Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label freedom

The Racism of Anti-Racists: Bourdieu, Said, and Inverted Orientalism

“On one hand, we have the symbolic violence of intellectual gatekeeping, where certain voices—usually elite, often Western—decide which suffering is legitimate and which resistance is ‘too Western’, ‘too liberal’, or ‘not authentic enough’. On the other, we have the remnants of Orientalism living on in reverse: an unwillingness to confront tyranny when it wears traditional clothes or speaks the language of anti-imperialism. “Bourdieu showed us how elites define what counts as legitimate knowledge. Said exposed how empire produces false knowledge in order to rule. But what neither could have fully foreseen is this third form: where knowledge cloaked in anti-imperialist jargon becomes a tool to delegitimize resistance .” Here is an example: Tariq Ali cannot being himself to go beyond 'geopolitics' to sociology . There is not a single mention of the Iranian society, power relations, repression, etc., and how all that is related to 'geopolitics'. 

Quote of the Week: You Will Have a Good Life When …

You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion, when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life … when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings … when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors … when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than the politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats... — Wilhelm Reich,  Listen, Little Man!

It is the Oppressor Who Defines the Nature of the Struggle

  "A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire." –From Nelson Mandela's book, "Long Walk to Freedom"* *Mandela was unfortunately delusional: “ Mister President, we accept this great honor bestowed upon us today as a symbol of how  South Africa  and the  United States ,  Africa  and the West, the developing and the developed world, are reaching out and joining hands as partners in building a world order that equally benefits all the nation sand people of the world. ” ( Mandela speaking at  Harvard  after receiving an honorary doctorate from the university in 1998).   The state of South Africa today proves that delusion. The bankruptcy, sell out and complicity of the Palestinian Authority is a major factor in exacerbating the plight of the Pale...

Freedom and Democracy Update

It takes Cristiano Ronaldo around  3 minutes  to earn the weekly salary of  a Saudi worker on the average annual salary of £58,000,  90 seconds  to earn the weekly salary of  a British worker on the average annual salary of £26,000. Ronaldo earns £3.6 million per week.

Iran: Mahsa Amini

We Need a Few Good Dictators

A liberal with a different colour. Some countries are not mature, global capitalism, uneven development, imperialism, etc. have nothing to do with the plights of these countries. Thus, Robert Kaplan in this article echoes what some of my white Western students once said: “a benevolent dictator is a good thing for countries the Middle East and Africa,” or what a Canadian suggested when she said “we should stop talking about democracy in those countries.” What those students and Kaplan have in mind when they speak about ‘democracy’ is ‘democracy’ within capitalist social property relations. Capitalism for them is not the fundamental determiner and the fundamental problem.  Some countries are just unfit or ‘we’ – major Western regimes, corporations, international financial institutions, colonial and neocolonial powers - have not played any role in the predicaments of those countries. Furthermore, the arrogant ignores that the historical processes of Western Europe,  industrialisa...

Ursula Le Guin on Capitalism

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries— the realists of a larger reality . Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art.  We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings.  … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. ...  The name of our beautiful reward is ...

On Passports and Other Things

US

It must be clearly established ... that the government of the United States is not the champion of freedom, but rather the perpetrator of exploitation and oppression against the peoples of the world and against a large part of its own population.     —Che Guevara, from a speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations, 11 December 1964

Freedom and Democracy

Cristiano Ronaldo’s annual salary is 31 million EUR. He currently plays in Italy. When an Italian earns 32,000 EUR after tax a year, Ronaldo earns that sum in 8 minutes. Like a few other things, this has been normalised and generally accepted and unquestioned by the general population. When a system succeeds in instilling such consent or acquiescence, it is those who question such injustice are looked at as old-fashioned, utopian, or people with extremist ideas about social justice and freedoms. Who are going to vote for in the next election in order to preserve the “democracy” and “freedoms” of the “free market”?

US

"Freedom without constraints" or the American definition of freedom  by a conservative who sounds liberal

Sudan’s Draft Constitution

Muslims, like those of 2011 uprisings before the counter-revolution, and like those in Algeria, are not led by Islamists and are not demanding an Islamic state. Weird, isn't it? Sudan's military rulers  "responded to a draft constitutional document presented to it by a coalition of protest groups and political parties." The Transitional Military Council's leaders said " the document omitted Islamic law , which they said remained the bedrock of all laws."    David Pilling from the Financial Times  wrote: "there is a retro-revolutionary feel to a movement that has both a secular and a syndicalist tinge." I am not opitmistic though when it comes to toppling the regime. There is no strategy to either take over state institutions or build a dual power. The army is still intact and there is no organisation to carry pit an insurrection. Putting pressure would at most achieve modest reforms (see Tunisia). Genuine change requires a radical mo...
The writer here has attempted to refute the Conservative's arguments. However, as I mentioned in my comment below the article I don't understand why he singles out the Conservatives and the Libertarians but does not include the liberals of "free market liberal democracy" and their defence of the system nationally and internationally with its implications from wars to exploitation and preserving the status quo albeit with what they call "reforms" . "Can democratic socialism set us free?"