Month: January 2011

Springtime of the Peoples, North Africa

January 30, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Mohammed Bouazizi, sparking a revolution.

In 1848, in the midst of economic hardships and political repression, alliances between middle class liberals and working class radicals rose up and challenged the “forest of bayonets” protecting absolutist regimes throughout Europe.

Triggered by events in Paris, news of revolutionary successes and violent repressions was transmitted with unprecedented speed by new communication technologies — telegraph, rail and steamship — which, in turn, fueled the wave of rebellion and gave rise to the “Springtime of the Peoples”

Today we see something analogous happening in North Africa: a wave of revolutionary activity that was sparked, literally, by the self-immolation of a frustrated Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohammad Bouazizi. Within weeks, copycats had self-immolated in Egypt, Mauritania and Algeria displaying the pervasiveness of North African discontent with their autocratic governments.  In Tunisia itself,  the 23 year reign of Ben Ali came to an end as he fled the country, giving others in the region hope that they too might liberate themselves.

Nowhere did this hope take root more than in Egypt, which is on the verge of toppling the 30 year reign of Hosni Mubarak.

Made in the U.S.A.

The regimes in Tunis and Egypt have both been U.S. allies, and Mubarak especially has enjoyed lavish amounts of military aid — aid which has continued under Obama.

As a matter of fact, the tear gas canisters being used to put down the rebellion in Egypt are “Made in the U.S.A” — Jamestown, Philadelphia, to be precise.  So “if the army ever decides to shoot into a crowd of unarmed protestors, it will be shooting with hardware provided by the United States.”

Meanwhile, leaders of the current U.S. administration wasted no time in offering support to their beleaguered friend, Mubarak.

Sec. of State Clinton exposed her sympathies when she asserted that Mubarak’s tyrannical regime was “stable” just as hope emerged among Egyptian people that it was not. Vice President Biden added that he “would not refer to [Mubarak] as a dictator” — on the contrary he “has been a good ally”. And Obama, whose military escalations and drone strikes continue to kill and wound many, made a plea to the Egyptians that “violence is not the answer”.

Meanwhile Wikileaks, in the wake of developments in Egypt, has released more U.S. diplomatic cables which corroborate what we already knew — that the U.S. turns a blind eye to the torture and lawlessness of its client regimes. See, for example, this cable in which a U.S. diplomat relates how, during murder investigations, it is the practice of Egyptian police to “round up 40 to 50 suspects from a neighborhood and hang them by their arms from the ceiling for weeks until someone confesses.”

One such excess in particular had become a rallying point among Egyptian protesters: the murder of Khaled Said, who was beaten to death by Egyptian police. Here are pictures of Khaled before and after his treatment by the Egyptian police, and a cartoon (by Carlos Latuff) of his afterlife as an avenging angel:

BagNewsNotes, always interesting for its analysis of news images, has discussed this photograph of the Egyptian government pissing on its citizens:

And we have to give a shout out to this guy:

A word of warning, however: In 1848, the “Springtime of the Peoples” was ultimately succeeded by a “Counter-Revolutionary Autumn” in which many of the democratic advances were reversed. According to historian Mike Rapport, this reversal was made possible in part by the unraveling of the tenuous alliance between “liberals” (who sought to retain some privileges from the conservative order) and “radicals” (who sought a more thorough transformation of society).   Time will tell if events in North Africa will follow a similar trajectory, but for now perhaps we can celebrate recent advances with this man.

Kasr Al Nile Bridge

January 28, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Civil Discourse and Targeted Concern

January 19, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Everyone affected by the murderous rampage of the disturbed Loughner deserved a public memorial, but to my eyes the irony of Obama’s targeted concern for victims of the massacre in Arizona was impossible to ignore. Obama is in command of an enterprise which has resulted in the slaughter of many little girls, but one would be a fool to expect him to condemn his own “senseless violence” or publically grieve for the victims of his own drone strikes — that would run counter to the imperial ideology of American Exceptionalism, according to which the lives of U.S. American are regarded as more valuable than those outside the nationalist circle of concern.

Obama even reserves for his office the right to execute anyone in the world, even U.S. citizens, and claims this right to be unlimited even by  judicial oversight. He therefore stands as a model for extra-legal vigilantism.

But these questions are not explored in the MSM, generally speaking, which instead has been dominated by the question of violent rhetoric in U.S. political discourse.

These two images present competing ways to look at the current “political climate”.  Where the cover of The Economist makes an easy equivalence between “left” and “right” rhetorical bellicosity, L. Dangle at Troubletown appeals to ideological stereotypes to suggest such equivalence is an illusion.

It is difficult to escape the idea that certain people have a particular responsibility.  I mean, before she was shot, the Congresswoman saw it coming, and saw it coming from particular places:

We’re on Sarah Palin’s “Targeted” list, but the thing is that the way she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. And when people do that, they have got to realize there are consequences to that action.

In response to the charge that the violent rhetoric is exclusively coming from the right, rightward leaning commentators are quick to point out recent examples of violent rhetoric coming from the left, which are in fact not hard to find.

Fair enough, but that abstracts from at least two important considerations.  First, there is a double standard about how the state deals with left leaning activism, even when it is not violent. Consider this comparison by A. Cockburn:

If Palin was in the Animal Rights movement she would have  been indicted, sentenced and imprisoned long ago. To draw a specific comparison: the SHAC 7 were convicted of “animal enterprise terrorism” for running a website which posted the names and addresses of individuals tied to the animal testing lab Huntingdon Life Sciences. They were not charged with any act of property destruction, they were charged with “conspiracy” on the grounds that they should be held accountable for the actions of others in the same movement.

Second, I don’t think it is controversial to claim that those on the right are, at least these days, more thoroughly armed.  And considering this compilation of “lone nuts” who have translated rhetoric into action, many are more dangerous as well.  Anti-war protesters I’ve seen — and I’ve seen many — are generally equipped with nothing more threatening than cardboard and crayons and costumes and drums, just as the Troubletown cartoon contends. Maybe if there WAS an armed left in the U.S. it would not be so easily and thoroughly taken advantage of.

Other perspectives / sources:

Tom Engelhardt writes about how civilian casualties in Afghanistan go underreported while the nation mourns the Arizona victims.

Amy Goodman, the best news anchor in the U.S., calls for an assault weapons ban and connects the debate to the violence in Juarez.

Billy Wharton argues that we should take Loughner as a reason to have single payer health care.

MLK: Beyond Vietnam

January 16, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

From ABC news:

At an event commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Thursday, the general counsel of the Pentagon – Jeh Johnson – said that if King were alive today he would support the war in Afghanistan.

This claim is so absurd I don’t know whether to think that Jeh Johnson is more dishonest or stupid.  Instead of wasting time addressing such idiocy, I’ll just refer to King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.  It is in this speech that King  links his struggle for domestic civil rights with the struggle against imperial war more generally.  It is the speech that got him killed a year to the day later.  As I said in the very first post on this blog, you can judge for yourself how much of this speech applies to the occupation of Afghanistan:

To review King’s points:

  • War dismantles poverty programs
  • Disproportionately large numbers of dispossessed are used to fight wars not in their interest
  • As an advocate of non-violence, he could not be silent about violence perpetrated by his own country
  • The fight for civil rights entails a fight against imperial war.
  • He is compelled to voice opposition to war as a Nobel Peace Prize winner
  • Just as he is bound by his own commitment to “the ministry of Jesus Christ”

The “Military-Marriage Goal”

January 11, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

With the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, the state will now recognize openly gay men and women as worthy to fight and die in its imperial wars.

On the one hand it is great that the U.S. is beginning to recognize openly gay citizens as fully human — and likely will continue to do so in the nearish future by conceding also the right to marry.

But to get married and become soldiers?  How did these things become the focus of the fight for gay rights?

It wasn’t always like this.  In the wake of Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front issued a Manifesto that located the root of the oppression of gay people in the very form of the Patriarchal Family, “consisting in a man in charge, a slave as his wife, and their children on whom they force themselves as the ideal models.”

The Manifesto argued that “gay liberation” required more than mere reforms to such oppressive social institutions — it required nothing less than revolutionary social change, including a rejection of the very ideal of monogamy.  And of course gays “openly serving in the military” was not even on the radar.

Part of the story of how we got here from there is that the rejection of the ideal of monogamy was made difficult by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and in the ’90s a conservative reaction emerged which fetishized “normality” against the earlier radicalism. A brief history of that debate can be read here, but I’ll quote Judith Butler’s succinct summary of the conflict in her essay “Competing Universalities“:

The lesbian and gay movement, which in some quarters has extended to include a broad range of sexual minorities, has faced a number of questions regarding its own assimilation to existing norms in recent years. Whereas some clamoured for inclusion in the US military, others sought to reformulate a critique of the military and question the value of being included there. Similarly, whereas… some activists have sought to extend the institution of marriage to non-heterosexual partners, others have sustained an active critique of the institution of marriage, questioning whether state recognition of monogamous partners will in the end delegitimate sexual freedom for a number of sexual minorities…. the enstatement of these questionable rights and obligations for some lesbians and gays establishes norms of legitimation that work to remarginalize others and foreclose possibilities of sexual freedom which have also been long-standing goals of the movement. The naturalization of the military-marriage goal for gay politics also marginalizes those for whom one or the other of these institutions is anathema, if not inimical. Indeed, those who oppose both institutions would find that the way in which they are represented by the ‘advance of democracy’ is a violation of their most central, political commitments.

So, what is really to be gained by the repeal of DADT?

First, it must be granted that because gays have been barred from a public enterprise on the basis of their sexual orientation, the repeal of DADT can be seen as an advance of “civil rights”. But there is a moral principle of equality at work here, and it stands in tension with more global considerations. The equality won by the repeal of DADT comes with a built in and nefarious limitation, since it is merely an equality among U.S. Americans in good standing — those outside of the imperial in-group can be (and in fact are) annihilated or disappeared with impunity. In this case an advance in “civil rights” is an affront to human rights universally.

Second, given the general hero-worship of those who sign up to be imperial pawns, gay soldiers stand to gain a satisfying increase in social respect and cultural acceptance from the repeal — but only at the cost of agreeing to follow orders from demonstrably untrustworthy imperial managers.

In these respects, fighting for the right to serve in the U.S. Military looks like a slavish response to Baby Bush’s Manichean Challenge — “We are with you! We are with you!”

In the end, the only thing gained is to be more completely recognized as a part of the imperial in-group, set against the global dispossessed. So winning the right to openly participate in the U.S. military is indeed a victory of sorts, but certainly not a victory for humanity generally speaking.

So much for what is gained. Now what is lost?

Self-described “queer” Medical Student Jess Guh asks this question in a thoughtful essay.  Guh is saddened by the repeal of DADT, in part because she had seen the exclusion of queers from the U.S. military as an “insurance policy against any eventual draft”.  In the event of a draft, she could have simply revealed herself as queer and thereby escaped conscription.

In that sense, the repeal of DADT is the loss of an asset for draft dodgers.

But, she continues, it is also the loss of a “huge opportunity to make more significant gains.”

Like the teen-aged Vietnam War draftees who fought for the right to vote, gay rights activists could have used willingness to participate in the U.S. military as a concession in a negotiation for other rights they lacked:

…equal marriage rights, rights to have a family through adoption, and discrimination protection (the federal Equal Opportunity Employment Law still doesn’t bar firing or harassment over the issue of sexual orientation).  Partners of queer military personnel won’t even be eligible for health benefits, because that benefit requires a marriage certificate.”

Estimating the number of “homosexuals” in the U.S. is a complex project, but it is fair to say that a significant portion of the population fell under the category prohibited from participating openly in the armed forces. Since “a substantial portion of current and future military personnel” are “queer”, Guh asks:

…what would have happened if every queer soldier and ally refused to work, fight? What if queer folk just refused to enlist?  From infantry to engineering to culinary services, all fronts of the American military would have been crippled.  Would we have been able to demand equality in more controversial areas in addition to the simply right to serve?

This would have been negotiating from a position of power.

And actually, such a move remains a possibility. It is also possible (for everyone) to make participation in the military contingent on a just and legal cause — conscientious objectors can come in any flavor.  But as far as I know, the DADT debate was abstracted from any question about the justice or legality of the U.S. military project.

And really, from an anti-imperialist perspective, it is strange to speak of the “right” to “serve” in the military. Why is it considered a “right” to “serve” an aggressive war machine? And is this right universal and human? If so, then what of the universal human rights of those on the receiving end of this machine?

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Some sources for the collage:  The gay pride revelers come from an amusing satire from the Onion; the Navy officer is retired Reserve Commander Zoe Dunning (Ret.) and her partner; the central body in black and white is from genderqueer, a blog featuring “images of gender-bending, trans and queer people of all sorts, meant to empower and celebrate the beauty within all gender expressions.”; Dan Choi is a prominent activist who worked to challenge DADT.

The portrait of a gay soldier hiding his identity is by Jeff Sheng, from a beautiful series I first encountered at the Manifest Equality artshow in L.A.