Our western privilege is the legacy of historical violence
June 24th, 2010 § 1 Comment
This is part of a debate occurring at Mondoweiss: part one, my response, David Bromwich’s response-to-me-that-wasn’t-a-response, Robin Yassin-Kassab’s response.
David Bromwich has responded to my comment about non-violence and violence with a strong, textual case for non-violent mobilization. Engagement is welcome. There is space for tactical and conceptual clarification and discussion. First, though, several mistakes, misinterpretations, and mis-directions demand correction. Bromwich insists that “For Gandhi and for King non-violence was a principle,” and proceeds to lay out their ideas, appending a post-script with extended quotations. I do not know why Bromwich brought up King, who was anyway not the dogmatic pacifist he presents, and whose non-violent activism achieved its partial successes against the specter of violence in American urban centers and the threat of revolutionary militancy from the Black Panthers and the social spirit they stood for. Anyway, I did not bring King up. Here I will stick to Gandhi:
I do believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done, had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defended me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence
Bromwich placed this quotation at the end of the piece in which he insists that Gandhi’s non-violence was principled. Similar statements abound in Gandhi’s work. Clearly, Gandhi was not a principled adherent to non-violence in the sense that I used it, or in the vernacular sense that most would understand principled non-violence. If I say that non-violence is my principle, and then advocate punching someone, then the reasonable conclusion is that non-violence is not my principle. Principles that one deviates from are like quitting smoking between cigarettes. Non-violence as a principle I adhere to except when I don’t is not a principle, it’s a tactic that I sometimes advocate and sometimes don’t, sometimes practice and sometimes don’t. Bromwich and I can banter back and forth over what the phrase “moral principles” or the word “principles” mean, but it is pretty clear that we are both using it in the sense stipulated above.
Non-violence is not a principle, it is a tactic
June 14th, 2010 § 6 Comments
I thought the latest post by Matthew Taylor was out of touch. I have news for him: violence works. Violence pushed Israel out of southern Lebanon, and violence repelled the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 2006. Violence let the Bielski partisans save our people during the Holocaust. Violence defined the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, one of the prouder moments of Jewish history. Non-violence can only be assessed conjuncturally, within a dense mesh of sociology, history, politics, and ideology. Each situation is different. There are no formulas. But we can use a rough typology of tactics. Non-violence must be pitched to appeal to either the world’s conscience, or the humanity of the oppressor. It can also function as widespread civil disobedience—a general strike, for example, that can jam up the machinery of violence. These tactics are not exclusive of one another, but nonetheless it is clear that non-violence is not a principle, as Taylor raises it to. It itself is a tactic.
Taylor extracts his principle from a mis-reading of Gandhi, who supported violent resistance, and a mis-reading of Indian history. The British presence in colonial India was less than .05 percent of the population. The colonial apparatus mostly relied on the native “sepoy” army. Gandhian non-violence intended to sway that army, not the British colonizers. And that didn’t work either. Japanese violence ended British colonialism, not Gandhi, and even Gandhi’s non-violence worked against the looming fist of violent resistance taking place around the rest of the subcontinent.
Yes, Bianca Zammit will be at the demonstrations next week, Netanyahu
April 25th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Credit: Max Ajl
This photo? This photo is of Bianca about an hour after an IDF sniper shot a bullet through her left thigh from about 80 meters away to try to cripple her and scare the shit out of her and us so we wouldn’t go to subsequent demonstrations. Doubt that’s going to work, Bianca is usually 10 meters in front of me at every demonstration we go to. Bianca is tough and was up walking as soon as the doctors in Al-Aqsa Hospital let her leave the bed, after they’d cleaned the huge wound the bullet left as it tore through her leg.
In Memoriam: Bassem Abu Rahma
April 16th, 2010 § 2 Comments
It does not devalue the lives or the deaths of white or Western heroes to say that we live in a racist world that refuses to know the names of heroes like Bassem Abu Rahma, that our world honors heroes with the resources to get on a jet-plane, that it honors less heroes that can never afford a jet-plane. A year ago the Israeli army murdered Bassem Abu Rahma for defending his land in Bilin. Remember him.
Farmers in Beit Hanoun March for Their Land
March 29th, 2010 § 1 Comment
We went to an amazing demonstration on the 23rd, in Beit Hanoun, east of the Erez checkpoint. Hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinians, organized mostly by Local Initiative—farmers, shebab, women, scores of unfurled Palestinian flags. The organizer warned us that the IDF had several tanks and jeeps near to where we’d be marching, and that they might try to abduct Palestinians. Or us. He warned us that under no circumstances could internationals be abducted. We conferred with one another and decided that if we saw Saber for example, being abducted, we would grab him. Vittorio suggested that we’d be supping in an Israeli prison that evening. There was a loudspeaker mounted on a truck, as there always is. There was also, trailing behind us, an ambulance. In the vanguard was a motorcycle, moving slowly along, one shebab driving, another standing on the rear, languidly waving a flag.
Žižek on Avatar
March 19th, 2010 § 26 Comments
Here’s something Slavoj Žižek and I have in common. We’ve both seen Avatar. I was not totally bewitched by it, maybe because balancing a pair of 3-D spectacles on top of another set of glasses while sitting two meters from the screen, tilting my head at a 30-degree angle in order to see it, detracted a bit from the visual experience. But still, Avatar was excellent: a sledgehammer of an assault on American corporate imperialism, the exo-skeleton clad high-explosive-wielding security forces a straightforward proxy for the American Army, engaged in a murderous resource grab.
Dud dialog and slightly heavy-handed (the never-to-be-obtained mineral named Unobtanium)? Sure, fine. But the plot’s lack of subtlety wasn’t the point, not amidst its political content, presented alongside stunning visuals: hallucinogenically colorful flora, chunks of mountains phantasmagorically floating in a thick fog, and blooms of shimmering jellyfish-like spirit-seeds that alight on the protagonist, Jake Sully, blessing him, and eventually anointing him. Their presence prevents the Na’vi—Hebrew for prophet—princess from shooting him dead with a bow and arrow. The Na’vi are humanoid blue creatures living in a pre-lapsarian relationship with their planet, capable of connecting to the biosphere and its fauna through their hair. They link directly to Aywa, the earth-goddess, a direct analog for James Lovelock’s Gaia. “We have nothing they need,” says Jake, bemoaning the inability of the corporate mercantilists to make an exchange to get the Na’vi out from the tree in which they make their home. Indeed: “You are so stupid!” the Na’vi princess lashes into Sully. Fair enough. They had already destroyed their planet—earth in 2154—and what could be dumber than to destroy your home and render it unlivable? Can an ecological criticism of corporate imperialism be more powerful than to simultaneously highlight its genetic avariciousness and its viral nature, destroying the world that birthed it?
Bombing Iran? America Says Wait
February 19th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, and Secretary of State Clinton were in the Middle East in the last few days informing Israel that it had better not attack Iran. Israel is a fantastically terrified garrison state, eager to bomb the smithereens out of Iran–Haggai Ram writes of the “exaggerated or misplaced anxieties” which have succeeded only in scaring the Israeli public “out of its wits.” A witless terrified country reacts with violence, unless told to do otherwise by its financier.
See, hatred and fear of Iran is a bi-partisan near-consensus, but the means through which policymakers will act on that hatred and fear are the object of at least a little bit of debate. Given the power differential between the United States and Israel, America’s orders to Israel for a stay of bombardment shouldn’t be surprising except to those who advocate a mono-causal analysis of the Empire’s foreign policy. In this case, American policy-makers understand, I suspect, the dangers of war but are getting twitchy about the prospect of pummeling some more people in the Middle East, an essential pre-requisite for being an American statesmen. The Lobby is one force pushing for war, but far from the only one.
Lobby aside, American policy is headstrong and blind. Headstrong because it can not tolerate an independent Iran that refuses to vet its foreign policy with the empire, which includes the ability to be nuclear-capable without being nuclear-armed, probably Iran’s goal. And blind because it thinks that the regime is weak enough that destabilization will uproot it from the society within which it is embedded. Not a chance, say the Leveretts. Even those in the midst of reverie and with considerably less grounded visions of what the green movement is and isn’t, like Farhang Jahanpour, note that
Yes, This means Ahmadinejad Won the Election
February 5th, 2010 § 4 Comments
Quick question: what do confused sectors of the Western radical left and the editorial board of the New York Times agree about? That last June’s Iranian presidential election, which almost certainly was not fraudulent, was fraudulent, that Ahmadinejad is not the legitimately elected president of Iran, that to analyze or criticize the tactics or ideologies of the green movement is tantamount to Stalinism, and that the correct political stance vis-a-vis the green movement is posting YouTube videos of protesters pummeling working-class basij.
For the NYT, this is a matter of massaging reality so as to prepare the symbolic ground for imperial warfare and destabilization. For the Empire, an independent nuclear-capable Iran is haram (forbidden). A state of suicide bombers armed with fissile material? Oh hell no. Muslims can barely be relied upon to refrain from building minarets or misogynistically controlling their women, in stark contrast to the courageous feminism that permeates the West. The repressed men of The Muslim World would almost certainly manifest their frustration in Armageddon if they got remotely near a nuclear weapon, and the West–lily-white pure when it comes to visiting Armageddon upon other people–could not possibly tolerate such a frightening prospect.
The Contradictions of J Street: Because Zionism Doesn’t Stop
January 26th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
J Street has been a messy contradiction from the outset. It’s a contradiction because, in principle, it’s against Israeli expansionism past the ’67 armistice lines but it has no way of turning that principle into practice. It’s also a mess because that principle is completely unprincipled. It’s a mess because it wants Israel to be a democratic, Jewish state without recognizing the contradictions therein insofar as Israel has non-Jewish inhabitants. And it’s a mess because the reality of ongoing territorial maximalism and the destruction of Palestinian nationalism are undermining–or have undermined, depending on taste–the two-state solution [sic] it claims to support. Oddly, and out of step with previous bulletins, J Street has now taken a fairly strong stance on the Sheikh Jarrah arrests, wonderfully chronicled here, protesting the eviction of Palestinians from housing units in East Jerusalem to clear the way for Israeli settlement.
Sheikh Jarrah is a neighborhood where close to 500 Palestinians live, all of them threatened with eviction. They are refugees from al-Nakba, most of them from Haifa or West Jerusalem. Their houses were constructed in a joint collaboration between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government. They’ve been there for over 50 years. Israeli settlers have already evicted about 60 residents. They constantly protest their dispossession, while settlers assault them and the police harass them, and activists, too. Ethnic cleansing and quashing non-violent protests apparently piss J Street off.
