of mangled bodies and doctors frantically trying to save lives. There will be no interviews with family members or friends telling us how wonderful and caring their deceased loved ones were - because the Western media kno w that to do so would humanise the Palestinian people and create international sympathy for their cause. Western nations are complicit in these war crimes, treacherous Arab nations are silent, and those shameless African nations who clambered over each other to attend the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem have disgraced the memory of those who fought for African independence and against apartheid. The proverbial image of David vs Goliath could not be played out
"It is the peculiar fate of oppressed people everywhere that when they are killed, they are killed twice: first by bullet or bomb, and next by the language used to describe their deaths . A common condition of oppression, after all, is to be blamed for being the victim, and that blame gets meted out in language designed to rob the oppressed of their very struggle."
Interpreting "This is America" by Childish Gambino Warning: there is no ass shaking, knickers or even Eurovision trash.
What is required is a Foucaultian investigation into the conditions of possibility for truth statements about "Islam." Instead of assuming and seeking to uncover the machanisms by which something called sexuality operates inside the category Islam, scholars must begin with the "positive mechanisms" that generate this Western will to know. Folowing Foucault, "we must investigate the conditions of their emergence and operation ... we must define the strategies of power that are immanent in this will to knowledge." The outcome of this kind of approach will reveal much about how Western scholarship on sexuality not only constitutes something it calls "Islam" but also how it constitutes "Europe," the "West," as an always already racialized normativity." The question to ask then is not what is the nature of "sexuality," its operations, repressions, manifestations, and productions in Islam, but rather in a specific
There have always been Marxists in Labour but it has never been a Marxist party (or even, by some definitions, a socialist one). Its 2017 general election manifesto was social democratic in nature, vowing to reform rather than replace capitalism. But in his speech, McDonnell couched the party’s pledge to renationalise “water, rail, Royal Mail and energy” in more radical terms: “It’s a significant development as a result of the new exploration of the ideas of Marx.” John Mcdonnell and the rebirth of British marxism?
The invention of sexual indentity and its imposition on the Other. "American and European missionaries of liberalism, that is, those who imagine that the global community of the future will be led by a secular cleric, [have sought] to proselytize their value system and model of social and political order to all Muslims whom they seek to save and rescu e from their despotic system of rule, failing which, the missionaries would at least want to rescue Muslim women and increasingly male (and female, though less attention is paid to the latter) Muslim 'homosexuals' from Islam's misogyny, homophobia, and intolerance. This act of proselytization aims to convert Muslims and Islam to Western liberalism and its value system as the only just and sane system to which the entire planet must be converted. As Talal Asad put it, the liberal mission is to have the Islamic tradition 'remade in the image of liberal Protestant Chiristianity.' Muslim resistance to this benev
Are we the baddies?
"There is no "core" or "periphery" to the global operation of capital and the military forces that sustain it. The ruling elites in the US, the EU, Asia, Africa, and Latin America are as much the beneficiary of the system they violently uphold as those who are disenfranchised by it are dispersed in these very places.  Racism  is a mere ideological veneer to the hardcore economic logic of colonialism and imperialism. Predatory capital is colour-blind and gender-neutral. It abuses white and coloured labour identically and it makes no difference to its maddening logic if you are a Donald Trump or a Saudi prince, an Egyptian general, an Indian entrepreneur, a Russian oligarch, or a Chinese businessman. Those who are abused and maligned by the selfsame system are as much among the poor of the US and Europe as they are in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Colour and gender codification of power is a mere false consciousness to the economic logic of power and domi
There is a book sweeping the popular media at the moment.  It’s called  Factfulness .  It purports to argue that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the world is becoming a better place.  Poverty is falling, life expectancy is rising; health levels are improving; people have more things and better services.  Even violence and wars are in decline. This is a hoary old message... Rising world inequality

Remembering the Saur Revolution

" The Saur Revolution had been based on a coup led by young officers. But Afghanistan had a conscript army, with men from every corner of the country, mostly from the families of small peasants and sharecroppers. Those soldiers followed orders, but they had not been politically convinced. There had been no urban uprisings and no peasant war for land. In that sense, the Saur Revolution was a top-down coup with little rural support. The idea that Communism or socialism required a dictatorship by a minority was widely accepted among radicals in the 1960s and 1970s. Karmal had learned his politics in prison in Kabul, Taraki had learned his in Bombay, and Amin had spent years in New York. The Afghan Communists were simply doing what the Left globally knew had to be done if they really wanted to change the world. Their tragedy is, in an acute and terrible form, the same one replicated elsewhere ." Related The West's favourite Afghan
A recommended read "If what I call vanguard neoliberalism established this phase of capitalist development (in the UK: 1979–97, and social neoliberalism then consolidated it (1997–2007)), the current period of crisis neoliberalism (2007–) is primarily defensive, an attempt to preserve the now decaying order through ever-more generalised attacks on the subaltern classes – not as ‘occasional’ incursions to enable budget cuts here or prevent industrial action there, but as permanent aspects of the political regime (Davidson, 2017)." Neoliberalism as a class-based project You may need to open a free account to access the essay
52 Palestinians killed on deadliest day since 2014, reports the BBC.  So what? Who cares? There is the World Cup soon! An IDF tweet
I think that the article, contrary to its title, it is a more a summary of the main ways the Palestinian have followed in their struggle against a settler colonial state since the first Intifida  than "why Isreal kills". Why Israel kills
One of the paradoxes of social life in late capitalism is that, even as more and more people abandon certain types of drug -- alcohol, tobacco, ecstasy, sex -- addictions  ar on the rise .  The number of alcoholics, opioid addicts, gamblers , social media addicts, porn addicts and so forth shows a secular increase. In other words, the drugs of sociability are declining, while the drugs of solitude are gaining ground. What kind of problem is this?  Trump says, massacre the dealers . The Duterte option . Liberals, with the soft paternalism of the moral reformer, say treat the disease . So we murder the problem, or we medicalise it. Hard cop or soft cop; either way, the problem is being suppressed . Toxicity in late capitalism
Prior to the 12 May demonstration in London, the Trade Union Congress had publised the results of a research: "The current period of wage stagnation is the worst for two centuries. Not since the beginning of the 18th  century (when it took 24 years ) , has it taken so long for real wages to recover from a slump." Britain's 17-year real wage squeeze
Aren't the people of Iran and North Korea entitled to the same protection racket? "They, arguably, are more threatened. Yet that isn't how the global hierarchy of violence works." Trump, Netanyahu, and the nuclear conflict with Iran
"But then –the third event—globalized capitalism that exhibits all the features that Marx so eloquently described in  Das Capital , and the Global Financial Crisis, made his thought relevant again. By now he was safely ensconced into the Pantheon of global philosophers, his every extant word published, his books available in all the languages of the world, and  his status, while still subject to vagaries of time, safe—at least in the sense that it could never fall into obscurity and oblivion. In fact, his influence is inextricably linked with capitalism. So long as capitalism exists, Marx will be read as its most astute analyst. If capitalism ceases  to exist, he will be read as its best critic. So whether we believe that in another 200 years, capitalism will be with us or not, we can be sure that Marx will." The influence of Karl Marx – a counterfactual
It is a sin to link to the Daily Mail, but it is good to know one more example of how a criminal regime apologises for its crimes by putting the blame on three or four individuals .
Why Israel is picking up a fight with Iran The writer forgot to mention that Israel is backed by the strongest military power on earth.
Those who would doubt Marx's commitment to a truly democratic society should study his eloquent (second in literary brilliance only to his  The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ) description of the 1871 Paris Commune. The Commune abolished rents and debts, equalized wages, hailed culture and education, made leaders subject to immediate recall by the people, destroyed the guillotine. Women played a crucial role in all of its activities (see Gay Gullickson,  The Unruly Women of Paris ). It was, Marx said, “the most glorious achievement of our time. Howard Zinn on how Karl Marx predicted our world of today
US teachers strike New polls  show that 78 percent of Americans think teacher pay is too low, while more than half are supportive of the strikes. A Field Guide to the New Red-Baiting
"Reasons include the United States' interest in maintaining lucrative arms deals with the Gulf states – primarily Saudi Arabia – and the fact that many U.S. politicians support bombing Iran (as demanded by the  right-wing Israeli leadership)." Middle East nightmare – made in Washington
Exploitation and robbery "London was the least affordable region in England and Wales, with city-dwellers spending 41.1% of their annual salaries on rent in 2017."
"In reality, there was never any golden age of liberalization under Erdoğan. The praise he attracted from Western elites as a ‘moderate’ and a ‘reformer’ was motivated above all by the  AKP ’s staunchly pro-American foreign policy and readiness to maintain good relations with Israel (the same criteria that earn the Saudi regime its ludicrous plaudits as a moderating force in the region). It also helped that  NATO ’s favourite Islamists had taken up the neoliberal agenda with gusto, privatizing state assets into the hands of  AKP  cronies—including Erdoğan’s close relatives." Erdogan's cesspit
Here is what John Bolton wrote in May 2015 " The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran." "To stop Iran's bomb, bomb Iran"

Conscripts of Western Civilization

The West has become a vast moral project, an intimidating claim to write and speak for the world, and an unending politicisation of power. Becoming Western has meant becoming transformed according to these things, albeit in a variety of historical circumstances and with varying degrees of thoroughness. For conscripts of Western civilization this transformation implies that some desires have been forcibly eliminated—even violently—and others put in their place. The modern state, invented in Europe, is the universal condition of that transformation—and of its 'higher truth'. — Talal Asad, Conscripts of Western Civilization , 1992, quoted in Joseph Massad's Islam in Liberalism, 2015, pp. 251-2
K for Karl — Exploitation (episode 4)
Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from ‘facts’, as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the circumstances of their own production . The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat. No democracy has ever been destabilised by terrorism Marx and 'capitalism' by John Lanchester
After Obregón founded the modern Mexican state, back in 1920, his successor Plutarco Elías Calles, established the ruling elite’s political party, which eventually became the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000. For decades the PRI won all the elections for every office, from president to mayor of the smallest town. This was done through fear and favors, clientelism and patronage, fraud and, when necessary, murder. Will the Mexican elite and its foreigner allies tolerate a social democrat, a "populist"? Last time they used fraud. Even if Obrador wins, cooptation and betrayal might do the work. The recent examples in Latin America, Venezuela being the most obvious case, has showed that if the economic power of the elite is not attacked, local and international capital would not let a social democratic movement succeed in instilling small changes. The plot against López Obrador
"I want to argue, however, that we cannot understand science or speak of its limits or boundlessness in the abstract. To speak of “science for science’s sake” — as if, to paraphrase Samuel Butler on art, science had a “sake,” is to mystify what science is and what scientists do. This mystification, still often on the lips of the ideologues of science, serves to justify specific interests and privileges. Instead, we have to consider this science in this society. I shall argue that it is indeed limited, and that its limits are provided by a combination of two major factors. The first is material, the second ideological. I will consider each in turn." Limits to Science