PULSE: 20 Top Global Thinkers of 2009
December 16th, 2009 § 39 Comments
On 30 November 2009 Foreign Policy magazine published its ’Top 100 Global Thinkers’ list. We were naturally skeptical since the selection included Dick Cheney, General Petraeus, Larry Summers, Thomas Friedman, Bernard-Henri Lévy, David Kilcullen, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salam Fayyad, The Kagan Family (yes, all of them) and Ahmed Rashid among others. We don’t consider any of these people thinkers, let alone having global significance, and we couldn’t help but notice that the main thrust of all their work aligns with the global military and economic agenda of the US government. In response we asked twelve of our writers and editors to nominate their Top 20 global thinkers of 2009. Our criteria included choosing those who inspire critical thinking, as well as those who have been able to buck received wisdom and shape public debate. Always agreeing with their statements and positions was not a requisite, but in all cases our selections involved nominating those who have spurred people to challenge or enhance their own thinking in different ways. The following is our unranked list.
Update: See Foreign Policy’s response, our rejoinder, and our reflections on the debate. (Also see our 20 Top Global Media Figures of 2009)
Arundhati Roy
The top nominee when it came to number of votes among PULSE contributors, Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy is as much known for her non-fictional political work as she is for her award-winning fiction. She is a spokesperson of the alter-globalization movement and a critic of hegemonial US foreign policy, as well as vocal on behalf of the anti-nuclear and environmental movements both in India and abroad. She is also a staunch critic of the repressive Indian policies in Kashmir. Most recently a contributor to We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples (October 2009), Roy continues to be passionately engaged and eloquently outspoken in building a social movement towards developing alternatives. Her latest book is Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy.
Why is Democracy Now shielding “war for oil” against reality?
December 15th, 2009 § 5 Comments
In its headlines for December 14, Democracy Now followed the report on Blair’s confession about his committment to regime change in Iraq regardless of the absence of WMDs, with this:
Iraq Signs Oil Deals with 10 Foreign Companies
Blair’s comments come just as Iraq has signed a series of major oil deals. A two-day auction ended Saturday with ten foreign companies winning access to Iraq’s massive reserves. The oil giant Royal Dutch Shell won the rights to the Manjoon oilfield near Basra, one of the world’s largest. The US-based Exxon Mobil and Occidental Petroleum also submitted winning bids.
The wording is careful: it appears to suggest a connection between what Blair said and the Iraqi oil contracts. The war in other words was for oil. That is a remrkable conclusion to draw from news about an auction in which US companies were the big losers (hence DN’s careful choice of the words ‘foreign companies’). Unless Democracy Now is suggesting that the US waged a war for Russia, Norway and China — biggest winners in the auction — it is not clear why it continues to insist on the discredited “war for oil” argument? Why is it so difficult to admit who actually conceived the war?
Mahmood Mamdani: State Formation and Conflict
December 15th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Mahmood Mamdani on state formation and conflict in Sudan. This lecture is a couple of years old (from 2007), but highly informative.
Norman Finkelstein on Israel’s War on Gaza
December 14th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Near the end of December 2008 the Israeli government began a vicious military assault on the occupied Gazan territories with a bombing campaign that progressed into a ground invasion. In less than 1 month an estimated 1,400 Palestinians were murdered (1/3 of which were children), and thousands were displaced and maimed with injuries.
This is what the Only Democracy in the Middle East Looks Like
December 13th, 2009 § 5 Comments
This Friday, International Human Rights Day was marked for the first time in Israel. In Tel-Aviv, some 5000 people marched in a general human-rights march. It was a quiet event that was covered very favorably and widely by the press. What wasn’t being covered by the press? The second March to Sheikh Jarrah, which ended up with 24 arrests and one demonstrator in the hospital.
Putting Sheik Jarrah in Context
In 1875- Ottoman times- the Committee of the Sephardic Ethnic Group bought these lands. There was a small Jewish community living there until they gradually started fleeing, during the violence, in the area, during the 1920’s and 30’s and up until 1948. From 1948 to 1967, the land was under Jordanian control. At that time, 28 Palestinian refugee families were given lodging on this land by the Jordanian government, under the condition that they give up their UNRWA benefits and pay symbolic rent, for three years, by which time the houses will be passed under their names. The last part never happened.
Copenhagen, Danish Hospitality and The Elements
December 13th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
It took some time, almost a whole week, but Danish riot police have finally been given the chance to greet the thousands of climate justice activists visiting Copenhagen with some traditional elements of Scandinavian hospitality – a mass pre-emptive arrest of almost 1,000 people and the ‘kettling’ of hundreds of others, forcing some to “urinate themselves while detained on the ground.” The churnalists who have converged upon Copenhagen seem satisfied too, eagerly engaging in the media ritual of filling the headlines with the standard litany of cliches about “anarchists running street battles with the police“. Sadly, it seems beyond their intellectual capacity to use the occasion to even mention the existence of a parallel People’s Climate Summit – the Klimaforum 09 – taking place in Copanhagen at the moment. But if the arguments and policy alternatives presented by the likes of Naomi Klein (see video below the fold) are too rational for the mainstream press to digest, perhaps they’ll find this wonderful bit of creative subversivness produced by artists at the Klimaforum more palatable. Here’s episode 5 of The Elements, where our hereos take on the The Paramount Public Opinion Distortion and Confusion Data Processor:
The ‘First Wives Club’ or the Politics of Visibility and Invisibility
December 13th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
by Huma Dar
In her article in The Observer, ‘The First Ladies Of The Arab World Blaze A Trail For Women’s Rights’, Helena Smith waxes eloquent about a very exclusive, seven-year-old club, called “Arab Women Organisation” with only fifteen members so far: the first ladies of Jordan, the Emirates, Bahrain, Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, Syria, Oman, Palestine, Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, Mauritania, Morocco and Yemen.1
The first wives of the other seven Arab countries with “some of the more traditional societies” have also been invited and there are “tremendous hopes” that they, too, will join up, Smith gently reassures the reader. This article carries the tag line: “A large and powerful alliance of leaders’ wives is making huge strides in breaking taboos and getting feminist issues on the political agenda.” The list of issues being “sexual slavery,” “trafficking,” “child exploitation,” “prostitution” and “rape” in the Middle East,” and, of course, this is duly prefaced by an obligatory, pious declamation that these “societies [are] not known for their commitment to feminist agendas.”
One wonders if this particular set of issues has indeed been adequately dealt with in any part of the world, and immediately thinks of the epidemic proportion of violence against women in the United States of America, which happens to be one of the more violent places for women as far as the proportionate rates of rapes, assaults, and murders are concerned, with every two minutes a woman being sexually assaulted, and every eight minutes a woman being raped.2
The Road to Tehran
December 12th, 2009 § 3 Comments
Jim Lobe
UPDATE: The key to the neoconservatives disproportionate influence despite their small numbers has always been coordination. As Lobe reveals (and had predicted), Kristol has now been joined by Robert Kagan in calling for escalation against Iran.
The common neoconservative position back in 2003 was that the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad. Today they are gunning for Tehran, yet another stop on way to the ‘promised land’. But since the Washington establishment isn’t that keen to invade Iran, the neocons have figured the only way they could keep the possibility of destroying Iran alive is to push hawkish policies on Afghanistan. Withdrawal from Afghanistan will diminish the chances of action against Iran, so it becomes imperative to attack any sign of realism as ‘appeasing the terrorists’, who we are told are a threat on par with Nazi Germany. In his eagerness not to be seen as ‘idealistic’ by the likes of William Kristol, Thomas Friedman and George Packer, Obama has duly indulged in the same rhetoric (most recently in his Nobel speech). Now that he has delivered, the neoconservatives are already trying to steer the military juggernaut westward. In the following post, Jim Lobe, one of the world’s best investigative journalists, sheds light on this evolving neoconservative strategy.
(I have long maintained that had people been following Jim’s exceptional reportage in the lead up to the Iraq war rather than Chomsky’s deterministic, contranalytical, and ultimately demoralizing views, with their inevitable demobilizing effect, they may have actually done something to check the march to war).
Kristol Pivots from Afghanistan to Iran
by Jim Lobe
Now that he and presumably his friends at the Foreign Policy Initiative got a lot of what they wanted from Obama on Afghanistan, Bill Kristol is once again pivoting westward — this time to Iran, rather than Iraq — as he did eight years ago with the infamous September 20 PNAC letter. Look for more of this to come from Kristol and the neo-cons in the coming weeks, as they re-align themselves with AIPAC and like-minded groups after their three-month campaign on behalf of Gen. McChrystal and the COINistas.
Utopia as Alibi: Said, Barenboim and the Divan Orchestra
December 12th, 2009 § 1 Comment
by Raymond Deane
As a classical musician involved in pro-Palestinian activism, I frequently encounter the assumption that I am an unconditional admirer of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (WEDO). My reservations on this score tend to produce shocked disapproval: How could I not enthuse about such an idealistic project, particularly since it was co-founded by the late Edward Said, a figure for whom I have frequently expressed respect and admiration?
In truth, I have always been a little wary of Said’s veneration for the eighteenth/nineteenth century canon of European classical music. I look in vain in his writings on the subject[1] for a historical and political contextualisation of music comparable of that to which he so perceptively subjected literature in his indispensable Culture and Imperialism.[2]
In his 2002 speech accepting the Principe de Asturias Prize, Said claimed that he and his friend the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim founded the WEDO “for humanistic rather than political reasons”. This surprising dualism implies that music belongs to a utopian sphere somehow removed from the dialectical hurly-burly of hegemony and resistance.
The paradoxes of Said’s position have been ably dissected by the British musicologist Rachel Beckles Willson.[3] She quotes her colleague Ben Etherington’s critique of Said’s tendency “to assert the intrinsic value of Western elite music without really exploring how that tradition escapes mediation.” Paraphrasing Said’s critique of literary scholars in his Humanism and Democratic Criticism[4] she convincingly claims that he “omitted to make ‘a radical examination of the ideology of the [musical performance] field itself.’” (Willson’s chain brackets).
A Dude Named Lumumba Said It
December 11th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Sudanese G77-chair Lumumba Di-Aping told IPS:
Africa demands up to five percent of the GDP of industrialised nations every year, because of their historical debt and the continuation of causing the harm…We are talking roughly about two trillion US dollars annually till 2050 for adaptation, mitigation and technology transfer. We do not believe this is a big amount of money as the U.S. spent 22 trillion on saving Wall Street.
A tithe would be better, but Africa deserves 5 percent of the industrialized countries’ GDP. More. The other 5 percent should go to Latin America and South Asia. But the tithing is going the other way. Sub-Saharan Africa spends 15 billion dollars a year on debt service. Most of the debt is “odious,” hence, illegitimately incurred. Africa has no responsibility to pay it. 15 billion dollars a year is the amount sub-Saharan Africa pays on its ~227 billion dollar extant foreign debt, 70 percent of Africa’s over-all debt. That’s monetary. Africa’s ecology will pay, too. Its agriculture will be devastated by a global temperature rise of more than 2 degrees. A global average temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius means African temperatures rise 3 degrees Celsius. Many African countries close to the equatorial belt will see their grain production essentially destroyed–African corn and wheat production is already close to its survival thresholds at current global temperatures. In Mali, Niger, the Sudan, and much of the Horn of Africa—West Africa, too—arid and semi-arid agriculture will likely be wiped out. Somalia and Sudan are already wracked with climate wars.
