The Republic of Dissent

The intolerable notion of sin in politics

Disturbing quote from Yasmin Albhai-Brown:

In international politics, too, memories roam and fuel conduct. Take the very moving film about a white farming family in Zimbabwe this week. What was the back-story, the historical decisions and power grabs that created the civil enmities? We Ugandan Asians were cruelly dispossessed by Idi Amin in Uganda, but we too must ask why so many Africans ended up hating us – our racism and economic greed consumed them and they then behaved abominably. And the British need to acknowledge their role in the making of leviathans like Mugabe and Amin.

According to Alibhai-Brown's logic,  the original sin is always more important than anything else that follows and the real culprits are never doers who fit a particular profile or share a certain history but rather those who should have stopped them or who enabled them or had the power over them once upon a time. In short, Mugabe and Amin were creatures of the Brits who don't have the right to judge them because they are the original sinners.

Scary and distressing logic, which divides the world between the powerful who are always guilty of something because the sinful past and the weak who always have an excuse for doing the unconscionable. In short, the notion of sin in politics is a limited, destructive and misguided one which just facilitates intellectual masturbation and other self-indulgences.

Secularism and anti-enlightenment

Quote of the day is Melanie Phillips :

(...) in certain areas science has overreached itself by trying to play God, and as a result has turned into an ideology. Contrary to popular myth, Western science was not created by Enlightenment secularism. It grew out of the revolutionary claim in the Bible that the universe was the product of a rational Creator, who endowed man with reason so that he could ask questions about the natural world. With the rise of secularism, the striking thing is that people didn’t lose the drive to believe. They stopped having religious faith — but that drive was diverted instead into the creation of a wide variety of secular religions, otherwise known as ideologies. But these are the true enemies of truth and reason.

There are no Western values

I agree with Kenan Malik on this:

what we now regard as "Western values" – individual rights, secularism, freedom of speech – are modern values, distinct from those that animated European societies in the past. And it's not just medieval Europeans who would reject contemporary European values. Many contemporary Europeans do too. The British writer Melanie Phillips is militantly hostile to what she sees as the "Islamic takeover of the West" and what she calls "the drift towards social suicide" that comes with accepting Muslim immigration. Yet she is deeply sympathetic to the Islamist rejection of secular humanism, which she thinks has created "a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets." Muslims "have concluded that the society that expects them to identify with it is a moral cesspit", Phillips argues. "Is it any wonder, therefore, that they reject it?" Caldwell, too, thinks that while the West's current encounter with Islam may be "painful and violent", it has also been, "an infusion of oxygen into the drab, nitpicking, materialist intellectual life of the West", for which we need to express our "gratitude".
There is, in other words, no single set of European values that transcends history in opposition to Islamic values. Nor indeed is there a single set of western values today. The very values against which radical Islamists rail – the values of secular humanism – are the very values that so disgust some of Islam's greatest critics.

Exporting elections

Simon Jenkins on the exportation of democracy to others countries:

The west's proudest export to the Islamic world this past decade has been democracy. That is, not real democracy, which is too complicated, but elections. They have been exported at the point of a gun and a missile to Iraq and Afghanistan, to "nation-build" these states and hence "defeat terror". When apologists are challenged to show some good resulting from the shambles, they invariably reply: "It has given Iraqis and Afghans freedom to vote."

I'm wondering if it is possible to argue with a straight that Afghanistan and Iraq are sustainable democracies, meaning that their citizens have as many political choices as Americans for example.

Democracy as a means not an end

Adrian Hamilton's on the promotion of Democracy in foreign affairs:

Democracy, like any other political system, is ultimately about power. And for those with power it becomes a means of retaining their position. For authoritarian regimes in particular, with control of the registration and voting procedures, elections are used as a means of asserting their authority not a way of challenging it. It is what is happening in Sudan and in Burma. It's how President Karzai saw it in Afghanistan and how President Mugabe took it in Zimbabwe. Far from being threatened by the vote, they see it as a stick with which to beat back domestic opposition and foreign criticism.
The trouble is that so much of Western pressure on countries to introduce democracy actually aids authoritarian regimes in this approach. Elections are made the condition of approval of aid or diplomatic relations. They are then seized on as a useful gesture by the governments concerned, who see that they can turn them to their own advantage, while other power groups look to them as a means of furthering their own interests.
Of course the outside world tries to ensure fairness with observers and rules. But they are inevitably caught up in the politics of place which they don't usually understand and have little control over. Worse, the desire by the Western world to show progress and open up communication means that they are very reluctant to call a dud election a sham.

I agree with Adrian Hamilton that Democracy is a means, not an end, and that realities on the ground matter, but I disagree with his attempt to make particularities an universality without placing the emphasis on the fact that matters, which is the consent of the governed.

The Taliban aren't Islamists

Pertinent observations from Adam Curtis on Afghanistan and the Taliban:

There is a growing sense in the West that we no longer know what we are fighting for in Afghanistan. The question that is almost never asked is what they are fighting for? What do the Taliban want?
We are told that we are fighting to prevent terrorist attacks in Europe and America. But the reality is that the Taliban have no interest in attacking the West. In the public imagination and in much journalism the Taliban are seen as exactly the same as political Islamists such as bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri. The truth is that they are the very opposite of each other.
The radical Islamists see themselves as modern revolutionaries. They want to reshape Islam and fuse it with the modern world of science, technology and mass politics to create a new kind of society. The Taliban rose up because they thought the Islamists had failed to do this. And instead the Taliban decided to go back into the past and try and reinvent an old world.

My observation is while I believe that Afghanistan is not a winnable war, I'm wondering whether the sole consideration about assessing the Taliban should be the threat that they pose to the 'west.' In any case, that's a choice for the Afghans to decide. Still while agreeing that humanitarian intervention is a thing of the past, I'm thinking/hoping that they ought to be a way for other countries to show that they disapprove of the values of the Taliban without belittling the Afghans and using well-intentioned paternalism.

The global war on crime

I agree with this:

America must recognise that not all the terror its suffers from abroad is the work of terrorists. Since the destruction of the twin towers in 2001, the West has been so consumed by terrorism that it has focused insufficiently on criminality. Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions,North Korea, Albania, the Balkans — these and other failed or failing states demand at least as much of our attention. If oil-rich but tottering Nigeria, for instance, were to tumble, the impact on both Africa and the world would be catastrophic.
These are not necessarily terrorist havens, but their actions can have terrifying consequences for the West none the less. It is time the war on terror was matched more rigorously by a global war on crime.

I think that the single-minded focus on terrorism has been to the detriment of the fight against so many crimes, which have also dangerous consequences. The point is that single-mindedness is never an effective way to ensure security and political stability in a world that is too integrated, too complicated, too interdependent for its ills to be solved solely by the 'war on terror.'

Burqa wearers

Fascinating stuff from Andrew Brown:

In France, where there is an inflamed debate on the matter right now, the first investigation carried out by the police last year found that there were 367 women in France who wore burka or Niqab – 0.015% of the population. This was so low that the secret service was told to count again, and came up with a figure of 2,000; in Holland there seem to be about 400, and in Sweden a respectable guess suggests 100. The most fascinating figure of all, though, came from the Danish researchers, who actually interviewed some of the covered women. Most were young, or at least under forty, and half of them were white converts. I think this makes it entirely clear that in modern Europe the burka is not an atavistic hangover, but a very modern gesture of disaffection from and rejection of society, which appeals to a certain kind of extreme temperament.

If those stats are right, it means in my opinion that banning the Burka/burqa is even more of an invitation for women who want to make a point to wear it as an act of defiance and of rejection of 'modern' society. The question that I have then is whether the Burqa/Burka becomes less threatening to the usual suspects if it isn't a symbol of women's submision or of a proof of Islamisation, but simply an instrument of rebellion? My answer is that it doesn't matter for what a woman wants to wear is her business and should never become a matter for the state or for a religion.

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.

Bringing Congo to London

Great stuff from Jon Day:

The Congolese embassy, a shabby unassuming building at the insalubrious end of Gray’s Inn Road, is very different again. I used to go there regularly, on jobs from mining companies asking permission to get digging. Occasionally, I’d share the waiting-room with immaculately dressed Sapeurs, flamboyantly suited and booted fashionistas who’d wait in line clasping ornate canes and wearing Davey Crocket hats. More often than not, I’d be alone. But I’d often clock up an hour’s waiting while the correct stamp was being located, or the right person came back from lunch. I don’t know if any of the visas I subsequently delivered turned out to be fakes.
The embassy was set alight in 2007, in an arson attack allegedly perpetrated by supporters of Combattants de Londres, a group dedicated to preventing Congolese musicians who support Joseph Kabila from performing in Europe. Embassy staff were evicted from their homes in 2008 as no one had paid the rent. Ovens, clothing and furniture filled the embassy’s waiting room for months. The hallway leading into the building remains blackened by fire, and the burnt smell still lingered in the air the last time I was there.

Something is wrong with this reality, but I don't have the words to formulate it because I believe that it would be too painfully simple to say that we are uniquely the product of our environment.

Geert Wilders as a freedom fighter

Toby Young, my favorite judge of Top Chef, defends Geert Wilders in the Daily Telegraph by arguing that he is a freedom of speech warrior:

are the Dutch people just fed up with being told they’re not allowed to criticise Muslim extremists because to do so is “Islamophobic”? As a defender of free speech, I don’t believe for one moment that the Koran ought to be banned. But if I was a member of the Dutch electorate I would vote for Geert Wilders’ party nonetheless because I don’t think he deserves to go to jail for 16 months just for arguing that it should.
Wilders doesn’t really want to ban the Koran, of course. It’s a theatrical gesture — a situationist move — designed to underline the absurdity of trying to limit freedom of speech on the grounds that certain words or phrases or images might move people to violence. What Wilders is saying is that if you believe the critics of Muslim extremism should be silenced because their words might incite religious hatred, then, logically, you ought to ban the Koran on the same grounds. It’s not a serious suggestion, so much as a reductio ad absurdum of a completely untenable, illiberal position.

It is for precisely this reason that I have always believed that European countries are wrong to attempt to censor what they consider to be hate speech or speech denying certain historical events such as the Shoah. Hate-speech laws or any other laws that try to limit free speech based on its content always make the extremist the victim. Moreover, they force people such as Toby Young who likes to provoke and who believe that freedom of speech is the most sacred of values to defend Geert Wilders without seeking to see behind the trees. Guided by his orthodoxy about free speech,  Young is convinced that Wilders can only be right because that it is always absolutely unjust to try to shut somebody hate because society doesn't like what he is saying or finds it too distasteful. It isn't an erroneous positon to take, just a limited and an absurd one because the conclusion seems to be that victims of censorship are always and absolutely right or rather they cannot be right or even extremist.

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.

Europe and Nation-building

Christopher Chivvis argues that Europeans are bad at Nation-building when it ought to do its best to be good at it to make a necessary contribute to wars which America is fighting most alone in the name of the "West" since it is so unwilling to fight in them:

Civilian work is now widely recognized as an essential ingredient in addressing security challenges around the world. Weak states need people who know how to investigate a murder, run a prison system, collect customs and other taxes, and generally keep a state bureaucracy up and running. There is little point in pacifying a country militarily if its infrastructure, courts, fiscal controls, and health systems are so feeble that chaos returns the moment the troops leave.
Europe seems particularly well-suited for this kind of work. Not only is the European Union the gravitational center of Europe's foreign economic power, Europe is home to some of the most skilled legal, administrative, and law enforcement experts in the world.
Unfortunately, the European Union is failing to live up to its potential. Unless it expands its efforts by taking on more ambitious projects, with larger staff and bigger budgets, the age-old dream of transforming the EU into a civilian power will falter, just as its military prowess continues to decline. NATO -- and the mission in Afghanistan -- will suffer along with it. In its first five years of existence, the EU sent civilian experts to 13 war-torn countries. This sounds impressive, but the vast majority of these missions had fewer than 80 staff members, and most lasted less than a year. Some had little or no impact on the ground.

Is it just me or does Europe seem like the perfect scapegoat for the lack of a viable military strategy in Afghanistan and elsewhere that would lead to victory? What Chivvis does is too easy and in a way cheap because it blames Europeans for been bad at something that it is hard to be good at especially when their countries have an history of being colonizers. I guess one gets historical amnesia when one is looking for culprits.

The dead ends of history

The Economist has a great article on the ex-Communist Europeans countries and the fact that they are leaving their History behind as they move forward:

For the past 20 years, the countries of this region have been involved in what might be called "therapeutic historiography": tearing up old communist propaganda versions of history, and writing new ones. That has been an exhilarating, messy and sometimes disconcerting process. For Estonians and Latvians, for example, it meant the chance to honour those (heroes or victims, but not villains) who fought against the impending Soviet occupation in 1944-45. Yet many outsiders see these men as no more than Nazi collaborators: they wore uniforms of the SS, the epitome of wartime evil, and served alongside some war criminals. Context and comparison (far more Russians than Balts fought on Hitler's side) become irrelevant.
Slovaks and Croats want to de-demonise their wartime republics (Nazi puppet states from one viewpoint, a snatched breath of national regeneration from another). Germans and Jews, once seemingly vanished from the region, have emerged from the shadows (and from abroad), with their own unhappy memories that undermine the self-righteousness of both Communist and ethno-nationalist versions of history.
(...) Now central and eastern Europe may be joining the club of the ahistorical and apathetic. Historical rows are already the exception, not the rule. Poland is the signal example.

Usually, when the past is a source of shame or rather cannot be one of pride, it dies for those whose memory is too fresh to reinvent it. It is a lot easier to become ahistorical and even apathetic when you believe that the present is better than the past and than the future will be even better. The point is that former Communist countries for the most part feel that they are a lot to look forward to and that they may even be the future of Europe to make an indirect reference to Rumsfeld's provocative statement that there was an old and a new Europe.

The Others

No comment necessary to discuss this "it is US against Them" mindset illustrated by Marty Peretz's comments except a brief one to wonder about its policy implications and its usefulness, well maybe those are just foolish/wimpish considerations:

Why are so many liberal Democrats reluctant to concede that there is an intricate international network of ideological gangsters who recognize each other as ikhwan? These brothers do not define themselves by nation. They define themselves by religion, although there are many hundreds of millions of Muslims who are defined out--and define themselves out--of the bloody fraternity of the faithful. Sometimes, they too are stigmatized as enemies, which means they are also targets. And, of course, there are the boundaries of sect, in which Sunnis commit mass murder of Shi’a at prayer (and vice versa).
Then there are the other designated victims: outsiders … us. Not just Westerners and certainly not just Americans. Or Jews, for that matter, although they have a very special place in the demonology of Islam, and particularly in the armed demonology of Islam. Jihad.

The honor of primitive manliness

James Bowman on what it means to be a real man and the fact that it has to do with primitiveness (that's my characterization):

A hundred years ago, when the Western honor culture still existed, it was well-recognized that part of what it meant to be a real man was to respect women and to be ashamed to pick on those weaker than or different from oneself. It also meant being able — in a now almost forgotten phrase — "to hold one’s liquor" and, where the honor culture was at its strongest, it also meant being good at one’s studies. There may never have been a very large number of those who could be described as "a gentleman and a scholar," but there were few who didn’t recognize that having such a description applied to oneself was one of the highest of compliments.

When I read something as uncultured as Bowman's assertion, my first instinct is to appeal to the guy upstairs that only lives in the imagination of the unimaginative and then I just come to the realization that the real problem here is that only men are allowed to find honor in their primitiveness even when it means embracing  the beast within.

The past can kill the future

Aaah, it never stops, but "it" I mean the paternalist and irresponsible assertion that Haïti has been a country doomed from the very start of its existence (unlike the US?) and that its sad present is the fateful consequence of its cursed history. Here is another example from Christophe Wargny in Le Monde Diplomatique:

Haiti continues to pay dearly for the circumstances surrounding its unwanted birth, between 1802-4. The West, led by Napoleonic France, attempted to kill this bastard child of the French Revolution, and it endured a terrible war of independence. Haiti had the only slave revolt that led to the creation of a state, born through rejection of French colonial power.

France could not accept such defeat, which represented a stain on Napoleon’s reputation as well as the loss of commercial revenues. Saint-Domingue, as it was known, was in 1789 France’s wealthiest colony, producing half the world’s sugar. Nineteenth century Europe could not tolerate such emancipation. Nor could the infant US, a land of slave owners, cope with the idea of such a nation at its gates. There was only one solution: to forbid it to exist.

The Ethnicization of terrorism

Thought-provoking point from Paddy Hillyard in his long essay on the difficulty of defining terrorism, which advocates the replacement of terrorism, bu the term "political violence":

By defining many different and disparate politically violent groups together under one label, a relationship is established where none may have existed in the past. The label itself enhances the status of every minor group and encourages the further use of political violence. The enemy, “Al-Qaeda,” has been constituted as “the other,” making it easy to capture under its umbrella a whole range of acts of political violence which have very different motivations and contextual features, but all supposedly coordinated by a man in a cave who gave up using a cell phone years ago. The term “Axis of Evil” has extended the umbrella to include the PLO, Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas and more recently Iran and Yemen. A further discursive turn occurred with the use of the adjective Muslim or Islamic in front of the term creating dozens of suspect nations, thousands of suspect communities and millions of suspect individuals.
There is nothing in new appending an ethnic or racial description to terrorism. During the troubles in Northern Ireland journalists and some academics used the term “Irish terrorism.” The detention process for many started with a form stamped with the words “Irish Suspect” — a term sufficiently ambiguous as to which is the noun in the phrase — that a police officer could either consider the individual in racist terms or the whole of the Irish race. At UK airports and ports Irish people were separated out from other passengers for checking with signs that stated “Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland passengers this way,” further increasing the general public’s suspicion of Irish people. Security experts are now arguing that the same procedures should be introduced at all airports for Muslims.

The issue is that almost everybody stops to be rational when it comes to their safety. Terrorism is a term that is as popular as the use of the word "evil" in America because it is simple and because it appeals to whatever within our human nature that will always want to be safe rather than to be sorry. It just happens that the ethnicization of terrorism is about being safe and will never stop as long as people believe that it works  and  that it is simply based on common sense.

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.”

Afghan war strategies

Mick Hume on the Afghanistan war and the total absence of a coherent and permanent military strategy :

From the first, the West’s latest adventure in Afghanistan has been a war without a clear casus belli, launched after 9/11 and sustained without a central strategic purpose – Anti-terrorism? Democracy? Women’s rights? Anti-drugs? – against enemy or enemies uncertain (...). It has long looked like a war fought as an end in itself, the only real aim of which is to reassert the authority of America and its allies and provide them with an ersatz sense of mission. Inevitably, it has done the opposite, exposing the absence of any coherent worldview or clue as to what they are doing in Washington or Whitehall.
Now the self-defeating mission-free military occupation of Afghanistan is reaching new depths of absurdity. First US president Obama announced a fresh ‘surge’ of American forces into the battle-zone – at the same time as floating plans for a withdrawal from 2011. Hence NATO simultaneously appeared to declare war and admit defeat (...). Now NATO has fanfared its largest Afghan offensive since 2001 – a campaign, according to reports, ‘to impose government control on rebel areas before US forces start to withdraw by [President Obama’s] self-imposed 2011 deadline’. So, it’s total war! Until, er, next year, then we’re off. In the meantime we have given the rebels fair warning we were coming, and a timetable to go away and think about….
Who needs the Taliban anyway when the West is evidently so capable of outwitting and defeating itself? We are left, not for the first time, facing the worst of all worlds – an occupation without purpose, a dangerous military offensive without goals, a war without causes but plenty of casualties.

The problem with the Afghan war for the US and NATO has always been that its only goal can only be nation building and that it is next to impossible to build a state as occupying powers in a country that has a history of resisting to the death occupation. i don't even think that Obama believes that in twenty years, there will be an Afghan that will be an ally of the United States where there will no longer terrorist threats. On the contrary, he is focused on the short-term and what the "defeatism" and weak image that he would give to Americans if he chooses to withdraw from two wars (Iraq included) by declaring that they are unwinnable, even though experience on the ground shows that they are more than likely or that decades of American blood and treasure to fight to even entertain of the possibility of victory, which seems to be a hollow term in this context.

Fukuyamism 2.2

Francis Fukuyama in the Spectator on current events, history, and the future of democracy (hat tip: Hattie Garlick):

I think that even in the wake of the Ukrainian election and other recent reverses, the future of democracy is not so bleak. In the first place, democracy remains, in Amartya Sen’s words, the ‘default’ political condition: ‘While democracy is not yet universally practised, nor indeed universally accepted, in the general climate of world opinion democratic governance has achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.’ Very few people around the world openly profess to admire Putin’s petro-nationalism, or Chavez’s ‘21st-century socialism,’ or Ahmedinejad’s Islamic Republic.
(....)The next phase of global history will be a challenging one, as America and Europe stumble to get back their economic balance. It seems doubtful that either the US or Britain will achieve the degree of growth in the next generation that they did in the previous one. But one of the great advantages of democracy is that it does not depend for its legitimacy on continuing high levels of economic growth, as the Chinese system does.
As we move forward, it is important to keep in mind the simple power of the idea of a government by, for, and of the people. We need to match those high ideals with unglamorous but steady investments in institution-building if liberal democracy is to deliver on its promises.

It is good to see that since The End of History, Fukuyama has become timid about making bold and grand predictions about the future. However, the problem is that he has become so timid that he is no longer original so busy that he is to cleanse his reputation from his original sin, which was to have the arrogance to assert that history had ended, and from the fact that he, maybe in spite of himself, inspired Neoconservatism. To come back to his essay in the Spectator, the problem that I have with it is its shortsightedness and its author's unwillingness to ask the grand question, which is whether societies who are dominated by the market can remain Democratic no in the superficial sense of the world, but in Tocqueville's sense of it. If corporations are people and can greater influence in politics because they have more money, if the electorate's vote is solely based on identity politics,  if not all voices are represented in a representative Democracy, is  such a political system still democratic and can we really ignore its shortcomings by arguing in a Thatcherite and autocratic fashion that there is no alternative? Unfortunately, Fukuyama, in my opinion purposely, offers no answers and furthermore and that is most disappointing, he doesn't even allude to those problems by pretending that the crux of the future legitimacy of democracy is elsewhere.  

The disappointment des imbéciles heureux

Reading Johann Hari express his disappointment at Obama’s foreign policy choices reminds me of the tourists who go to every market in Morocco or elsewhere to buy all the old lamps expecting one of them to be magical and who, later on, explain that they were duped when none are :

The revelations this week about how the CIA and British authorities handed over a suspected jihadi to torturers in Pakistan may sound at first glance like a hangover from the Bush years. Barack Obama was elected, in part, to drag us out of this trap – but in practice he is dragging us further in. He is escalating the war in Afghanistan, and has taken the war to another Muslim country. The CIA and hired mercenaries are now operating on Obama's orders inside Pakistan, where they are sending unarmed drones to drop bombs and sending secret agents to snatch suspects.

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.

A Dark continent

Provocative words from Leo Igwe:

Part of the reason why Africans are deeply religious, spiritual and supernatural in outlook is because the people have given up hope of achieving justice and happiness in this life and in this world. (...)Justice is light and injustice is darkness. Eradicating injustice is an enlightening and illuminating process. So tackling unjust systems is critical to the growth and development of humanism in Africa. Today Africa is a dark continent not because there is something fundamentally wrong or lacking or extraordinary with the regional geography and weather conditions. Africa is a dark continent because of so many acts of injustice that reign supreme in the region. Africa is mired in darkness because of the reign of anomie, the terror of barbarism, the ubiquity of impunity, criminality and savage acts.
Unfortunately, Africans always point accusing fingers on colonialism and imperialism for injustices on the continent. As if there were no unjust acts or systems in Africa before its contact and ‘corruption’ by the outside world. When it comes to analyzing and addressing Africa’s problems and predicament, colonialism is always a cop-out or an alibi. Imperialism is a reason or an excuse Africans always tender to avoid responsibility- accepting or taking responsibility for their mistakes and failures.
Africans always comfortably prefer blaming the West and the whites for their woes and troubles. Surely, injustices predate and post date colonialism in Africa. Unjust acts have been going on in Africa for ages.

The trouble is not that Igwe is right, but that he isn't wrong.

Human rights and the deification of traditions

Tzvetan Todorov on human rights:

I’m not against human rights. Who could be against human rights? But I’m a little sceptical about their use. It seems to be that the preliminary of human rights is indeed something that we should cherish very much, which is the capacity of finding a common ground. I observe, however, and I think that’s why I have this sceptical view, that human rights nowadays are used as a kind of instrument for justifying our Western superiority. And as soon as we observe that somewhere rights are not exactly accepted in the same way, we consider these countries definitely inferior and maybe even deserving punishment.
I think that we in the West are very proud of our traditions and justly so, but we still have a lot to learn from the Chinese traditions, from the African traditions, from all sorts of ways of being elsewhere. We need to pay attention to these rather than extracting one savage habit such as clitoridectomy, and say, “Well, how can you do that?”

I disagree with him for two simple reasons. The first is that I don't think that there is such a place as the "West" and the rest for this distinction comes from the denial of the reality that the world is too small and the west has become the rest and vice versa. This fact doesn't mean that we are all the same, but rather that differences cannot longer be sacred and justified by invoking a glorified past or unchallengeable faith in the divine. My second reason for disagreeing with Todorov is that although I'm to acknowledging the human rights are problematic especially in the sphere of international affairs, that reality doesn't mean that cultural differences are legitimate excuses/justifications for barbarism and cruelty. Culture doesn't justify anything and more importantly, traditions can be barbaric, grotesque, and unique without using the human rights criteria or comparing them to what others or to use a lauded term "civilized" people do. It is always important to pay attention to savage habits because they affect more often than not an incredible amount of people.

The neverending culpability of the West

What is wrong with Karen Armstrong? When she writes about her experience at a conference in Cairo, I have to wonder in what she lives:

(...)if the professors felt so enraged, what on earth could it be like on the streets of Cairo, where this level of frustration, aggravated by economic and political discontent, could make many people easy targets for extremist propaganda?
But the mood of our conference changed. During the last session an American theologian managed, with some difficulty, to take the floor and spoke on behalf of us all. We had, he said, been deeply impressed by the pain in the room; we knew that "the eight horrible years of George W Bush" had inflicted grave damage on the region, and would do everything in our power to work with Al-Azhar for a better future. Immediately, one of the most vitriolic of our assailants responded with generosity and the conference was finally able to issue a firm and positive joint resolution.
So far, Obama has not given the concrete sign that we felt was essential. But the Chilcot inquiry has also raised hopes. If there is any hint of whitewash or cover-up, the consequent disillusion will only exacerbate an already inflamed situation. In Cairo, we discovered that a frank acknowledgment of culpability could turn things around. In our dangerously polarised world, we may not get such an opportunity again.

Wow....I think that for one Karen Armstrong is way to religious to understand the Camusian difference between culpability and responsibility, and she fails to get the fact the problem here isn't for the west to acknowledge some type of culpability to turn things around in the streets of Cairo or Islamabad, but rather to live by its own ideals while stopping to treat the poor as victims and as incapable of taking control of their own destiny.  Karen Armstrong has a Mother Theresa like view of international affairs for she believes in guilt, in atonement and in all the disturbing sentiments, which always to Imperialism, paternalism, and just wars, which are later found to be unwinnable. The point here is that the "West" which doesn't exist except in the mind of those who love to divide the world into archaic categories doesn't have to bear a cross for the fact that shit happens and that more often that not, it strays away from the least unjust path because it is too complex and because it believes that national interests justify the use of any means. Thus, the question here is solely one of responsibility and of the continuation of Hobbes's state of nature in spite of progress and modernity. To put things simply: should we just accept that we are all barbarians and be done with ethics and accept that might makes right.
The goal of the Chilcot inquiring shouldn't be the same as those Witch trials in Salem that is to burn the guilty to appease angry mobs. The aim should be to make those who had power to assume responsibility of their mistakes in judgment and more importantly to force the electorate to realize that democracies only function when they realize that  they shouldn't be waiting for "the one" but rather should force the imperfect leaders that they have to live by the principles that make their country what it is.

Churchill and the British Empire

Piers Brendon reviews Richard Toye's upcoming book, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made in the Literary Review:

The Empire, indeed, was the main bone of contention between Churchill and Roosevelt during the war. The President found it hard to believe that they were fighting Axis tyranny but not working to free people all over the world from colonial oppression. He openly disagreed with Churchill's assertion that the promises of self-government in the Atlantic Charter did not apply to the British Empire. The Prime Minister thought it was 'pretty good cheek' for the Americans, who had blood on their hands in the Philippines, to try 'to school-marm us into proper behaviour' in the Empire. And with the Empire behind him, he felt able to stand up to the Great Republic. According to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's plea that India should be allowed to rule itself wrung from Churchill a 'string of cuss words [that] lasted for two hours in the middle of the night'.
Young Winston had vowed to devote his life to the maintenance of the British Empire. As warlord during the struggle against Hitler he fought to preserve it even though that meant testing the Anglo-American alliance, which he also championed. As an old man he lamented that his life had been for nothing: 'The Empire I believed in has gone.' In view of all that it is remarkable that no substantial scholarly work on this subject has hitherto appeared. There have been essays and a couple of partial studies, and the topic has been aired in some of the many volumes about Churchill published since the opening and electronic cataloguing of his papers. But Churchill's Empire is the first book to cover all the ground. It does so in a masterly fashion, drawing on much fresh evidence, teasing out the nuances of Churchill's attitudes and providing a marvellously illuminating appraisal.

Well, at least and at last, Churchill has something in common with Charles de Gaulle, but should we expected that men who grew in times when empire is synonymous not to say equaled to their nation's grandeur are reluctant to give it up and to see decolonization as a plus?

Sucker punching Arendt

Irving Louis Horowitz defends Hannah Arendt against Bernard Wasserstein's brutal and in my unfair and idiotic assault in an article in The Times Literary Supplement, which many others such Ron Rosenbaum continued in an article in Slate with neither much thought nor originality:

Arendt in no shape or form “blames the victim” for the terrible punishment inflicted by the Nazis. What she does do—in my opinion, correctly—is identify the extraordinary depth to which the Nazis went to exterminate a people. Sadly, a large bloc of German Jews felt that, if the Nazis could not be turned back at the gates of genocide, they could at least be prevented from carrying out their worst ambitions. An equally large bloc felt that that was not possible once the machinery of terror and the political order were enshrined in jurisprudence. The end result was a disaster for the survivors. Arendt’s bitterness was indeed focused on Jews who urged and even advocated compromise. In light of historical events, one might argue against her views on the Eichmann trial but most certainly not that the theme of banality reflected anything other than despair over the German Jewish community’s failure to recognize the pervasiveness of the system and the corrosion of the legal groundwork of its Nazi-infected mass movements.
Issues with Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem keep turning up. The theme of the banality of evil did not win favor with Arendt’s critics; psychological explanations of human behavior rarely settle matters. But Wasserstein has raised criticism of a possible loophole for disquieting personal behavior—a criticism introduced by Walter Laqueur many years ago—to a much higher level. Wasserstein condemns Arendt’s views as little more than using the Holocaust to “blame the victim.” The idea that such a grotesque reading can pass without evidence is difficult to entertain. Arendt, echoed by many in the German Jewish communities of the Nazi era, did not blame anyone but the Nazi state (at one level) and the German people as a whole for the Holocaust. What Arendt may have failed to appreciate was the enormity and the gravity of the situation, that she as well as others see as a failure of nerve and verve alike and to take appropriate measures and safeguards.

I'm reminded me of the vicious assaults against Irène Némerosvky justified by the pretext that she was a self-hating Jew. Critics are never as ferocious and unfair against people they believe should be a member of group and yet, are not representing it well or rather are irritatingly escaping categorization. I'm not a fervent admirer of Arendt, I just think that some have never forgiven for refusing to say that Eichmanm and the Nazis were uniquely evil as if the Shoah would stop being the greatest horror and in my view the defining moment of the last century if we didn't refuse to acknowledge that Hitler didn't have to be unique to kill over six million people and that that fact should weigh heavily on the collective conscience of humanity.

Prudent censorship

Reading this sugary excerpt leaves a bitter taste in my mouth because of my anxious apprehension that it is a sign of things to come for we are in a world where taking offense or crying wolf put a stop to necessary interrogations and deserved criticisms:

There is, however, a glaring omission in The Cartoons that Shook the World. None of the twelve cartoons has been reproduced in the book. In August, Yale University Press announced that it would suppress the controversial images, citing advice from a handful of academics, diplomats and journalists, including Marcia Inhorn, John Negroponte, and Fareed Zakaria. According to the publisher, “the decision rested solely on the experts’ assessments that there existed a substantial likelihood of violence that might take the lives of innocent victims.”
Klausen reluctantly agreed. After all, by her own count, the publication of the cartoons had already been responsible for at least 200 deaths and 800 additional injuries. Yale University Press had to tread lightly, and it was certainly within its rights to do so.
To justify its decision further, the publisher noted that curious readers could easily view the cartoons online. Here, at least, Klausen is clearly at odds with her publisher. In the text, she warns readers that “the longevity of such sites is unpredictable and they are often marred by obscene commentary and misleading translations of the Danish captions.” 

For some reason I'm reminded of the second debate of the 2000 Presidential election  where to any timid criticism Gore made, Bush responded smartly that he was hurt because his heart was being questioned, which killed a debate, which he feared. If our biggest concern becomes to bow to the sacred and to the fanatical and absolute adoration that people have for it, why don't we just pass laws forcing us to love and to respect each other and not to question any religious or personal  beliefs..It's scary that we live in times where the heart and the divine are annihilating reason.

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Vibrant recent history

I can't believe it has been 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell, that's probably because I was too young when it happened to understand the meaning of the moment and the fact that East Germany was hell as this sugary excerpt shows ... :

The brutal nature of the East German regime means that Monday's celebrations will be tinged with melancholy. Dozens died while trying to cross the barrier which divided Berlin and Germany in two while the Stasi squelched all protest in the German Democratic Republic, as communist East Germany was called. Ziehm says that, with attention focused on reunification, many from the former East are revisiting the past in a much more personal fashion. In the last year, tens of thousands of people have headed to the Birthler Authority to finally take a look at what their Stasi files contain. Interest has been so high, in fact, the waiting list is now two years long.
The files -- which occupy over 100 kilometers of shelf space (not including the 16,000 sacks of shredded documents the Birthler Authority is currently trying to reassemble with the aid of computers) -- are testament to a darker side of humanity. And Ziehm says that films like "The Lives of Others," which indicate that many were coerced into spying on friends and neighbors, don't come close to plumbing the depths that some ultimately fall to. Friends informed voluntarily on friends and spouses even tattled on each other.

Ubuland

I found this video of Idi Amin Dada, the former dictator of Uganda talking his ability to dream the future not only funny, but enlightening. Not very much has changed for the perceptions remains and when one looks at things today in Uganda and elsewhere, it is difficult not to think of Alfred Jarry's famous play Ubu Roi  except that here it is not the French middle class, which is at the center of the theater of the absurd in this case. What is alarming is that there are some who believe that Dada was great partly because he was a thorn to the sides of the Brits and to the Israelis. In other words, the standard for political greatness in many African leaders is standing up to the former colonizers and to foreigners and being a menace to the world as leaders such as Dadis Camara and Omar Al Bachir show just to name two of them.

In need of a sexual revolution

I love the idea that what Islam needs is a sexual revolution as Seyran Ates argues, but still I'm wondering if sexual revolutions have ever had any other results than the reassertion of the privileges of the few to do what they please and the duty of others to romanticize/moralize their sexuality to avoid becoming objects:

I believe that the Islamic world must grapple with the consequences of rigid sexual morals, not unlike the way, as he describes, the Soviet Union dealt with its own circumstances. It must pursue the path of change, just as any totalitarian system must do when it wants to become a democratic society. Part of the process is that sexuality has to be recognized as something that every individual determines for himself or herself. Institutions like moral and religious police must be abolished. People who have sex before marriage cannot be punished or ostracized by society. Parents must be confronted with the question of why they do not allow their 16-year-old daughter to have a boyfriend, while their sons can brag about how many girlfriends they have. Sex education must be taught in the classroom. Parents shouldn't have to do it, but they should accept it when the schools do it. Young and old people who are already living a self-determined sexuality in the Islamic world have to be more confident and make their voices heard.

Choosing the right representative

Through quite innovative means, I'm able to watch Gadhafi (Gaddafi)'s performance at the United Nations. I'm using the word performance because that's what it is. His goal isn't to convince people that he is right, but to put himself in the spotlight. He is talking about an important issue, the need for the African Union to have a seat on the Security council but nobody is taking him seriously because he is an actor who, just as Joe Pesci in Casino or in Goodfellas, captivates/scares people, but doesn't inspire them or make them believe in what he says. Africa needs better spokespersons,  someone who can at least appear to be credible and not just what Africans want to hear about Western hypocrisy and double standards, colonization, and reparations.

Almost there, but not quite

I agree with the last part of this statement even though I hates the way Katha Pollitt frames the issue, but if feminists were innovative and problem-solvers, feminism wouldn't be as dead as socialism:

If women's equality is the great cause of our time--and I hope it is--we'll get further by acknowledging it as a challenge no country has yet fully met rather than by framing it as a Western crusade.

Standoffish equivocations

Important simple questions: Is there a difference between considering that women don't have the choice to decide whether to have or not to have a child and to decide that they should remain hidden behind their burkas/burqas? Assuming that they (women) do have those choices, how judgmental is society allowed to be? What level of misogyny is acceptable for a society to be civilized? Does invoking the so-called laws of nature and imperfections of the human spirit when it comes to gender, the biases and all the unacceptable stuff that it creates tell us that women are simply objects in the clash of civilizations that too many seem to want to have? Doesn't this fact tell us that the world doesn't really abhor misogyny, it just abhors the possibility that it might lead to something else that will  in turn lead to what it considers to be real obscurantist/terrorist and manly (because physically destructive) acts. Those are some of the questions that came to my mind when reading Nick Cohen's article on Misogyny (hat tip: Mick Hartley). I love it when people talk about the so-called women's rights (why is there always the temptations to separate women from men as if to say that since physical strength justifies better status or more rights), I just wish they would become fanatically consistent to emphasize the fact that patriarchy, to use an expression that feminists love, is never acceptable even if it is less obscurantist and less barbaric and being a little bit better than barbarians on the issue of misogyny is not acceptable especially when the argument is about values, morality, and hypocrisy.

Unsavory truth

Sugary excerpt of the day:

In the twenty first century, some women have to be enslaved and imprisoned in the household so that others can be freed from it. An unpleasant, but a tried and tested truth.

International justice, politics, and money

Rob Lyons on the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the sole convicted culprit of the Lockerbie bombing, international justice, and politics :

(...) from a political point of view, the release of al-Megrahi in this way seems the best option. The US and UK governments avoid any awkward revelations at an appeal hearing. The Scottish government gets to assert itself as an independent force in world politics, even though it has no foreign policy authority as such, while appearing to be principled and humane. The Libyan government is presenting the release of al-Megrahi as a diplomatic triumph, as yesterday’s welcome party for him shows.
The driving force behind every episode in this case has been the interests of governments, particularly the major Western powers, not the lives of the people unfortunate enough to get caught up in their machinations. Sadly, justice has got nothing to do with it.

I'm only wondering whether al-Megrahi would have been released if Libya was still viewed as a sponsor of international terrorism and if it wasn't an oil-rich nation. I don't think he would have no matter how sick he was.Unfortunately, the lesson of this case is that la raison d'état always prevails over much everything else especially when economical interests are at stake. It is hard not to be impressed over the way Qadaffi has been able to buy himself a new image.What does it say about our world if it is possible to buy respectability without ever fulling atoning or even acknowledging the mistakes of the past?

Distinctions and differences

Nadeem Aslam on Islam, Al-Qaeda and the West (hat tip: Seher Hussain):

Not everything that is wrong in the Islamic world is the West’s fault. We must understand this. Within all societies there are elements that will get out of hand. It is all coming from Pakistan, and the tribal areas. They have hijacked something very important. They have hijacked people’s core beliefs and they have somehow tried to link their brand of Islam to the true Islam. If you study Osama bin Laden’s speeches sequentially, and also those of al-Zawahiri [former head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad], al-Qaeda is, I think, tormented by the fact that the world, for better or worse, has managed to make a distinction between Islam and them, the Islamists. It is still way short of the ideal, but the world has understood that what al-Qaeda represents is not Islam. They want the West and the world to think that Muslims are all terrorists. But it is not going to happen.

Crazy God talk

Another proof via Eliot Weinberger on the London Review of Book Blog that Bush and Chirac couldn't get along because the first was persuaded that he was elected to do God's work who had so little faith in him that s/he/it needed to lead him every step of the way:

In 2003, George W. Bush called Jacques Chirac to persuade him to join the Coalition of the Willing in the jihad against Saddam Hussein. Appealing to their ‘common faith’, Bush said:

Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East… The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled… This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.

A little hazy on his Book of Revelation, Chirac sought enlightenment from Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne. Romer told the story in the university’s journal, Allez Savoir, and Chirac himself later confirmed the conversation in an interview with the journalist Jean-Claude Maurice.

Berlusconi is everywhere

While Martin Amis compared Ahmadinejad to Reagan,  Slavoj Žižek compares him to Berlusconi:

To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the ‘return of the repressed’ of the Khomeini revolution.
What all this means is that there is a genuinely liberatory potential in Islam: we don’t have to go back to the tenth century to find a ‘good’ Islam, we have it right here, in front of us. The future is uncertain – the popular explosion has been contained, and the regime will regain ground. However, it will no longer be seen the same way: it will be just one more corrupt authoritarian government. Ayatollah Khamenei will lose whatever remained of his status as a principled spiritual leader elevated above the fray and appear as what he is – one opportunistic politician among many. But whatever the outcome, it is vital to keep in mind that we have witnessed a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit within the frame of a struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If we don’t see this, if as a consequence of our cynical pragmatism, we have lost the capacity to recognise the promise of emancipation, we in the West will have entered a post-democratic era, ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.
Is there a link between Ahmadinejad and Berlusconi? Isn’t it preposterous even to compare Ahmadinejad with a democratically elected Western leader? Unfortunately, it isn’t: the two are part of the same global process. If there is one person to whom monuments will be built a hundred years from now, Peter Sloterdijk once remarked, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who thought up and put into practice a ‘capitalism with Asian values’. The virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. Deng Xiaoping praised Singapore as the model that all of China should follow. Until now, capitalism has always seemed to be inextricably linked with democracy; it’s true there were, from time to time, episodes of direct dictatorship, but, after a decade or two, democracy again imposed itself (in South Korea, for example, or Chile). Now, however, the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken.This doesn’t mean, needless to say, that we should renounce democracy in favour of capitalist progress, but that we should confront the limitations of parliamentary representative democracy.

I don't shared this view point, but it is difficult to disagree with the assertion that the link between democracy and capitalism is been broken or at least is no longer self-evident. It is so sad to say and surely not sympathetic enough to say, but so far nothing that has happened in Iran has surprised me. The script has been followed. I think that the spectators are just waiting impatiently for the end of the movie while the actors still have to figure out how much they are willing to risk to change the script.

Preachers and blindness

Desmond Tutu on the West and its right to criticize Africa:

The West should in general, he warns, beware of preaching about corrupt African dictators. “You could say the same about Europe. You get a Churchill and then there’s a long wait . . . What gives me a great deal of hope for Africa is looking at the history of Europe. Very recently you had two world wars, you had the Holocaust, you had dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Greece. There was a time when Italy was changing governments like you change pairs of socks. There was the Soviet Union, Stalin’s gulags. You forget that you really made a mess of things. It was a Western country that was the first and only country to use weapons of mass destruction. [Africa] is not on a level with Western people.

Tutu is not only wrong, he is dead wrong. I cannot believe that it is still possible to use the old foolish excuse of Africans and Africa being different to shelter them from criticisms (both legitimate and illegitimate) as if they would deadly wound them, as if they are so lost in the heart of darkness that strangers ought to just shut, accept or respect differences even when they are atrocities and unacceptable.

Love, weddings, marriage and other catastrophes

I agree with Jessa Crispin on this:

Marriage has freaked me out since I received a proposal at the age of 21 from a nice young man who didn’t see why I needed to work. My mouth said, “Umm, I need to think about it;” my brain said, “Run.” Ever since that event, I have fled all the men who prefer to set up a house, packing my bags the second he starts hinting about rings. It’s a difficult position to take in a culture so marriage obsessed. Let me rephrase that: Wedding obsessed. Engagement ring obsessed. Proposing on top of the Empire State Building obsessed. The crushing need to find that man, get that ring, and pick a date permeates movies, books, television, and the commercials. Even in that horrible Sex and the City movie, after one attempt at a wedding goes awry, our heroic couple reunites to wonder why they needed to get married in the first place. Couldn’t they just be together? The sentiment only lasts a moment, and then they’re off to the altar again.
And a wedding is the assumed goal of any love story. You can be one of those crazy couples together for 10 years, but when you fall in love, those around you immediately start asking when you’ll get married. Yet never has marriage seemed less appealing. Divorce is not only probable, but expected, to the point that the cynical phrase “starter marriage” has entered our vocabulary. The great love stories of our time are tabloid wedding photos of celebrities, everything airbrushed and shiny and choreographed to the last second. The same tabloids will stop at nothing to find cracks in the marriage only a few issues later, and will shame and pity a divorced or single woman until that rock is on her finger. It’s love as business arrangement, as item on a checklist, as social conformity.

Remaining America

I agree with this:

The White House Press corps loves to laugh condescendingly at Helen Thomas because, tenaciously insisting that our sermons to others be applied to our own Government, she acts like a real reporter (exactly as -- according to Politico's Josh Gerstein -- White House reporters "could be seen rolling their eyes and shifting in their seats" when Obama called on The Huffington Post's Nico Pitney, who has done some of the most tireless work on Iran, gave voice to actual Iranians, and posed one of the toughest questions at the Press Conference).  The premise of Thomas' question was compelling and (contrary to Obama's dismissal) directly relevant to Obama's answers:  how is it possible for Obama to pay dramatic tribute to the "heartbreaking" impact of that Neda video in bringing to light the injustices of the Iranian Government's conduct while simultaneously suppressing images that do the same with regard to our own Government's conduct?

Becoming Robespierre

Stuart Jeffries on Sarkozy, the Burqa, and its assertion that it isn't welcomed in France (hat tip Arthur Goldhammer)

Sarkozy now goes further, following revolutionary logic in not just chasing those who dress in ways he and French political culture finds intolerable out of public spaces, but pursuing those who dress in a way that is a rejection of western values even into their private worlds. He said: "The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic." Even religious justification is bad enough, run the suppressed premises of this argument, but the absence of such despicable justifications is worse.
The woman in a burka is revealed as subservient to patriarchal culture. She must be made free to choose to be more western. Sarkozy proposes, in giving his backing to the establishment ofa parliamentary commission to look at whether to ban the wearing of burkas in public, that such imposed freedom would improve her lot.
French venerate such abstract freedoms. We needn't. They were, for Hegel, the basis of the revolution's collapse into the Terror in which, he argued, individuals were sacrificed to the ill-conceived pursuit of abstract freedoms. Sarkozy is thus a modern-day Robespierre, proposing some women – whom he presumes to have been silenced by patriarchal society and whose voices he doesn't want to hear –be terrorised in the name of the kind abstract freedoms France has venerated for 210 years. Let's see if he succeeds.

Sarkozy and the Burqa

Neil Clark on Sarkozy and his willingness to put the Burqa at the center of the French political debate:

The secret of Sarkozy's success is that he knows how to spot a vote winner. While the left sought to focus on the underlying causes of the riots which plagued Paris in the autumn of 2005, Sarkozy, as Minister of the Interior, simply sent in the riot police and denounced the rioters as racaille or 'rabble'.
Faced with the impact of the global recession, he ditched his flirtation with Anglo-Saxon capitalism and adopted more traditional dirigiste Gaullist policies - in the process completely wrong-footing the left.
Now it seems he's played another trump card by announcing on Monday the establishment of a commission to consider banning the wearing in public of the burka - the garment worn by some Muslim women which covers the entire body, including the face.
His argument for doing so is not just that the burka represents an assault on French secularism, but that it is degrading to women. By championing the rights of women, Sarkozy is able to pose as the defender of the founding principles of the Republic. He also gains kudos for dealing with a hyper-sensitive political issue head-on. And here's the really clever part: he manages at the same time to expose divisions on the left. 

This debate about the Burqa frustrates me because it is clear that it isn't about the burqa, but about something else, about identity politics, defining/redefining what it means to be French and what/who cannot become French. I don't mind having such a debate, but it isn't cheap to confine it to the interdiction of the Burqa of French society when the issue is about finding the balance between liberty and religion, all religions not just Islam for after all, if as Sarkozy asserts the Burqa is about foreign traditions and cultures, then what is the problem? Can women wear the Burqa if they assert that they do it just because they like it, just as they would wear fur or a thong?

Faith and political reforms

Oliver Kamm on Obama's Cairo speech, Islam, and political reforms:

I'm uneasy about an American President (or sometime British Prime Minister, for the same applies to Tony Blair) declaring as a matter of policy deep respect for Islam. I can see the political imperative for doing so and (in the case of the statesmen concerned) the sincerity of the sentiment. But the proper attitude of a constitutional democracy towards religious faith is not respect but disinterest (i.e. neutrality). Our societies defend religious liberty and conscience. That's the least, but also the limit, of how the state should treat religion.
There's a pragmatic reason for such a stand. The Islamic faith is a fact of life and a huge influence on the world order. It's essential for peace and justice that Islam be dominated by elements that make their accommodation with democratic values, modern mores and secular education. To speak in an undifferentiated way of Islam and its achievements does not give the right message to those elements: to political reformers, religious moderates and heroic secular forces in autocratic states. Their voices need to be heard and encouraged, in the same way that dissidents in the Soviet bloc were given heart by an explicit commitment (in the Helsinki Final Agreement of 1975) to human rights.
That was the missing element in Obama's address. And when you see the pictures of demonstrators demanding freedom in Tehran, you have to conclude that the omission was not even good politics.

I'm agnostic on this issue as I am on most Obama's speeches because I don't think that speeches are good substitutes for policy. Kamm has a point, but I wonder if all of this fluff matters.

Secularization, Christianity, and Europe

Terry Sanderson on Secularization, Christianity, and the future of Europe:

A Eurobarometer poll (pdf) reveals that when asked about what they value most, only 7% of Europeans nominated religion. That same poll tells us that about half of Europeans think that religion is afforded too much importance. When asked about what values the European Union represents, the ranking starts with human rights (37%), then peace (35%), democracy (34%) and way down last again is religion with only 3%.
So, if Christianity is not the future of Europe, will the continent become Islamic?
The answer is again, no. The capitulation of western governments to the violence of Islamic jihadists and the subsequent channelling of all discourse about Muslims through religious representatives has created the impression that all Muslims are deeply pious and inimical to western values. They are not.
We have been bamboozled by the term "Islamophobia", which suggests that Islam is under systematic persecution in the west. But new research by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (pdf) shows clearly that while people who identify themselves as Muslims are, indeed, victims of much discrimination, by their own account hardly any of it is because of their religion. Another poll showed that young Muslims have a strong desire for westernisation, which again contradicts those who have been appointed to speak for them from the pulpits.

Shifting principles

Oliver Kamm on Liberalism, its ideals, and their degeneration:

Liberalism, in its broadest sense, has become suspicious of its own ideals.
Notions once considered reactionary, even extreme, have insinuated themselves into the mainstream of right-thinking (that is, left-thinking) social idealism.
The degeneration of progressive idealism has many roots. But among the most important is the instinct that the ideas of Western liberty are specific to time and place — that they are Eurocentric. Almost coincident with the revolutions of 1989, which testified to the power of the human instinct for liberty, was a far more atavistic political movement. (...) there is a type of left-wing thinking that regards militant Islam almost as idiosyncratic liberation theology. Verso, the left-wing publishing house, has produced a volume of the thoughts of Osama bin Laden entitled Messages to the World. To read the editor’s annotations is to gain the impression of a revolutionary figure who daringly challenges Western oppression. The mass murder of American and other civilians on 9/11 was the expression of a nihilistic, millenarian doctrine of religious absolutism. Yet for a certain type of critic the greatest war criminal of our age is Tony Blair.

I'm tempted, really tempted to agree totally with Kamm, but I can't because he doesn't present the whole picture. He sees a lot of the trees, but rearranges them to depict the forest that he wants to see.

Celebrity activism

Nathalie Rothschild on Celebrity activism, which she has trouble to view as selfless:

Farrow and her fasting buddies are presenting their efforts as selfless sacrifices, all done for the sake of suffering Darfurians, to ‘raise awareness’ of their plight and put pressure on the ‘international community’ to intervene. But rather than shedding light on the conflict in Darfur, aloof celebrity activists are primarily drawing attention to themselves while at the same time obscuring the facts on the ground, which are, in reality, complex.
However, for Farrow and other celebrity activists, like Matt Damon and George Clooney, the conflict in Sudan is a black-and-white issue. They present themselves as the virtuous good guys in a morality play where the Khartoum regime are the evil barbarians, the people of Darfur the pathetic victims and Western celebrities are the heroes coming to their rescue. Clooney, for instance, once said of the conflict in Darfur: ‘It’s not a political issue. There’s only right and wrong.’
(...)From celebs demanding, in neo-colonialist fashion, that the West intervene to save Africans from themselves, to greens claiming to represent ‘The Planet’ against mankind, many protests today are staged ‘on behalf of others’ – even if those others have not asked for it. Farrow’s diet for Darfur is part of this contemporary trend. These days, it seems that protests that lack celebrity endorsements and which are staged by those who are actually affected by the conflict they are trying to end, get little attention or airtime.

I'm agnostic on the subject of celebrity activism because celebrities have the right as any citizen to get engage in causes. Nevertheless what I deplore on these celebrity campaign is that they end up being about celebrity and good and evil which is not solely the fault of celebrities, but also of the media, which loves nothing much that syrupy tabloid like of serious topic without feeling questioning their own ethics while being ensured to get a wider audience. Thus the trouble isn't that celebrities don't get celebrity and are unable to be selfless even for good causes, the trouble is that the globalized media likes so much beautiful and effective storytelling that it has let celebrities become the better advocates for causes, which have more knowledgeable, but less flashy advocates.

European cowardice

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on what she believes to be an identity crisis in Europe, which makes Europeans unwilling to die for their values such as free speech and willing to tolerate the intolerable from Muslims :

Europe has become a place for new religions, new creeds, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism. Everything is thus relative. This is an uncertainty that the Muslim does not share. The Muslim ethic and tribal spirit are far more resilient and fierce in war than the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.
(...)Take the debate on freedom of expression. In 1989 and afterwards, the provocations in the name of Islam were greeted with a confident, "No way! This is Europe, and you can say what you like, write what you like," and so on.
Two decades later, Europeans are not so sure about the values of freedom of expression. Most members of the media engage in self-censorship. Textbooks in schools and universities have been adapted in such a way as not to offend Muslim sentiment. And legislation to punish 'blasphemy', if not passed, has been considered in most countries - or old laws that were never used are being revived.
(...) Muslims try to abolish freedom of expression using the vocabulary of freedom
The terrifying paradox about these developments is that Muslim immigrants were admitted into European borders on the basis of universal rights and freedoms that a large number of them now trample on, while others perhaps watch passively, or seek to defend only the image of Islam.
(...)In reality, if Europe falls, it's not because of Islam. It is because the Europeans of today - unlike their forbears in the Second World War - will not die to defend the values or the future of Europe. Even if they were asked to make the final sacrifice, many a post-modern lily-livered European would escape into an obscure mesh of conscientious objection. All that Islam has to do is walk into the vacuum.

I don't know, but there is something is this Ali's arguments that seems artificial and even insincere. I think that Glenn Greenwald is right to assert that people such Ayaan Hirsi Ali go out of their way to clash with Islam because they believe in global clashes and that there is indeed a clash of civilizations, which must be won by the West by taking the fight to the barbarians. However,  it is difficult to deny that there is a malaise within Europe caused not solely by Muslim immigration, but also by the critical debate, which has yet to happen or to least lead to some decisive political action about what it means to be European and whether nationality and citizenship can be about something other than culture especially when the later clashes with the present social compact.