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Guantanomo Bay
Back and causing difficulties
Tony Blair was interviewed by Sky TV over the weekend on his return from talks with George Bush. Adam Boulton, Sky's political editor, asked him if any progress had been made on releasing the four Britons still detained in Guantanamo Bay. Here is Blair's reply:
I have a pretty low opinion of our prime minister's truthfulness, but this is a gobsmacking smear even by his standards. The five British Guantanamo detainees sent home so far are under 24-hour surveillance (one of them has been "worrying" police, apparently). None have been arrested, let alone charged with anything. Nevertheless, Blair tells us they have been "causing difficulties". What on earth could he mean? Gareth Peirce, solicitor for three of the British detainees, provides a compelling interpretation:
A relative of Tarek Dergoul, a 26 year old ex-detainee from East London, points out:
The creepiest aspect of Blair's slur is his casual, matey "as you know". It's unclear whether the "you" was addressed to Boulton, signalling secret knowledge shared by a political and journalistic elite. Or perhaps it was addressed at all of us, a tacit instruction that we should all "know" that disabled, traumatised torture victims constitute a threat to "our own security". Muslims are the enemy within, after all. Everybody "knows" that. • A few snippets worth reading – Over at CounterPunch, Stan Goff has a pleasantly rambling account of an encounter with a neocon bigwig, while Ghada Karmi reflects on life after Arafat. James at DML has dug out an interesting polemic on the "twilight of the liberal hawks" (it's by a libertarian, but don't let that put you off too much). And finally a blast from the past – Yasser Arafat makes his debut speech to the United Nations on 13 November 1974 (PDF format). Assault on Fallujah
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition
Further to the comments on secularism below, and for anyone interested in the mindset of some of the American troops currently "liberating" Fallujah, a little noticed report from Agence France Presse makes pretty hair-raising reading:
Check the weirdo Christian Zionist undercurrent to the King David stuff. The reporter also makes this connection, noting how the marines "perceive themselves as warriors fighting barbaric men opposed to all that is good in the world". US elections
Zizek on Bush
Slavoj Zizek's response to George W Bush's re-election – The Liberal Waterloo – has been published by In These Times, the Chicago-based radical magazine. It's a typically spiky piece centred on the following thesis:
As ever with Zizek, the article fires off darts in all directions, some of them hitting their targets, others not. A couple of critical comments follow. With regards to Left Behind, a series of Christian fundamentalist novels that have shifted 60 million units in the US, Zizek writes:
Well, quite. This casts a revealing light on the current liberal fetishisation of "secularism" – understood as a kind of formal neutrality towards religions. The falsity of this abstraction stems from the fact that religions are not, in fact, "all the same" and the pretence that they are hides some ugly double standards. In particular, one religion – Islam – typically plays the role of ideological scapegoat: in contemporary "secular" discourse, Islam acts as a stand-in for religion in general. So liberals attack Islam for, say, its treatment of women – when it's pointed out that other religions are no better in this regard, the liberal retreats, claiming that his/her critique of Islam was in fact an instance of a more general critique of religion. But then why single out Islam in the first place? The other side of this false secularism is the way it lets fundamentalist Christianity off the hook. Pro-war liberals who attack Respect for its "unholy alliance" between socialist and Muslim activists never once pause to consider their own unholy alliance between their "progressive Enlightenment values" and Bush's homegrown crusading army. The irony here is that "fundamentalism", now seen as an exclusively Islamic trait, in fact makes no sense outside the context of Christian theology. And "secularism" is similarly culturally specific – it arose out of Europe's religious wars and is fundamentally a demand for religious freedom (including, crucially, the freedom not to believe), rather than being about "neutrality" or "separation of church and state" (a separation which, incidentally, in practice occurs nowhere). From Kerry to Kautsky After a brief and rather muddled overview of the "new world order", Zizek writes:
Errm, nope. This crosses the fine line between affirmation and panglossian wibble. And the position leads to patently absurd consequences: if progessives should be glad of a Bush victory, they should have voted for him and advocated voting for him. The fact is that whatever Kerry's failings, a defeat for Bush would have been a defeat for his war on terror and a defeat for his imperial project in the Middle East. People would have been dancing in the streets the whole world over. Moreover, the supposed downside of a Kerry victory that Zizek outlines is strangely unconvincing:
Well, sure, but so what? The liberals in question deserve to face the consequences and take the blame, since they were thoroughly complicit in launching the Iraq war in the first place. The only effective opposition to the war came from radical mass movements located outside "official" political space. All the "anti-war" bourgeoisie (Chirac, Blix etc) had to offer were incoherent legalistic quibbles, whose abject failure testified to a profound lack of political will on their part. Turning Zizek's statement around, it is a Kerry victory that would have "drawn the contours of the confrontations to come in a much starker way", by revealing the complicity between the two wings of the Business Party. The fact that Zizek does not recognise this signals an unfortunate residual attachment to liberalism on his part. Zizek is playing the contrarian here. And that's forgivable, given the pukeworthy wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth currently emanating from traumatised Kerrycrats (Canada's immigration web page saw a six-fold hitcount leap on Wednesday!). Nevertheless, in his haste to distance himself from liberal idiocy, he overlooks the truly dialectical solution to this electoral conundrum: a vibrant Nader campaign would have mobilised the progressive vote in a way Kerry could never have managed. Instead the US left shamefully lost its nerve, and Nader was squeezed to near-oblivion. Despite these and other more Kautskyite lapses (eg supporting a "strengthened EU" against the US), Zizek ends on an upbeat note:
Amen to that. On this note, it's worth underlining the parallels with 1972 – Nixon won a second term by a landslide (every state bar one endorsed him), yet within two years, his presidency was in tatters and US troops were forced out of Vietnam. Time to pick up the pieces and get back on the streets. • Coupla recommendations – CounterPunch has a characteristically feisty response to the US presidential elections, while over at ZNet, Michael Albert dissects the corpse and makes some sensible suggestions – plus there's a forensic analysis of controversies at the recent London ESF that's well worth reading. | |
