Thursday, January 06, 2011
The new spirit of armed combat posted by Richard Seymour
"To summarise, then. Let's say our eight thousand men[!], coordinating themselves via their wikis, voting on a dozen on-the-hoof strategic propositions, utilizing their collective cleverness and experience (instead of suppressing it under the lid of feudal command) - that our eight thousand, because they had drawn on all eight thousand as a tactical resource as well as a fighting force - had thoroughly defeated an army three times our size. Let's say they had a dozen armoured- and tank-cars; and air support; and bigger guns, and better and more weapons. But let's say they were all trained only to do what they were told, and their whole system depending on the military feudalism of a traditional army, made them markedly less flexible; and that each soldier could only do one thing where we could do many things.
"Anyway, we beat them.
"Here's something else: they couldn't believe we had beaten them, even long after we had done it. I don't mean 'they couldn't believe it!' as a periphrasis for general astonishment. I mean they literally could not believe it. It did not seem real to them. Something was wrong somewhere, and the wrongness must be somewhere else than the feudal logic of old-style military thinking (they outnumbered us by so much! They were better armed by so much! They were a professional experienced army! And so on). But we beat them for all that.
"There were three hours, give or take, of further fighting, although it was intermittent and we neither killed nor were killed in large numbers. They held out that long, I suppose, hoping that reinforcements could be sent up from Deepcut, where another Regular Army corps was fighting another NMA. But neither that force, nor the much larger body of men and machine to the north, was free to come to their aid. After it became apparent that nobody was coming the battle wound itself up smartly. We selected a dozen negotiators - some NMAs like to decide on negotiators before battle, but I've always thought that a short-sighted thing to do (what if they get killed or wounded in combat? It takes no time to have the wiki randomly identify a dozen troopers, and we're all, more or less, equally capable when it comes to such negotiations.) Our negotiators went in and talked to the surviving ranking officers, and terms were agreed. We confiscated their remaining cars, and took some civilian automobiles as well; and then we loaded up the weapons we had seized into those and took them away.
"We had a quick wiki debate about what to do with these two thousand unarmed men, some wounded (some wounded badly) and some not. If our enemy had been like us, their well men would have tended their unwell and everything would have gone better for them; but since it was a feudal force it depended upon specialized medics to look after the sick. Of course it is in the nature of such specialists that there are always too many of them, with not enough to do, in peacetime; and always too few, with too much to handle, in battle.
...
[After success in battle, the new model army prepares to ship out.]
"We are at our weakest when it comes to mass transit of this sort. It's not what we are best at doing. Moving in swarm, thousands of individuals making their own myriad ways, is our natural mode of transport. Moving en masse puts us in danger. But I do not offer this to you as a tip, since if pressured tactically at such a moment - should you, in plain language, see to take advantage of that situation - we can easily eliminate the problem by killing our prisoners and dispersing ourselves. We would prefer not to, but it is an option available to us: and in that case the problem is removed. The only difficulty would be in killing such a large body of people quickly enough not to be disadvantage tactically; but here the nature of NMA combat structures - the fluid and rhizomatic nature - was on our side. A feudal army would, I suppose, select a number of men as an execution detail, and work methodically through the mass of prisoners. But we were all armed, and there were more of us than the prisoners; so once the vote was taken it would be a simple matter for each member of the NMA to pick a prisoner, dispatch him, such that it would all be over with a single boomingly multi-tracked gunshot. We are all equally capable, and responsible." (Adam Roberts, New Model Army, 2010, pp. 35-7 & 42)
The new model army is, as you see, a network without hierarchy (not all networks are necessarily so); an emergent intelligence, connected by real-time peer-to-peer connections; a democratic Leviathan, made possible by the internet and the wiki. It is the swarm. And now here is Hardt & Negri's version of the swarm:
Here we find ourselves in front of a sort of abyss, a strategic unknown. Every spatial, temporal, and political parameter of revolutionary decisionmaking a la Lenin has been destabilized, and the corresponding strategies have become completely impractical. Even the concept of "counterpower," which was so important for the strategies of resistance and revolution in the period around 1968, loses its force. All notions that pose the power of resistance as homologous or even similar to the power that oppresses us are of no more use.
...we know that capitalist production and the life (and production) of the multitude are tied together increasingly intimately and are mutually determining. Capital depends on the multitude and yet is constantly thrown into crisis by the multitude's resistance to capital's command and authority. ... In the hand-to-hand combat of the multitude and Empire on the biopolitical field that pulls them together, when Empire calls on war for its legitimation, the multitude calls on democracy as its political foundation. This democracy that opposes war is an "absolute democracy. " We can also call this democratic movement a process of "exodus," insofar as it involves the multitude breaking the ties that link imperial sovereign authority to the consent of the subordinated.
When a distributed network attacks, it swarms its enemy: innumerable independent forces seem to strike from all directions at a particular point and then disappear back into the environment. From an external perspective, the network attack is described as a swarm because it appears formless. Since the network has no center that dictates order, those who can only think in terms of traditional models may assume it has no organization whatsoever-they see mere spontaneity and anarchy. The network attack appears as something like a swarm of birds or insects in a horror film, a multitude of mindless assailants, unknown, uncertain, unseen and unexpected. If one looks inside a network, however, one can see that it is indeed organized, rational, and creative. It has swarm intelligence.
Recent researches in artificial intelligence and computational methods use the term swarm intelligence to name collective and distributed techniques of problem solving without centralized control or the provision of a global mode. Part of the problem with much of the previous artificial intelligence research, they claim, is that it assumes intelligence to be based in an individual mind, whereas they assert that intelligence is fundamentally social. These researches thus derive the notion of the swarm from the collective behavior of social animals, such as ants, bees, and termites, to investigate multi-agent-distributed systems of intelligence. Common animal behavior can give an initial approximation of this idea. Consider, for example, how tropical termites build magnificent, elaborated domed structures by communicating with each other; researchers hypothesize that each termite follows the pheromone concentration left by other termites in the swarm. Although none of the individual termites has a high intelligence, the swarm of termites forms an intelligent system with no central control. The intelligence of the swarm is based fundamentally on communication. For researchers in artificial intelligence and computational methods, understanding this swarm behavior helps in writing algorithms to optimize problem-solving computations. Computers too can be designed to process information faster using swarm architecture rather than a conventional centralized processing model.
The swarm model suggested by animal societies and developed by these researchers assumes that each of the agents or particles in the swarm is effectively the same and on its own not very creative. The swarms that we see emerging in the new network political organizations, in contrast, are composed of a multitude of different creative agents. This adds several more layers of complexity to the model. The members of the multitude do not have to become the same or renounce their creativity in order to communicate and cooperate with each other. They remain different in terms of race, sex, sexuality, and so forth. What we need to understand, then, is the collective intelligence that can emerge from the communication and cooperation of such a varied multiplicity. Perhaps when we grasp the enormous potential of this swarm intelligence we can finally understand why the poet Arthur Rimbaud in his beautiful hymns to the Paris Commune in 1871 continually imagined the revolutionary Communards as insects. It is not uncommon, of course, to imagine enemy troops as insects. Recounting the events of the previous year, in fact, Emile Zola in his historical novel La Debacle describes the “black swarms” of Prussians overrunning the French positions at Sedan like invading ants, “un si noir fourmillement de troupes allemandes.” Such insect metaphors for enemy swarms emphasize the inevitable defeat while maintaining the inferiority of the enemy-they are merely mindless insects. Rimbaud, however, takes this wartime cliché and inverts it, singing the praises of the swarm. The Communards defending their revolutionary Paris against the government forces attacking from Versailles roam about the city like ants (fourmiller) in Rimbaud’s poetry and their barricades bustle with activity like anthill (fourmilieres). Why would Rimbaud describe the Communards whom he loves and admires as swarming ants? When we look more closely we can see that all of Rimbaud’s poetry is full of insects, particularly the sounds of insects, buzzing, swarming, teeming (bourdonner, grouiller). “Insect-verse” is how one reader describes Rimbaud’s poetry, “music of the swarm”. The reawakening and reinvention of the senses in the youthful body-the centerpiece of Rimbaud’s poetic world- takes place in the buzzing and swarming of the flesh. This is a new kind of intelligence, a collective intelligence, a swarm intelligence, that Rimbaud and the Communards anticipated. (Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Multitude, 2004, pp. 90-3, italics in original).
Labels: anticapitalism, autonomism, capitalism, class, empire, hardt, multitude, negri, zapatistas
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Iran: The Islamic Revolution Defeats Western Hopes for Regime Change posted by Yoshie
. . . and Hashemi's hopes for a palace coup.Isfahan | Tehran |
Having defeated the Western hopes for regime change and the endogenous upper-class hopes for a palace coup, Salomes of Iran will have a better chance to fight for freedom.
* For the social and political character of the Green Wave, consult Iran's Last Marxist Nasser Zarafshan: Setareh Derakhshesh, "Interview with Dr. Nasser Zarafshan and Farrokh Negahdar" (VOA Persian, 6 January 2010).
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Historical Materialism conference posted by Richard Seymour
Speakers include: Gilbert Achcar * Robert Albritton * Kevin Anderson * Jairus Banaji * Wendy Brown * Alex Callinicos * Vivek Chibber * Hester Eisenstein * Ben Fine * Ferruccio Gambino * Lindsey German * Peter Hallward * John Holloway * Fredric Jameson * Bob Jessop * David McNally * China Mieville * Kim Moody * Leo Panitch * Moishe Postone * Sheila Rowbotham * Julian Stallabrass * Hillel Ticktin * Kees Van Der Pijl * Hilary Wainright
Panels include: APOCALYPSE MARXISM * ART AGAINST CAPITALISM * CLASS AND POLITICS IN THE 'GLOBAL SOUTH' * COGNITIVE MAPPING, TOTALITY AND THE REALIST TURN * COMMODIFYING HEALTH CARE IN THE UK * CUBAN REVOLUTION AND CUBAN SOCIETY * DERIVATIVES * DIMENSIONS OF THE FOOD CRISIS * ECOLOGICAL CRISIS * EMPIRE AND IMPERIALISM * ENERGY, WASTE AND CAPITALISM * FINANCE, THE HOUSING QUESTION AND URBAN POLITICS * GLOBAL LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS * GRAMSCI RELOADED * INTERPRETATIONS OF THE CRISIS * LABOUR BEYOND THE FACTORY * LATIN AMERICAN WORKING CLASSES * LINEAGES OF NEOLIBERALISM * MARXISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE * MIGRATION * PHILOSOPHY AND COMMUNISM IN THE EARLY MARX * POSTNEOLIBERALISM * RACE, NATION AND ORIENTALISM * RED PLANETS: MARXISM AND SCIENCE FICTION * REMEMBERING PETER GOWAN AND CHRIS HARMAN * REVOLUTIONARY THEORY, AUTONOMIST MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY * SLAVERY AND CAPITALISM IN THE US SOUTH * STUDENT MOVEMENTS AND YOUTH REVOLTS * THE CRITIQUE OF RELIGION AND THE CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM * UTOPIAS, DYSTOPIAS AND SOCIALIST BIOPOLITICS.
Book here.
Labels: capitalism, empire, historical materialism, marxism, socialism
Thursday, November 12, 2009
American Insurgents posted by Richard Seymour
Review of Gerald Horne, The End of Empires: African Americans and India.![](http://web.archive.org./web/20171113160853im_/http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_JNlxgs6qm2M/SvxXCY3ezcI/AAAAAAAACts/Uy86hsX4Wcg/s320/ghadar.jpg)
Gerald Horne is an historian who has been revealing neglected aspects of African American history for several decades, particularly those relating to class struggle, communism, and what W E B Du Bois referred to as the global ‘colour line’.
In The Deepest South, he disclosed the efforts by Deep South slavers to form a pact with Brazil and build a southern empire that would protect white supremacy. At the same time, he revealed, Lincoln and the northern establishment looked toward schemes that would result in the removal of former slaves from the United States, perhaps to indentured plantations in the British Empire. Again, in The White Pacific, he followed the trail of former slave-owners as they set out across the Pacific, to Australasia and the Pacific Islands, where they engaged in a form of slavery known as ‘blackbirding’. In Cold War in a Hot Zone, he demonstrated the links between African American struggles during the Cold War and militancy in the Caribbean as the British empire was replaced by American dominance. And in Black and Red, he anatomised the African American response to the Cold War, noting that “US Blacks have been among the vanguard of anti-imperialism”.
In this, his penultimate volume, African American anti-imperialism is at the fore again, as Horne assesses the relationship between the Indian struggle for independence from the British empire and the African American struggle against Jim Crow. It is reasonably well known that Martin Luther King was influenced by Gandhi’s doctrine of satyagraha (non-violent resistance), and perhaps less so that Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, Pauli Murray and others also drew on Gandhi’s doctrines. Nehru’s speech at the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement of Third World states paid moving tribute to the struggle of Africans, and particularly of African Americans, whose liberation he pledged India would support. A more recondite affinity drawn out by Horne is the influence of the Ahmadiyya movement of Indian Muslims on African Americans in the early 20th Century – an influence that would later be felt through the Nation of Islam.
Horne traces these connections, from prehistorical origins to the twentieth century, with the overwhelming focus on the decades leading up to Indian independence and the culmination of the civil rights struggle. The shared historical destinies of black America and India arguably began with the American revolution, when some revolutionaries looked to India as a potential anti-colonial ally. Their fate was subsequently bound together through the production of cotton and the circulation of slaves between south Asia, Africa and the United States. Opposing antebellum slavery in the United States, abolitionists in England deplored the country’s manufacture of cloths from slave-produced cotton when it might just as well have been obtained using free labour from the banks of the Indus, at less cost. The Indian rebellion of 1857 carried grave race warnings for the United States. For some, it showed the madness of trying to permanently rule over non-white people. Andrew Carnegie, visiting Lucknow in 1879, fretted that “these bronzed figures which surrounded us by millions” may once again “in some mad moment catch the fever of revolt”. It showed what a “dangerous game” it was for the US to try to conquer neighbouring islands populated by black majorities. Carnegie would go on to become a generous benefactor of the Anti-Imperialist League when it was founded in opposition to the Spanish-American war of 1898. Similarly, the Civil War of 1861-65 which was to end in the abolition of slavery (quite against the original intentions of the North) was closely determined by the availability of cotton from India, not least because it dissuaded English capitalists from throwing their weight behind the Confederacy to defend their cotton access.
Interwoven destiny
African American activists, cognisant of such an interwoven destiny, sympathised with the plight of Asia. Booker T Washington and Jawaharlal Nehru both sympathised with Japan in its 1905 war with Russia, hoping that victory for the former would boost Asian chances of independence from would-be racial oppressors. African American journals considered that a victory for the Tsarist empire would be a “triumph for color prejudice”. The grounds for direct solidarity with Indians were enhanced by the treatment of Indian labourers who migrated to the United States and were treated by racist politicians, including the presidential contender William Jennings Bryan, as a great “peril” to the American way of life.
As a result of this oppression, Indian labourers tend to live among and associate with African Americans. But the first sign of a direct political connection between India and black America was the emergence in 1889 of the Ahmadiyya movement by Mirza Ghulam Ahmed. Early on, the movement despatched a mission to the United States, just as African American Christian missionaries had – with less success – visited the Indian subcontinent to find converts. The movement hinted at a new racial synthesis that was also increasingly emerging in the thoughts of Islamic modernists such as Jamāl-al-dīn al-Afghani: a pan-Islamic alliance that would unite Indian anti-colonialism with Pan-Africanism.
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Revolution and anti-colonialism
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The combined experience of racial oppression in the United States and British colonialism led to the formation of the California-based movement, Ghadar. It was a revolutionary movement for Indian independence which proclaimed socialism as its ideology and supported military actions against the British, which the latter invariably described as ‘terrorism’. It was influenced in part by the anti-racist leftism of the International Workers of the World, and among its founders was the anarchist Indian intellectual Har Dayal. The organisation was implicated early on in its existence in an alleged Kaiser-funded plot to time an Indian rebellion against British rule with Germany’s campaign in Europe. That such allegations touched on American anxieties about its own developing imperial role was indicated by Secretary of State Robert Lansing’s complaint that German Americans and British Indians intent on stirring revolt in India had arrived in the Philippines, the base of US colonialism in the region.
The Ghadar case aroused sympathy among African American journals, such as the NAACP’s The Crisis and A Philip Randolph’s The Messenger, especially as the suspects were convicted and deported to their fate at the hands of the British authorities. The Messenger also noted, with approval, the refusal of West Indians called on by the British to help quell growing Indian revolt, to raise arms against “the Hindu people in their struggle for freedom”, and referred to Haiti as “America’s India”. India and its emerging generation of Marxist intellectuals exerted a profound influence on African American militants such as Alain Locke. And while Tokyo had once been the lodestar of resistance to white world supremacy, the emergence of an anti-imperialist, socialist Russia came to unite south Asians and African Americans in opposition to racial oppression of all kinds.
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It was not just the left that was inspired by the new era of militancy. Garvey’s pan-Africanism drew on the example of Ghadar and its anti-sectarian approach to resisting white domination. “If it is possible for Hindus and Mohammedans to come together in India,” he averred, “it is possible for Negros to come together everywhere”. In general, the Garveyites focused considerably more attention on the fate of the British Empire and its consequences for African Americans, than most others. They also expressed profound admiration for Gandhi whom they, in the greatest compliment they could offer, compared to Garvey himself.
However, it was Du Bois and the NAACP that led the campaign to forge solidarity between African Americans and India. These relations were sometimes strained by the red-baiting of prominent members such as the Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes, who supported Indian independence but was deeply hostile to all communist influence in a way that was not true of the mainstream Indian anti-colonial movement. Nonetheless, the inspiration was reciprocated. Reading Du Bois’ work from London, the Indian activist A K Das wrote to ask why it was not possible to unite “what is called the coloured races”. A R Malik, writing from Punjab, saw Du Bois’ struggle to liberate “the Negroes from the bondage aristocrats and capitalists” as analogous to India’s struggle, declaring that Indians “naturally view the struggle of the Negros with great sympathy”. The NAACP provided information for Indians seeking to rebut myths of their racial inferiority, and Du Bois’ journal, The Crisis, became a sought after source of polemical nourishment in Punjab and elsewhere. Throughout the 1930s, a growing number of African Americans travelled to India to study its difficulties and draw lessons from its intricate race and caste order, and found an audience interested in the struggles of African Americans. And when India was traduced by the American writer Katherine Mayo, in a number of popular books rationalising British colonialism, Indian writers responded by pointing out the barbarism of the American racial order. America, they noted, claimed the right to independence from Britain despite maintaining a gruelling system of oppression – why should India, which did not have this flaw, be denied the same right?
A free and independent nation “of dark people”...
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As Horne has previously covered in his Race War!, London and Washington were deeply concerned to counter this sympathy, and particularly the charge that a ‘war for democracy’ was hypocritical when India was not allowed to be free. Powerful voices in both capitals thought the best way to do this was to make some concessions to African Americans and to consider independence for India, but they were ranged against entrenched lobbies. At the very least, though, statesmen had to attenuate the force of any public sermons on behalf of white supremacy. Sensing the possibilities opened up by the war, African American leaders such as Walter White of the NAACP lobbied for Indian independence. White met personally with Lord Halifax to request a commission be set up for the purposes of determining the future of India, a proposal that did not amuse Halifax. He also urged the United States to support independence for India, noting that racial inequality was driving sympathy for Japanese propaganda and would potentially lead to Japan acquiring the Indian subcontinent. White also gave London headaches with his visit to India, and his expressed desire to see Nehru and Gandhi, at a time when Britain was jailing the Indian leadership. Throughout the war, African Americans and Indians pressed their demands in growing coordination. Thousands of African Americans applauded Paul Robeson and Kumar Goshal in the Manhattan Center in 1942 when they demanded a free India as the best condition for defending India against Japan. Goshal went on to write regularly for the Negro Quarterly, a journal for which Ralph Ellison was the managing editor, advising readers in the indissoluble link between the fate of African Americans and Indians, especially as the former defended the latter from Japanese conquest.
The US was sometimes capable of responding pragmatically to this situation, as when military top brass noticed that African American soldiers fighting in India demonstrated an ability to relate to Indian civilians that surpassed that of white soldiers, and were thus an asset – despite the generally racist perception of black soldiers as incompetent, lazy, and so on. Nonetheless, with a segregated army and a war in the name of a ‘freedom’ most African Americans did not receive, such understandings were of limited use. The situation of both India and African Americans would have to change if the dominant position of the US was to be secured. According to Horne, whatever the reality of Japanese policy, the perception that it was waging a ‘race war’ against the white world made conditions more favourable for Indian independence and improvements for African Americans.
From race war to Cold War
While the Cold War that followed WWII proved unfavourable for the African American Left, the NAACP emerged the strongest African American organisation in the US. The NAACP has often been belaboured for aligning with Cold War ideology, its leadership arguing that race reform was an integral part of the struggle against communism. Some historians, such as Penny Von Eschen, have argued that the NAACP’s decision shut down possibilities for raising more radical conceptions of social and economic justice that would later come to the fore, and limited the scope for international anticolonial solidarity. Manning Marable argued that the NAACP effectively acted as the “left-wing of McCarthyism” in the early Cold War period.
Horne has been known to share this broad line of argument, and here he acknowledges the limits placed on the NAACP by Cold War ideology, lamenting the decreasing internationalism in the African American movement at just the time that the Indian anti-colonial movement was denouncing apartheid, launching the Bandung Conference to give Africa and Asia a global voice, and founding the Non-Aligned Movement, to escape the restrictive embrace of anticommunism. The anticommunist leadership not only refused to show solidarity with those being put on trial by the state for communist activity, which included many African Americans. Its stance also meant that it had to depart from any idea of an independent foreign policy which would challenge the very global order that Washington was seeking to conserve and reform in its own image. The leadership rarely deigned to express a view that differed from established Washington opinion, and Walter White ended up effectively counselling President Truman on India, steering the NAACP toward a position of trying to influence India in favour of anticommunism. The old internationalism reached a nadir when W E B Du Bois was expelled from the NAACP for attempting to persuade an Indian delegation to the UN to raise the plight of African Americans before the body’s general assembly, a move that would have reflected poorly on Washington’s new stance as a global protector of human rights.
Still, the relationship to India did not vanish overnight. In the year preceding Indian independence, the NAACP was capable of a vigorous campaign on India. Outside the NAACP, African American missionaries to India tried to use their experiences to help overcome the communal divisions that ripped through the subcontinent at a cost of millions of lives as the British opted to ‘divide and quit’. The African American left was profoundly critical of the British division of India, and Congress militants themselves pointed to the evil of racial hierarchy in the US to warn against any attempt to exclude or subordinate Muslims in an independent India. Some worked through YMCAs to develop contacts with Indian militants. Bayard Rustin made contact with local capitalists the better to forge allies among India’s newly independent ruling class.
And there was still a profound awareness of the fact that thousands of Indians lived in the US and suffered racial oppression alongside African Americans. But even here, potential problems arose. A minority of Indian residents of the US chose to argue that their legal rights should be respected on the grounds that they were properly categorised as Aryans, which raised the question of whether anti-racist organisations should campaign for people of South Asian origin to be respect as ‘white’. The major barrier to sustained solidarity, though, was the atmosphere of anticommunism, a political perspective that did not bode well for relations with a country that had pioneered non-alignment, and which had two mass, influential communist parties. The fear of being charged with being communist sympathisers drove many internationally oriented African Americans away from even discussing global affairs. The era of internationalism would return with the next upsurge of the civil rights struggle, but it would come with the breakdown of the liberal Cold War consensus.
The fact that the African American struggle for liberation was compromised in the way that it was by Cold War repression does not mean that it was no longer dependent on global struggles. The very fact that millions of newly free Indians (and Asians of all backgrounds, and Africans) were open to the idea of a systemic alternative to Washington-dominated capitalism was, as Horne’s narrative makes clear, one of the main reasons that the destruction of Jim Crow became a political goal of the liberal wing of US power. America’s global standing became far more important to its long-term advantage than the preservation of its peculiar institution of white supremacy.
In keeping with his long-standing efforts to revive the forgotten international contours of African American history, Horne has done an enormous service in illuminating the anti-imperialism at the heart of black America’s struggle. He has also, in the course of this, brought to light a myriad of class, gender, national and caste issues that intersected with this story. There are times when one would wish for a more critical appraisal of the role of the USSR, whose conduct gave much succour to the anticommunists Horne berates, and whose international stance was often profoundly conservative – its long support for French colonialism in Algeria and Zionism in Palestine, for instance, suggests that it could hardly be depended on as an ally of the victims of white supremacy. At other times in the narrative, it is more evident that African Americans and Indians had a shared destiny, than that substantial political forces among either understood this. And it would have been useful to have an engagement with critics, such as Manfred Berg, who have mounted a defence of the NAACP’s position in the Cold War period. Nevertheless, these are minor criticisms. Horne has written another powerful ‘history from below’, as it were, in which the main agents of liberation are the oppressed themselves. Their stories, and their ideas, are so infrequently told that one can only welcome the fact that such a gifted historian as Horne has chosen to relate them.
Labels: british empire, cold war, colour line, empire, india, jim crow, racism, segregation, US imperialism, w e b du bois
Saturday, August 01, 2009
Truth and Reconciliation for Iran posted by Yoshie
The following is an extremely good and timely statement, signed by Iranians, some of whom have taken one side or the other regarding the presidential election and post-election conflicts, and others of whom have taken a neutral stand on them. I encourage non-Iranian leftists to support this attempt and others like it.Truth and Reconciliation for Iran
We are a group of university educators and antiwar activists with diverse political views who are based in Europe and North America. During the past few years we have been active in defending Iran's national rights -- particularly those relating to the peaceful use of nuclear energy -- against the pervasive deception created by western and Israeli-influenced media and official statements. We have consistently taken a stand against the policies of the United States and its allies, including the improper submission of Iran's nuclear file to the United Nations security council, the imposition of sanction resolutions against Iran, covert destabilisation inside the country and repeated threats of military intervention and bombing of nuclear centres on the part of US and Israel.
At the same time, we have advocated the human rights of individuals and democratic rights for various groups and constituencies in Iran. We have emphasised that the guarantee of such rights is necessary not only for Iran's social and political advancement, but also for the vital unity of our people against foreign pressures.
In the current post-election crisis, we see it as our duty to share our views based on years of defending Iran's national rights, and to help develop realistic solutions for the benefit of all our compatriots of whatever political persuasion.
The background to the current situation is the longstanding belligerent policies of the US and its allies, encouraged by the neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby, which peaked during eight years of Republican rule in the White House. Despite President Khatami's conciliatory approach, exemplified by his promotion of "Dialogue Among Civilisations", and despite Iran's co-operation in the overthrow of the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan, the administration of George W Bush labelled the Islamic Republic a member of the "axis of evil". Following the illegal invasion of Iraq, Bush pushed for regime change in Iran. These provocative and confrontational policies played a key role in the defeat of Iranian reformists in the parliamentary elections of 2003 and the presidential election of 2005.
During the past four years, a whole series of policies have targeted Iran's right to produce nuclear fuel for peaceful energy, including illegitimate UN/US sanctions, repeated implicit and overt threats of military attack by the United States and Israel, overt and covert well-funded US destabilisation operations, and aid to terrorist forces seeking to overthrow the government of Iran. These policies have created fears of an externally-instigated "velvet revolution" in the leadership ranks of the Islamic Republic. These fears were used to justify restrictions of civil and political freedoms promoted by the reformist administration of Khatami and, as a result, civil society and non-governmental organisations suffered a setback.
According to critics, these social and political pressures, along with government mismanagement caused by the removal of competent technocrats, have negatively impacted the public interest and put enormous pressure on the middle class, the educated class, journalists and artists. These people must be allowed a more open and free environment in order to fulfil their instrumental roles in service of the country.
On the external front, the Obama administration, facing neoconservative pressure and keeping many of his predecessor's policies against Iran, has nevertheless declared its readiness for unconditional negotiations with Iran. He has for the first time referred to Iran as the "Islamic Republic" and indicated that he is not pursuing regime change in Iran. Furthermore, shortly before the Iranian elections, in a first for an American president, Obama admitted the role of his country in the 1953 coup that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister Muhammad Mossadegh. These changes in US politics have created room for active and constructive diplomacy for the purpose of solving conflicts and disagreements between Iran and the United States, and for creating a nuclear-free Middle East.
This year, there was in Iran a record level of participation in the elections, unprecedented television debates and, most important of all, widespread participation in election campaigns. Despite some restrictions, the elections took place in an overall constructive climate, perhaps making Iran a model democracy among Islamic nations of the region. A day before the elections, Senator John Kerry, a key US statesman, was so impressed that he dismissed as "ridiculous" Bush's policy of denying Iran peaceful nuclear energy, which in itself exposes the baseless nuclear accusations levelled against Iran and proves the illegitimacy of security council resolutions against Iran.
However, in the view of a considerable number of Iranians who are discontented and frustrated with the restrictions on civil and political freedoms, there were various irregularities in the elections, including the suspension of reformist newspapers and mobile telephone SMS service on election day. This caused mass public demonstrations in support of nullifying the election. The unrest has created a major rift between the supporters of Ahmadinejad, who deem Iran's national sovereignty to be of the highest priority, and the supporters of the two reform candidates Karroubi and Mousavi, who demand increased civil and political freedoms above all.
Each of these two major wings of the body politic includes millions of people and both play a vital role in Iran's progress. The rift between these two must heal in an environment of calm, without agitation and mudslinging, for the sake of Iran's future. This healing must be pursued through the path of constructive dialogue and reconciliation, so that the unity of our people for safeguarding national rights can be achieved.
Unfortunately, a large number of our protesting fellow countrymen have been attacked and injured and even more regrettably, a significant number of them have been killed. Also, a large group of reformist activists and leaders have been arrested and imprisoned after the elections.
Both Mousavi and Karroubi have stressed that all protests must remain within the law. Following the request of the reformist and Green leaders, almost all protesters rallied completely peacefully, and in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, condemned all types of violence, calling the Basijis and Revolutionary Guards their own brothers. Extremist elements who used the opportunity to create chaos and engaged in the destruction of public property were condemned by Mousavi.
The western media, by their one-sided coverage of the post-election developments, portrayed the street demonstrations protesting the election results as the start of a "velvet" revolution against the Islamic Republic. Regime-change advocates also tried to piggy-back on the protests outside Iran for their own purposes. The British government, which claims to follow a policy of non-interference in Iran's internal affairs, did its part by confiscating nearly £1bn of Iranian assets. To make matters worse, the neoconservatives demanded a re-evaluation of the Obama administration's policy of unconditional negotiations with Iran. The US state department also used this crisis to justify its continuation of Bush-era policies of financing anti-Iranian government organisations for the purposes of "spreading democracy, human rights and a government of law and order". For "security reasons" they refused to release the identities of the recipients of the funds. The Iranian government, for their part, deported two British diplomats, accusing them of interference in Iranian affairs and pointing to western governments as the root of the post-election unrest.
Whatever the role of the western media, governments, and regime change forces, it cannot detract from the legitimacy of the massively popular protests. In fact, Mousavi has emphasised his complete loyalty to the Islamic Republic and admonished his supporters abroad to stay away from the anti-Islamic Republic groups. To attribute the roots of the demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of Iranians to external interference or to regime-change groups amounts to questioning the independence of the country which has been gained and consolidated by the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands.
In the opinion of millions of Iranians, the current crisis has been caused by restrictions on political freedoms, particularly freedom of the press, economic discontent, and deficiencies in transparency and accountability on the part of government institutions. Although these issues have been aggravated by the US political, military and economic encirclement and the CIA's destabilisation programmes, in the view of this segment of society the problems are ultimately rooted in the government's own policies. After their unprecedented participation in the elections, millions of Iranians have lost their confidence in the system. Awareness of this reality was expressed by the speaker of the Iranian parliament Ali Larijani, who indicated on live national television that some members of the Guardian Council openly supported a certain candidate, instead of being neutral during the investigation of the election complaints. He also added that the large segments of society who distrust the declared election results should not be regarded in the same manner as the rioters.
On the basis of the above assessment, and in the interest of resolving the present crisis, we direct all officials and fellow countrymen to the following proposals:
1) Arrests and assaults of reformist and Green movement activists and any use of deadly weapons against the protesters are against the national interest and must be stopped and condemned by the authorities. Of the government of the Islamic Republic, we demand, in accordance with the constitution and for the preservation of national unity, that it release the reformist leaders from detention and observe freedom of the press and other civil rights. Iranian state television and radio must provide time to the protesters to express their views. Permits for nonviolent assembly must be given to the protesters. The government must guarantee the safety of the demonstrators against any violence and those responsible for battering and murdering students and demonstrators must be identified and prosecuted.
2) The current division among the people that separates government supporters and dissenters, under conditions of economic, military and political encirclement, must be reconciled with calm and patient negotiations and reasoning, by condemning any kind of violence and by renouncing name-calling and inflammatory rhetoric. We call on the political forces of both sides to move toward building such a constructive climate and toward creation of an economic, political, and cultural agenda that can respond to all social needs.
3) Of the government of the Islamic Republic, we request that in view of the distrust on the part of a great segment of the country's population, it form an independent truth and national reconciliation commission with representation from all candidates, such that it can gain the trust of the people of Iran and find a reasonable solution for the conflict. The votes of a great portion of the Iranian society for both Ahmadinejad and Mousavi show that the best solution is negotiations for reconciliation and creation of a government of national unity from the ranks of Principalists and the Green movement and reformists. With a comprehensive programme based on Iran's national rights and on people's civil rights, such a government of national unity must address the current challenges facing the country and mobilise in an effective way the totality of human resources and expertise for national development.
4) Of western governments, we request that they cease any and all interference in Iranian affairs and end all their illegitimate economic, political and military pressures aimed at the internal destabilisation of Iran. They need to cease any support for the anti-Islamic Republic opposition and lift the economic and scientific sanctions. The Obama administration should emphasise unconditional negotiations and take steps toward creating a nuclear weapons-free Middle East. Only under these conditions, without any foreign threats, can the Iranian people reach their aspirations of freedom and establish their unity in a framework of independence and national sovereignty.
5) To the leaders of the reformists and the Green movement, we suggest that in order to prevent exploitation of the current crisis by western propaganda and opportunist groups, they unambiguously oppose all sanctions and condemn regime change operations and any foreign support for the anti-Islamic Republic opposition.
Signed:
Dr Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, SOAS, University of London
Professor the Baroness Afshar, York University
Mojtaba Aghamohammadi, researcher, University of Arizona
Professor Mohammad Ala, Persian Gulf Task Force
Esfandiar Bakhtiar, Georgia Institute of Technology
Professor Abbas Edalat, Imperial College London
Javad Fakharzadeh, Iran Heritage
Dr Farideh Farhi, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Massy Homayouni, independent antiwar activist
Dr Mehri Honarbin-Holliday, Canterbury Christ Church University
Mojgan Janani, independent antiwar activist
Mohammad Kamaali, Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran
Fareed Marjaee, writer and democracy activist
Masoud Modarres, independent activist
Professor Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh, Tarbiyat Modarres University
Daniel Pourkesali, Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran
Rostam Pourzal, Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran
Dr Mohammad Purqurian, LaaL.org
Manijeh Saba, independent human rights activist
Professor Mehdi Shariati, Kansas College
Professor Nader Sadeghi, George Washington University Hospital
Shirin Saeidi, University of Cambridge
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, independent antiwar activist
Reza Shirazi, Goftogoo TV
Safa Shoaee, Imperial College London
Saeed Soltanpour, Iranian TV Canada
Dr Alireza Rabi, Middle-East Citizens Assembly
Dr Elaheh Rostami, SOAS, University of London
Professor Rahmat Tavakol, Rutgers University
Professor Farzin Vahdat, Harvard University
Leila Zand, Fellowship of Reconciliation
Labels: democracy, empire, freedom, ideology, imperialism, iran, media
Sunday, July 26, 2009
How Many Leftists Are "United for Iran"? posted by Yoshie
"8,000 people at the [25 July 2009] event in Paris, 4,000 in Stockholm, 3,000 in Amsterdam, more than 2,500 in Washington DC, 2,500 in New York, 2,000 in London. . . ," says United4Iran.org, the sponsor of the global day of action. The numbers suggest that few non-Iranian leftists showed up (when leftists join and mobilize for protests en masse, Paris, for instance, sees hundreds of thousands -- sometimes millions -- of protesters easily). While a number of leftists have made impassioned pleas for solidarity with Iran's Green Movement, (throwing themselves into an obligatory intra-left battle royal that has eclipsed any battle against the power of unelected clerics in Iran), most leftists appear to find it inadvisable to join the protests against the Iranian government (such as United4Iran's) that don't have an anti-imperialist point of unity emphasizing "Hands Off Iran" as much as criticism of the Iranian government's conduct in handling the Green protests.Labels: civil liberties, empire, human rights, ideology, iran, left
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Enemy flags posted by Richard Seymour
The Conseil d'Etat ruled against Cheniere and there were numerous legal challenges. But Cheniere was not just any headmaster. He was a headmaster with political ambitions that went beyond who did what with the petty cash tin. In 1994, as an elected deputy for the department of Oise, representing the right-wing Raillement pour la Republique, he raised the issue again, launching a bill to ban all 'ostentatious' religious clothing. This failed at the time, but it is notable that such was the language used to justify later restrictions aimed at Muslims. In 2003, after Chirac had been elected in a presidential contest between himself and Jean Marie Le Pen, it was Socialist deputy Jack Lang who would bring it up again. Sarkozy was the interior minister at the time. A committee was convened to consider banning conspicuous religious garments in the schools.
The feminist writer Joan Wallach Scott, discussing the affair in The Politics of the Veil, notes that it was at this point that the media focused on the story of two girls, the Levy sisters, who had converted to Islam and chose to wear the hijab. What was interesting was that they were under no social pressure to convert. Their parents were atheists, and the father didn't approve of their conversion. But, seeing the hysterical media response, he suggested that his children might decide for themselves if they wanted to abandon their faith. He expressed astonishment at the attitude of the 'Ayatollahs of secularism' who wanted to boss his kids about. That this was the chosen symbol for the media campaign was telling. It would seem to indicate something about the complexities of faith, and of identity. It would seem to tell against the simplistic wisdom according to which the 'foulard' (or 'le voile' as it was increasingly called) is imposed by a patriarchical family. It certainly doesn't support the spurious racist conspiracy theory that Islamist troublemakers are simply using the garment to create "Muslim ghettos" and advance a state of conflict with "the West". But that isn't how it was received, and the ensuing debate corroborated the ultimate decision to ban the headscarf in French schools - a net loss for personal liberty, and for secularism at that, which was cheered as much by the far left as by the far right. It didn't maintain the state's neutrality as regards religion; it essentially said that Islam is incompatible with the Republic. It increased the state's interference in personal affairs. The justification for such interference was that the headscarf was too conspicuous a symbol of Islam, and therefore a kind of proselytism - not just for Islam, it was claimed, but for jihad. As Scott puts it, the garments are seen as "enemy flags" in the Republic.
This kind of 'laïcité' is therefore a curiosity. A particularistic universalism; an aspect of exclusionary nationalism that supposed internationalist embrace; a form of reaction and authoritarianism that some revolutionaries are willing to support; a harrassment of women of colour that so-called feminists endorse, etc etc. That it takes as its cue the legacy of Jules Ferry and the Third Republic - the high tide of French colonialism, the civilizing mission and kulturkampf in Northern Africa - is to be expected. Today's civilising mission is directed just as much against the indigenes.
It's worth noting that as this discussion has been reheated again and again, some British liberals and conservatives have looked across the Channel with envy. That such low politics, such vileness and stupidity, could be expressed in such grandiose language is a prospect that leaves these people breathless. Thus, from the liberals, Tories and 'decents' to the most reactionary elements in British politics, Sarkozy's broadside against the burqa has been a ralling cry over the last week or so. Now, Sarkozy was only last year on speaking terms with the Roman patriarch and floating the idea of "laïcité positive" in which religion might re-enter the public sphere. He was talking about his Christianity and his godliness as though he were the American that he obviously wants to be. But he is also someone who made his name with inflammatory attacks on Muslims in the banlieues back in 2005, which he promised to "karsherise". He knows perfectly well that from Le Pen to the left-republicans, there is a broad coalition of French voters that is deeply hostile to Islam. So, here he is baiting the burqa. And here we are, surrounded by the dim and the devious who cheer him on. And, as a speaker at the recent launch of 'Kafa' - a campaign against Islamophobia - noted, such racism toward Muslims is the cutting edge behind which every other form of racism follows. Islamophobia is correlated in the polls to other kinds of prejudice such as hostility toward asylum seekers and 'economic migrants'. The BNP are certainly using it in this way, and their supporters and voters largely seem to get this. The people who don't get it, or don't want to get it, are those who think you can flirt with 'progressive' Muslim-bashing today and not wake up with a more racist and fundamentally nasty society tomorrow.
Labels: colonialism, empire, france, imperial feminism, islam, islamophobia, le pen, nicolas sarkozy, racism
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Iran: This Is Not a Revolution posted by Yoshie
Let the Iranian people solve their conflict on their own. Defend Iran -- including both sides of the conflict -- from the Western powers. Then, one day, the Iranian people will perhaps choose a man -- or even a woman -- who is truly worthy of their fidelity, someone who thinks like Arshin Adib-Moghaddam and is capable of synthesizing the aspirations of those who voted for Mir-Hossein Mousavi (freedom) and those who voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (faith and democracy) and uniting people behind the new synthesis.Iran: This Is Not a Revolution
by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
Political power is never good or bad, never really just or unjust; political power is arbitrary, discriminatory, and most of the time violent. In Iran, the ongoing demonstrations sparked by the election results in favor of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad indicate that such power can never really be monopolized by the state. Iran's civil society is fighting; it is giving blood for a just cause. It is displaying its power, the power of the people. Today, Iran must be considered one of the most vibrant democracies in the world because it is the people who are speaking. The role of the supporters of the status quo has been reduced to reaction, which is why they are lashing out violently at those who question their legitimacy.
In all of this, the current civil unrest in Iran is historic, not only because it has already elicited compromises by the state, but also because it provides yet more evidence of the way societies can empower themselves against all odds. These brave men and women on the streets of Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, and other cities are moved by the same utopia that inspired their fathers and mothers three decades ago: the utopia of justice. They believe that change is possible, that protest is not futile. Confronting the arrogance of the establishment has been one of the main ideological planks of the Islamic revolution in 1979. It is now coming back to haunt those who have invented such slogans without necessarily adhering to them in the first place.
And yet the current situation in Iran is profoundly different from the situation in 1978 and 1979. First, the Islamic Republic has proven to be rather responsive to societal demands and rather flexible ideologically. I don't mean to argue that the Iranian state is entirely reflective of the will of the people. I am saying that is it is not a totalitarian monolith that is pitted against a politically unified society. The fissures of Iranian politics run through all levers of power in the country, which is why the whole situation appears scattered to us. Whereas in 1979 the bad guy (the Shah) was easily identifiable to all revolutionaries, in today's Iran such immediate identification is not entirely possible. Who is the villain in the unfolding drama? Ahmadinejad? Those who demonstrated in support of him would beg to differ. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? I would argue that he commands even stronger loyalties within the country and beyond. The Revolutionary Guard or the Basij? Mohsen Rezai, one of the presidential candidates and an opponent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who is contesting the election results, used to be the head of the former institution.
The picture becomes even more complicated when we take into consideration that some institutions of the state such as the parliament -- via its speaker, Ali Larijani -- have called for a thorough investigation of the violence perpetrated by members of the Basij and the police forces in a raid of student dormitories of Tehran University earlier this week. "What does it mean that in the middle of the night students are attacked in their dormitory?" Larijani asked. The fact that he said that "the interior ministry . . . should answer for it" and that he stated that the "parliament is seriously following the issue" indicate that the good-vs-bad verdict in today's Iran is more blurred than in 1979.
There is a second major difference to 1979. Today, the opposition to Ahmadinejad is fighting the establishment with the establishment. Mir Hossein Mousavi himself was the prime minister of Iran during the first decade of the revolution, during a period when the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, was president. Mohammad Khatami, one of the main supporters of Mousavi, was president between 1997 and 2005. Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, another political ally, is the head of the Assembly of Experts and another former president. They are the engineers of the Islamic revolution and would never devour their project. When some commentators say that what we are witnessing is a revolution they are at best naive and at worst following their own destructive agenda. The dispute is about the future path of the Islamic Republic and the meaning of the revolution -- not about overthrowing the whole system. It is a game of politics and the people who are putting their lives at risk seem to be aware of that. They are aware, in other words, that they are the most important force in the hands of those who want to gain or retain power.
Thus far the Iranian establishment has shown itself to be cunningly adaptable to crisis situations. Those who have staged a revolution know how to sustain themselves. And this is exactly what is happening in Iran. The state is rescuing its political power through a mixture of incentives and pressure, compromise and detention, due process and systematic violence. Moreover, when push comes to shove, the oppositional leaders around Mousavi would never question the system they have built up. As Mousavi himself said in his fifth and most recent letter to the Iranian people: "We are not against our sacred regime and its legal structures; this structure guards our independence, freedom, and Islamic Republic."
Born in Istanbul and educated at the University of Hamburg, American Universtiy (Washington DC), and Cambridge, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam lectures on politics and international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. The author of Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic (Hurst/ Columbia University Press, 2007/2008) and The International Politics of the Persian Gulf (Routledge, 2006), he was the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. He was also elected Honorary Fellow of the Cambridge European Trust Society at the University of Cambridge. His latest publication Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic is now available for worldwide distribution from Hurst & Co., Amazon.com, and Columbia University Press.
Labels: class, class consciousness, democracy, empire, freedom, gender, ideology, iran, islam
Monday, June 22, 2009
What Western Leftists Lost in the Iranian Elections posted by Yoshie
. . . is a chance to gain the trust of Muslims, such as Al Musawwir, regarding Western leftists' commitment to truth, democracy, and class solidarity, transcending the cultural divide:Wittingly (for the most part) and (a few) unwittingly, the "western" left is, in essence, siding with the elite, upper classes, against the working class. Now, why are they supporting these elites -- well, the twisted logic is that this has "politicized the Iranian people" and that civil strife of this kind is good, even if the cause they are supposedly fighting for is not real "fraud or no fraud". This is like saying, that running towards a mirage is good, hey, at least you are running, it'll get you energized. That is the kind of nonsense one would expect from those who engage in psyop destabilization, because their aim is to create a chaotic situation, and then swoop down and take the spoils.
Strange as it may seem to some, these days, Muslims are, probably on average, better at being historical materialist than Western leftists, who prefer fantasy to reality.
Labels: class, class consciousness, class politics, empire, ideology, islam, islamophobia, media
Friday, June 19, 2009
Be Like Rostam posted by Yoshie
Had I lived in Iran at the time of the Iranian Revolution, the Islamic republicans running Iran today would have killed me at worst or put me under house arrest at best, like Iran's Red Princess Maryam Firuz in her last years, because I'm a socialist. But still and all, a majority of the masses supported, and still support, the Islamic republicans, because they are populist Muslims, not socialists.In the history of social revolutions, it often happened that leftists helped to bring about social revolution (socialist or nationalist), and then, after the overthrow of the ancient regime, a faction of revolutionaries (usually centrists) liquidated left-wing and right-wing revolutionaries as well as defenders of the ancient regime.
That's what happened in Iran, too. The revolution did in its leftists, as well as rightists. But, over all, the Iranian Revolution has done more good than bad for a majority of Iranians, making Iran the best country -- the most democratic! -- in the Middle East today.
The fate of leftists in many countries (excepting Cuba) is often the fate of Rostam: serve the rulers who are unworthy of your support, because the nation ruled by the unworthy rulers still must be defended from its many enemies.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Ahmadinejad Won posted by Yoshie
Iran's election commission still hasn't counted all the votes (roughly 32 million votes in total), but, according to the official results based on about 28 million votes counted so far, Ahmadinejad (18,302,924 votes) defeated Mousavi (8,929,232 votes).Most of the Western media were predicting a close race, and some were even suggesting that a landslide for Mousavi might be possible. But the actual results were presaged by those of the telephone survey of Iranian voters conducted by Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, the New America Foundation, and KA Europe SPRL about a month before election day.
TFT/NAF/KA Survey
Official Results as Reported by BBC Persian
UPDATE
Based on the counting of nearly 31 million votes, the results are 19,761,433 votes for Ahmadinejad, 9,841,056 votes for Mousavi, 633,048 votes for Mohsen Rezaei, and 270,885 votes for Mehdi Karrubi.
Official Results as Reported by BBC Persian
Labels: class, empire, iran, media, ruling class, working class
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Who has the right to self-defence? posted by Richard Seymour
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20171113160853im_/http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JNlxgs6qm2M/SYArO8HmCDI/AAAAAAAACf8/-COy1sVNt6I/s320/hamas+rally.jpg)
As Israeli troops re-enter Gaza, the omnipresent mantra will be that "Israel has a right to defend itself". I recognise no such right, given that what it actually means is that "Israel has a right to defend its supremacy over the Palestinians with extreme force". But I just want to briefly point out one implication of this constant invocation of the right to self-defence in this context. The IR theorist Marc Trachtenburg once pointed out that the humanitarian intervention of the Victorian era "dramatised the fact that the society of nations was not a society of equals — that there were in fact two castes of states. To be a target of intervention — indeed, even of humanitarian intervention — was to be stigmatized as of inferior status". The obverse of this was that those of the inferior caste did not have the right to defend themselves. At best, they had the 'right' to be protected by members of the ruling caste, supposing anyone felt like giving a hand.
It might be argued that today the lower caste of states do have some rights of self-defence, but these are heavily circumscribed. Thus, the ruling caste reserves for its exclusive use the right to weapons of mass destruction, to aerial bombardment, invasion, and so on. Israel has a right to all of this but, say, Iran does not. And the Palestinians who - poor fools - don't even have a state, are not even permitted to have a rusty cache of rockets. The question of statehood is important. It is not uncommon for Israel's supporters to emphasise the fact that it is a sovereign state while its designated foes (Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, Islamic Jihad etc) are non-state actors. This emphasis presumably derives from the perspective of Just War theory, particularly that championed by Michael Walzer who is a strong supporter of Israel and can be relied upon to offer a sophisticated apologia for whatever war it is currently engaged in (Operation Cast Lead was no exception). For Walzer attributes to states the right not only to defensive violence, but to violence that targets civilians - both rights he denies nonstate actors. As Andrew Valls has pointed out, this is a double standard that relies on a heavily loaded conception of the kind of violence that nonstate actors might employ ("random murder"). This is an intriguing form of myopia given Walzer's background. For Walzer is, after all, one of those who helped pioneer the idea of Zionism - against the increasingly sceptical New Left - not as a religious or colonial venture but, rather absurdly, as a national liberation struggle with Labour Zionists juxtaposed to the Indian National Congress and the Algerian FLN. Nonetheless, the double standard operates in most conceptions of 'just war', and is mobilised in support of Israel's "right to defend itself against Hamas".
This caste arrangement was once structured by claims of racial solidarity, such as those of Anglo-Saxonism. Such are the origins of the 'special relationship' between the US and UK in the later 19th Century, in which the US resisted the urge to annexe any part of British territory in Canada or the British West Indies while the British not only acceded to American expansionism but embraced it at key points, such as during the 1898 war. Anglo-American competition did not disappear, but it was twinned with a new strategic orientation based in part upon racial sentiment and fear of emerging rival imperialisms of Russia and Japan. At this point, race and conceptions of democracy were inseparably intertwined, the latter seen as a function of the former. That is, for American imperialists such as Theodore Roosevelt no less than for the British empire, democracy was appropriate to the 'white race' which had alone reached a state of self-government.
The trend since 1945, however, has been to make racism invisible - as Robert Vitalis puts it, there is a pervasive 'norm against noticing' the way in which the global order is powerfully structured by race. In the Cold War, of course, the defence of white supremacy in South Africa, Rhodesia or even in the Deep South of the US, was interpreted as an anticommunist imperative. Opposition to anti-colonial movements was 'antitotalitarian'. Even the defence of right-wing dictatorships supported or imposed by western states was a defence of 'the Free World'. Today, the explicit justification for such caste distinctions is almost wholly democratic, (even if one will occasionally hear that the difference between the UK and Iran, for example, is that the former is a "civilized" state). Israel, it is argued, is not only a sovereign state but a democratic one. The world's democracies, it may then be added, have a duty to support one another against undemocratic rivals, at most offering friendly criticism if an ally appears to act against its own interests. Moreover, those democratic states have enhanced legitimacy in their global actions as they are said to be genuinely constrained by popular will, as opposed to despotic states that pursue narrow and parochial interests without the humane restraints that democratic states operate under (thus, "Israel takes the greatest of care not to harms civilians..."). This set of assumptions, as Vitalis suggests, rests upon a certain faux-naïveté about the endurance of race as an organising principle in world affairs, and in this way they help naturalise western supremacy. It would be pedantic to list the examples of democratic states that have been targeted for subversion and military attack by western states, or the democratic movements that have felt the iron heel of western repression. It is sufficient to note that in the most recent case of Israel's 'self-defence', the opponent has been the elected government of Palestine. Such violence by western states is neither democratic in method nor in aim, unless one is willing to descend to the argument that by definition political coercion by democratic states constitutes an enlargement of democracy's scope.
The way that the right to political violence (and to the technology and ideological legitimacy that enables it) is distributed, tells us a great deal about the way in which the global "colour line" that Du Bois wrote of has persisted beyond its formal overthrow. It stands as a rebuke to those polytechnic Polyannas who still insist that the era of 'humanitarian intervention' is one of unbounded egalitarianism.
Labels: colonialism, empire, gaza, hamas, international relations, Israel, palestine
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Syndrome posted by Richard Seymour
In light of the revelations by people like Aidan Delgado and Specialist Jody Casey about officially sponsored racism in the military, the use of the dehumanising proper noun 'haji' to facilitate murder, and the spree of free and easy killings that ensues, I found the following testimony, quoted in Michael Krenn's account of racism in US foreign policy, resonant:"On August 8th our company executed a 10-year-old boy. We shot him in the back with a full magazine M-16. Approximately August 16th to August 20th - I'm not sure of the date - a man was taken out of his hootch sleeping, was put into a cave, and he was used for target practice by a lieutenant, the same lieutenant who had ordered the boy killed. Now they used him for target practice with an M-60, an M-16, and a 45.
...
"I don't want to go into the details of these executions because the executions are the direct result of a policy. It's the policy that is important. The executions are secondary because the executions are created by the policy that is, I believe, a conscious policy within the military. Number one, the racism in the military is so rampant. Now you have all heard of the military racism. It's institutionalized; it is policy; it is SOP; you are trained to be a racist. When you go into basic training, you are taught they are gooks and all you hear is, "gook, gook, gook, gook." And once you take the Vietnamese people or any of the Asian people, because the Asian serviceman in Vietnam is the brunt of the same racism, because the GIs over there do not distinguish one Asian from another.
"They are trained so thoroughly that all Asians become the brunt of this racism. You are trained, "gook, gook, gook," and once the military has got the idea implanted in your mind that these people are not humans, they are subhuman, it makes it a little bit easier to kill 'em. One barrier is removed and this is intentional, because obviously, the purpose of the military is to kill people. And if you're not an effective killer, they don't want you. The military doesn't distinguish between North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, Viet Cong, civilian--all of them are gooks, all of them are considered to be subhuman. None of them are any good, etc. And all of them can be killed and most of them are killed." (Testimony of Sgt Jamie Henry, 4th Infantry Division, to The Winter Soldier Investigation, organised by Vietname Veterans Against the War, 1971.)
Of course racism in the US military is a matter of policy. The pitch from the military itself is that it regards racist stereotyping as detrimental to discipline and performance, and does all it can to stamp it out. This is utter bullshit. It is not, of course, the 'Vietnam Syndrome'. That was a pseudo-medical coinage to explain the popular aversion to the necessary slaughter of brown people. Rather, it is the Philippines Syndrome, the Haiti Syndrome, the Hiroshima Syndrome, the Navaho Syndrome etc. It is the race, empire and genocide syndrome.
Labels: empire, genocide, iraq, racism, US imperialism, vietnam
Monday, September 08, 2008
Interventionism of a different kind. posted by Richard Seymour
After the big market melt-down on Friday, oweing to massive job losses in the US, the American government has just formally nationalised the two biggest mortgage firms in the US. Yes, Freddie and Fannie are owned by nanny. In light of this kind of drastic intervention, Gordon Brown's miniature bribe to would-be home-buyers is pretty pathetic. But, of course, that reflects the different magnitudes of the problem as perceived by policymakers. Apart from American homeowners, who were drawn into unprecedented debt by a Federal Reserve policy of driving down interest rates and allowing house prices to soar (thus decreasing the cost of debt and increasing the collateral available to homeowners), much of the world's financial system depends on these two companies staying afloat. Almost half of America's deficit is contained in those two firms. Much of its banking system is heavily exposed to the housing market. In other words, the stability of the empire is at risk. It has nothing to do with protecting vulnerable homeowners, since the government is quite ready to see them expropriated both legally and - as in New Orleans - illegally. But it just goes to illustrate one of the profound paradoxes of American politics, namely the coexistence ultra-free-market ideologies among the political and economic elites with a constant orientation toward heavy state intervention to protect corporate interests.Britain's housing market slump doesn't have anything like the same significance. While it is clearly a problem for mainly City-based firms, the government prefers to manage bail-outs in a protracted, piecemeal fashion that satisfies no one, so as not to produce a ruling class panic about the crypto-socialism of the administration. The UK housing market is a peculiarity, in that the stimulation of mass home ownership was intended by its authors in the Thatcher administration in part to create a big declassed layer among workers, and hopefully retain their loyalty at elections. It was to create a "homeowners' democracy", much as the liberalisation of the stock exchange was to create a "shareholders' democracy". In fact, what it did was to create a perpetual housing crisis, as high prices and the lack of affordable council houses meant that the mere business of having somewhere to live consumed more and more of people's income. It also contributed to the creation of a chronic homelessness problem, with approximately 79,000 households officially acknowledged to be homeless and about 400,000 people estimated to be 'hidden homeless'. In addition, the shortfall has been exacerbated because high prices encourage property speculators to buy up homes in the hope of making a huge fuck-off fortune. And, as we learned at the beginning of the year, a big part of the housing boom of late has been sustained by rank fraudulence. Now that house prices are plummeting, would-be homeowners don't stand to benefit, because it comes with contracting credit and falling incomes, and is itself the result of a slump in effective demand. The only realistic policy, if the concern is to ensure that people can have affordable housing, is to reverse the marketisation of housing, stop the 'right-to-buy' schemes which are contributing to the shortage, and introduce a big campaign of home-building. Some of this happens to be official government policy north of the border. However, New Labour is committed to making a market-driven housing system work while avoiding scaring business with big public expenditure commitments, which is why we're being offered peanuts. And business opinion would seem to approve. The Economist, just before the latest bad news struck, expressed some relief about the fact that Brown's measures were so piddling, and assured readers that this whole 'crisis' business was being massively inflated, and that America was already bouncing back.
Amid all this economic grimness, the only possible good news is when working people organise to stop the government and business from making them pay for the crisis. In light of which, this is excellent news. Mark Serwotka of the PCS is pledging a far more sustained and intensive battery of strikes than the one-day actions that we've seen to date. It should be pointed out that the CWU has already voted unanimously for further strike action at its conference, although I'm pretty sure the bulk of the union leadership doesn't want to confront Gordon Brown at this point. After all, it's an item of faith among the TUC's best and brightest that the argument is close to being won, the Labour Party is going to be reclaimed, that Brown is basically sympathetic, that if we can only somehow shore up the government enough to keep the Tories out, all will be well...
Labels: empire, gordon brown, housing, recession, trade unions, uk, us economy