Adam Curtis on “Oh dearism” in the News
December 22nd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
A short film by British documentary maker Adam Curtis who is no stranger to examining social issues (and news media in particular) in a controversial way:
Everyone knows that television news can be boring, that’s because it’s often about politics which can be very dull…But these days there’s another problem with watching the news. Night after night we are shown terrible things which we feel we can do nothing about. Images of civil wars, massacres and starving children which leave us feeling helpless and depressed and to which the only response is: “Oh dear.” There is a name for this. It’s called “oh-dearism” and this is the story of the rise of oh dearism in television news.
Honduran Coup d’état Finds Rival in Nicaragua
December 21st, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Mel Zelaya and Daniel Ortega.
First published in Upside Down World, 21 December 2009
I was surprised to discover at the end of October while reading the newspaper in Honduras that a coup d’état had been detected in Nicaragua. According to the 21 October edition of the Honduran daily La Tribuna, former Nicaraguan president Arnoldo Alemán had applied the term golpe de estado to the recent ruling by the Nicaraguan Supreme Court of Justice that Article 147 of the national Constitution prohibiting the immediate reelection of presidents was “inapplicable” in the case of current President Daniel Ortega’s proposed candidature in 2011.
Alemán refrained from applying such terminology to the behavior of courts of other nationalities, such as the June order by the Honduran Supreme Court of Justice that the Honduran armed forces remove President Mel Zelaya from power—which seemed to be more in line with the traditional definition of “coup” as it had involved a change of government. The Honduran coup regime of Roberto Micheletti meanwhile missed the opportunity to capitalize on conceptual adaptations by Alemán and to concede that there had in fact been a coup in Honduras but that it had been carried out by Zelaya. « Read the rest of this entry »
The Israel Lobby and the Prospects for Middle East Peace
December 21st, 2009 § 1 Comment
Stephen M. Walt speaks at an event at the Fleming Museum in Burlington, Vermont, at an even UVM Departments of Political Science, Geography, History, and Middle East Studies and Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel.
Hello Resistance, meet Resistance…..
December 19th, 2009 § 1 Comment
In Volume I of History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault famously notes:
Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.
Earlier this month, Foreign Policy magazine published their “First Annual List of the Top 100 Global Thinkers.” Notably, the list included figures like Dick Cheney, General Petraeus, Larry Summers, Salam Fayyad and Ahmed Rashid – a combination of people that many, including those of us here at PULSE, felt fell short of exemplifying what FP claimed it was doing: presenting a list of ‘thinkers’.
Obama: World-Killer
December 18th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Look at the strangely robotic body language. Obama’s “accord” is go-nowhere hot air and he knows it. Nowhere good–it’s a letter-of-intent for genocide. It must be unprecedented for a world leader to issue such a warrant so calmly, with such technocratic language–it’s such a brazen refusal of responsibility. 10 billion dollars a year in capital transfers for mitigation and adaptation is an insult to the global South, and to the world’s collective intelligence. As the courageous Lumumba quipped, “Ten billion will not buy developing countries’ citizens enough coffins.” Perhaps they’ll economize on size. Children will die first. They’re more vulnerable to malaria and famine.
So to watch Obama jerkily rotating his head, repeating the words his speech-writers drafted for him perhaps 5 hours before the speech (it looks like he hadn’t even read it before delivering it), reminding the world that “our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now,” is infuriating. The notion of “collective action” suggests “collective responsibility.” But who is this collective? Why is “everyone” responsible? The global North’s climate debt—the dollar-amount of over-use of the atmospheric commons, both historical and projected given reasonable reductions in CO2 emissions—is 23 trillion dollars.
Foreign Policy shoots back on Global Thinkers
December 18th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Foreign Policy editor Joshua Keating is generous in referring to PULSE’s 20 Top Global Thinkers of 2009 list as ‘a welcome addition to the conversation‘. FP has certainly ignited a debate around its choices in its inaugural global thinkers list.
Keating misses our point, however, in part because he misreads our argument. It is clear from our post that we are referring specifically to the incongruity of having individuals such as Dick Cheney, General Petraeus, Larry Summers, Thomas Friedman, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salam Fayyad, The Kagans and Ahmed Rashid on a list of thinkers. We surmised that it may have to do with the fact that the main thrust of their work aligns with the US military and economic agenda worldwide. We could not have been referring to FP’s entire list, since, as Keating correctly notes, several of our choices overlap with FP’s, and there are others on the list that we actually respect and admire.
Activists Raise Second Billboard for Palestine
December 18th, 2009 § 2 Comments
On December 10th the Coalition to Stop $30 Billion to Israel erected its second billboard in plain sight of all passing traffic in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
In April 2009 the excellent Mondoweiss posted a piece about the appearance of a billboard in New Mexico urging Americans to tell congress to stop funding Israel’s war machine with their tax dollars. In addition to highlighting the inspirational quality of this important and creative form of activism, Philip Weiss also noted that one of the members of the Albuquerque-based Coalition to Stop $30 Billion to Israel (the group responsible for the campaign) had also stated that he was a defecting member of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Perhaps even more inspiring is the fact that even though the billboard was brought down after a barrage of complaints by the usual suspects, the Coalition continued to raise funds and successfully erected their second billboard on December 10th. Their positive action also spurred people in other states to follow their brilliant example — individuals in San Francisco and Seattle are apparently mobilizing as we speak.
MacBook Pro Threatens Israel’s Security
December 18th, 2009 § 1 Comment
I was sitting on the deck overlooking the Red Sea… Moments later a man came outside and introduced himself as the manager on duty. And then, “I’m sorry but we had to blow up your laptop.”
That about sums up Lily Sussman’s experience with Israeli security forces at the Taba Border Crossing after coming over for a visit from neighboring Egypt. Sussman (a non-practising Jewish-American citizen) will be keeping her laptop as a “souvenir” of her experience of Israel. She has characterized the event as “symbolic of Israeli aggression.”
Five Books on Syria; Batatu on the Peasants
December 16th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Inspired by the Browser interview concerning my five favourite books on Israel-Palestine, I’ve come up with a list of five on Syria. These are all books available in English, so my selection is inevitably skewed. I’ll name them, then talk at length about the first on the list, the Batatu book.
Hanna Batatu
1. Hanna Batatu. “Syria’s Peasantry, the Descendants of its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics.”
2. Patrick Seale. “Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East.”
As essential for understanding power machinations in the US, the USSR, Palestine, Israel and Lebanon as in Syria, this is a biography of Syria’s ruthless, inscrutable, masterful dictator, Hafez al-Asad. Nation builder or gangster, as you will, but surely the most important Syrian of the 20th century.
3. Samuel Lyde. “The Asian Mystery Illustrated in the History, Religion, and Present State of the Ansaireeh or Nusairis of Syria.”
American Muslims radicalize selves in tradition of European counterparts, Washington Post discovers
December 16th, 2009 § 1 Comment
U.S. government, on the other hand, continues to refrain from radical behavior in Pakistan.
A 12 December The Washington Post article entitled “Arrests suggest U.S. Muslims, like those in Europe, can be radicalized abroad” by Mary Beth Sheridan and Spencer S. Hsu begins:
A spike in terrorism cases involving U.S. citizens is challenging long-held assumptions that Muslims in Europe are more susceptible to radicalization than their better-assimilated counterparts in the United States.”
The limited scope of Sheridan and Hsu’s anthropological breakthrough is suggested by the fact that they neglect to explain whether the rape of Iraqis by US soldiers would not also qualify as “radicalization abroad”; as for “long-held assumptions,” these had apparently been bolstered by “British domestic intelligence chiefs [who had] warned in 2006 and 2007 of 200 terrorist networks [in Britain], at least 2,000 individuals who posed a direct security threat and perhaps 2,000 as-yet unknown would-be terrorists.”
