Alice O'Keefe Wishes Manu Chau Was Not Quite so...
Lost in a century
Alice O'Keeffe
Published 27 September 2007
In contrast, La Radiolina sounds urgent and hectoring, laden with rock guitars, wailing sirens and lyrics that border dangerously on the facile: "In Baghdad/it's no democracy/just because it's a US country/In Fallujah too much calamity/This world go crazy, it's a fatality." In its lighter moments ("Me Llaman Calle" and "Otro Mundo"), La Radiolina recalls the best of Manu Chao, but too often it feels like being trapped next to a member of the Socialist Workers Party at closing time in the student bar.The feeling is not entirely dispelled by an hour in conversation with Chao; he has a tendency to make apocalyptic pronouncements, such as: "If we stay like this: chaos. End of civilisation. I mean what I'm saying. It's a matter of time" and "Capitalism is barbarity, it's the law of the jungle in money". Maybe so, but I find myself wondering what happened to the sensitive, poetic person I heard on his early albums.
Why couldn't they have got someone to interview him who was actually sympathetic to his ideas? I can't understand why the writer feels we would particularly care to have her status quo viewpoint inserted here. Would she find it so very implausible to think that it might be his political 'sensitivity' that makes his records so popular in the first place? Evidently so. Well, hopefully Mr Chao won't be too concerned about her strictures on how to be the nice, well-behaved sort of rock star that she would prefer to listen to. What piffle.
van Creveld: The World Can Live With a Nuclear Iran
Opinion
Martin van Creveld | Mon. Sep 24, 2007
Since 1945 hardly one year has gone by in which some voices — mainly American ones concerned about preserving Washington’s monopoly over nuclear weapons to the greatest extent possible — did not decry the terrible consequences that would follow if additional countries went nuclear. So far, not one of those warnings has come true. To the contrary: in every place where nuclear weapons were introduced, large-scale wars between their owners have disappeared.
Iran Targetted Over Iraq; Blind Eye to Saudi Role
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/25/142247
In a speech at Columbia University, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended Iran's right to nuclear power but denied Iran was seeking to build nuclear weapons. Ahmadinejad's appearance sparked widespread protests at Columbia. We speak with Trita Parsi, author of "Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States" and Baruch professor Ervand Abrahamian, co-author of "Targeting Iran." [includes rush transcript]
TRITA PARSI: Saudi’s role -- well, a military report just came out about two months ago -- it was leaked in the LA Times -- that showed that about 45% of all the suicide bombers in Iraq are Saudi nationals. We've known for quite some time that there's a lot of money flowing into Iraq from Saudi Arabia that is going to the Sunni insurgents, because their belief is that they're fighting a war against Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. We're not talking about that. On the contrary, Saudi Arabia got praised by Ambassador Crocker during his testimony. And I think it's a very one-sided way of looking at the problems we're facing in Iraq. And as long as we pursue a very political perspective on the Iraqi situation, then I fear that we will continue to be in a rather difficult mess over there.
Juan Cole: Turning Ahmadinejad into public enemy No. 1
Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial are all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war.
By Juan Cole
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/09/24/ahmadinejad/
And...There is, in fact, remarkably little substance to the debates now raging in the United States about Ahmadinejad. His quirky personality, penchant for outrageous one-liners, and combative populism are hardly serious concerns for foreign policy. Taking potshots at a bantam cock of a populist like Ahmadinejad is actually a way of expressing another, deeper anxiety: fear of Iran's rising position as a regional power and its challenge to the American and Israeli status quo. The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state.
Instead, the U.S. State Department denounced Ahmadinejad as himself little more than a terrorist. Critics have also cited his statements about the Holocaust or his hopes that the Israeli state will collapse. He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on killing Israeli Jews, even though he is not commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces, has never invaded any other country, denies he is an anti-Semite, has never called for any Israeli civilians to be killed, and allows Iran's 20,000 Jews to have representation in Parliament.
Iranian University Chancellors Ask Bollinger 10 Questions
Iranian University Chancellors Ask Bollinger 10 Questions
TEHRAN (Fars News Agency)- Seven chancellors and presidents of Iranian universities and research centers, in a letter addressed to their counterpart in the US Colombia University, denounced Lee Bollinger's insulting words against the Iranian nation and president and invited him to provide responses for 10 questions of the Iranian academicians and intellectuals.
Eurozine: Counter-revolution against a counter-revolution
G.M. Tamás
Counter-revolution against a counter-revolution
Eastern Europe today
State socialism in eastern Europe, though intolerably authoritarian, offered security and the opportunity for upward mobility, writes G.M. Tamás. Members of the middle class resist becoming déclassé but cannot identify with the communist institutions to which they owe their status. In order to defend social relations before 1989 without losing face, they portray the neoconservative destruction of the welfare state as the work of communists. The new counter revolutionaries can, then, be described both as left- and as rightwing – as the anti-communist enemies of communist privatizers and globalizers.
Dissent: Who Named the Neocons?
Who Named the Neocons?
By Benjamin Ross
SUMMER 2007
The Rosetta Stone that unlocks this linguistic puzzle is the next appearance of neoconservative in Dissent. It was in Fall 1975, just as Daniel P. Moynihan’s appointment as ambassador to the United Nations began to propel the word into prominence. An article by John P. Diggins used it to describe William F. Buckley’s early collaborators Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Will Herberg, and James Burnham.[10] The conservative writer B. Bruce-Briggs demurred in the Spring 1976 issue: "One must quibble with his use of the term “neoconservatives” to label the ex-Marxists who went over to the right before 1950. In contemporary usage, “neoconservative” labels those liberals who would not accept the “New Politics” shift during the mid1960s; they are careful to keep their distance from the premature antiliberals of Buckley and company. On the right, as the left, sectarianism demands scrupulous care in nomenclature." A neoconservative, for the Dissenters of the early 1970s, was either someone with a new variant of conservatism or a former leftist who had moved right. The term was applied to the group that evolved into today’s neocons, simply because they were the new conservatives of immediate concern. But its meaning was not limited to them. It was elsewhere that neoconservatism became a name rather than a description. Scientists know that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can sometimes trigger a hurricane on the other side of the earth. In this case, fluttering on the West Side of Manhattan is connected to a hurricane three decades later in Iraq. For the butterfly that has thus flown into history, scrupulous care in taxonomic nomenclature is indeed demanded.
Review of Mearsheimer & Walt's new book
BY SCOTT McLEMEE Special to Newsday
September 16, 2007
At the same time, they are wedded to the notion that the U.S. and Israel have distinct national interests - with the American interest defined, more or less, as sustained access to Middle Eastern oil. They reject the idea that Iraq was occupied in pursuit of oil. Hence, that policy was an effect of the Israel lobby's efforts on behalf of a different national interest. Here, we see the real limits of their analysis. After 1993, by their own account, the major focus of Israel's concern about its own security was Iran, not Iraq. But it was the American neoconservatives - defined by the authors as part of the Israel lobby - who drew up the plans for attacking Iraq. This scheme did win support among the Israeli public in 2002 and '03, but it's hardly a matter of subordinating American policy to another country's interests.
Mearsheimer & Walt: Seven Questions: The Israel Lobby Revisited
Posted September 2007
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt made waves in 2006 when they argued that a powerful “Israel lobby” distorts U.S. policies in the Middle East. Back with a new book expanding on the same topic, these noted realist scholars sat down with FP to explain why they are speaking out.
All politicians are sensitive to interest groups, whether it’s the farm lobby, or drug companies, or energy companies, or the National Rifle Association. Clearly, groups like the Israel lobby tend to exert their most profound influence on Capitol Hill, but they also wield considerable influence—like other special interest groups—over the executive branch. This is not to say that any of these organizations control U.S. policy, just that they exert a very powerful influence on it. And one of the ways you see that is in the presidential campaign that’s currently going on. American Middle East policy is clearly in trouble, and you would expect presidential candidates to be discussing and debating what ought to be done on a wide range of Middle East issues. But when it comes to Israel, all you get from presidential candidates is a competition for who can demonstrate the greatest devotion to Israel and willingness to back it almost unconditionally.
LRB: Anderson: Depicting Europe
Perry Anderson
http://lrb.co.uk/v29/n18/print/ande01_.html
9/20/07
Perry Anderson's review of some Europhile works, new and not so new, contains some interesting comments. Certainly the current path of the 'project' of the European Union is overshadowed by some serious problems: racial integration; brain drain from the East; Turkey; and the all pervasive issue of the Transatlantic Alliance. But perhaps the most troubling problem of all, and here Perry is quite right, is that the Europhile's have incredibly high notions of themselves, and the moral role of the Union:
Self-satisfaction is scarcely unfamiliar in Europe. But the contemporary mood is something different: an apparently illimitable narcissism, in which the reflection in the water transfigures the future of the planet into the image of the beholder. What explains this degree of political vanity?
I addressed this in my classroom last autumn. We were reading Rifkin's book and I have to admit, there were moments when I felt extremely uncomfortable with my decision to put in on the syllabus. While the work does an excellent job of explaining in very accessible terms the 'problem of modernity', and the particular advantages of the 'European' socio-economic model in dealing with this problem, the author seems far too comfortable with his rather monolithic assumptions. To be sure, 'Europe' is a decidedly ambiguous project. On the one hand, it is driven by a Functionalist logic of integration. The results of this for the marginal are perfectly represented by Perry:
The role configured by the new East in the EU, in other words, promises to be something like that played by the new South in the American economy since the 1970s: a zone of business-friendly fiscal regimes, weak or non-existent labour movements, low wages and – therefore – high investment, registering faster growth than in the older core regions of continent-wide capital. Like the US South, too, the region seems likely to fall somewhat short of the standards of political respectability expected in the rest of the Union. Already, now that they are safely inside the EU and there is no longer the same need to be on their best behaviour, the elites of the region show signs of kicking over the traces. In Poland, the ruling twins defy every norm of ideological correctness as understood in Strasbourg or Brussels. In Hungary, riot police stand on guard around a ruler unabashed at vaunting his lies to voters. In the Czech Republic, months pass without parliament being able to form a government. In Romania, the president insults the prime minister in a phone-in call to a television talk-show. But, as in Kentucky or Alabama, such provincial quirks add a touch of folkloric colour to the drab metropolitan scene more than they disturb it.
We Europeans in America complain ad nauseum about the average American's lack of basic knowledge about their society. Yet how many Europeans are aware of the basic strategization of their own society? The answer to this question must be disappointing for the Rifkins of this world, as the following quote reveals.
In the syrup of la pensée unique, little separates the market-friendly wisdom of one side of the Atlantic from the other, though as befits the derivative, the recipe is still blander in Europe than America, where political differences are less extinct. In such conditions, an enthusiast can find no higher praise for the Union than to compare it to ‘one of the most successful companies in global history’. Which firm confers this honour on Brussels? Why, the one in your wallet. The EU ‘is already closer to Visa than it is to a state’, declares New Labour’s Mark Leonard, exalting Europe to the rank of a credit card.
So, Europe is now referred to as something akin to a corporation, one clear hint as to why its police forces might now be in the business not simply of dispensing justice but also maintaining the corporation's bottom line. With this stated, the next obvious question is what we really mean by the 'European Dream,' and whether or not there might somehow be a way to creatively intervene in its machinations:
Transcendence of the nation-state, Marx believed, would be a task not for capital but for labour. A century later, as the Cold War set in, Kojève held that whichever camp achieved it would emerge the victor from the conflict. The foundation of the European Community settled the issue for him. The West would win, and its triumph would bring history, understood categorically – not chronologically – as the realisation of human freedom, to an end. Kojève’s prediction was accurate. His extrapolation, and its irony, remain in the balance. They have certainly not been disproved: he would have smiled at the image of a chit of plastic. The emergence of the Union may be regarded as the last great world-historical achievement of the bourgeoisie, proof that its creative powers were not exhausted by the fratricide of two world wars, and what has happened to it as a strange declension from what was hoped from it. Yet the long-run outcome of integration remains unforeseeable to all parties. Even without shocks, many a zigzag has marked its path. With them, who knows what further mutations might occur.
Yes. But in a sense, this is just where the debate starts. On the one hand, Zizek warns us not to fall into the same psychological dilemma of 'false choice,' as confronted by the Amish teenagers. On the other, Negri, Alliez, et al., pushing for a more centralized (yet 'centerless'?) Europe, the sooner to beget the global Empire, the final obstacle to global democracy.