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Showing posts with the label "middle east"
Alliance of Middle East Socialists - a founding statement I have no problem with the statement, but the overwhelming majority of the foundrs are not in the Middle East!
"The coming together of Qatar, Iran and Turkey against Saudi Arabia and its allies, showed that coalitions now forming to compete with each other are not strictly based on the Shi’a-Sunni divide.  The alliances currently confronting each other are fighting over the control of the region, its capital,  and aim  to repress any movements for social justice." The threat of wider wars in the Middle East
AS:  I take your point, and clearly Europe to did see, as you call it, a great ‘sorting-out’, but of course that term as you’re using it describes a set of  different processes – or, I should say, historical events and catastrophes – ranging from the Final Solution, the extermination of European jewry to the ethnic cleansing that took place at the very end of and in the aftermath of the Second World War. But what all these events share is that they’re are not a sorting-out of primordial identities so much as they are political events, driven by war, state interests, racial ideology, etc. And so to bring the conversation back to the Middle East, I think there is, unfortunately, a danger in the West’s conversation about sectarian warfare, to treat these identities as if they were primordial and as if this conflict that we’ve been seeing in Iraq and Syria is somehow natural, this sorting-out is a natural process, when in fact Syrian and Iraqi Sunni and Shia Muslims and Christians lived
A reminder from the aftermath of the Paris attack This article, which I had reposted before, mentions state terrorism in passing without making it a fundamental point besides/part of/a determinant "in the nine truths". Instead, it calls state terrorism "counter-terrorism".  That is aside,  the arguments ("the truth") are quite valid and accurate, I think.  The threat is already inside
  A few interesting things in this narrative ,   but why does it avoid to mention the global capitalist system as the context?
"The Arab uprisings were followed by a great deal of bitter violence, repression, counter-revolution, and cynical regional and international great power manipulation. On the other hand, these uprisings showed that ‘presidents-for-life’ and parts of regimes could be overthrown or substantially threatened by ‘people power’ – a fundamental innovation on the post-colonial stage in the MENA region. They have exposed the bankruptcy and violence of command and control structures that rely solely on violence and coercion. They have drawn attention to the importance of trans-local, transregional and transnational forms of politics. They have also underlined the importance in the MENA region of the question of radically democratic, de-centralized, and leaderful organizing — its possibilities and limits." — John Chalcraft The Middle East: an interview with J. Chalcraft
Making and Unmaking of the Greater Middle East It is a good essay, but I wonder why one in concluding a 30-page essay does not insert three lines on the role of Russia and its support of the Assad regime.
When Western governments, "NGOs", CIA, etc pour money and agents in some countries to influence elections outcomes and make sure that the winner is their ally, does no make it to the news headlines, but considered conspiracy theory. When suddenly something is unearthed because there are elelection in a Western country and rivals are at each others' throes, then it is news. “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.” Hillary Clinton, 2006
Via Joey Ayub' blog "The inherent contradictions which have plagued Syria and the world should give rise to deeper realizations, eloquently expressed by Kurdish activist Dilar Dirik in a Facebook post: “It is the capitalist-statist-nationalist-patriarchal system that forces people around the world and at the moment especially in the Middle East to choose between lesser evils in the name of freedom. Forcing millions of people to pick between ISIS or Assad; religious fundamentalism or secular militarism; monarchy, caliphate or racist nation-states; women's pornification or complete veiling; Sisi or Morsi; Atatürkism or Erdoğanism; etc are not choices but perfect weapons of breaking the people's will. To force people to settle between death by drowning or by burning is the perfect way to make them lose the most fundamental human power: hope."
A book The Poisoned Well - empire and its legacy in the Middle East I think it is worth reading this book.  My questions to the author after reading the review:  “He also briskly dismisses the fashionable ISIS/Daesh-driven exaggeration of the significance of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement and other post-WW1 ‘lines in the sand’ to focus more sharply on the dismal shortcomings of the post-colonial era. Just one niggle: the ruling family of Saudi Arabia is (still) the Al (upper case, no hyphen) Saud, like the Al Thani in Qatar, and not to be confused with the more common Arabic definite article.” Does that mean the authors dismiss two fundamental aspects of the historical process: the artificial nation states in the region and the economic factors, i.e. the uneven development of capitalism and the core’s interests for stability in the region, a stability which guarantees the status quo and thus economic and geo-political interests? Does the author also dimiss the West’s role in c

Colonialism and Imperialism

We should flatly refuse the situation to which the Western countries wish to condemn us. Colonialism and imperialism have not paid their score when they withdraw their flags and their police forces from our territories. For centuries the foreign capitalists have behaved in the under-developed world like nothing more than criminals.”  —Frantz Fanon “Imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control. For the native, the history of colonial servitude is inaugurated by loss of the locality to the outsider; its geographical identity must thereafter be searched for and somehow restored. Because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through imagination.”  —Edward Said War on Want