The Republic of Dissent

Giddy Journalists

C'est dur à dire mais …Lawrence Pintak is right to be disturbed by this :

On the morning Gaddafi was killed, an ebullient Wolf Blitzer told Sen. John McCain that he knew the senator was pleased on “this very special day.” The look on Blitzer’s face and the celebratory tone of his network left little doubt that he—or CNN—agreed.

As I said, “basic journalistic ethics” can be a slippery thing.

The corruption of the American character

 

 

Interesting conversation as always between John McWhorter and  Glenn Loury. I just have one question or rather two. What is American character?  Does it exist?

I might be trying to suggest with these questions that there isn't such an American identity, that Americans are what they do and that America is an ideal, a noble idea that alas cannot remain good in itself because of Americans aren't always able to live up  to it.

Stout simplicities

The conclusion of Christopher Hitchens's article on the upcoming anniversary of 9/11:

The battle against casuistry and bad faith has also been worth fighting. So have many other struggles to assert the obvious. Contrary to the peddlers of shallow anti-Western self-hatred, the Muslim world did not adopt Bin-Ladenism as its shield against reality. Very much to the contrary, there turned out to be many millions of Arabs who have heretically and robustly preferred life over death. In many societies, al-Qaida defeated itself as well as underwent defeat.

In these cases, then, the problems did turn out to be more complicated than any "simple" solution the theocratic fanatics could propose. But, and against the tendencies of euphemism and evasion, some stout simplicities deservedly remain. Among them: Holocaust denial is in fact a surreptitious form of Holocaust affirmation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a direct and lethal challenge to free expression, not a clash between traditional faith and "free speech fundamentalism." The mass murder in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the random product of "ancient hatreds" but a deliberate plan to erase the Muslim population. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called "evil." And, 10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.

Hitchens states the obvious (which may be virtuous, but more often than not unproductive when the goal is to refuse that even stout simplicities lead to uneasy complexities) in an ideological manner. He does it to avoid posing the tough questions, and be on his high horse when he refuses to acknowledge that in life, politics or in any aspect of life being on the right side, fighting 'evil' doesn't make things simpler, but more complicated because it means that there is a duty to act as if  only the final result matters for the other side is evil.

Hitchens fails to understand the question is never in the characterization of evil as evil, but in the uncomfortable notion that stating it doesn't solve anything and does make things simple. 

In short, 9/11 did make life, the world easier, it make it more complex because the 'evil' of the act was so obvious that reflexion and the morality of political acts mattered more tha ever before.

The politics of aid and development

Question of the day taken from Peter Gill,'s article on Ethiopia and the politics of development assistance :

Is the rich world interested in helping Africa’s poor or in promoting government systems which resemble its own?

Race and American delusions

I have a problem with Bill Benzon's post on Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad at the Valve in which he compares them to Ike Turner and Sam Philips and finishes by suggesting that the solution is to get beyond the boundaries of language. Sugary excerpt:

The point of this exercise, no, this demonstration, is that language and its reasonings and arguments cannot, in principle, encompass everything. That life itself is greater than language goes without saying – or does it? What matters is how we conduct ourselves around and about, in the shadow of, language.

Because I believe as Eluard that les mots ne mentent pas, I have a problem with  what Benzon is demonstrating.  The attempt should never be to get beyond the boundaries of language, but to acknowledge them and to break them down. 

I know I promise to stop bashing constantly Obama (I believe that I'm doing it rationally and analytically), but I believe that his 2008 campaign showed that Benzon is wrong and that America's problem with race isn't about its people not being able to get along, but rather about their need to believe that race is all encompassing and that  it is about something grand, when it is about petty stuff and about that itch that Benzon seems to have to want Achebe and Conrad get along.  It is far too obvious that Achebe didn't want to get along with Conrad, but needed to punch him in the gut to affirm his own existence and to define in his own terms what it meant or rather didn't mean to be 'african' (my contention is that it doesn't mean anything for Achebe has much more in common with Joseph Conrad than he does with Ferdinand Oyono).

In short, my point to Benzon, to America, and to Americans  is get over it already! Race isn't about race and instead of obsessing about getting along or pretending that you want to or that you do get out your own way and stop being so self-involved!

Quand on est con....

This sugary excerpt from Gary Younge is infuriating because it shows that people who have grand theory about identity politics without acknowledging its frivolity are cons:

Thinking of identities as being part of a fixed hierarchy is a terrible mistake. Being gay and black doesn’t mean that person has it twice as bad as a straight white woman. That’s the kind of mess some white feminists got into with the 2008 presidential debates between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They suggested that somehow a black male candidate had it easy, and that it was much worse to be a white woman candidate, which is just crazy. Not that it was more difficult for Obama than her. It’s just that the terms of the discussion weren’t helpful to either of them.

One of the many reasons this is an obstacle is that identities aren’t fixed in place and time. Their meaning and relevance is always shifting. As much as anything, this book is an attack on essentialism, because one thing essentialists have always tried to do is suggest there is a fixed notion to who and what we are. Actually, we are many things to many people while also being one thing to ourselves. Whatever else is said about Hillary Clinton, no one questions her being born in America or claims she is a Muslim. They have certainly said other things – demeaned her on the basis of her relationship with her husband or etched out every laugh line, crease and wrinkle – but identity should not be a competition. And if it is made a competition, then everybody loses.

Hey Younge leave Hillary Clinton alone, isn't Black the new president ? So deal with it and explain to us one more time why the One had to be the One.

Rape and perfect victims

Good summary of the DSK Affair:

The lesson here seems clear:  if you think you’ll get raped and want to bring a case about it to trial, try to live a blameless life.

Of course, the above sentence is troublesome, but it reflects a disturbing reality. I never believed that DSK would be convicted. What troubles me is that behind my certitude was solely the realization that it would have been extremely difficult for the accuser to be clean enough to convince a jury that a man  whose 'status' and 'identity' give him the presumption of decency and thus makes it hard believe that he could just snap and rape.

The issue isn't about class (it is but not in the traditional sense) and race, but one of gender and to  see it one needs only to imagine what would be happening if the roles were reversed.  Let me say it more clearly and bluntly: DSK could afford to have a 'past,' a less than perfect  sexual history, the accused could not afford to have any problematic past history and to do dumbt and dishonest things before and after the incident. I'm not talking here about DSK's guilt or innocence and that is what bugs me for it doesn't matter whether he did it or not for the central issue is and always was the ability of the accuser to be the perfect victim and the fact that she is far from perfect dooms the case.

I'm not implying that she is a victim of her past, but rather that who she is much more than what she did killed this case for there was always going to be something to make her not credible. That said, the District Attorney should let DSK go already especially if he doesn't believe his own witness.

Honestly, I have to say that I hope that she made the whole thing up, it would make what is happening less vile. I hope also that DSK is an innocent man; my problem is that I know that the accuser's lies don't make her necessarily an impostor (in the sense that she made the whole thing up), but that it doesn't matter. In spite of my own tribulations, I do not believe that anybody ought to have her/his life destroyed when there is reasonable doubt and there is undoubtedly more than reasonable doubts in this case. What bugs me is that those doubts have become reasonable because of the accuser/victim, but that's the way the American judicial system words and it has already shown its shortcomings.

Symbols and illusions

Sentence of the day from Zoe Williams:

Prominent women do not necessarily pursue the rights of women generally, and it is almost worse when they pretend to (Lagarde said once: "I feel accountable to the community of women. And I don't want to fail because of them.") than when they don't (...)

You don't say! I have to admit that Williams puzzles me (she would bug me if her arguments were convincing) because she is stuck in the 1960s for she is still under the impression that women are a caste and that feminism is its only true religion.

Wars of choice and patriotism

I agree with Professor Bainbridge on this:

Supporting wars of choice where no vital national interests are at stake is not a very good litmus test of one's patriotism.

Even though I agree with Bainbridge, I wonder whether it is possible to be a dove even in cases of wars of necessity and to be a patriot. Does patriotism has anything or rather everything to do with wars or rather with supporting them? I have the feeling the answer is much more complicated that suggested above, but at least Professor Bainbridge begins to denounce the simplistic and vile notion that in wars,  there are only two sides the patriotic and the unpatriotic ones.

The Vagina Cartel

Belle Waring just made my week summer by stating this about some men's belief (Anthony Klavan in this instance who doesn't have the culture to be sexist in an original and thought-provoking manner) that there is a such a thing a 'pussy vagina cartel' designed to control their access to sex:

Now, it’s very likely that I’ll be assassinated by a crack team of female ninjas before I can hit “post” (they are all hot 22-year old Japanese women who may also subject me to intensive questioning, should anyone in the Valley be at a loss for movie ideas.) But I am about to reveal a huge secret here: OPPEC. That is, Other People’s Pussy Economic Consortium. Note that the “People” who own the pussy in this case are the women themselves, contrary to traditional usage. But think about it: women, taken as a whole, have control of all the pussy in the world. That is some valuable assets right there. What could be more natural than the formation of a cartel?
So, yeah, we have bi-monthly secret meetings and stuff. Sometimes pussy output among married women has to be steeply ramped down to allow for appropriate levels of sluttiness among college students. (...)So, yeah, but at the end of the meetings some situations have to be handled, usually in large classes because it would take too long. Often something comes up like “53-year-old, divorced, former warbloggers who appear to have forgotten the existence of Iraq and now lurk on MRA forums and troll Pandagon” and all the ladies hit this one button in unison “BZZZZT,” and that’s it. No pussy is distributed to these guys at all.
As to why proven assholes continue to get showered with pussy, one must remember that the decisions are to an extent emergent from the mass of women, in a dictatorship of the proletariat kind of way.

Oh boy man jesus God gender is making sex uncool! Too many men people can't accept that just like French cuisine, it involves some know-how (yeah, there is some learning involved for there has to be more than bacon to a meal) and that nature isn't queen in those matters.

The IMF and the Western fix

Gideon Rachman gets this right as he does more often than not:

It does look as if the Europeans, backed by the Americans, will manage to push Christine Lagarde into the job. But the groundswell of protest against the idea of a Western fix – and the accompanying commentary highlighting the shift in economic and political power from West to East and from North to South – will probably ensure that this will be the last time that a European appointment can simply be bulldozed through.
So President Obama is right when he insists “the time for leadership is now.” But Madame Lagarde might add – “Apres moi, le deluge.”

As a true non-believer in the division of the world between the West and the rest, I have to say that it would be more than a disappointment if the new head of the IMF came from Europe, it would be scandalous. Such an outcome would be indicated of the existence of more than a Western fix, but  of a problematic bias within that organization that must be influencing its policies.  Furthermore, I baffled by the fact that Christine Lagarde is a credible choice to be head of the IMF not because she isn't competent, but because she just isn't a good choice for so many reasons, the least important of which is that France isn't entitled to get a second chance at the position after it supported Strauss-Kahn knowing full of  the risks that something could happen.

Old and new lefties

Interesting stuff from Chris Dillow:

We old lefties see politics as one activity among others. We see no connection between Marxist politics and Marx’s, ahem, colourful sex life. And I, for one, have combined leftist politics with jobs in the City and non-political journalism.
The newer left, though, is less compartmentalized - hence the slogan, “the personal is political” and the desire to politicize everyday life.
On this point, though, I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I’m tempted to defend my conception of politics on the grounds that it is more liberal: seeing everything as political is the road to fanaticism and totalitarianism.

I'm just confused about one thing, does being a Leftie is about politics or something else? Does it matter? I have to admit that I'm bothered with the idea that the personal is political because it makes politics sentimental. It reminds me of the 2008 Democratic primaries or even of George W. Bush in the 2000 election when in response to critical examinations of his record as Governor in Texas, he would talk about how hurt he was that people could question his heart. In short, the idea that 'good' people are good politicians bugs me and is moreover dangerous. That isn't to say that the personal doesn't matter or is irrelevant, but simply that more often than not, it is a part of a wider context and can be unessential, but titillating.

Bin Laden's death and Justice

I almost agree completely with this:

Bin Laden’s killing is very likely justified under the laws (such as they are) of war. But, as best as I understand them, these laws are not intended to conduct towards justice; instead they are intended to conduct towards a minimization of those regrettable little side-effects (massacres of prisoners; the deaths of multitudes of civilians &c) that tend to go together with military disputes. It may also possibly be justified in purely pragmatic terms – very possibly, many more people would have died over the longer run had he been captured rather than killed. But it cannot be justified in terms of the procedural requirements of justice as practiced by democracies, which usually do require trials, evidence, judgments that can be appealed and so on.

Zombies at the Vatican

Another proof from R.W. Johnson that faith in politics is about the bling and should remain in the private sphere:

The news that Robert Mugabe and his wife Grace were among the million people (including 22 ‘world leaders’) who thronged St Peter’s Square for the beatification of the late Pope John Paul II lends a piquant note to what was already a gothic occasion. Their presence was not, in itself, surprising: Mugabe tends to remember he is a Catholic whenever it is convenient – as in the case of his marriage to Grace, celebrated in a Catholic high mass in Harare, although they had by then already had two children. More recently, however, the main point has been to evade the EU’s targeted sanctions and thus provide Grace (widely known as ‘Dis-Grace’) with opportunities for her extravagant shopping trips. The Mugabes were in Rome in 2005 for John Paul II’s funeral, and again in 2008 and 2009 for UN food conferences – they get a free pass from the Vatican and from the UN, of which Zimbabwe is still a member.

The dangers of loyalty in politics

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

One thing is for certain: right now, the Democratic Party is absolutely correct in its assessment that kicking its base is good politics. Why is that? Because they know that they have inculcated their base with sufficient levels of fear and hatred of the GOP, so that no matter how often the Party kicks its base, no matter how often Party leaders break their promises and betray their ostensible values, the base will loyally and dutifully support the Party and its leaders (at least in presidential elections; there is a good case that the Democrats got crushed in 2010 in large part because their base was so unenthusiastic).
In light of that fact, ask yourself this:  if you were a Democratic Party official, wouldn't you also ignore -- and, when desirable, step on -- the people who you know will support you no matter what you do to them?

Well to paraphrase David Mamet, that is in part the reason I am no longer a brain-dead liberal and I have decided to be an independent. Politics should never be about loyalty or to be more accurate partisanship but about thought and action.

John Quiggin has a take on Greenwald's post that makes me wonder why politics has become about good and evil and about saying that the others are scarier and therefore should be kicked to the curve. More people should fight the talibanisation of American politics by refusing to make it about good and evil and solely about actions and no empty words such as hope and exceptionalism.

Côte d'Ivoire, Libya and the audacity of hope

A good question from Gideon Rachman:

If the UN and western military forces are prepared to intervene so forcefully in Libya, why has the response to Ivory Coast been so relatively feeble?

The answer is an easy, but alarming one:  Ivory Coast Côte d'Ivoire is Côte d'Ivoire and Libya is Libya. That statement of fact means simply that it is easier to deal with the dead of Côte d'Ivoire than with the ones of Libya because there is a widely accepted presumption that some parts of the African continent are  at the heart of darkness, and thus too barbaric, and too 'out there' to be helped/saved. That explains why Congo (DRC) has never captured the world 's attention.  In shot, it all comes that to that silly Obamanian world hope. It is easier to accept hopelessness in Côte d'Ivoire than in Libya.

BHL, Germany and Libya

Bernard-Henri Lévy on Germany's stand on the Libyan intervention (it abstained on the UN security council's vote of  resolution 1973 establishing a No fly zone):

We lost a great deal of time because of the Germans, which is a disaster, mainly for the Libyans, but also for the Germans, who will pay bitterly for abstaining. What happened here will leave a lasting impression in Europe. And Germany will run into problems in its legitimate effort to secure a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel jettisoned all principles of German foreign policy since the end of World War II: There was the principle that something like National Socialism should never happen again. Never again crimes against humanity. Merkel and (German Foreign Minister Guido) Westerwelle violated this pact. This is a serious incident, not a minor detail. (...) Angela Merkel has the worst foreign minister Germany has had in a long time. Guido Westerwelle is a disaster. Immediately after the German abstention, he told your magazine: "Gadhafi has to go." It's really Westerwelle who ought to go, but he doesn't even seem to be ashamed of his decision, of this valley of shame.

I have stopped taking BHL seriously on those matters (it took me a long time because often I agree with his conclusions, but never with his argumentation)  because even when he is right, he can't get out of his own way and resist the temptation of self-righteousness.  The fact that he was so involved on Sarkozy's decision to take the lead in Libya worries me not because BHL is an unsavory and unserious character, but because he doesn't understand foreign policy when it becomes about more than postures, grand gestures, and cinematographic heroism.

Elusive vindication

I disagree strongly with the following assertion by Norman Geras:

Whatever you may think about it, similar to and/or different from the intervention in Iraq, the Libyan action is a vindication of sorts for Tony Blair and his doctrine of liberal intervention.

What!? Why by the same token isn't it a vindication of the crusades or simply of war in general? Geras's assertion is as true as saying as the financial collapse of 2008 is a vindication of Marxism.

It isn't all about the concept, the context does matter so do actions and their consequences.  I'm sure that if people look hard enough they can find events to vindicate all the wrongs in history and those who made fanatically, in spite of evidence, the conscious decision to do the knowing full well that smart people like Geras will always find reasons in the future to clean their dirty hands. Juan Cole has a persuasive post, which explains why Libya 2010 isn't Iraq 2003.

Hope and Ethics

Okay, this is the last sugary excerpt of what must have seemed as 'bash Obama week' and it is from Glenn Greenwald:

(...)in Barack Obama's administration, it's perfectly acceptable to abuse an American citizen in detention who has been convicted of nothing by consigning him to 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, barring him from exercising in his cell, punitively imposing "suicide watch" restrictions on him against the recommendations of brig psychiatrists, and subjecting him to prolonged, forced nudity designed to humiliate and degrade. But speaking out against that abuse is a firing offense. Good to know.

Well, I guess none of this matters since there is no alternative to Obama as John Quiggin and others would argue. Yeah, doesn't it feel great to live in a world where hope and the one killed ethics?

 

Military might, egocentrism, and greatness

Interesting, but worrisome:

Back in the days when the cause of humanitarian intervention was on the rise, during the argument over Bosnia policy, Madeleine Albright (in Colin Powell's telling) encapsulated the thinking in a pithy phrase: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Mr Powell wrote in his memoirs that he "almost had an aneurysm"; the military was not a toy to be used because we had it sitting around. But basically, Ms Albright was right: the United States inherited the world's strongest military because of the Cold War, and if in the post-Cold War world there were no longer any plausible uses for that military, there really was no point in having it. Mr Powell, in fact, presided over dramatic cuts in the size of the defence establishment. It was the embrace of humanitarian intervention in the cause of promoting democracy, first in Kosovo, then (after the September 11 attacks) in Afghanistan and finally Iraq, that provided the new justification for a military buildup.

The fact that the debate on Libya in America and elsewhere has become about intervening and not doing alarming. It simplifies a complex issue. Few seem to  have learned the lessons of the past, which isn't that humanitarian interventions are futile, but rather that they can't be done in a vacuum and motivated solely by noble, and self-indulgent sentiments. The point isn't that the US, France, and others are powerless, but that what is happening shouldn't become about them. The Obama administration's position irks me because it is timid and the fear of failure has crippled its imagination in the time when decisiveness is needed. Military might means nothing without vision and the audacity not of hope, but of originality and action.

Obama is Swiss

The sugary excerpt of the day is from Mick Hume's interesting take on Obama, Libya and interventionism:

The response of US president Barack Obama, aka the West’s commander-in-chief, has apparently evolved from speechlessness to impotence, leading one veteran commentator to wonder, in an ironic reference to the debate over Obama’s ‘true’ nationality, whether he might actually be Swiss. The administration quickly shot down European kite-flying about setting up an immediate no-fly zone over Libya. US commanders pointed out to their European partners that this would involve a full-scale military operation against Gaddafi’s air force. Some might naively wonder why that would pose such an insuperable obstacle to the mighty US air force. But after the damage done by Iraq and Afghanistan, the US authorities lack the political authority and will to impose themselves on Libya and fear getting dragged into another civil war.

The trouble is of course that Obama suffers from a lack of imagination due to the fact that in spite from what people wants to believe about his "difference" he is a typical president who has trouble accepting powerlessness and not making every crisis about America and his own political legacy. When I hear Charlie Rose for example repeating his delusion that the fact that Obama spent some time in Indonesia when he was a kid gives him a different world view, I shake my hand and realise how americancentric even the most cultured and most worldly American are to be able to transform insignificances because they seem peculiar into essentialities.

Simple question of probabilities

Important point from Chris Dillow on Saif al-Islam Gaddafi:

(...) how many times in history has the son of dictator succeeded his father and successfully transformed his country to a liberal democracy? Basic Bayesianism tells us that, with such a poor base rate probability, we should have not have been hopeful about al-Gaddafi.

I don't think that people really believed in what the younger Gaddafi was selling, just in the fact that he had the means to buy a lot of their needful things as Stephen King would say.

The 'thing' speaks for itself

Gideon Rachman on Gaddafi and the 'contradictions'of the 'international community' (I have nothing but disdain for that term) :

There is no acknowledgement that is a disgrace that Libya is a member of the council [the United Nations Human Rights Council] in the first place. However, this is not some weird accident. It is the settled will of the international community. The Libyans were voted onto the council in May – getting 155 votes of the 192 UN members. Gaddafi is obviously a popular chap.

 

Women as human shields

Sugary excerpt of the day or rather of the night from Juan Cole:

Note to Muslim-hater Bill Maher, who should know better: It is not true that women cannot vote in 20 Muslim countries, and please stop generalizing about 1.5 billion Muslims based on the 22 million people in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, the only place where women cannot drive and where men can vote (in municipal elections) but women cannot. It would be like generalizing from the Amish in Pennsylvania to all people of Christian heritage and wondering what is with Christianity and its fascination with horses and buggies.

I have to admit that I have stopped watching Bill Maher years ago because I couldn't take him seriously. He is exactly like the people he criticized, arrogant and fanatically persuaded to be on the right side except that his views are  seen more fashionable and more 'cultured' (some forms of inculture in America and elsewhere are tolerable/fashionable than others when they lead to more palatable conclusions).

Bill Maher doesn't care about the status of women in the "Muslin world," to use an expression that I hate. He is using it to make a cheap point to win an argument that isn't about women, but about a group of people he considers as savages.  My own point here isn't that there is no there there, but to make the assertion that consistency matters when being self-righteous.

I will not foolishly assert that women in America are not privileged compared to others or that foreign countries especially those in certain parts of the world have a 'woman problem.' I will just argue that saying that isn't saying much for the question remains what is the ideal, what are absolute and universal values, and to stop using women as human shield, as props to win ideological wars.

The essentiality of Freedom

I disagree strongly with Theodore Darymple when he makes the following point:

Certainly, it does not seem to me that the future necessarily belongs to freedom as we have known it, and such as it was, and that therefore China must break apart under demands for personal liberty. It is a mistake, in my view, to assume that all people want to be free, in the sense of the American pioneers.
I think they much prefer to be comfortable; as the establishment of welfare states almost everywhere as the political summun bonum has shown, the greatest of all freedoms, the one that more people want more than any other, is the freedom from responsibility and consequences. It is true that the Chinese have never had the freedoms of speech, etc., that we have enjoyed, and have taken for granted, but I am not sure how much they are missed there.
Moreover, I fleetingly, and no doubt dangerously, wonder whether freedom is as importantly a matter of the soul as of political arrangements. I cannot ever forget Arthur Koestler’s book, Spanish Testament, in which he said that the time he spent in the condemned cell in the Nationalist zone was the time in his life when he felt most free.

The trouble with Darymple's assertions is that they lead to dangerous slippery slopes, which he ignores in a attempt to be both provocative and cute (he fails at both). From now until the end of times, people have had arguments on the essentiality of freedom and whether we all we need/want it. That debate is meaningless. It is a way to avoid the question of responsibility and morality. The issue is not and has never been whether we want/need freedom, but rather what we do with our Sartrean/Existential eternal condemnation to be free and the heavyness of that burden. 

It is archaic to oppose freedom between comfort, but it is also as sterile as opposing existence and essence. In short, it isn't because some choose not to choose or choose sometimes to reduce their own their own choices, that freedom/liberty  isn't for everybody. Freedom is about what we want for after all, the world is human, but not anthropomorphic.

Troubling double standard

Alarmingly, Norman Geras is right when he makes the following assertion:

(...) the global human rights community overlaps significantly with left-liberal political 'orthodoxy' - a sector of opinion in which the wrongs done by democratic Western governments are always to be condemned outright, whereas those committed by tyrants, terrorists and other such criminals may be softeningly 'explained' and thereby either wholly or partially excused (see here and here). It's one of the major moral and ideological disgraces of our time, and the human rights community has not been immune to it.

Are we really all just prisoners of the past and of history?

 

It's good for us, but not for them

Sugary excerpt from Brendan O'Neill:

In their fear that Egypt doesn’t have the right amount of middle-classness or the correct type of civil service to do democracy properly, we can glimpse Western observers’ conviction that politics is best done away from the people, insulated from the masses, in grey buildings occupied by experts and judges. At a time when even young American voters can be described as a ‘glassy-eyed, brainwashed cult’ (as Barack Obama’s youthful champions were branded in 2008), when white working-class voters in Britain are looked upon by the liberal elite as an alien breed of ‘bigots’, and when leading Western thinkers deliver speeches titled ‘Why democracy is overrated’, it’s not surprising that Egyptians, too, are seen as a marauding mob with weird passions. From the outright anti-Arab sentiments to the demand that a better middle class be created in Egypt before the creation of democracy, from the colonialist snobbery about foreigners to the cultural relativism about whether ‘our’ political systems are suitable for them, the response to the Egyptian uprising has revealed Western observers’ multifaceted lack of faith in the very ideal of democracy. The general sentiment is not so much that ‘democracy is okay for us but not for those people’, à la Clive of India, so much as ‘democracy – eeurgh’.

The problem of course is as much one of condescension as it is one of culturalism for the assumption and the assertion is that some, because their 'culture' and identity are too immature and too savage for democracy.

Democracy and the use of force

The abomination of the day is from Neil Reynolds:

It’s the exceptional vulnerability of democracy that, in the end, justifies the use of force to defend or extend it – as the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights implicitly recognizes.

I guess that means that the UN should send troops to Iran and other places to 'install' democracies everywhere. But of course, the key issues here are one of definition and power. What is democracy and who decides when, how, it has to defended with the use of force? Sermons are great in church, but futile and even dangerous in international politics even though they may be inspiring.

Politics, media and ego

Just one word, ouch  after reading this word from Professor Bainbridge on Arianna Huffington:

Is it not obvious by now that Huffington has no permanent principles, other than doing what's best for herself? When it was convenient and popular, she was an ardent GOPer, supporting folks like New Gingrich. But she craved popularity out here in Hollywood, where no conservative can ever be the belle of the ball. So she switched sides so as be embraced by the Hollywood crowd as their "intellectual" voice.

The difference between Huffington and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is thus revealed to be almost nonexistent. They'll all do whatever it takes to pad their bank accounts while extending their 15 minutes of fame.

Foresight and narrow-mindedness

Fraser Nelson over at the Spectator's Coffee House can't step out his way to see the forest through the trees:

In Egypt, the army look like they are settling in. If there is regime change, I doubt that whoever takes over will be pro-Western (the crowds will likely remember that the tear gas used on them was dispensed in canisters saying “Made in USA”). The grim fact remains that Iran is racing towards the bomb, and if they succeed then the Sunni world – in Saudi Arabia and Cairo – will likely follow suit. I’d love to see some wind of change blowing through Arab street, but I still fear that we’re heading for a multi-polar nuclear standoff in the only part of the world which is mad enough to use nuclear weapons. I do hope I’m wrong.

The trouble with Nelson isn't that he may be wrong or can be right, but rather that he sees Egypt not as a country like his own or any 'normal' one (I would use Western, but I don't believe in the existence of the West or in the division of the world between the West and the rest). Egypt to Nelson is a means to an end or worst a part of a jungle whose happenings must not be allowed to disturb the peace and stability of the 'modern world.'  The issue isn't about what the events of Egypt means for the rest of the world, but about what they mean for Egyptians. It is alarming to realize that too many including the prominent members of the Obama administration haven't learned from the greatest mistakes of the past. Doing so would have taught them that tolerating wrongs to avoid the worst never works in international politics for the simple reason that it legitimates the worst by delegitimating the moral arguments against it.

Thus, tying to the fall of Mubarak to the nuclearisation of Iran and of the whole middle east is like tying the fall of Louis XVI to the rise of anarchy in Europe and of the reign of terror. History isn't gastronomy and Egyptians are thus neither ingredients nor slaves of a predictable or controllable future.

Paradoxes and liberalism

The first sugary excerpt of the day of the year is from the great Norm Geras:

It is indeed paradoxical, as a liberal, to think that other people should have to dress as you prefer or dictate; but it is not at all paradoxical to think - as a liberal - that people are most likely to be able to 'grow and thrive' best in societies in which they are guaranteed a wide space of personal freedom. I'd say that the liberal was a strange one who thought that growing and thriving could take place equally well anywhere - under tyranny just as well as not, oppressed within the home as well as not, with not enough to eat, etc.

It is those kinds of paradoxes who make me wonder whether liberalism can remain true to itself if it becomes solely political (in the Obamanian sense of the word) and thus a form of devotion.

The allusory and illusory African World Cup

Interesting and informative words from Sanza Tshabalala (first quote) and Ann Berstein (second) on the South African World Cup, the obsession with race and the horrendously stupid and anti-intellectual notion that it was the African World Cup:

The more the African teams were going down, the more I started getting worried about our race relations. I thought, we [Africans] are not doing well otherwise and I thought we would do well in football and it would maybe do something with our pride.
I’m obsessed with race issues. South Africans should be behind African teams. Then I went to see the Argentina-Nigeria game, at Ellis Park. And I see young Indian professionals, white people, all dressed up in Lionel Messi jerseys, and the few of us [who] are supporting Nigeria – probably 2 per cent of the stadium. I sat there thinking, ‘What’s this society going to?’ Because we’re meant to be supporting an African team, aren’t we?

---

Why? Why should we support an African team? There isn’t a black view, nor is there a white view. What’s striking to me, going to a Soccer City game, was that you were seeing very large numbers of this emerging black lower middle class. They could afford to come to the game, they had all the right clothes and they were there. Class is more important now.

This World Cup confirmed my belief  that Africanity/Africanness  is a concept created by those who refuse to acknowledge the complexities and the diversity of the African continent either because it challenges their prejudices and received ideas or because it is more convenient for them to believe that the populations of the African continent, as Conrad's cannibals, are the same and therefore have the same views, the same needs, and the same identity. It would be too inconvenient for Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, the football international governing body, to accept the idea that the South African World Cup was solely the one of a country not of a continent because it would mean taking the risk to have another country on the same continent host the World Cup sooner than in a decade or two. In short, africanity/africanness is about anything but reality for it is an attempt to take short cuts to avoid acknowledging unsettling realities and to be content with bienfaisant paternalism or simply paternalistic humanism.

Religious Hitchens

Sugary excerpt from a Guardian article on Christopher Hitchens:

To say that Hitchens is stirred – even obsessed – by the question of courage would be to state the obvious. It seems therefore highly likely that his longing for the great Orwellian test – the momentous moral challenge to match the 1930s – might tempt him to overstate the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. "Do I ask myself," he replies, "do I think our civilisation is superior to theirs? Yes, I do. Do I think it's worth fighting for? Most certainly."
That wasn't really the question.
"Well, I know how to correct atavism in myself, yes, I do," he retorts. As evidence, he offers the fact that after 9/11 he voted against his Washington apartment block flying the American flag. "So I was pleased to find out I wasn't in the mob majority in that way." But then he adds, bizarrely, "The other thing is, what happens when this ebbs, and the flag gets tatty? And you start seeing cabs with flags worn to rags, making the flag look crappy."

I 'm convinced that Christopher Hitchens is going to end up becoming one of the type of people that he hates the most, that is a man who is so religious about everything that he likes that he stops thinking to descent to believe in his own grandeur just as any evangelical preacher who is convinced that he is a prophet who is always right.

Freedom of speech isn't about content

I agree with Peter Tatchell on this:

Freedom of speech means accepting the right of other people to say things that we may find disagreeable and even offensive. Unless people make untrue libellous comments or incite violence, they should not be criminalised for expressing their opinions.

It is too easy to be a liberal society in the Lockean sense of the word when the context is peaceful and agreeable. Freedom of speech is a principle that is under attack in too many societies because there is this dangerous notion that dissent, outrage or vile speech is as destructive as terrorism and should be quieted because manufactured and artificial consent in a society is key to its cohesiveness. The trouble of course is in our world, there is almost nothing as attractive and as potent as the forbidden especially when it pertains to challenge an established order or political correctness.

Conventional and damaging beliefs

The most painfully and hurtfully naïve statement of the day:

I genuinely believe that the legacy of colonialism is to blame for so many of the woes facing the African continent today, and that former colonising countries can and should do more to address the global inequality that was built on the backs of slavery and colonialism.

The trouble with this assertion is that it is based uniquely on feelings and ideology and that it is more importantly unhelpful and superfluous.

Simone de Beauvoir during occupation

Sugary excerpt from Hazel Rowley's review of new books of France under Nazi occupation:

In June 1940, when the Germans sheet-bombed their way into France, Beauvoir "experienced the depth of despair". Back in Paris after the famous exodus, she decided that the only way to collect her nerves was to write about the horror she was experiencing:
I purchased this notebook and a bottle of ink with the intention of untangling the history, the story of these last three weeks, and writing everything down for Sartre and Bost, and for the future. It was the first day that I came out of my shell and stopped living like a "crushed bug" and tried to become a person again.
(...)She and her friends got around Paris on stolen bicycles. They were hungry, and occasionally resorted to blackmarket food. As a teacher, Beauvoir was required to sign an affidavit declaring that she was neither a Jew nor a Freemason. Not signing would have meant losing her job, income, ration card and identity papers. She signed.
After school, she worked on her autobiographical novel, She Came to Stay, about the loves and jealousies of four young people. Surprisingly, the novel got past the German censors. To her astonishment, she heard that it was a serious contender for the top literary prize in France. This was Vichy France: Jews were debarred from professional life and Jewish writers were not allowed to be published. Nevertheless, Beauvoir admitted: "If I had been awarded the Prix Goncourt that year I should have accepted it with wholehearted jubilation."

It's unfair to portray Beauvoir as someone who was willfully unaware of what was happening around her and who didn't care while ignoring the context. The bigger point is that not enough French intellectuals had the courage to oppose Nazism and to write about that opposition. To the contrary, many adapted to the realities of occupation longing for a return to a normalcy that would permit them to write tranquilly without having to care about Nazism and its victims. My point is that Simone de Beauvoir was not an exception, but the norm. Her attitude and behavior during occupation shows that even for philosophers who believe in the supremacy of existence in defining being, doing the right thing or rather making the choice to behave honorably and courageously while taking the chance to die is a difficult choice to make.
The irony of the sotry is that years later Sartre, BeauvoIr's partner in crime, pun intended, would write a manifesto arguing for littérature engagée, thus arguing, conveniently after his own shameful neutrality during the war,  that writers have the obligation to take a stand on every political and social issues because neutrality is unacceptable.

Feminism and troubling personal choices

Ilham Moussaid who became known as the veiled candidate of one of the French extreme left party to the last regional elections on Feminism and her choice to wear to veil:

For my part, I'm not submissive: it's a personal choice. I'm a feminist. I fight for women's rights with my women comrades. I fight for equality between men and women. I fight for the right to abortion, the right to contraception. It's true they see it as a symbol of oppression but unfortunately they forget that there are women who wear it out of choice. A certain number of women are obliged to wear it, of course, I don't deny that, and I'll fight for these women. But you can't say that all those who've chosen to wear a headscarf are submissive. It's not true. Once it's a question of personal choice you can't say the person is being oppressed, as these feminists argue.(...) For me, being a feminist means defending the right of women to have control over their own lives. I have control over mine and I've made this choice but it's not respected. These feminists don't respect it because I haven't made the same choice as them. My response is that there's not just one way to be a feminist; there's not just one way to be a woman. We can't all be alike. We need to concentrate on what unites us, on the fight for equality between men and women, and not to say we should all dress the same way, that you can't wear a headscarf because otherwise you're not a feminist. I think that shows a lack of respect. I don't feel represented by feminists who say that the headscarf is always a question of obligation. There are a lot of feminists who agree with me, who see that I'm fighting the same battles as them, and they support me.

I'm all for Moussaid's right to make the personal choice to wear the veil or even to be submissive. I'm just wondering since when feminism has become the sole ideology/movement/whatever else it has become acceptable to affirm a woman right to be whoever she wants be even it means displeasing other members of the same sex or ignoring the constraints/so-called obligations of gender .

Power and powerlessness

Amartya Sen on Power, powerless, and its effects on individual lives:

What about power – a concept that closely relates to the idea of freedom? To say that a person is powerless in reversing the kind of neglect that they have been experiencing can also be expressed in the language of capability: they are not capable of reversing the neglect from which they suffer. And yet there is some evocative strength and rhetorical force in the language of power, particularly in dealing with powerlessness, that the word capability, which is really a term of art, cannot really match. Analysing power and powerlessness can help to generate a better understanding of the divided world in which we live.

I have the feeling in so many ways the present state of the world has too much in common with the state of nature for people to worry about powerlessness rather than to have a single-minded focus on power.Social justice is becoming a forgotten concept because a diminishing number of people worry about those who cannot take advantage of individual freedoms for reasons, which they cannot change by just using will, courage, hard work, and determination.

Justice and identification

Vivian Gornik on the rights of others and the theory of Justice:

(...)I am remembering that in the early 1970s, when the second wave of the woman’s movement began to gather steam in America, the crucial word at the center of my feeling intelligence was neither “equality” nor “justice”; it was always “real.” “Real” meant that I wanted only to be born into the same existential unhappiness that afflicts all who take their social and political reality for granted. Suddenly, I was stunned—insulted!—by the realization that political history, from antiquity on, had withheld the recognition of that “reality” from whole classes of people, including women, and—as though I’d become the doctor in Chekhov’s Ward Six, the man who comprehended the horrors of imprisonment only when he himself was imprisoned—could only now grasp what that insult signified. It was the existential need of our souls to not put ourselves in the place of another; to make hierarchies that would include and exclude; declare this group fully human and that one not; as though a sense of one’s own reality depended on the lesser reality of another. And indeed. As Virginia Woolf asked, how could men dress up, speechify, go out and civilize the natives if they couldn’t come home and see themselves writ twice as large as life in the eyes of their adoring wives?

I've always wondered if it isn't difficult for people, especially for other women, to identify with women precisely because of the accepted inherent imperfection of womanhood, which makes  it easier to paraphrase Nietzsche for women to hate the idea of the "woman' and therefore to believe that they must turn their eyes to something else or to abstracts concepts or ideologies such as feminism.

The American government, foreign policy and Anti-Americanism

For some reason reason, this point on anti-Americanism from Mehdi Hassan troubles me:

Noam Chomsky, bête noire of the right, has long argued that the notion of anti-Americanism itself seeks to excuse the crimes of US elites and "identify state policy with the society, the people, the culture". It is an important point. I condemn the actions of the US government in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen, without attacking my American friends in Houston, LA or New York.
“I am willing to love all mankind," Samuel Johnson said, "except an American." I cannot agree. I may be considered anti-American, in that I abhor many US foreign policies, but the person I love most happens to be an American. America is not the American government. Nor is it the US border patrol.

I'm wondering whether America is the only country in the world, which isn't allowed to defend its national interests and which is always viewed no matter what it does as a bully because it is first and therefore people assume that it shouldn't be always victorious. I'm reminded of the tennis matches between Serena Williams and Justine Henin. During those matches, commentators , even when they are American, root for Henin because she is smaller, more skilled and tacitly argues that she is smarter and the better player while deploring that Williams is solely physically stronger and implying that she is lazy and bully.

Marshmallow multiculturalism

Sugary excerpt from Les Perraux's essential article on the different perceptions in Québec and the rest of Canada on the burka/burqa/niqab and what it says about Canada's brand of multiculturalism:

Prominent Quebeckers known for promoting equality, including Mr. Taylor, Mr. Bouchard and Ms. McAndrew, argued the gender segregation that comes with the niqab – along the practical barrier of a covered mouth – was too much to expect from a provincial Immigration Ministry class designed to teach spoken French and help integration.
In the rest of Canada, it was often the mainstream view in Quebec that was shunned.
One Toronto television commentator linked Quebec's fertility subsidies to the banishment of Ms. Ahmed – a barely disguised suggestion that Quebec wants women to be uneducated and pregnant.
Ms. McAndrew argues Canadians looking down on Quebec should consider why debate seems impossible outside the province.
“Public debate in Quebec is vigorous, and the level of the debate is complex. On diversity, the debate is very poor in Canada. It's marshmallow multiculturalism. You're okay, I'm okay,” she said.
“It's tolerance, but it's very soft and will face its own challenges at some point.”

Having addressed this issue several times, I have no doubt that it isn't going to go away because Québec is not going to give up its own views of secularism and integration to please the rest of Canada,. However, the key issue is being ignored in this debate and that is the state shouldn't have the right, any more than religious figures or anybody else, to tell women how to dress and to tell them that they defined by their body and how they present it. Anything else about gender discrimination and equality is gibberish designed  to mask a totalitarian view of gender with popular and seemingly modern principles.

Humanitarian interventionism and maturity

Conclusion of Mark Mazower's must-read essay on humanitarian interventionism and its decline::

(...) the ending of the era of humanitarian interventionism may come to be seen as a sign of the waning of Western power, and mourned as consigning more of the world’s peoples to the mercies of the tyrants who rule them. But it is possible to view it more positively, as the belated emergence of a new maturity in international relations.

I would like to see that the fact that  humanitarian interventionism is less popular than it used to be as a sign of maturity. However, I'm convinced that it is the consequence of the slow and painful realization the people who have  to be saved/reed, more often than not, have a strong dislike for any kind of lasting intervention (which is required in most cases to be successful), within their own affairs.  They resent it and end up resisting it violently or in others ways because they perceived it as a form of imperialism and of recolonization, which are still  the most evil of ills in most parts of the world.  To say differently, Le devoir d’ingérence, the duty to intervene to help has become stop to be viewed as humanitarian to be viewed as both paternalistic and symptomatic of a complex of superiority of the interventionists. Salvation doesn't work when the ones supposed to be saved are suspicious of their purported saviors.

America and sin

I don't agree with Stephen Kinzer on this:

Rather than embrace Mitt Romney's aggressively ignorant view of the world, Americans should try to accommodate themselves to history. That means accepting the reality that every nation, like every human being, has sinned. Nations have the moral authority to point fingers at others only if they also reflect on how their own policies have contributed to the suffering, rage and violence that is shaking the world. "We abominate in others those faults which are most manifestly our own," Montaigne wrote five centuries ago. Then he quoted one of his favorite Latin proverbs: Stercus cuique suum bene olet. Everyone's shit smells good to himself.

My problem is with Kinzer's use of the word "sin" which is too religious and too absolute and negates the reality that Nations, countries aren't godly. I prefer to use  the term "error" or "mistake" for one of the things that plagues our time is the religionization of history and politics, which leads too many to ask for apologies and to divide humans incessantly, cunningly, and spitefully between victims and sinners. America has never committed any sin. It has made mistakes, outrageous and reprehensible mistakes that apologies or atonement cannot erase, but which acknowledgment can enable it to uplift itself above the unnecessary guilt by enabling it to avoid to repeat them through responsibility and the acceptance of the obligation to do and to be better.

Multiculturalism and diversity

Kenan Malik on the differences between multiculturalism and diversity:

The irony of multiculturalism as a political process is that it undermines much of what is valuable about diversity as lived experience. When we talk about diversity, what we mean is that the world is a messy place, full of clashes and conflicts. That's all for the good, for such clashes and conflicts are the stuff of political and cultural engagement.
(...)Multiculturalism, on the other hand, by reposing political problems in terms of culture or faith, transforms political conflicts into a form that makes them neither useful nor resolvable. Rather than ask, for instance, "What are the social roots of racism and what structural changes are required to combat it?" it demands recognition for one's particular identity, public affirmation of one's cultural difference and respect and tolerance for one's cultural and faith beliefs.
Multicultural policies have come to be seen as a means of empowering minority communities and giving them a voice. In reality such policies have empowered not individuals but "community leaders" who owe their position and influence largely to their relationship with the state. Multicultural policies tend to treat minority communities as homogenous wholes, ignoring class, religious, gender and other differences, and leaving many within those communities feeling misrepresented and, indeed, disenfranchised.

Britain's brand of multiculturalism has failed because it placed at its center the cult of diversity and thus sacralized differences in the name of culture and of religion making moral judgments difficult and segregation/sectarianism unavoidable. I'm uncomfortable with drawing sharp distinctions between Britain's multiculturalism and diversity because  in the mind of too many those two concepts have merged. Nowadays, people who argues fanatically for diversity are in fact doing so  by categorizing people, by hierarchizing particularities, and thus deciding which ones ought to more important than others. The trouble with both multiculturalism and diversity as they are commonly understood is that they lead to desindividualization. People are forced to identity with a group of people in order to matter and to avoid marginalization because identity politics is the most potent form of politics.
To put things more simply, the only acceptable multicultural society is one, which sees that people as individuals, not as member of a group/community/whatever else and recognizes that culture and particularities are never legitimate justifications for the erosion of the social compact and the unjustifiable.

Amnesia Nigeriana

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani on the Nigerian propensity to ignore bad news or rather to live with it as if it is part of the Nigerian normality

I’VE heard it said that we Nigerians are the happiest people on earth. We’re also accused of being passive about issues that would stir up revolutions in other countries. For instance, it’s been just over a week since ethno-religious violence left hundreds dead around Jos, a city in central Nigeria, but the slaughtering of our fellow citizens has already largely faded from our headlines and conversations.(...)Amnesia Nigeriana, someone called it: that tendency of Nigerians to blank out national trauma. As it happens, more than anything else, it is the reports that persist on the BBC and CNN that remind us that hundreds of innocent Nigerians, women and children, were slaughtered in their sleep that Sunday night. When I look up at the huge TV screen in the newsroom where I work, there’s usually a foreign reporter with a look of high seriousness, scenes of Jos in the background.
Every time Nigeria experiences an episode of violence, we seem to go quiet while the rest of the world becomes fixated. Perhaps it’s understandable that we begin to resent these foreign journalists and the constant focus on our disasters.

Something tells me that Amnesia Nigeriana is an affliction that does not plague uniquely Nigerians...

Terrorism and wimpish politics

I agree with Sean Collins on this:

But this ‘Republicans strong, Democrats weak’ discussion obscures a more fundamental consensus between the two parties. Both establish anti-terror polices on the premise that the country is vulnerable and at risk. And both therefore overplay the threat posed by possible terror attacks.
The common assumption is that the American people are afraid, worried about the next explosion, and therefore in need of heavy state protection. And since, therefore, all it takes to traumatise the masses is an isolated bomb, it is taken as a given that any party in office at the time of an attack would be severely damaged in political terms. In this, both parties have agreed to allow the terrorists to define success, and have collaborated in reorganising US life around tiny groups.
When American politicians talk about getting ‘tough’ on terrorism, about pursuing a ‘war’ on it, they are actually using code-words for saying ‘we are scared shitless’. And in that respect, both parties are wimps; in fact, if anything, the noisier Republicans are the biggest wimps of all.

The frightening thing is that the question is never asked whether tough talk on terrorism followed by bad policies is effective because it is assumed that it is better to talk tough and to fail rather than to talk softly and to success. In short, tough talk sells because it is flashy and wimpish politics is prevalent because the worst fear of an American politician is our age is to perceived as girly and therefore unwilling and unable to protect Americans.

Domesticated intellectuals

Slavoj Zizek on the state o fintellectualism today :

The ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest revolutionaries; the philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia to detect proponents of totality. The ordinary anti-terrorist policeman tries to detect those preparing to blow up buildings and bridges; the philosophical policeman tries to detect those about to deconstruct the religious and moral foundation of our societies...
One should thoroughly reject not only this criminalization of intellectuals, but, even more, the defensive domestication of radical intellectuals who, so the story goes, offer a provocative correction to democracy which,through his exaggeration, renders visible the inconsistencies and weaknesses of the democratic project. The idea is that radical theories are provocations which are not really “meant seriously,” but aim, through their “provocative” character, to awaken us from the democratic-dogmatic slumber and thus contribute to the revitalization of democracy itself… This is how the establishment likes “subversive” theorists to be: turned into harmless gadflies who bite us and thus awaken us to inconsistencies and imperfection of our democratic enterprise – God forbid to take their project seriously and try to live them…

Zizek is always pertinent, but I wonder whether his love affair with radicalism hasn't done to him what he believes modernity, capitalism, and democracy have done to other intellectuals, that is whether he hasn't been domesticated. To put it differently, I'm coming to the realization the sole major distinction between Zizek and BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy)  image and other technicalities because both of them seem very domesticated to me in the sense that they sell and don't really bother the powerful, which means that they are not really gadflies, which doesn't mean that they aren't relevant and useful. I wonder how Zizek would feel, if he had enough distance and was less narcissistic, if he realized that he was the BHL or the Olivier Besancenot of a pseudo radical philosophy, which for some reason is extremely marketable in a capitalist society..

'Muslim' hearts and minds

Flashy,  but problematic assertions from Roger Hardy

Much of the talk about winning Muslim "hearts and minds" is shallow and misguided. The issue is often seen, especially in the United States, as a matter of public relations – as if America has an image problem in the Muslim world, and dollars can buy it a better one. Or it is seen, in a facile way, as a matter of bolstering "good Muslims" while clobbering "bad Muslims". Without a surer grasp of Islamism and its discontents, the battle for Muslim hearts and minds will be lost.

What bugs me about Hardy's assertions is that they are full of air and not much else because he tied together awkwardly and dangerously the issue of discontent with the so-called West and its foreign policies and the one of "identity." Talking about Muslim hearts and minds is as dumb as talking about a "western" identity for we know that an American is different than a French and has different sensibilities. The point is that too many people tend to homogenize groups of people when they want to make an ideological and grand point that fits their world-view, but does not reflect the realities. In short, I'm rebelling here against the notion that "Muslims" are so different from other people that policy makers trying to appease tensions and address apprehensions while dispelling misunderstandings should forget about the simple fact that people just hate being stripped of their individuality and being told that they matter less than anybody else because of something that they haven't chosen. It seems to me that by claiming that Islamism is different and misunderstood, Roger Hardy just reinforces the old and dangerous stereotypes that values and reality are relative and that some people are allowed to be barbarian and that the rest of the world should accept it.  What bothers is that Roger Hardy would never make the same point about Christian fundamentalism and that's the problem.

The objectification of the 'African' woman

Atrocious, but ordinary personal story of an Ethiopian wife in the Independent who never made  choices about her life because of her gender to put it gently:

Nurame was in her bed when she was woken by an angry mêlée. In her family's hut there were grown men – an incredible number, 10 or more, all in their 30s, all standing over her father, shouting. They reached for her. At night here, where there is no electricity, perfect darkness falls, and everything becomes a shadow-play of barely visible flickers. But even though she was eight years old, she suspected at once what was happening. She had heard whispers that, when a girl is considered ready for marriage, a man will seize her, and rape her, and then she must serve him for the rest of her life. "That was the culture," she says. But it wasn't her culture: like all the other little girls, she didn't want it. "I started screaming and tried to run out of the hut," she says. "I hid in the trees – hah! – but one of the men found me."
She was taken back to his home, held down in front of his family, raped, and taken to be married the next morning. Dazed, she signed the papers, and waited for a moment when she could flee.
After three days, he finally left her alone in the hut. She ran for miles barefoot back to her family, wanting to return to her life, and to her childhood. She hurried through the door, weeping with joy. "But my father told me that now I had had sex with him, nobody else would want me because I was ruined goods, and I had to go back to him and be a good wife," she says. "My mother was very sad but she said it was true. I thought then, 'I have to do this. I have no choice'. I just prayed to God, 'Please help me, please...' I went back. Soon after that I was pregnant, and what could I do? Hah! Now many years have passed and I have six children. Life is hard for a woman. Hah!"

Many will argue that the ordeal of Nurame are exceptionally harsh and that she is an atypical Ethiopian wife and uncommon 'African' 'woman. That would be a way to dismiss the issue for what Nurame's case shows is that Ethiopian women and women in virtually all African countries are commodities and that the choices that they can make about their lives are limited solely because of their gender. To put it in more provocative terms, African manliness is close to godliness while womanhood is about objectification and the sexual gratification of the African manly king who has great needs. It is for this reason for example that Fela Kuti can write a song about "African women" advising them not to westernize and then marry 27 Nigerians at the same time as if they were sheep thus making the point that the issue is about submissiveness, giving up up individuality in the name of a weaponized and artificial 'africanity' and about respecting the so-called laws of nature and sacredness of an imagined "African" culture.

Democracy and genocide

I find this bit by Geoffrey York about a Rwanda's official and his arguments against democracy alarming:

With an election looming in a few months, Rwanda’s authoritarian government has made an astounding claim: democracy leads directly to genocide.
The claim is made in an article this week by Jean Paul Kimonyo, an advisor in the office of Rwandan President Paul Kagame. He argues that Rwanda has only had “plural politics” for two brief periods in its history, and both times it “led to mass killings.”
He also makes the sweeping statement that “political parties and independent media” were a big reason for the killings. All parties and all media, in his view, are just as dangerous as the hate-spewing radio stations and politicians that fuelled the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
His conclusion, apparently, is that Rwanda needs to suppress its political parties, restrict its independent media and tightly control its elections, even though it’s been 16 years since the genocide. Democracy – or “confrontational politics,” as he prefers to call it – would “almost certainly lead to renewed violence.”

The questions that I ask myself is whether there isn't a false dichotomy created between democracy and genocide in order to justify the unjustifiable, and finally, the second, which the more complex question, is whether Kagame is doing as best as can best expected given the fact that things could be worse or whether adding that caveat is stopping too many for either giving him either the credit or the criticism that he deserves. I have neither have a Manichean view of Kagame nor an absolutist one because it is undeniable that he has a number of  successes, which can not be dismissed, but it is also true that as with all politicians, he is a complex figure, who neither be divinized not vilified without understanding the importance of the context, but also by without indulgence when it comes to principles such as human rights and democratic ones.