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.
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.
George Ciccariello-Maher on Venezuela
November 13th, 2009 § 2 Comments
I actually lived in Caracas for 3 months a couple years ago, and have on my screen in front of me (literally) a 25,000 word (coruscatingly intelligent) essay on rural mobilization in Bolivarian Venezuela. The video above is George Ciccariello-Maher, the English-language social historian of Bolivarian Venezuela. He’s no joke. If you have 19 minutes, watch it, and if you don’t have 19 minutes but have an inkling of an interest in the current goings-on in Venezuela, watch it anyway. The gist is that Chavez is not the messiah nor the Lenin-like lider maximo responsible for the Bolivarian Revolution. Instead, he is the output of a process of cultural radicalization, beginning in 1958, in fact earlier, stemming from the guerrilla struggle, which emerged out of the smashed hopes of the generation that installed nominal political democracy in 1958. Overly inspired by Regis Debray’s focismo, the guerrillas failed to make the links with peasant communities which would have enabled them, perhaps, to succeed in their struggle against the repressive state. By the time they realized their mistake, it was too late. The guerrilla struggle largely peaked by 1965, with maybe 1000-2000 guerrillas in the Venezuelan countryside. But it left an invaluable bequest, a legacy of resistance, that would later combine with Afro-Venezuelan and indigenous movements to begin the Bolivarian Revolutionary process. This radicalization really emerged during the caracazo, the “first shot across the bow of neo-liberalism,” before Seattle, before Chiapas.
Dispelling Fantasies about Iran
October 31st, 2009 § 1 Comment
Despite the previously blossoming rhetoric about “social facts,” “fraud,” and the Green Movement (only the third term refers to something that actually exists), news out of the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to suggest that the Iranian populace voted strongly for Ahmadinejad, despite true-but-meaningless affirmations that “Millions of Iranians believe that the Interior Ministry, under Sadeq Mahsouli, and the clerical leadership have disenfranchized them,” as James Buchan writes at the New Left Review.
The Iranian lower and lower-middle class probably voted for Ahmadinejad for a pretty simple reason: Ahmadinejad stands for economic and cultural populism and populist nationalism, alongside political illiberal-ism. This accords with something socialists have known for a long time: freedom to assemble is a booby prize when you’re too hungry to go to a protest.
J Street: Rumble on the Hill or Mumble on the Hill?
October 27th, 2009 § 1 Comment
As I write, well over 1000 overwhelmingly Jewish peace activists are gathered in the sub-sub-sub-basement of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, D.C. because they think that the AIPAC line of Israel-right-or-wrong—but really, Israel is right—is intolerable. They want a different sort of American policy towards Israel and probably a different sort of Israel. That means a sharp change in Israeli policy. Mass characterization is hazardous. The J Street attendees have a lot of different views. But generally, I imagine they want a two-state solution, an end to the occupation, and, perhaps, an end to the degradation of the Palestinian people.
Is all this a good thing? It’s definitely a better thing than AIPAC. Let’s start from there and then quibble about substance and rhetoric. On those fronts, the J Street plenary was a bit of a disappointment. There was much talk of Israel being a Jewish homeland, and way too much talk of a “strong” Israel and a “secure” Israel: Strong + Secure = Safe. That equation seems like it’s missing something–the phrases “Palestinian” and “occupation” have been conspicuously missing from most of the conference thus far, ushered politely off-stage in the name of “pragmatism” and politesse.
Who Needs Clean Water?
September 24th, 2009 § 12 Comments
Correctly characterizing the Gaza strip in a typology of repressive institutions isn’t easy. Without question, it’s a refugee camp, but a quite developed refugee camp, and some of its inhabitants have been there for 60 years. When refugees stay refugees for six decades, they’re still refugees, but they’re locked in a “prison for the stateless.”
Actually, in Gaza, “zoo” used to be the more precise descriptor: the sole goal was to keep the inhabitants, or most of them “alive, with an eye to how outsiders might see them.” Freedom was never at issue. Amidst the savagery of Cast Lead and its mounting consequences, zoo may now be a passé metaphor. It’s hard to argue that Israel’s overwhelming concern is how the outside world sees Gaza. Concern for outsiders’ opinions doesn’t lead one to call a massacre “impressive… [its] timing brilliant” in your country’s leading liberal newspaper. Nor to chants calling for the slaughter of Palestinians in city squares.
Concentration camp could no longer be polemical but rather descriptive. In a concentration camp one herds a population into a dense, tightly controlled space. Human beings come to serve instrumental purposes. One controls survival by controlling inputs—food, water, caring only slightly about the inhabitants, sometimes not at all. Some will surely die, and that’s hardly a concern. They’ll die of disease, as at Andersonville. Sometimes they die because one kills them. Sometimes “sometimes” becomes often.
Disease is a convenient form of slaughter for an ostensibly liberal state. “We didn’t mean to,” state officials can demur; “it was unimaginable that when we destroyed their water supply and their sewage treatment facilities, typhoid and salmonella poisoning would break out!” The inevitable feigned ignorance is even less believable in the case of Gazan water than in other socially-forced humanitarian crises. This has been a long time coming. Gaza has the lowest-per-capita capacity of freshwater in the world other than Kuwait, which subsists on desalinated salt-water, the privilege of an ultra-wealthy oil statelet. Desalinization plants aren’t an option for Gaza, which has to physically import shekels, dinars, and dollars.
Chomsky and Ian Williams Engage in a Battle Royale
September 14th, 2009 § 1 Comment
It looks like Chomsky and Ian Williams have been having a tiff. At the words “Chomsky” and “tiff,” the first question is: what’s the body count? The expected has occurred, but Williams has opted for a peculiar sort of posterity. Call it the walking dead. Like most zombies, Williams’s mental capabilities aren’t so keen—but in his case it’s a state he’s been in since 1999, when Tony Blair and Bill Clinton claimed that we could save Kosovo by bombing it. Williams notoriously signed on, his integrity and mental faculties swiftly collapsed, and he’s been a bit of a mess ever since.
Anyway, here’s the deal. Chomsky said something perfectly sensible about the R2P [Responsibility to Protect] doctrine, pointing out that “A…principle is that virtually every use of force in international affairs has been justified in terms of R2P, including the worst monsters.” Referring to what is frequently described as an exception to a pretty uniformly crummy historical record—the NATO assault on Yugoslavia, described by Blair as the fight “for a world where dictators are no longer able to visit horrific punishments on their own peoples” under the legend “A New Generation Draws the Line,” Chomsky added the following:
The NATO bombing did not end the atrocities [in Kosovo] but rather precipitated by far the worst of them, as had been anticipated by the NATO command and the White House. The conclusions that are so richly documented by the Western records are reinforced by the indictment of Miloševic, issued by the International Tribunal at the height of the bombing. With a single exception, the crimes charged follow the bombing.
The states of the global South, having a bit of experience with imperial violence, roundly condemned the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as illegal and having no justification in international law. It’s a bit obvious to point out, but Chomsky didn’t write that all interventions are a priori wrong, noting that some regions of the world would benefit from R2P: the Gaza strip, for example. More generally, he observed that “R2P can be a valuable tool.”
All of this is perfectly true and utterly sensible. What does Ian Williams say in response? He resorts to casuistic and verbose hyper-ventilation: noting of Chomsky that “he claimed that the NATO air raids on Serbia actually precipitated the worst atrocities in Kosovo. This latter claim isn’t only untrue but morally unpalatable in its spurious causality.” Now Williams can craft a beautiful copy of a drink-sodden Christopher Hitchens, no doubt about that. But is that something to aspire to? [We all remember what happened when Hitchens picked a fight with Chomsky].
Chomsky responded thusly:
Between ‘Social Fact’ and Fiction
July 26th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Hamid Dabashi, Reza Barahani and Noam Chomsky at the international day of protest for Iran
As we have noted earlier, with all due respect, we find Hamid Dabashi’s notion of ‘social fact’ problematic, and would find it utterly unacceptable if it were to be used by our adversaries. Zionist myths after all are still a ‘social fact’ for many in the US and Israel. Here is Max Ajl‘s riposte to Dabashi. (Also see As’ad Abu Khalil’s response to Dabashi’s criticisms of him and Azmi Bishara).
Hamid Dabashi has had a remarkably consistent line about what’s going on in Iran. Consistency is an admirable trait, and the line is an attractive one. It goes something like this. Dabashi demurs from taking a stance on whether there was electoral fraud, calling it a “social fact,” e.g. widely believed in Iranian society. He deems the demonstrators part of a burgeoning “civil rights” movement. He calls Mousavi a nascent “Gandhi,” or “Mandela.” He says that the protesters are a rainbow-hued, heterogeneous lot: middle class, lower class, peasants, workers, plumbers, waiters, officers, bankers, students, professionals. And he doesn’t say much about those who voted for Ahmadinejad, or protested in favor of his victory, or stayed home.
A recent Al-Ahram essay crystallizes this message in remarkably compressed form, although slightly adulterated by a bit of ideological obfuscation. The obfuscation comes when he lectures Palestinian intellectual Azmi Bishara, for having the temerity to note that there exists in Iran an “ideology that claims to have answers for everything and that seeks to permeate all aspects of life.” According to Bishara, that ideology “is a real religion embraced by the vast majority of the people…a religious doctrine is the state ideology, the clerical hierarchy defines and anchors the state hierarchy, and the lower echelons of the clergy are the intermediaries between the people and the ruling ideology.”
Iran, Ciphers and Social Facts
June 27th, 2009 § 3 Comments
A gathering of Ahmadinejad supporters in Tehran
Max Ajl offers a sobering corrective to the hype and nonsense that surround the discussions over the recent Iranian elections. Editorially, we don’t quite share the writer’s appraisal that Mousavi is an ‘execrable figure, by all accounts’ — that may be the view of some such as As’ad Abu Khalil but we recognize that this view by no means speaks for all.
Reading liberal and left-wing commentary on what’s going on in Iran, I’ve been rather shocked. Everyone–including this writer–transforms into a savagely incisive Iran scholar equipped to pontificate on Iranian society, its domestic political institutions, the velayat-e faqih, the social composition of Ahmadinejad supporters and Mousavi supporters, etc. etc., enlightened by studious Twitter research, perusal of YouTube videos, a glance at Juan Cole’s blog, and for the extremely careful, a quick read through the last 50 pages of A People Interrupted.
