The Republic of Dissent

Liberalisms

Quote of the day from Norman Geras:

There are, in fact, two types of liberal. One believes that liberalism is a better moral and political philosophy than its illiberal alternatives and is willing to say this upfront and follow through on the consequences. The other does not believe this, and is merely confused - not having any secure basis for saying why she is a liberal.

American politics 5.0

Interesting bit from George Packer:

The fall of Arlen Specter and the rise of Rand Paul don’t make an overnight revolution in American politics. Instead, they continue trends that have been with us for a while: the decline of party establishments, the erosion of the center in Congress, the power of media (mainly conservative) to control the political agenda. We are seeing the rise of the politician as electronic loner, brought to power in a system that looks more like direct democracy than republican government.

Packer's assessment isn't on point for he is too close to the trees not only to acknowledge the existence of a different forest, but to realize its depth. My take on recent events in American politics isn't a worrisome move toward direct democracy, but rather toward identity politics. This trend is strengthened by  the central players' realization that the people are too disillusioned with politics for them to talk about issues, without giving them some red meat, which is this case is either something to love or in most cases to have  It wasn't by chance that Obamabots needed to have Sarah Palin as much as they needed to love Obama or that now fans of Rand Paul are equally Obama's haters because American politics nowadays is solely about personalization and identity, about the true red blood Americans or sophisticated and cultured Americans vs. the fakers or the American idiots.

Demography and political power

Sunny's advice over at Pickled politics on the ways for minorities to have more power in a liberal democracy:

After a while the race and the religion doesn’t even matter: it comes down to numbers. If your numbers or clout is large enough then the establishment will pay lip service. Perhaps the mistake Latinos in the US made was to tilt too far towards the Democrats… removing the Republican incentive to avoid pissing them off. Although it looks like Republicans are paying the price already.
Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that the only way a minority can get over the bigotry is either by expanding in large numbers, or getting very close to the establishment. 

There are two major implications of Sunny's advice and both of them bug them. The first is of course that it is acceptable to view having children as a means to an end, especially a political end. Children, thus become little things to enlarge a group giving them limited room to acquire an individuality. The second implication is that identity politics is so supreme that women should see as their mission to expand the numbers of their group by having more children. Women who are part of the minority group thus become essentially breeders since the objective is to have little ones to make their 'people' more powerful. How disturbing !

South Africa is colonizing Zimbabwe

Provocative assertions from Innocent Madawo and unfortunately, he is more right than wrong, which shows once again that the idea of 'Africanness,' 'blackness' is superfluous for even people who have the skin colors can have different interests and will not hesitate to establish their supremacy to protect those interest, realpolitik is colorblind :

In a typical case of “he who pays the piper calls the tune,” Mr. Zuma recently “ordered” Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai to avoid any political drama until after the soccer World Cup, a money-spinning extravaganza from which Zimbabwe could benefit. Obviously, Mr. Zuma will dictate what course Zimbabwean politics should take afterward, but his decision will be guided by South Africa's economic needs in Zimbabwe, not what Zimbabweans want. If that's not being colonized, what is?

Hamid Karzai and Charles de Gaulle

Great analysis as always from Juan Cole on Karzai's impossible situation even though he misses the mark with his comparison of Karzai to de Gaulle:

Karzai's problems do not derive from being crazed or a drug addict. Rather, he is in an impossible situation. He knows that the Obama administration came into office last year determined to remove him as indecisive and more of a problem than a solution. He responded by rigging the presidential election to ensure his hold on power. He presented the Americans with a fait accompli, which they reluctantly acknowledged and even embraced. (...) Karzai has responded to this difficult situation by blaming the US for some of his troubles, by reaching out to negotiate with figures such as Gulbadin Hikmatyar (not Taliban but mujahid or 'freedom fighter' in Ronald Reagan's terms)-- with whom the US would probably prefer he not be talking-- and then by adopting the rhetoric of mujahid or freedom fighter himself. (...) Karzai would very much like to likewise position himself as having brought greater security to his country and as having forced the US to set a withdrawal timetable for its exit. Karzai's outbursts and his apparently erratic statements actually just mark off his peculiar, almost DeGaulle-like situation (in being in his own mind a national liberator who in fact is deeply dependent on foreign allies. That humiliation and contradiction once led DeGaulle to warn that missiles could be aimed as easily at the US from France as toward the Soviet Union.

My beef with Cole's comparison is that Karzai is an empty suit whose sole objective is to remain in power at any cost. Charles de Gaulle, whatever one thinks of him had an ideology, political principles, a sense of what he felt France was and needed to be in the world. Moreover, he would not have given up those ideals to remain in power. Karzai is just posturing to show the Americans that he is irreplaceable and in case, they don't realize it, he will become an ideologue for political survival. Charles de Gaulle would have never become Churchill no matter what the circumstances were.

America as a normally vicious country

Quote of the day from Damon Linker:

The truth is that in many ways the United States is not exceptional at all. The world is a nasty, vicious place, and we’ve contributed our share of nastiness and viciousness over the years.

Assessing Sarkozy's failures and the rise of far right

I  agree in part with Jim Wolfreys on this:

Sarkozy came to power on a promise to break with the compromises of previous governments. One apparent measure of his determination to do so was the trenchant language used on immigration. It is this combination of authoritarianism and anti-immigrant rhetoric that has contributed to Sarkozy's undoing at the expense of the FN.
This is largely due to the demagogic nature of racism in the political arena. Since it is based on the myth that immigrants (or ethnic minorities in general, or Muslims) are to blame for unemployment, crime or other aspects of social decay, it has become a self-defeating tool for the government.
Under Sarkozy, unemployment stands at its highest level for a decade, at 10%, and France has one of the worst youth unemployment rates in Europe. Here, the link between racism and authoritarianism is important. The debate over national identity engineered by Sarkozy's UMP has seen Islamophobia reach a new pitch – at one point the party spokesperson compared the burka to a "Mickey Mouse mask".
Yet however shrill the scapegoating of Muslims, it has done nothing to obscure the government's impotence in the face of serious social and economic problems. Moreover, the realisation that Sarkozy is not an enforcer but a rather insecure figure in thrall to wealth and celebrity, has strengthened the claims of Le Pen to be the real authority figure in French politics.

One of Sarkozy's biggest failures is that he has legitimated the arguments of the French far right by using its language and that by not providing results,he has lead a part of the electorate to conclude that they may as well vote for the real dea forl when they were voting for Sarkozy they thought that, contrary to the far right, he would do what he preached since he would have the power to do it.The trouble is that Sarkozy's rhetoric is likely to get tougher.  He needs the vote of his right whether it is extreme or not to get reelected. This reality explains why yesterday, in his first public intervention after the Sunday's elections, he put back the Burka/burqa in the center of the political debate, but saying that it was one of his priorities to have the parliament vote a law to ban it.

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.

Islamism and Irony

TF Lane argues that Islamists are 'ironists':

Irony tends to be used in one of two ways: as an ideology or a tool. Used as a tool, it is possessive of a deeply affirmative power: that individual refusal to be coerced or to submit to tyranny – what WH Auden calls the “Ironic points of light / [that] Flash out wherever the Just / Exchange their messages”.
Islamists believe this is the way they employ irony. The car bombs and beheadings, the audiotapes and jihadist websites, the curers who kill and the vocal opponents of free speech – all of them are “points of light”. Each is a message from the Just, piercing the obscure lies of liberalism.(...)
Many secular commentators talk of Islamism as a radical ideology. But jihadists believe there is nothing idea-listic about it: to them, there is a moral map beneath their feet as ordered and patterned as a well-spun rug. It is a code written down more than a thousand years ago, the unchangeable words of God, and a glimpse into a higher realm. What we engage with as reality, they view as an elaborate fiction.

The only question that I have is whether the use of irony here isn't common to all religious fundamentalist groups, which want to merge the religious with the political and needs enemies in this militant conquest. Are Islamists a particular breed of fundamentalists? I don't think that they are, but I could be wrong.

Roads and development

Quote of the evening from Geoffrey York contrasting Congo and Rwanda:

When you cross the border from Congo to Rwanda, suddenly the roads are a dream. You discover a series of beautifully paved, smooth highways, whisking motorists all the way from the Congo border to the capital, Kigali.
Roads and other infrastructure projects have been a top priority for Rwanda’s government in recent years. This is a government with relentless attention to detail. Kigali is a spotlessly clean city, considered a model for Africa.
Is it any coincidence that Rwanda’s economy has been one of the fastest-growing in Africa, while Congo continues to be one of the poorest in Africa? Without good roads, a country is doomed to stagnation

Greed, militarism, and guerrilla warfare

I found this quote from Zakes Mda about South Africa on point :

In this brave new world, accumulation of personal wealth is dressed up in militarism, as if capitalism is the continuation of the guerrilla warfare that was fought during apartheid.

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..

Politics and American foreign policy

Matthew Yglesias on the role that politics has played within American foreign policy in the Post-cold war era:

In the post-Cold War era where politics drives foreign policy rather than the other way around, this seems to be a fairly stable equilibrium. Presidents will pursue an activist course, with the nature of the activism determined by their own predilections, but the public must not be asked to bear any burden. The question is how long can this be sustained. During the Cold War, objective considerations of international relations constrained American options, even as relatively small oscillations around the mainstream view were the subject of contentious argument. Today, no country can even remotely match American military might, and none is likely to do so for decades.

I wonder whether Yglesias's view isn't too American-centric to see the big picture, as a matter I know that he  is for he doesn't seem to be able to realize what are the essential and international consequences of his hypothesis. The issue within American foreign policy has never been that it is driven by politics, but rather that it is made and formulated badly for the simple reason that Americans only understand foreign policy when it relates to domestic policy and is said to affect them. The distinction that I'm making here is that all foreign policy reflect domestic politics, but some of them are made more effectively and with the acknowledgment that foreign policy requires some expertise and some knowledge of foreign countries, In short, I don't think that the United States has the foreign policy that it deserves  because as Yglesias, it doesn't realize that results have as much to do with power (military, hard, soft, diplomatic or otherwise) than with knowledge and a non-ideological awareness of different realities.

Benedict XVI as the failed purificator

Attention grabbing bit from the Independent's article on the troubles of the Pope, the Vatican, and the Catholic Church:

When he was crowned Pope nearly five years ago, Benedict promised to clean up the Church. He would not be a showman Pope like John Paul II, he would not flog himself around the world addressing huge stadiums. The Church under his guidance would not have expansiveness as its goal, but purification. It might be a smaller, tighter institution but it would be clean, consistent, and true to its word.
But events of recent weeks suggest that corruption is rooted close to its heart. A wealthy Italian industrialist called Angelo Balducci had been honoured by the Vatican as a gentiluomo del Papa, a "gentleman of the Pope", but then in charges that hit the headlines in Italy last month he was put under investigation for allegedly raking in money from sleazy building tenders. Separately, a member of the Vatican choir claims he was paid to find gay partners for Balducci. Despite the Church's draconian stand on homosexuality, the Vatican has long been known as a gay hot house, and insiders believe that Benedict's elevation changed nothing.
Meanwhile scandals continue to rain down on the Church from abroad. Shortly after Benedict condemned the "heinous acts" of paedophilia among priests in Ireland, accusations of similar acts surfaced in the famous choir of Regensburg, in Bavaria, of which the Pope's brother Georg was director while Joseph Ratzinger was a professor at the university (Georg claims no knowledge of any such abuse during his time there).

History teaches that purification are never possible because more often than not they are used to maintain a code of silence about the injustices of the past to avoid having to acknowledge them and to address the serious issues that they pose. Purification is about repentance without admission or change and that's why they are about continuation with the illusion of transformation and are exposed as such at the first crack on the facade. I have always believed that the designation of Joseph Ratzinger as pope was in fact a thumb at the nose of modernity and of those within the church that believed that what was needed was pope who could have the courage to break with certain ways of the past and to provide the bind between tradition and modernity.  I have the feeling that Benedict XVI's reign is over, but that only his death will make the Vatican choose a successor. In short, the Vatican has lost its head.

Puritanism followed the sexual revolution

Tony Judt on the restrictions that came after 'the sexual revolution' and its consequences on the interactions between men and women

Since the 1970s, Americans assiduously avoid anything that might smack of harassment, even at the risk of forgoing promising friendships and the joys of flirtation. Like men of an earlier decade—though for very different reasons—they are preternaturally wary of missteps. I find this depressing. The Puritans had a sound theological basis for restricting their desires and those of others. But today’s conformists have no such story to tell.
Nevertheless, the anxieties of contemporary sexual relations offer occasional comic relief. When I was Humanities dean at NYU, a promising young professor was accused of improper advances by a graduate student in his department. He had apparently followed her into a supply closet and declared his feelings. Confronted, the professor confessed all, begging me not to tell his wife. My sympathies were divided: the young man had behaved foolishly, but there was no question of intimidation nor had he offered to trade grades for favors. All the same, he was censured. Indeed, his career was ruined—the department later denied him tenure because no women would take his courses. Meanwhile, his “victim” was offered the usual counseling.

For some reason, I don't think that there was ever a sexual revolution. America is suffering from the fact that it has religionized both sex and gender more than any country in what some call condescendingly the modern world. Sexual harassment has nothing to do with sex, but solely with that conviction that some have that they are entitled to sex because of who they are, what they represent or whatever else. Judt is missing the point, by trivializing the issue in order to address the fact that to America, good sex is an oxymoron and therefore has to be cleaned and taken away from the environment where children, young people are learning.

Volapük

I've always said that Sarkozy was as good with words as Obama, just in a different way, this proves my point:

The French president, complaining about negotiations leading up to last December's UN climate summit, said world leaders had been handed a draft text "similar to volapük."
Even native French speakers were stumped by this one, and some at first thought he said "vol a Buc", or "flight to Buc," a small and obscure town near Paris that has no airport.
Better-versed minds prevailed, and it turned out not only that Mr Sarkozy was making a nod to history and his hero. Volapük is a language invented in the late 19th century by a German Roman Catholic priest, Johann Martin Schleyer, who dreamt of creating a universal means of communication. His idea never really took flight and other international languages, such as Esperanto, emerged as more successful candidates. In French, "to speak volapük" was once used to denote gibberish or gobbledegook, but it was last used in any major context at a press conference in 1962 by General de Gaulle, who is revered by Mr Sarkozy.

Would it too condescending or too cynical of me to suggest that Sarkozy had no idea what Volapük meant until his advisers suggested that he used the word this morning to convey his mastering of the situation? It is amazing how language is important in politics especially when it is used either to elevate one self or to suggest that one is part of the common folk. Something tells me that Sarkozy is about to undergo another transformation just in time for his reelection 2012.

Missed opportunity for American-led multipolirty

I would like to agree with Nikolas Gvosdev on this:

The attacks of Sept. 11 created a second opportunity. In the wake of the collapse of the Twin Towers and the destruction at the Pentagon, governments around the world were stunned -- the fruits of globalization, which had so advanced the cause of prosperity, could also be utilized by those who would seek to bring down the state. What's more, all governments were vulnerable -- democracies and non-democracies, developed and developing states alike. The shock to supply chains around the world in the attacks' aftermath, when interruptions in air travel and new security procedures impeded the flow of goods and services, made many realize how vulnerable the international system really was. And because the rising and resurgent powers had harnessed their chariots to the horses of global economic growth, they were amenable to finding common ground.
As a result, the anti-terrorist coalition could have become the basis for a new concert of powers. But the give-and-take of the classic concert system, in which a series of quid pro quos set the basis for collective decisions, was a mindset largely alien to both the Bush administration and Congress. With a new concert not in the making, and with the U.S. making clear it would act unilaterally in order to secure its own interests, other states began to find ways not to openly challenge the United States (...)

Hum, I'm reluctant to buy Nikolas Gvosdev's arguments because I'm wondering if power can really be shared when it hasn't be earned based on feel-good principles and charity. I'm starting to believe that the biggest failure for a hegemon is to use power in circumstances when it cannot help it and will therefore weaken it. Moreover, recent developments in international affairs have led me to question the concept of multipolarity. I don't think that the world can't ever be multipolar for it is always the powerful who make the decision not really in unison, but through real political bargaining, which reflects the reality of the day. Thus, the biggest mistake of the Bush administration wasn't really unilateralism, but ideology, incompetence, and a blindness to reality. It was so inflexibly ideological that in too many cases, it never took the steps that were required to win and to achieve its objectives because it as decided that reality didn't matter and was almost never going to get in the way of its ideology.When you are a Hegemon, failed demonstrations of strength will weaken you every time.

Winnie Mandela as the Queen of Denial

Winnie Mandela is denying giving an interview in she slammed her former husband by arguing that he was a sellout:

I did not give Ms Naipaul an interview. It is therefore not necessary for me to respond in any detail to the contents of a fabricated interview.

My guess is that Mrs. Mandela just realized how costly it can be both financially and humanely when one assaults Nelson Mandela especially without making substantive arguments and  by playing with lasting resentments and identity politics. I think this denial is showing that one, not to say the principal, reason Winnie Mandela is remaining a radical is because it is the only role that she can to remain relevant and to still be invited around the world to speak, of course , for a fee. I'm starting to believe that even that role is going to be difficult to play, because Jacob exists and the real Mandela is, alas, going to die soon and then, people won't want to hear her speak because they will remember that she tried to stain him.

Divorce is necessary in politics

I'm always happy when somebody, in this case Clancy Sigal,joins me in the Republic of Dissent by divorcing Obama and his Democratic Party:

n a bad marriage, if we're lucky, a sad, angry, unwelcome realism takes over and an existential fear invades our soul. But we do not want to be alone in a loveless world. A divorce often means being cast out into psychological darkness, exile from the "mainstream", the loss of (and even abuse from) friends, a terrifying sense of isolation and inadequacy. So, stuffing our ears and blinding our eyes to our own victimisation, we recommit to the relationship. We continue to deny, deny, deny. Life goes on, diminished and undignified. Soul-suicide.
But now I want a divorce from the Democrats, the "party of the people" versus the Republicans who with a few honorable exceptions are the party of cruelty. Are there some good Democrats? You bet. Are they outnumbered by callow, fearful Democrats? You bet.
I don't care that at the moment there's nowhere to go and hardly anybody to cheer for.

The ineffectiveness of Soft Power

I agree with Charlemagne on this:

If our big bet in Europe is that speaking with one voice will make our norms-based, soft power approach work, what lessons should we draw when Mr Obama's outstretched hand of friendship is smacked away? Because even in a perfect, parallel universe, in which the EU magically falls in line behind Catherine Ashton and the new EU diplomatic service, we will struggle to become one half as united as the American government is. Our 27 countries will always find it hard to match America when it comes to identifying and defending our interests. And though there can of course be differences in the messages sent out by the White House, the State Department, Congress and so on, in general America speaks with one voice to the outside world, in a way that the EU can barely hope to match.And yet all that speaking with one voice, in defence of agreed, common interests, does not seem to shield the Obama administration from snubs.

The truth is that Soft power only works when hard power isn't contradicting it and when actions and policies demonstrate that soft power is about more than empty gestures, but about accepting that others do have their point of view and their own self-interests. Soft power hasn't worked for the Obama administration and has little chances of working for the Eu if it ever gets its act together because it is seen as bandage not confront peacefully real and substantive differences about the world. I think that even Obama realizes how American-centric and naive, it was of him to believe that soft power would fix everything and lead to changes without policy changes.

Failing sanctions and Iran

Distressing fact from James Joyner's post on the ineffectiveness of the regime of sanctions against Iran:

America's regime of sanctions on Iran are ineffective but we're likely to see more of them.

What's the point of sanctions if it's known that they don't work? Well, it is to give the appearance of action, resilience, and of strength when as the sanctions against Iraq for example showed that they always lead to the inevitable: confrontation or acceptance of the feared outcome. The US is using sanctions to gain time in the hope that the situation will either change in Iran, i.e. another revolution, or on the world stage that would force, Russia  to join the US and its allies to form a block to have Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. My opinion is that neither possibility is likely.

Obama and Palin as Siamese twins

Mark Steel has an op-ed which purports to offer some advice to Obama, but which  ends up being about Sarah Palin. Sugary excerpt:

When you watch Barack Obama make these speeches to try and introduce healthcare to America, you have to wonder whether he might improve his ratings if he lost his temper and chucked things. Because the opponents of health reform are getting away with whatever they want, such as Sarah Palin’s claim that “My parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’.”
And somehow she and the Republicans have convinced millions of Americans that if everyone has healthcare, a panel looks at each patient and decides whether or not to kill them.
Next she’ll say, “Under Obama’s plan, patients on life support will be forced to race each other for their lives down a bobsleigh course. They’ll be pushed by a relative and the one who finishes in the slowest time will have their machine turned off by a socialist, like what happens in Britain.”
It seems extraordinary that so many people can be opposed to universal healthcare that would clearly benefit them, because it contradicts their attitude to the free market.

It is evident to me that Obama has become Palin's twin for better and for worse especially for those who are going to sacralize him no matter what happens and therefore need her to be the devil while he is a God.  Thus, Obama is the good twin, while Palin is the evil one. People seemed to have forgotten that she was only second on the Republican ticket to make her Obama's principal  opponent while at the same time arguing that she has no credibility, which is a contradiction, In any case, Mark Steel's advice to Obama to hit back at Palin and at other Republicans ignore the quintessential fact that to hit back, you need to have a spine and to know who you are politically instead of trying to be the Jesus of American politics and to believe that fighting for the people who got you where you are isn't a credible way to govern and to be reelected. Is it just me or aren't the Obamabots and Obamaniacs getting from the guy what they told the rest of us we would be getting if Hillary Clinton got to the White House and that it was just unacceptable?  I guess the truth of the matter is that most voters don't mind getting eating shit in politics to put things crudely as long as they like the guy feeding it to them and it almost always have to be a guy or a manly woman.

Obama and the Post-Western World

Quote of the day from Roger Cohen can sometimes, probably in spite of himself, be pertinent:

The Obama presidency has been a shock to Europe. At heart, Obama is not a Westerner, not an Atlanticist. He grew up partly in Indonesia and partly in Hawaii, which is about as far from the East Coast as you can get in the United States. “He’s very much a member of the post-Western world,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund.

I'm still wondering whether what you symbolize is more important than what you do or who you really are.

The Demons of the Vatican

Another proof that the Catholic Church is an institution like any other than can be corrupted and perverted by a code of silence and moral cowardice:

In the interview published today, Georg Ratzinger, who led the sparrows from 1964 to 1994, appeared to signal that knew physical punishments were meted out to his pupils but he had been unaware of how brutal the beatings often were.
"Pupils told me on concert trips about what went on,” he said. “But it didn't dawn on me from their stories that I should do something. I was not aware of the extent of these brutal methods.”
He added: “If I had known about the excess of force he was using, I would have said something ... I ask the victims for forgiveness."
The 86-year-old said he had no indication that pupils were being sexually abused and added that staff had never talked about it. Although an admission from the Pope’s brother that he hit pupils may shock many today, at the time such beatings were perfectly legal in Germany which only banned corporal punishment in 1980.
But the allegations emanating out of Regensburg are awkward for the Vatican because the Pope and his brother spent so much of their careers there. Survivor groups have now called on the pontiff to talk about whether he ever encountered abuse accusations when he was a bishop of Munich and Freising during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The German government has also criticised the Catholic Church for maintaining a “wall of silence” which has made it difficult for prosecutors to access information about abuse.

It is starting to be painfully obvious that the cardinals who thought that Joseph Ratzinger was the safest choice to head the Vatican made a mistake and are probably praying with ferocity and intensity that he dies sooner rather than later.

When Winnie bites Nelson

Winnie Mandela is probably one of the few persons who is not afraid to slam her former husband, even though he is a God in South Africa. After reading her comments, I have to believe that any movie made about her will be better than any movie made about Nelson Mandela because she is more flawed and thus more human; actors and directors aren't going to be afraid to go "there." A few of her reproaches to her former husband: 

Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a burning young revolutionary. But look what came out.(.,.) I cannot forgive him for going to receive the Nobel [Peace Prize in 1993] with his jailer [FW] de Klerk. Hand in hand they went. (...) Do you think De Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart? He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed, and our struggle was not a flash in the pan, it was bloody to say the least and we had given rivers of blood. (...) I had kept it alive with every means at my disposal.

Something tells me that Winnie Mandela wishes Mandela had remained in prison so she would never had had to fade in the background as a disposable thing when he came out because she wasn't clean. Part of the truth of course is that Winnie Mandela never learned to become a stateswoman because she believes in radicalism ,raciality, identity politics, money, and not much else. For after all, she is speaking up this loudly now because she wants somebody to pay her to shut up.

Harlem as a Babylon without future

Stephen Foley has a must read article on Harlem and its slow decline as the center of "black" politics in America. Sugary excerpt:

Harlem is where the black political elite – including Paterson's father, Boris – has resided for generations; a ferocious, ready-made block vote wielded on behalf of the civil rights movement and advancing the community's causes.
Adam Clayton Powell, the first African-American sent to Congress from New York State, shepherded the civil rights reforms of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson through his chairmanship of the Education committee; his successor, Rangel, ascended to run the powerful Ways and Means committee, which controls Congressional purse strings.
(,.. )He [Charlie Rangel] dodged censure over unpaid taxes on a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic, but was then criticised by a House watchdog for company-funded trips to the Caribbean. The accumulating accusations of ethical violations threaten to bring down this last remaining Harlem pillar, with little apparently to take its place. (...) But what of the future? Reading the newspapers on the block opposite Rangel's Harlem home, a local character known as Mister Nature, a man who has observed the area's politics for three decades, says the political elite has only itself to blame. "The Democrat political meetings are sorry affairs," he says. "There is no new blood. We have politicians who are proud of their past, and working for themselves and for the rich today, but they are not looking into the future. They have simply not trained others to replace them.

The trouble with identity politics in America and elsewhere is that those who are using it to get to power once they get there believe that it's solely about them, that they cannot be replaced because they are the ones who built the trainstation. This is what I called the Mugabe theory of politics, which explain why leaders who use identity politics to get there almost never leave at the right time, but more often than not eat their young to make sure that only death takes them away from power. It's sad to say, but Mandela is the exception not the norm and he had to spend 25 years in jail to get that wise and to learn that legacy matters more than personal gratification.

Living off scandal in American politics

I agree with Sean Collins on this:

Anti-corruption campaigns are inherently problematic. They are usually a distraction from the major issues of the day. And, even though such movements are understood as ‘progressive’, the measures taken to address corruption typically restrict democratic rights, and – ironically – give more power to the same state that is charged with being corrupt.
But pushing the anti-corruption angle has an even greater detrimental effect on political life today. The bigger issue facing both parties is an essential lack of faith in government institutions – and not just in Washington, but at the state level as well. That fundamental problem is the one that needs to be addressed. The politics of scandal keys into dissatisfaction with the political class as a whole and reinforces it, thus making the underlying condition worse. Living off scandal is the self-destructive temptation in American politics.

The issue is that because Americans, more than most, believe that politics is a dirty business, love scandals and the promises that others make when they say they will 'clean' Washington and throw the bums out so that Jesus can come in.

The imperial reflex and the post 9/11 world

Pankaj Mishra argues convincingly, I have to say, that the United States and the "West" still have imperial reflexes, which are preventing them from acknowledging the realities of the post 9/11 world, an era where the East and the rest of the world are no longer scared of them and have their own ideas about how things are going to be. Sugary excerpt:

Decolonisation seems to have dented little the sense of superiority that since 1945 has made American leaders in particular consistently underestimate the intensity of nationalist feeling in Asia and Africa. In proposing cash bribes for the "moderate" Taliban, the Obama administration reminds one of FDR's bright idea about the original inhabitants of Palestine: "What about the Arabs?" he once asked the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. "Can't that be settled with a little baksheesh?"(...)The Chinese, Indians, Iranians and other emerging powers too have an idea of what they owe to themselves: the richness of the world that the west first claimed for itself. But while getting what they want, they won't claim the sanction of a superior morality and civilisation. Indeed, the long and appalling history of European hypocrisy in Asia and Africa may be why Beijing dispenses altogether with talk of Chinese values as its strikes deals with nasty regimes in Africa, and why even democratic India keeps mum about the advantages of regular elections as it tries to offset Chinese influence over Burma's military despots. 

Reading Mishra's article forces me to ask myself whether America's most influential mark on the world was that it made it so cool and often so stylish to be a hegemon that now every country wants to be one and to exercise power in the same way. I'm coming to the realization that the post 9/11 world is one with a bunch of countries who have fallen in love, whether they want to be admit it or not with the American style of power, even as they resents it when it affects them. America is John Wayne and we know that there was a time when every man, no matter where he came from, wanted to be John Wayne even when he hated the fact that he was killing "Indians" and shooting from the hip without much finesse, sophistication or awareness of the sensibilities of others.

The dangers of toothlessness in American Foreign policy

Quote of the early morning from Michael Young of the Daily Star:

The reality is that the Obama administration these days provokes little confidence in its allies and even less fear in its adversaries. The US remains the dominant actor in the Middle East, but to what end? If Obama’s ultimate goal is to be different than George W. Bush, he hasn’t even managed that. As setback follows setback, he is increasingly finding himself constrained by the same dynamics that Bush faced. But at least Bush knew what he was supposed to be about. Obama just seems lost.  

Feminism as the essential ally of Patriarchy

Quote of the morning from Jim Pollard, which shows that we are indeed in a postfeminist world:

When I was a student in the 1980s, feminism was the “ism” du jour. The women’s groups sliced up injustice, while the men’s groups pondered the ethics of masturbation in low, guilty voices. Feminism did change the way we related to each other—the personal became political—and we assumed the world would follow. It hasn’t.
But it has done wonders for men. It’s not only that sex is more open and—since no modern woman wants to be labelled “unliberated”—more frequent and varied. More important is the economics. Going Dutch means single men carry home a fuller wallet from a date, while those in couples are no longer sole breadwinners.
True, feminism has given a tiny minority of highly-educated women better jobs. But what else? Huge divorce settlements? Only in the handful of cases that make the tabloids.(...)It seems that feminism may have helped the patriarchy in a similar way. Relationships between men and women may have loosened up, but the underlying economics have remained much the same. Isn’t that what feminists should be talking about?

The tyranny and fetishism of culture

Jacob Zuma just won't let me leave him alone when he continues shamelessly and shamefully to use culture as an excuse for his incivility and barbaric manliness:

When the British came to our country they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way ... I don't know why they are continuing thinking that their culture is more superior than others.(...) Bear in mind that I am a freedom fighter and I fought to free myself, also for my culture to be respected. (...) I've not looked down upon any culture of anyone ... and no one has been given an authority to judge others.

What a limited, pompous, and dangerous argument ! I guess we should just let the Talibans stone women in the name of Islam, we should tolerate female circumcision because Africa was colonized and yes, finally,  we should say to "African women" as Fela Kuti would say that they should be grateful to be one of the numerous possessions of "African" men who are all Kings with great needs that no just one of them can satisfy. I have the feeling if Zuma were white, and were justifying the unjustifiable by using culture, he would be called a racist because people would say that he is in fact saying that some people have the right to be savages because it is their nature and because their culture encourages barbarity.

Indigenous Zimbabweans and the racialization of racism

Robert Mugabe may not senile, but he is still a racist as this sugary excerpt of a post by Annie Lowrey shows:

Today, in Zimbabwe, a highly controversial new law requiring businesses to be majority-owned by indigenous Zimbabwean citizens comes into effect.
Within the next 45 days, every company with an asset value over $500,000 needs to submit paperwork detailing the racial background of its shareholders. If the company has a majority of white or foreign shareholders, the Indigenization and Economic Empowerment Act -- brainchild of President Robert Mugabe, whose catastrophic land reform act caused hyperinflation and famine -- requires it to transfer shares to indigenous Zimbabweans.
The goal of the law -- "a deliberate involvement of indigenous Zimbabweans in the economic activities of the country, to which hitherto they had no access, so as to ensure the equitable ownership of the nation's resources" -- is a noble one. But the law is a calamity that promises to drive away foreign dollars and further the impoverishment of average Zimbabweans.

It troubles me that people are reluctant to call Zimbabwe a country with a "race" problem and Mugabe a racist because they are justifying his actions with history as if a rose has stopped to be a rose to be a rose when it is of a different color. In other words,  I find it outrageous that Zuma can consider even asking the Brits to lift/ease the sanctions on Zimbabwe and that there seems to be a complaisant silence from too many people who like to scream racism on this story when one doesn't need much of an imagination to guess what they would be saying if Mugabe and the so-called indigenous Zimbabweans had another skin pigmentation.

The Afghan Time paradox

Dexter Filkins on Afghanistan, the Obama's surge and the essential question of time:

The trouble with Obama’s deadline is that, in crucial ways, it appears to be at war with itself. If the intent of the president’s message was to convey to the American people that the end was in sight, then it was almost certainly untrue. In all likelihood, the end of America’s involvement in Afghanistan is not in sight. (...)The Afghan version of the surge was announced by Obama last December. And for all the talk of counterinsurgency, the real hope, clearly, is that the fresh infusion of troops will be able to bleed the Taliban enough to force them to consider some sort of political settlement. This is really the heart of the matter. But how likely is it? (...) But there is the time paradox again. With an eighteen-month deadline looming, what incentive does the Taliban have to make a deal? If you read the movement’s regular Internet communiqués, you will see that their morale is not that of an army on the brink of defeat. “With their own hands the Americans made the people of Helmand stand with the holy warriors, and all of them have entered the trenches of resistance to seek vengeance and jihad,” a recent Taliban missive proclaimed. “This will bear no fruit except the enemy’s defeat, Allah willing.” It appears the Taliban wholly expect the Americans to run out of will.

I'm willing to bet my left leg that America will still be in Afghanistan by the time of the 2012 presidential election. Obama will justify this decision by making the argument that although progress has been made, there is still work to be done, which is essential to America's security and national interests. The only reason for an American president to support a military surge is to find reasons not to leave and to make an omelet without breaking any egg by having it both ways: by making the point that you want desperately to leave to have on your corner those who believe that the war is not winnable and by demonstrating strength to those who believe that you don't have the stomach to use military might by saying that you do whatever it takes for a limited period of time.
I'm afraid that the Afghan Time paradox leads inevitably to a dead end because in wars, it is impossible to have it both ways and to please everybody.

Globalization and exploitative racism

Interesting stuff from Lenin's Tomb (hat tip: Chris Dillow):

Occasionally, if you open the Economist or the FT, you'll read an argument that runs something like this: people shouldn't be bigoted toward immigrants, because by they do jobs that British workers won't do for pay that British workers won't accept. In a similar way, you often hear members of the Institute of Directors or the CBI explain that 'globalisation' and international outsourcing is an excellent thing because it gives jobs to hard-working people in Third World countries who work much harder, and are much less demanding, than spoilt, recalcitrant Western workers. This is the zenith of ruling class anti-racism, and it's just another argument for exploitation. And it is, of course, deeply racist toward the recipients of its supposed benediction.

I have to say that I know longer know what racism is and what being a racist means. I feel like the Supreme Court Justices when they were trying to rule on pornography and had to define obscenity. I'm puzzled and stuck in the middle of an intellectual Sahara on this issue.

Bush is still here

Well, I know that it won't be a surprise but I agree with Alex Massi's conclusion, but not necessarily all of his sentiments when he writes this:

Increasingly I suspect that George HW Bush may be one of the most under-rated American presidents since the Second World War. Politically, sure, he wasn't the smartest, sharpest or smoothest and some of his greatest achievements - most notably the management of post-Soviet eastern europe - owed something to a policy of what was, in some senses and to some extent, benign neglect. But there's a certain old-fashioned, perhaps patrician, wisdom in that too. The first Bushies got some things wrong and they got some kinds of lucky too but their reserve also helped them avoid too many self-inflicted mistakes.
It wouldn't be quite right to say that the Obama administration is Pappy's heir but its approach to foreign and security policy certainly borrows from the GHWB playbook.

I'm wondering what people would be saying if Hillary Clinton were in the White House and following the same course? I believe that Andrew Sullivan (who once said that she was Dick Cheney in pantsuit) and others would already be Sarah Palining her and saying that she is pure evil and that she killed the poor "Black" guy to become president and yet, cannot even bring real change to America. Well, I guess that foolish and thoughtless toughness only works for dudes.

China, Mugabe, and Africa

No comments necessary to the news that China threw at its embassy in Harare a birthday-bash  for Robert Mugabe except to wonder whether the Chinese have any standards to their African policies and whether there is anything that they won't do (but again that something one can wonder about many world powers in Africa):

Mugabe celebrated his 86th birthday on Sunday and made time to attend a party held in his honour at the Chinese embassy in Harare, China's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Hailed as a saviour by fanatical supporters and praised throughout Africa for standing up to what many see as bullying by the West, Mugabe is hated in equal measure by opponents who accuse him of being a dictator.
Mugabe "thanked the Chinese embassy for its painstaking preparations for the birthday celebration and ... hoped to further expand friendly cooperative relations in every field between the two nations", the Foreign Ministry said.
The ministry's website showed pictures of Mugabe cutting a birthday cake in front of a large sign wishing him "Happy 86th birthday" and addressing almost 100 guests.

The Chicago political culture and Washington, DC

Michael Gecan on Obama, his Chicago Team, and the culture clash happening in Washington, DC:

Many people were puzzled when they heard wailing from the White House over the loss of the 60th Senate vote, but the administration’s despair was logical in the context of the Chicago political culture. In the Windy City, if you don’t have total control and the ability to dominate, you have no control and are check-mated. The art of using an overwhelming majority of 59 to 41 has not been practiced for generations in Chicago. Faced with anything other than uncontestable clout, the Chicagoans who went to Washington might as well have been asked to speak Greek.
Elections Mean Everything. The one thing that the political machine excels at is managing the electoral process from start to finish. Selecting and grooming candidates. Buying or scaring off reformers. Marshaling election lawyers to knock out other candidates’ petitions. Using only paid public employees to work (illegally, but with almost no chance of being caught and prosecuted because of the care taken to avoid detection) in campaigns and on election day. Filling vacancies produced by indictments and convictions of insiders with even tighter insiders. Nobody does it better. This is why the presidential campaign did so well in caucus states and less well in those with open elections: the machine thrives on narrow or limited voting situations. But it founders on the kind of fluid and shifting series of skirmishes that, say, the health care struggle became. The president’s decision to bring his Chicago team into the White House may, therefore, have been his worst. Axelrod, Jarrett, and even Emanuel are much more suited to electoral than legislative campaigns.

Well, what is Gecan is describing is neither unexpected nor surprising for every president has, soon or later, to confront the fact that the political culture of his inner circle may be clashing with the one of Washington, DC. The only interesting question is how long it is going to take Obama to make changes if ever for I don't think that DC is ever going to become Chicago no matter how much it loves Obama. However, it may be possible that governing is less important to Obama than winning elections meaning that being a two-term president is the point of it all instead of having Congress pass important and transformative legislation on key issues such as health care.

The need for liberal anger

Clancy Sigal wonders why American liberals aren't more angry and more importantly why there cannot be a public manifestation of this anger in the way some Conservatives are expressing theirs through the tea parties:

The last time I remember collective anger as legitimate was in the now-much-derided 1960s with its protest marches and brazen hippie-style slogans. Ever since there's been a gradual slide – I would argue descent – into sterile politeness. Recently, I attended a meeting of my local school board where a mild, hardly-above-a-whisper grumble from a parent prompted his expulsion enforced by armed police. Who knows what might have happened if any of us in the audience had stood up and actually spoken out as in that famous Norman Rockwell painting of a town hall meeting?
Why should full-throated emotion be the monopoly of the so-called "populists" who seem to be the only people around unafraid to shout, yell, stomp and scream?

I grew up in a boisterous, immigrant, loud neighborhood where everyone had an opinion and voiced it full throttle. Somewhere along the line, maybe when I shifted from working class to middle class, I lost my rough, grating, empowered, assertive voice – and maybe the anger that had fuelled it. If so, that's a pity.
We need liberal anger now more than ever.

I would like to agree, but I think that the problem is that Liberals don't have a backbone and have content  being in power than with changing America for the better. The Healthcare reform bill is the perfect example of that fact for liberals are willing to accept less even though for once they are on the right side of an issue and have the power to  pass real reforms. Instead, they are timid because they are afraid to lose. This unwillingness to fight for the change they asserted through their vote, time, energy and money they believe in passionately less than two years ago is an acknowledgment  of their conviction that their kind of change isn't worth taking the risk to lose power in Washington, DC for power is the more potent than true reforms. Thus, the problem here isn't a lack of liberal anger, but rather the sterilization of liberalism which is solely about the glitz and the swagger. 

Attacking American exceptionalism

Sugary excerpt from Richard Lowry's and Ramesh Ponnuru's essay which argues that Obama is attacking American identity by not embracing/repudiating American exceptionalism:

There have always been those who take exception to American exceptionalism. Europeans developed a cottage industry in travel writing about America, most of it — although not all, with Tocqueville the most important ex­ception — scandalized by the riotous freedoms of these restless, stubborn, commerce-crazy, God-soaked barbarians. The Amer­ica of these portraits was simultaneously primitive and decadent: “grotesque, obscene, monstrous, stultifying, stunted, leveling, deadening, deracinating, roofless, uncultured,” as James Ceaser summarizes the critique in Reconstructing America. Many of America’s European critics hoped that, over time, America would lose its distinctiveness. It would become just another developed Western country: more centralized, more elitist, more secular, less warlike, and less free. In short, a quieter, more civilized place.
The American Left has shared this maddened perplexity at its country’s character and this hope for its effacement. Marxists at home and abroad were always mystified by the failure of socialism in the U.S. They thought that, as the most advanced capitalist society, we would have had the most restive proletariat. Instead we have had a broad and largely satisfied middle class. Even our unions, in their early history, were anti-statist, their radicalism anarchistic rather than socialist.
(...) President Obama’s first year in office should be seen in the context of contemporary liberalism’s discomfort with American exceptionalism.
The president has signaled again and again his unease with traditional American patriotism. As a senator he notoriously made a virtue of not wearing a flag pin. As president he has been unusually detached from American history: When a foreign critic brought up the Bay of Pigs, rather than defend the country’s honor he noted that he was a toddler at the time. And while acknowledging that America has been a force for good, he has all but denied the idea that America is an exceptional nation. Asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism during a European trip last spring, Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exception­alism.” (Is it just a coincidence that he reached for examples of former hegemons?)
In this respect the president reflects the mainstream sentiment of American liberals. We do not question the sincerity of his, or their, desire to better the lot of his countrymen. But modern liberal intellectuals have had a notoriously difficult time coming up with a decent account of patriotism even when they have felt it. From Richard Rorty to Todd Gitlin, they have proclaimed their allegiance to a hypothetical, pure country that is coming into being rather than to the one they inhabit.

Given the liberal gestalt, it is perhaps unsurprising that every important aspect of American exceptionalism has been under threat from President Obama and his allies in Washington. Obama has frankly and correctly described their project as to change the country fundamentally.

To be blunt, I think that the reason why Lowry and Ponnury is so long is that they spent their time running away from or around their own arguments simply to express their differences with what they believe to be Obama's view of America and his foreign policy. Those differences are legitimate, but the fact that they exist doesn't mean that Obama is attacking America's identity by not embracing American exceptionalism as Lowry and Ponnury define it. All presidents when they come to power have to decide what message they want to give to the world and whether putting humility and soft power can provide accomplish faster policy goal than hard power. Lowry and Ponnury seem to forget that it was George Bush when he was running against Gore who talked about America's need to be humble and to believe that it can nation build any country. The point is that Obama isn't out of the mainstream of American politics or a leftist who want to Europeanize America for he doesn't know much about Europe and its different societies and ways of living (I suspect that this ignorance is shared by both Lowry and Ponnuru). My suspicion that Obama is simply struggling to find the right balance between assertive and soft power especially after the bellicose years of George Bush. Professor Anderson made this point better by quoting Raymond Aron and putting the emphasis on the idea that Hegemon cannot behave as though it isn't a Hegemon and expect to receive some accolades and thanks for its multilateral approach to power and its renunciation of the obligations of its status. Thus, American exceptionalism isn't really an issue, but a distraction from the fact that America is a Hegemon in a world with up  and coming hegemons and is dealing with issues which Obama believes it cannot resolve alone. Thus, the key question is whether America gains more by embracing its dominance, than by accepting the view that it will more by agreeable and multilateral. Cela se discute.

Ayn Rand's demons

Cathy Young in the Globe and Mail on what she calls the darker sides of Ayn Rand:

(...) Ms. Rand's work also has a darker, more disturbing aspect – one that, unfortunately, is all too good a fit for this moment in America's political life. That is her intellectual intolerance and her tendency to demonize her opponents. Speaking through her hero John Galt, Ms. Rand declared, “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.” She lambasted free-market theorists such as Friedrich A. Hayek for their lack of purity in allowing the government a legitimate role in alleviating poverty and its effects. In her novels, supporters of various forms of collectivism – moochers and looters – are shown as acting by stealth to take over and corrupt society and culture.
Ms. Rand's detractors have often branded her a fascist. The label is unfair, but her work does have shades of a totalitarian or dictatorial mentality. To refute this charge, Ms. Rand's defenders point to her explicit statements that force is acceptable only in self-defence. Yet her fiction sometimes seems to contradict this principle.
Particularly troubling is a passage in Atlas Shrugged in which bureaucratic incompetence and arrogance lead to a deadly train wreck. Ms. Rand sarcastically notes that many people would regard the dead passengers as innocent victims of a tragedy and then, in a series of brief character sketches, endeavours to show that they were far from innocent: All had benefited from evil government programs, promoted evil political or philosophical ideas, or both. Especially chilling is Ms. Rand's casual mention of the fact that one of these evildoers, a bureaucrat's wife, is travelling with her three young children.
Ayn Rand does not advocate these people's murder, yet she clearly suggests they had it coming. Both in Atlas Shrugged and in her nonfiction essays, political and ideological debates are treated as wars with no innocent bystanders.

Americans almost always have trouble accepting that the people they idealized can be complex figures instead of just being people whose purity would force the Vatican should offer them  up for sainthood. That said, I think that Young's point about war and innocence is both poignant and relevant because it may explain the reason why so many Rand's true believers are never troubled by the violent inequalities of liberal capitalism whitewashing them with the assertion that life is Hobbesian and there is nothing that even politics can do or should attempt to do. In any case, the point is that Ayn Rand's work is relevant, but also limited because she was such a defender for the market that she was unwilling to even acknowledge that its imperfections were great enough that it had to be addressed by society not just through charity, but politics and yes, Government. For after, having a Government who actually focuses on what it can fix instead of managing people's lives and making them happy cannot be proof of the beginning of the Apocalypse.

Beckism and fascism

This line of reasoning from Sandy Levinson against Glenn Beck troubles me:

We are indeed in a true moment of cultural and political warfare, in which Glenn Beck has made very clear that he has no regard whatsoever for the most basic notions of civility (which begin by granting the possibility that one's opponents simply disagree rather than are "cancers" to be ripped out of the body politic).
What "Beckism" presages is more terrorist violence like that conducted in Austin, Texas, where a demented citizen flew into an IRS building and killed a true American "hero" a/k/a known as a public servant who had dedicated his life to tax collection. One might remember that Justice Holmes called taxes "the price we pay for civilization." Part of our move toward fascism is to view as "heroes" only those who carry guns and are prepared to risk their lives while preparing to inflict fatal violence on others. We must recognize that all public servants are, in their own ways, "heroes." The Republican Party for the past generation has systematically viewed all public servants, save for the military, as chumps, who if they had any real talent, would be working in the private sector (perhaps in Goldman Sachs, etc.). I truly fear for our country.

As despicable as I find Glenn Beck, I don't think he is Mussolini or Hitler. Beckism isn't a prelude to fascism or nazism, but simply a symption that in America, faux populism whether it comes from the right or the left works because it designates scapegoats for the increasing number of people who feel marginalized by the system. What surprises me is that many such as Levinson are voluntary becoming victims of historical amnesia  because they don't know how to fight Beckism. They don't have any answers for people who follow him precisely because they are angry about the fact that America no longer works for them and that he gives them answers that comfort their "conspirationist" world view. An analysis of the recent history of these types of angry popular/populist/fundamentalist movements show that branding them as fascist doesn't work for it doesn't confront the underlying issue which is that increasingly the American political system is seen as not dealing with pertinent issues. What Levinson ought to fear isn't the rise of "Beckist terrorism", but the widening gap between the elected and the electorate that would force people to turn to opportunistic figures such as Beck in order to explode the system. In one sentence, Beckism is just one of the symptoms of a more potent disease, which is ailing America.

Mugabe at 86

Mugabe is or is going to be 86 years old. Bob Marley, if he can watch what is happening nowadays, wishes surely that he could rewrite his famous song, which celebrated proudly the hard fought independence, which Zimbabweans seized from Britain by warning them against providential men who believe that they are the state and their country cannot survive without them.
What do you wish a dictator who was once a national hero and an example for other leaders on the continent and who has become just a vulgar racist, narcissist, and autocrat on his Eighty-sixth birthday? : to die the mouth open in his sleep as soon as possible so that there is no bloody coup or political revolution and so that his people can at last start to build their country without living in the past and hanging on to old resentments.

Official high priests of intelligence and American presidents

Sugary excerpt from Jurek Martin's review of Garry Wills's Bomb Power:The Modern Presidency and the National Security State in the Financial Times:

The cult of secrecy has afflicted every president since, not merely the paranoid, such as Richard Nixon. Even Jimmy Carter was not entirely immune – the abortive 1980 rescue mission to extricate the US hostages in Tehran was executed without advising even his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, who resigned. Wills is particularly hard on the Kennedy brothers’ obsession with deposing Fidel Castro, a mindset so blinkered that it failed to acknowledge the reality that Cubans liked their president (ditto Salvador Allende in Chile, etc). That fits with Robert McNamara’s much later admission that the US knew nothing of Vietnamese culture even as it was losing nearly 60,000 troops in the war.

Presidents, Wills persuasively argues, have fallen into the trap of listening only to the official high priests of intelligence. Those without prized security clearance are somehow considered inferior, if not ignorant, even if proved right. That was the proposed sanction against Oppenheimer for opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb. To be in-the-know is to be omniscient. The Pentagon Papers, the in-house review of the Vietnam War published only after the Supreme Court so ordered, contained no state secrets. But they were highly classified and thus, for government, unfit for consumption by friend or foe.

But the organic growth of the national security state needed theoreticians and they comprise Wills’s large Hall of Infamy. It was the (ironically conservative) Reagan justice department, under attorney-general Edwin Meese, that developed the theory of the “unitary executive” – which basically says that the law is anything that the president says it is. This produced a welter of “signing statements” in which a president says he can disregard, for whatever reason, any section of a duly passed congressional bill he has just, er, signed.

African coups d’état

Appalling and despairing fact from Brian Whitaker:

Over the last 60 years Africa has witnessed more than 80 coups, though worldwide the number is declining. While it would be nice to attribute this decline to the onward march of democracy, there are other factors at work too.
In some countries, for instance, there is no need for the military to show their hand directly. They have enough influence behind the scenes to ensure that only "acceptable" civilian leaders can form a government. Often this is a better option for the military than seizing power themselves because it serves their interests while giving an appearance of legitimacy.
Establishing legitimacy is a major problem in the traditional kind of coup – which is why some plotters use more subtle methods.(... )Another factor is that traditional military coups are probably becoming more difficult to organise. The successful ones these days tend to be in out-of-the-way places, like Niger, where the state apparatus is still fairly rudimentary.

Sniffing the ashes of Communism

Sugary excerpt from Enda O'Doherty's review of Uncivil Society by Stephen Kotkin in the Dublin Review of books:

The chief practical flaw of communism, however, has not been the absence of public-spirited individuals, or even the failure of Socialist Man to develop into a perfect being, but the persistence of the need for repression. Many individuals, whether fortunately or unfortunately, have a tendency to put themselves and their families first in any economic calculation. They may also have a little room in their hearts for their neighbours, or even “society” ‑ but it will not normally be the best room. Such people of course, particularly if they are stubborn, stand in the way of creating a classless society and may have be dealt with, through expulsion, intimidation, imprisonment or, in extreme cases (or just to be sure), liquidation. These measures will be carried out by a new class of servants of the regime, whose most prized quality will be loyalty, and who will be decently rewarded for that loyalty. It would be equally foolish to entrust administration of the state’s industrial or agricultural enterprises or indeed of its education system or entertainment channels to people who because of their known attitudes or class backgrounds are unlikely to be completely reliable. Here too loyalty, rather than drive or intelligence, will be the key requirements. And thus we are well on the way to a creating a society where, in the analysis of its most virulent opponents, stupidity rises to the top (but perhaps we should be a little sceptical of that reading too: extreme stupidity is unlikely to make it quite to the top in any society). Excessively stupid or not, we will have a non-performing society, and one where the abuse of power is routine and goes unpunished.

 (...) The collapse of the communist states has also, more or less, entailed the collapse of communism as an ideology and of communist parties and with that the disappearance of the idea that capitalist society could be destroyed or replaced. Social democracy has (at best) a meliorist programme; Trotskyism, which retains a certain ability to recruit among the young, is politically little more than a joke (though at times an annoying one). There are many people nevertheless whom the triumph of capitalism (seen in its ability to survive politically virtually unchallenged even at a time of severe systemic crisis) does not fill with unalloyed joy. Where communism wants to give you butcher’s shops called “Meat”, capitalism gives you five thousand brands of shampoo (not to mention talk radio). It seems, however, that the only practical choice is between bearing this idiocy cheerfully and engaging in a form of personal inward withdrawal. If capitalism ever does collapse it will have been due to an inability to master its own anarchic tendencies. And we may well like even less what we get instead.

What I find fascinating is that although Communism (and I believe Socialism) is dead, it's still very much alive in people's mind. The reason for this fact is that Neoliberalism gave it, willingly in my opinion, a new legitimacy in order to create new monsters to slay and to make the perpetual point that Fukuyama was right and that we are indeed living the end of history since even the most brutal regimes believe in some form of the market. Unlike Alain Badiou and others who are living in the past in order to create the possibility of a new future, I don't believe that history is solely about repetitions (I have Hannah Arendt and René Char to thank for that conviction) or continuity and that it is impossible to create something new without  sniffing some of the ashes of Communism by trying to perfect its old model or trying to humanize it or perfect it. I'm coming to the conclusion with some regrets that the relevance of Communism or of even socialism is a proof that our times has run out of imagination, at least in the political sphere and that explains what it is focusing either on fear, the old, the past or simply and more alarmingly in my view fluff.  At some point, I hope somebody of influence will simply stop the discussion and say in more convincing manner than Walter Mondale in 1984, "Where is the beef?"

Grand Frère France

This worries:

The lower house of the French parliament has approved a draft bill that will allow the state unprecedented control over the Internet. Although the government says it will improve security for ordinary citizens, civil rights activists are warning of a "new level" of censorship and surveillance.
For members of the French administration, it is a law against digital crime. For civil rights activists and politicians from opposition parties, it is a plan for censorship that excites fear and loathing -- and even conjures up the specter of Big Brother and the surveillance state.
The lower house of the French parliament, the National Assembly, passed the first draft of the bill, known as "Loppsi 2," on Tuesday. It will now go on for a second reading in the Senate, where it seems likely to pass, thanks to the government's majority. If the Senate approves the bill, the new law could come into force as early as this summer. The legislation could have far-reaching consequences: Loppsi 2 contains rules that would make France the European country where the Internet is subject to the most censorship, regulation, control and surveillance.

What gets to me is how easy Loppsi 2 was to pass. This frightening fact underscores two critical reality about France. First, Internet has become the fundamental political,cultural and economical tool, which political, cultural, and economical elites want to control before it undermines totally their influence and their ability to remain "the ones". Second, there is no organized and vital opposition to Sarkozy despite his increasing unpopularity. Whatever one can say about Sarkozy, he has total control of his side while the opposition whether it is in civil society or elsewhere is too busy focusing about what they don't like about each other as if it matters since they don't have any power without offering a credible alternative that would at least tear down the new myth that there is no alternative to Sarkozysm.

The Al Jazeera effect

Noah Bonsey and Jeff Koogler on the increasing influence of Al Jazeera on Mideast politics ore especially the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict:

For Americans seeking to understand Al Jazeera’s role in shaping public opinion, it is perhaps useful to compare the channel to Fox News or MSNBC. Al Jazeera largely reports the facts, but in choosing which stories to highlight and which guests to invite on regularly, it betrays a certain political perspective. Of course, whereas Fox News and MSNBC operate in a highly competitive media environment, Al Jazeera is the main source of news for a majority of Palestinians and is the most popular television channel in the Arab world. This maximizes its influence. Indeed, Al Jazeera’s dominance of the Arab media makes it a political force unto itself. In no place is this more true than in the Palestinian arena, where it focuses much of its news coverage and where its market share is particularly strong.

No wonder, the Obama administration has chosen to have closer ties with Al Jazeera through   détente rather than conflict and confrontation.

Institutional anti-racism

It's been a long time since I've heard arguments about institutional anti-racism as pertinent the ones that Rod Liddle are making:

By ‘institutional anti-racism’ I do not mean people not being racist — that, we might all agree, is a good thing. I mean the state of mind which connives in wickedness, which is in a perpetual state of denial, which turns the other way, which does all this stuff because of the terror, the career-ending calumny, the shame of being accused of being ‘racist’.
(....)You can see institutional anti-racism pretty much wherever you look; as I mentioned last week, it is there in the closing down of any debate which touches upon race, unless it is to prove a charge of racism. It is there in the ludicrous sackings of people who are not remotely racist but who dare to speak their minds about issues concerning race; from the Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford back in the 1980s, to the Conservative MP Patrick Mercer — who, it should be remembered, was booted off the opposition front bench for suggesting that it was not unheard of for some sub-standard black soldiers in the army to use race as a weapon when challenged as to their poor performance. What a shocking thing to allege; who could believe it, etc.
And institutional anti-racism is there in a subtle but no less corrupting way in your office, right now, or maybe on your TV screen; the suspicion that someone has been given promotion, or preference, or leeway, because they are not white and that as a consequence someone else has been done down. It is there in what sometimes seems to be an over-representation of non-white people on the news programmes, or in drama productions and that in both cases these people are treated a little differently because of their supposedly defining non-whiteness. And sometimes all of this is a misperception, and then again, sometimes it isn’t. Who knows? Either way, it springs from the same source.

Institutional anti-racism cannot be distinguished form institutional racism with institutional racism for it poses the same questions about meritocracy, societal ethics and the use of unkosher categories and criteria to promote or to punish individuals. The trouble is that it is an issue more difficult and less sexy to address than the racism/anti-racism of people because it is harder to shame, to guilt, and to silence institutions into a political correct behavior or into an accommodating silence than powerful institutions. As I get older and I hope wiser, I have the feeling that the issue of racism/anti-racism is not even close from being the issue of our times, it is one too potent and too flashily empty who blinds people from more pertinent ones such as equity and social justice. Of course, the reality is that in heterogeneous societies everywhere, people talk about racism/anti-racism really to question the distribution of power in order to avoid developing more substantive and universal (and in my view more convincing) arguments to delegimate/legitimate a power structure and the powerful.

Enduring colonial legacy

I would like to agree with Tsenay Serequeberhan on this, but I do not and I have to say that the fixation of some of Colonization as if it has to the defining moment of all people who come/live/originate from Africa is bugging me :

European colonialism was established in the belief that “superior races” have the privilege and the duty to civilize the less fortunate, “inferior races.” The “ideological pacification” of the colonized occurs when this insidious and humiliating idea is decisively implanted in African psyches and is accepted by Africans as their destiny. As Frantz Fanon put it: “In the colonial context, the colonizer does not stop his work of breaking in [d’éreintement] the colonized until the latter admits loudly and clearly the supremacy of white values.” Long after the end of colonialism, this “breaking” goes on paying handsome dividends to our former colonizers. It secures indirect, but effective, hegemonic control of the periphery—that segment of the world which, by virtue of its broken heritage, presently occupies this marginal position. Broken docility! Is this, then, our postcolonial condition?
To date, the most enduring cultural legacy of colonialism has been this broken sector of African society that has internalized the colonial model of human existence and history. This is the segment that, on the whole, rules contemporary Africa. Not grounded in an indigenous history, but the residual dregs of colonial Europe, it has, as the yardstick of its existence, what lies beyond its shores. This is what Fanon refers to as the worship of the “Greco-Latin pedestal.”

Haiti, Guilt and self-reliance

Naomi Klein on Haiti and the "West's" debt to it:

Our [the West's]  debt to Haiti stems from four main sources: slavery, the US occupation, dictatorship and climate change. These claims are not fantastical, nor merely rhetorical. They rest on multiple violations of legal norms.

I would like to agree with Klein , but I cannot because her views creates the dangerous notion that the "West" is guilty for every disaster and for the underdevelopment of every country on the face of the earth. Of course, it shares some responsibility, but guilt is something that ought to be left in the religious sphere. The incessant  and unfortunately too prevalent arguments that the poor of the world should blame the West and powerful forces for their condition may be popular in some corners, but it is more emasculating and more paternalistic than the concept of the "White man's burden" ever was. The truth of the matter is that Haiti and Haitians to move forward need to avoid the dependency and the victim trap by taking aid while developing rapidly self-reliance and understanding that the world not matter how charitable it can be will in the short term can only care about them for so long and will never develop their country for them. Even if it were possible, why should Haitians want to have others do everything for them as if there was something crippling and cursed within the Haitian spirit that made it unable to do the heavy lifting and to take control of the destiny of their country.