LENIN'S TOMB

Friday, September 27, 2013

In which I am denounced by Golden Dawn posted by lenin

I wrote this. Golden Dawn, who I think some of you may know as Greek Nazi scum, didn't like it. They wrote this (rough Google translation):

A publication, indicating PARASTATE mechanism that moves in recent days against the Golden Dawn, played continuously from the websites of the regime leaves and channels, showing clearly in what becomes suspicious. The original article from the newspaper of the City of capitalists, "Guardian" and shows clearly the role of specific embassies in whole operation degradation of the Golden Dawn. It is worth noting before anything else that the publication of Marxist journalist - site owner "Lenin's Tomb" - saw the light of day yesterday, which is particularly important as you will find.
We give the first two contentious apospasmataprin move into analysis of his sayings: "although the main base of support remains in single digits and has fallen", "the only way the left is to render it useless, hampering operations."
...
The creepy the whole affair is that the journalist does not stay in the revelation of the plan rigged polls, but go even further, revealing the entire project terrorism against the Golden Dawn. As mentioned in the epilogue features is that "the only way the Left is to prevent the activities of the Golden Dawn."

"Parastate mechanism... Marxist journalist... City of capitalists... terrorism against the Golden Dawn". You get the gist. Can we get a decent translation and stick this on the next book jacket?

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

That 'niqab debate' in full posted by lenin

Recently, there was another debate about the niqab. Which, you may remember from all the previous debates about it, is a face-covering that some Muslim women wear.

And I suppose I understand the anxiety that this debate causes because when a Muslim woman speaks for herself about this issue, you don't know whether you can trust her. Because she's one of Them. And so, you get people who aren't one of Them who try to explain it*. And they're quite confusing because they often say many things that individually might constitute a perfectly valid piece of bigotry, but which together amount to incoherent bigotry. And, in one of the previous debates about the niqab, which you'll remember is a face-covering that some Muslim women wear because we've debated it previously, I tried to list some of the things that people who aren't Them say.

First of all, one of the things people would say is that They are getting 'special treatment', because they're being allowed to wear a niqab and no one else is. I'm not totally sure about the factual basis of this, but it's internally quite logical. But then, it does seem to grate quite badly against the idea that the niqab is a bad thing to wear. Which is surely the founding commitment of those who oppose the niqab. I think, giving it the benefit of the doubt, you could say that what people actually want is to be allowed to wear an equivalent of the niqab or, failing that, to deprive everyone of the right to wear the niqab or anything approximate to it. So to that extent it would be a coherent idea.

Second, another of the things that people who don't want to wear the niqab say is that it's a threatening garment. The reasons for this vary quite widely depending on what frightening news story has been circulated. For example, it might be that the niqab could cause death if used in Formula One racing. It might be used to conceal a hammer which could be used to attack a small child. In some cases the threat is more general than that, insofar as people say that to wear the niqab is to signal an empathy with terrorists. Again, I think you can fault their research if you're being very stringent, but in and of itself it does seem to be a coherent hate-speech-act.

A third thing they might say is that the Muslim women who wear this garment, which you'll remember is the niqab because of the other times we've debated it, are being oppressed. And I think the implication here is that the women don't actually want to wear it, but are actually being coerced by Muslim patriarchs into it because of a gender-opressive ideology. Or, perhaps they mean, a number of people are possibly coerced while others may choose to wear it within a context where choices are structured by a gender-opressive ideology and that therefore they don't respect that choice. It's quite hard to evaluate this because I don't know anyone who wears the niqab and I haven't done an ethnography or a study whereby I get to see all the ways in which someone who wears one might think about the niqab. And, as I say, you don't know whether to trust it anyway because it would be based on the word of one of Them. Also, I feel this is a subject I'm limited in because I have no idea what it's like to live in a society where women are sometimes coerced as to what to wear, or judged for what they wear, or where choices are made on the basis of a gender-oppressive ideology.

But anyway the basic conceit of white people saving brown women from brown men is actually one that was produced by the British Empire and it seems quite a solid piece of colonial orientalism in itself. Or, if you will, sartorientalism. Although, it is complicated by the fact that, quite often, people who aren't Muslims and don't want to wear the niqab say that the garment isn't authentically mandated by Islam. Admittedly, this is because they have looked it up on Wikipedia, which already means they have done more research than most racists. But, that does mean that they are accepting the legitimacy of standards internal to Islam, which seems to belie the secular foundations that are claimed for the critique of the niqab. I suppose giving this a generous gloss you could say that this bold attempt to comment on the texts of a religion of which one is neither an adherent or a student is motivated by a desire to persuade Muslim women that, contrary to what they may have assumed, they are not obligated to wear such an item and thus end their oppression. But that seems to me to be quite a foolish strategy for the Islamophobes because their persuasive power on this front seems to be quite limited by their lack of knowledge.

You can see where I'm going, I expect. These statements are confusing because they don't hang well together at all. You can't simultaneously think Muslim women are a threat because they wear the niqab and also are lucky for being allowed to wear the niqab and also are oppressed for wearing the niqab. I mean, I suppose that you can simultaneously think Muslim women are a threat because they wear the niqab and also are lucky for being allowed to wear the niqab and also are oppressed for wearing the niqab. But to simultaneously think all those things, that means that either you're the most subtle and sophisticated racist ever, or your racism is just a salmagundi of incoherent grunts and sentiments. And I think that if the racists were more rigorous in their thinking, they might not be so marginal everywhere except in the newspapers and on the television and in police stations and in the councils and on the streets and in parliament and in workplaces and on Youtube and Twitter and in pubs and coffee shops.

One last thing they might say - and they can become very frustrated at this point, and very belligerent - is that it's impossible to have a debate about this subject.

I don't know what to say about that.

*A friend points out the sub-heading. Read it and see if you can spot the problem.

Friday, September 06, 2013

Against Austerity posted by lenin

Coming up, this winter:

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Who is this 'we', mammal? posted by lenin

Two and a half years. Approximately 100,000 documented deaths on all sides. And despite fractures in the regime, despite some advanced forms of decomposition, there seems to be no prospect of Assad falling soon.

The opposition, meanwhile, has never cohered. It has made advances, and it has taken control of local state apparatuses - a town here, a police station there. But this has merely accelerated the fragmentation and disintegration of political authority within Syria. The one area of the country where the opposition is unified is in the Kurdish north-east, where a regional administration is governing with the support of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The formation of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces - out of a fusion between the old SNC, the Muslim Brothers, the secular democrats, the socialists, the Free Syrian Army and the Local Coordinating Committees - might suggest that some cohesion has been achieved, and that a popular interim government is ready to take power if the military balance of forces changes.

It is not as simple as that. It is true that the regime is militarily backed by Russia, but it clearly retains a significant degree of popular support, from which it has been able to forge a counter-revolutionary armed force with which to defeat its opponents. It is not, and never is, purely a military calculation: the revolution has failed to spread because it has not won politically. And this is because despite what some people would call 'top table' agreements between leaders, there is very little practical unity on the ground between anti-Assad forces. It is this which has given a certain space to the salafists, so-called 'Al Qaida in Syria' (Jabhat al-Nusra), to punch well above their weight. Of course, the idea that the opposition is dominated by a few thousand salafists is as implausible as the idea that when US boots land on Syrian soil their major foes will be 'Al Qaida'. It's horseshit. But it is better organised and more efficient than many of the other groups, it does get involved in most major anti-government actions, its politics are extremely reactionary, and it bears responsible for some of the worst war crimes.

Now we are potentially on a war footing*, with the ostensible issue of the conflict being the use of Sarin nerve gas in the suburbs of Damascus. Think about this gas. It works by causing the muscles to spasm, causing your respiratory system to stop working. It literally renders you helpless. There is nothing you can do except die, through a sequence of convulsion, vomiting, defecating and urinating until terminal suffocation. That is the grim end that hundreds of pale corpses reached in Damascus. It is true that hundreds of people are dying grisly deaths every day in Syria. It is also true that war crimes, some committed by the revolutionary forces, are a routine occurrence. It is true that most of the weapons used by the regime are indiscriminate in nature - shelling, cluster bombs, thermobaric bombs. Still, I think there's something specifically obscene about this type of attack. It solicits attention; and it says 'fuck you'. I don't claim to know who carried out this attack. And the fact that we have bounced into 'humanitarian' war before, on the pretext of certain salient atrocities, is reason enough to maintain a wary caution about official attributions of responsibility. Still, this atrocity has been used to push the button for 'intervention'. And, as we all know, 'intervention' solves all problems everywhere, ever.

What are the possible justifications for war, then?

1) Punishment. This strikes me as the most futile idea in the history of war. The concept of punishment has always been futile, but in this case it is woefully underwhelming and incredibly vague. How much 'punishment' exactly would be sufficient? If you bomb a police station or a barracks, is that enough? If you bomb a palace or two, will that do it? How much is enough to express the disapproval of 'the international community' at the use of nerve gas? Yet, staggeringly, this is the main justification for war being reported. I now suspect Robin Yassin-Kassab was correct when he said that the idea was to save face.

2) Tilt the balance of the war in favour of the opposition. It seems highly unlikely that this would be the goal of any such intervention. After all, it would take more than a few scuds to do that. As I said, the balance of forces is necessarily, though not exclusively, a political problem. And indeed one aspect of that political problem is likely that significant sections of the Syrian population regard the revolutionaries as too dependent on external support. If the US intended to overcome that, it wouldn't be enough to bomb a few targets; it would have to start funnelling arms in a serious way directly to the opposition. It would have to start sending in special forces to start training opposition fighters, and bring a load of cash to buy favour and keep the influence of well-organised jihadis at bay. It would have to think about bombing strategic targets. Given how entrenched the regime appears to be, it would have to seriously consider the possibility of significant aerial and ground commitments. 'Mission creep' would be an obvious peril, and the military leadership of the US is, I suspect, profoundly wary of this.

3) Regime change. This is the most obvious goal in a way, but it seems unlikely again. They would need a government-in-waiting, and the opposition is too fragmented to be that; the bourgeois leadership doesn't have sufficient control over the base, and is too divided among itself. The Obama administration has recognised the opposition as the legitimate government of Syria, but it has been extremely lukewarm. So if regime change did become the goal, they would have to find a way to knock the opposition into their desired shape - the 'interim government' that Hollande claims it is - and fast. Then they would have to be prepared for precisely the sort of escalating commitment that the Pentagon and imperial planners would do a great deal to avoid. This is to say nothing of whether such means would actually reduce the amount of civilian incineration and slaughter, which seems extremely unlikely at best.

4) 'We have to do something'. This argument isn't an argument. It's just one step up from 'think about the children'. If you're thinking 'we have to do something', just do yourself a favour and fill your mouth with cake or something. And anyway, as I was saying, who is this 'we', mammal?

*The UK parliament voted against war tonight, with Labour voting against the government. David Cameron, summoning up his immense, salesmanlike dignity, said: "It's clear to me that the British parliament and the British people do not wish to see military action; I get that, and I will act accordingly." He might actually have to resign. Well, fuck my socks.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

The austerity cookbook posted by lenin

"But there is more. The revival of austerity regalia is linked to another revival: that of the idea of empire. In the same tacky gift shops in which one finds the "Keep Calm and Carry On" dinner plates, one also finds the "British Empire Was Built on Cups of Tea" trays. This melancholic sense of loss is associated with the idea that today's poor have lost their way. They're not like the poor in the good old days; they are seen as feral, mindlessly self-indulgent, and stupid. In this purview, virtue can only be restored by a return to traditional families using traditional cooking and traditional husbandry."

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

A post about Miley Cyrus posted by lenin

Do I even deserve this? To come back, after all this time away, and write a post about Miley Cyrus? Don't I have to earn it a little, perhaps with a resume of the Syrian situation and the threat of impending war, before indulging trivial nonsense? Well, look, I'm doing it anyway. Deal with it. Besides, I will write about Syria shortly. And anyway, this isn't really about Miley Cyrus, but about the way otherwise trivial cultural moments become Rorschach tests for all and sundry.

So, a few points about Miley Cyrus.

1) Miley Cyrus is, in and of herself, not particularly interesting. She comes to my attention only because of the reactions to her, pertaining to a musical performance in which she 'twerked'.

2) There are three types of reaction. The dominant reaction which is evident on Youtube, CNN, Fox, in the outrage of Robin Thicke's mother, and in endless commentary about how Cyrus's eroticised dance with Thicke was done despite knowing he had a 3 year old daughter and a wife, etc. (Innocence horribly shattered, irreparably stained, killed to bits.) And also, as Fox pundits insisted (protesting too much), this dance was "not attractive, Miley". Basically, the dominant reaction of the media was to "slut-shame" her.

3) The other types of reaction are, a) the denunciations of the "slut-shaming", and b) the leftist and anti-racist critique along the lines that Miley Cyrus should not be shamed, but her dance was a type of minstrelsy, a patronising and degrading appropriation of black culture which reinforced the traditional racist notion of the 'black jezebel'. (A good example of this here, although it specifically uses the term 'misappropriation'.)

4) The intriguing thing about the language of 'appropriation' is that it leads to a terrible logjam of incoherence. Since few want to explicitly buy into a racial metaphysics, and no one wants to believe that culture is neatly segregated according to 'race', nationality, etc., the claim of 'appropriation' cannot be sustained. Culture is an open-ended process of cooperative creation, not a thing with definite, imporous boundaries. Cultural forms are not coherent, and their edges are more like shifting weather fronts than the neat, static lines of maps. They do not have an author; far less could their author be a certain 'race' or nationality somehow embodied. Cultural forms do not have an origin, a once-upon-a-time, and the search for origins is a sure route to absurdity. (If you doubt me, check this out). The notion that a representative of one culture can appropriate from another, each corresponding to a certain racial belonging, seems implausible outside the framework of a metaphysics of race.

5) The charge of 'appropriation' boils down to this. Miley Cyrus, implicitly and in other ways, claimed to be appropriating 'blackness'. The line was, 'as a dumb, Southern hillbilly white, I can do this cool black dance'. And of course, she did so in a way that used 'twerking' in a pantomime of race, as a symbol of black femininity (cf, the 'jezebel' stereotype). It is not so much an accusation of appropriation - I'm just guessing, but I bet that no artist who has 'twerked' thus far had anything to do with the invention and creation of that particular movement - as of the misuse not only of the 'twerk' but also of the black women on her set whose 'big butts' she literally handled as props. And this is what one would expect. I am not inclined to moralise about 'commodification', but there is a sense - one sense anyway - in which the inevitable attempt to turn a profit from a developing cultural form tends to have hypostatising effects, which arrest and freeze its development, assigning its fluid elements fixed meanings. In this case, the 'twerk', and the 'big butt' have been assigned their place within a system of meanings connoting a conception of black femininity, and they can be used again and again to evoke the same thing for the music industry.

6) This adds another dimension to the shaming mentioned earlier, because it seems obvious that one of the things the Right resents about the performance is that they really feel it did represent blackness - they really believe in it. And they're not concerned about 'appropriation' so much as a white woman embracing what they imagine to be 'blackness'. After all, on the authority of two white, male, middle aged and rich presenters: "That's not attractive, Miley."

7) Obviously, all of this was anticipated by Cyrus's producers and marketers.