Mourning the Manchester attack

After the terrible events of Monday night, the British government has suspended the election and the country is left shaken. The army has been deployed to protect “key sites” as the UK goes on ‘critical alert’ fearing an imminent terror attack.

Around 1,000 troops are being dispatched across the country. Up to 3,800 are available. It’s an unnerving show of strength as if to ward-off what we all fear is hiding in the shadows.

It’s also a natural move for Theresa May, our beloved leader, who is known for her authoritarian tendencies. May slipped and fell in the polls after an embarrassing U-turn over her ‘dementia tax’.

This ‘critical alert’ is as much a response to a genuine threat as it is a political manoeuvre.

In other ways, the response to the attack in Manchester has been the usual mix of virulent anti-Muslim racism, on the one hand, and conspiracy theory, on the other. Even before the body count emerged, social media was filled with comments like: “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims”. And that’s a polite example. Meanwhile, the conspiracists have trotted the theory that Ariana Grande ‘sacrificed’ the crowd for the Illuminati.

Apparently, the world isn’t scary enough for some people. Islamic State has claimed credit for the attack (though direct IS involvement has not been verified). People calling for a new war with ISIS ought to consider the group’s eschatology. Islamic State wants a war with the West in order to expand and entrench its support across the Middle East and beyond. This was the same logic behind 9/11.

Sometimes I get the feeling that people will listen to anything other than inconvenient truths. The fact that the UK was never attacked by radical Islamists until it invaded Afghanistan in 2001 is unmentionable. Let alone the subsequent wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria. This picture is less comforting if you’re looking for a reason to stay passive.

If we want to secure ourselves from suicide bombings, we should set limits on what the British government can do abroad. Stopping the killings, the torture and the occupations would be a good start. Yet if you raise such concerns you will be accused of being a ‘terrorist sympathiser’. All the more reason not to be cowed into blind support for Western foreign policy.

There is a line to walk in these dark times. It’s important that the families of victims have time to mourn and solidarity has to be extended to the victims, alive and dead. But this solidarity has to be meaningful. It would be a disservice to the victims to support a violent, racist response. The unity of struggle means solidarity between the victims of Manchester and the victims of state violence.

Not only should we seek a rational account of attacks like this, we must do so for the sake of the victims. Pretending that the suicide bombing was an insane and senseless act, or that the perpetrators was a monster from birth, is a way of denying that the killer had any agency in the first place. To deny an action is rational is to deny the individual has any responsibility.

Seeking an explanation is not the same as excusing or even mitigating this atrocious crime. Even still, we’re told we should be blind to American aggression against the Middle East. As if it was inconceivable that the deaths of one million Iraqis would mean anything in the first place. As if no one would feel a deep, burning sense of rage about the state of play in West Asia.

The fear of introspection is a reactionary force in our lives. It’s the reason why certain people loathe Freud and Marx in equal measure. They offer the most inconvenient insights into the world we live in. The left should play the same role in exposing the crimes of states. But the left shouldn’t forget its aims are based on moving people to take action. It’s not enough to have the right ideas and an audience of twelve.

The danger is that the anti-immigrant right has fought and won a great deal of sway over the debates around multiculturalism, Islam and freedom of movement. Things that were once taboo are now mainstream. The left has not been able to combat this rightward lurch. The arguments in favour of labour migration and diversity are barely made, let alone understood.

This is why it’s vital for leftists to not just ‘call out’ the enemy. The problem for the left is that there is a lack of positive vision about what we want to do about the threat of terrorism. The left is right to defend the rights of Muslims, as well as refugees and the cause of free movement more broadly. But the defensive game can only go so far.

This article was originally published at Souciant.

Derby's Terrorists.

I just read a report in The Guardian on a recent suicide bombing in the town of Beiji just north of Baghdad. The perpetrator was Kabir Ahmed, a British citizen from Derby - where I'm also from. The report details the impact: "The blast killed Lieutenant General Faisal Malik Zamel, who was inspecting forces in the town, and seven other police officers, while wounding 15 people, hospital staff and police officers." It wasn't all too surprising. I often wonder about the extent of alienation in the British Muslim community.

At the same time, there were car bombs in Baghdad and Ramadi which killed 12 people. So we should remain aware that we are only interested in a British death and its significance. We are always overly fixated on our own, even if we count our own among the enemy. I can't help but feel the need to comment when I read of the bombing. It reminds me of the Tel Aviv bomber Omar Sharif, who went to Bemrose as I did, albeit years earlier, and lived in Normanton - the city's Asian district, known in racist terms as a 'ghetto'. My mum recalls the area being described as the Black Hole of Calcutta and my own memory is littered with instances of racial tensions between white and Asian people. My first encounter with racism was in the playground of Becket.

I do wonder about the role of such communal tensions in the radicalisation of young British Muslims. From what I've seen I suspect disaffection with British society plays a role, but it's not a matter of a clash of cultures. There are a wide array of factors I would take into account. The English North and the Midlands have suffered economic deprivation for more than three decades now. On top of that there is the element of racism, as well as political disillusionment (which is also behind the rise of the Far-Right in the UK too) and a shift towards anti-politics. Religion stands as an alternative under such conditions. It's an identity-marker and it holds out hope of salvation by transcendence of the present situation. Tragically, it won't be taken seriously...

This latest incident comes after the US confirmed a series of air strikes against the Islamic State leadership. The US has been engaged against Syrian targets for quite some time now and its campaign in Iraq has found allies in Europe more than willing to join them. So far it seems that these airstrikes can be regarded as part of US efforts to maintain regional instability and, by extension, keep its hand on the global oil spigot.

Finkelstein on the latest attack on Gaza.

"Gaza was bombarded with 273 airstrikes yesterday (8th July). That's an average of 11 an hour. Gaza is about 25 miles long and 4 miles wide, with a population of 1.7 million crammed into that tiny space. It is under Israeli occupation and Israeli siege. Hospitals estimate they will run out of resources to treat the wounded in about a day. Electricity is intermittent. Gaza has no army, air force or navy. Israel is the fourth largest military power in the world. Resistance to occupation is allowed under international law. Israel's occupation, siege and collective punishment of Gaza is not."
- Norman Finkelstein, July 8 2014

"Better to burn-out than fade away..."

I could have written a piece for the twentieth year since Kurt Cobain killed himself. I have no time for the debate over whether or not Cobain did kill himself. I think it's much more important that we remember Cobain's work and not his death. Especially, as the man's suicide note stated "It's better to burn-out than fade away" and there may be something in that. In regards to mortality we shouldn't despair so much, finite lives make their mark and in the case of great artists they have their own piece of eternity. For the twentieth anniversary of Nevermind's release I posted an article (see extract below) drawing upon Fred Pfeil's observations of Kurt Cobain's swipes against repressive masculinity.

The example of choice is the music video of In Bloom in which the band are introduced on an Ed Sullivan-esque TV show as "three fine young men from Seattle" complete with combed hair and matching sports coats. The video is shot in grainy black-and-white to give it the feel of the early 60s, the days before there was such a thing as MTV, Heavy Metal or Punk Rock never mind Grunge.  The effect is a Brechtian distance, the verfremdungseffekt, the point of which was to encourage the audience to take a critical view of the events on stage. So the trio bob about cheerfully as the crowd of pubescent girls get all hysterical as the quiet opening line stands incongruous to the scene "Sell kids for food, weather changes moods". The immediate subject of mockery is the "one" who "knows all our pretty songs", who likes to sing along and shoot his gun but "knows not what it means"; later adding "We can have some more, nature is a whore". The position to be ridiculed is that to comprehend these lyrics is to "shoot a gun", e.g. to possess a phallus.

My anarchist buddy Ted says I should've brought up the fact that the songs Polly and Rape Me were really about highlighting atrocious violence towards women. Originally, the two tracks were to be paired together, played back-to-back, in memory of a teenage girl, who was kidnapped, raped, and tortured. Fortunately, the girl escaped and the rapist Gerald Friend was arrested and is currently rotting in prison. Far from being works celebrating violence against women, as they have been confused for in the past, the songs are very much anti-rape and ultimately life-affirmative.

What does this tell us about the State?

The killing of Mark Duggan has been found legal. The anger around this case is legitimate as were the first sparks of protest and unrest in Tottenham (though what came later is another matter) in which locals mobilised around the police station. It is only middle-class white people who feel an instinctive sense of being on the side of the police. Ordinary people know what it is like to be stopped and searched by the police, especially if they're black or if they fit the profile of a 'terrorist'. It's not a testament to the character of individual officers - who may be awful or munificent - it's about the structural role of the police as a repressive institution with a dismal collective unconscious.

By the way I think the content of the ruling is not expressly problematic. What did we expect of the justice system? Even if the ruling had found that the killing was unlawful it would only serve to reaffirm the sovereignty of the state in its authoritative claims to legality and justice. For this reason I don't think there could by any just result as I question the authority of the state, and that is the fundamental question here. It's hypocritical to suggest that the jury finding the police killing illegal would serve anything other than reasserting the sovereignty. That may be understandable given the high emotions around the death of this man. But it is not the political issue at hand. Andrew Robinson produced an excellent couple of articles on Agamben's work on the area of exceptions in law:

“Homo” means human/man, and “sacer” has the double meaning of “sacred” and “taboo”. Homo sacer is defined as someone who can be killed, but not sacrificed. They can’t be sacrificed to the gods because they’re defined as outside the recognised terrain of valued life (there’s nothing left in them worth sacrificing; to sacrifice them would be sacrilege), but for the same reason, they can be killed with impunity.

I have deployed this concept before in the past with regard to the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of the US army. On that occasion I was prompted to write by the incessant gurgling of Douglas Murray, who took the predictable position that it was fine for the US to violate Pakistan's sovereignty and commit an assassination. I think it can be said that Mark Duggan is a 'homo sacer' in that he is excluded from the sphere of rights and liberties (because he's a violent gangster, to quote the BBC) who can be legitimately killed by the police. Not even in controlled circumstances, not a public execution that has been legally ratified. Instead the killing is legalised by the very system which excluded Duggan in the first place. Thus, the departed was included insofar as he was excluded. It is in this process that the sovereignty claims its basic authority, the authority to make 'exceptions'.

What It Means to Fight Oppression.

There are vital lessons to be learned from the accomplishments and failings of Nelson Mandela. Yet the mainstream media prefer to portray this great man as a kindly and benign old codger who won his battle for freedom. The assumptions behind this can be easily detected and should be excavated with a critical eye. The emphasis is always on the efforts towards reconciliation between the 'races' and not looking for 'revenge' against his former oppressors. The presupposition of biological distinctions between Africans remains intact while Mandela is to be applauded for being a 'restraint' on the barbarous hordes. Behind this lies the white racial consciousness, e.g. 'us' versus 'them'. We should resist this troubling banalisation of such an important figure. What is most admirable about Mandela is not the compromises his side made once in negotiations to dismantle the Apartheid regime.

The much lauded multiracial democracy of South Africa is actually a balancing arrangement between a state monopolised by the black vote and economic power resting in largely white hands. The mines remain privately owned and the largely black workforce is still being squeezed dry. In some ways the South African class system is now even worse than it was under Apartheid, the aspects of racial oppression which were inherent to that system remain in place in economic form. Except now the black people to rise to the business class have a vested interest in maintaining the continued subjugation of the toiling masses (most of whom are not white). The Marikana massacre in September 2012 demonstrated the disgraceful extent to which the ANC has become embroiled in the exploitation and oppression of the working-classes. The sight of white and black cops shooting the miners should be taken as the metaphor for the New South Africa.

To find the true heroism of Nelson Mandela we must examine the reasons for hysterical right-wing accusations of 'terrorism' against him. The African National Congress was dedicated to non-violent resistance for decades by this point and had exhausted every alternative to violent direct action. This was the background to the important moment when Nelson Mandela and his compatriots decided to found the Spear of the Nation and initiate the armed struggle. The targets were to be primarily governmental and symbolical, other targets included industrial and agricultural sabotage. Mandela was always eager to prevent the campaign from getting out of hand. He consistently opposed attacks on civilians and car-bombing in particular for it would degrade the movement and its cause. But he recognised that the situation in South Africa demanded more than pacifism.

In the Rivonia trial Nelson Mandela gave a virtuous defence of the cause "During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." It was these words which were the reason Mandela was sent to prison for 27 years. It was these words which were the reason the US Congress refused to remove Nelson Mandela from their terrorist list until 2008. And it is precisely for these words which we should admire him in his indomitable resistance to tyranny. To call this 'terrorism' is to hold secret sympathy with the same kind of people we defeated in 1945.

If you want to know what the ANC were fighting against for decades you ought to examine the barbarism in which the Apartheid regime was by its nature embroiled. South Africa was a counter-revolutionary force in the face of national liberation movements in its neighbouring countries. In its occupation of Namibia and invasions of Angola and Mozambique, South Africa became the belligerent in a conflict which left more than 1.5 million dead. This was at the same time that the white supremacist state was carrying out assassinations, coups and atrocities which spanned the whole of Africa and beyond. The ultra-violence of the regime was completely supported by the American and British governments of the day, as well as most other European countries and Israel. The major ally of the ANC in its solidarity with the African rebels was the Castro regime of Cuba - who sent thousands of health workers, arms and troops to assist the Africans in their fight with the old colonial powers, as well as forces from South Africa and the CIA.

The reason why the mainstream media would prefer not to delve into the details of the struggle against Apartheid is that it leads to embarrassing questions about the Cold War. We might be tempted to ask why Western governments were so vehemently on the side of Afrikaner minority rule. We might also want to know why is it the Communists were intervening on the side of freedom and not the West. When it comes down to it we would have to examine the history of South Africa and ask some pointed questions. This is precisely what the compromises of the 1990s blacked out from the public discourse. In a way this isn't surprising. Common to all beginnings the traumas of the past are always to be suppressed to prevent troubling questions of the new order from being raised. If the Apartheid system was a means of managing the class antagonism built into any capitalist society (which was the case) then we should want to know if this multiracial democracy is really much different.

Through divide and conquer the Afrikaner minority could maintain its hold on wealth procured through the exploitation of South Africa's copious resources as well as its working-classes. In the end it was the international campaigns to boycott and impose sanctions against the South African economy which crippled the system of divide and conquer. The ANC fought alongside the MPLA, SWAPO and Cuban troops against the counter-revolutionary forces at Cuito Cuanavale in what Nelson Mandela called "a turning point for the liberation of our continent and my people." These events combined with the sight of burning townships from Table Top Mountain was no doubt enough to convince many it was over. In the late 80s the Afrikaner business class then began to meet secretly with Oliver Tambo and others in places like Zambia to establish ties and negotiate. It took the party-state a bit longer. In a couple of years Nelson Mandela would be brought to meet with FW de Klerk in the first steps to his release and the official negotiations.

No Clean Hands.

Q: How big a part did violence pay in moving ANC forward?

A: These things are always difficult to gauge, but it's worth noting that pretty much every means of non-violent struggle were exhausted over many years. In my view Nelson Mandela was justified in shifting gears in the early 60s and founding the Spear of the Nation to initiate a campaign of sabotage. That's not to say every single action was justified, and indeed Mandela didn't simply believe that the resistance was to be fought by all means available. He was an opponent of car-bombing for example, precisely because it would degrade the movement. It's also the case that Mandela was very careful to select government targets, as well as industrial and agricultural targets for sabotage. So this wasn't indiscriminate civilian bloodshed for the most part. Then we have to put the struggle in its regional context.

The decolonization of Africa was still underway when Mandela undertook the new approach, but the liberation of Spanish and Portuguese colonies was stalled until the Fascist regimes began to collapse in the late 60s and early 70s. The primary force of counter-revolution in the region was Apartheid South Africa and it quickly moved to try and prevent its neighbours from achieving independence. The CIA was heavily involved of course. South Africa occupied Namibia and intervened in Angola and Mozambique, as well as organising bombing raids, coups and death squads in a lot of other places. We're talking 1.5 million dead plus $60 billion in damage from 1980 to 1988. Cuba pledged a great deal of support for the rebels in Angola, Namibia as well as the ANC. In fact, the ANC along with the MPLA and SWAPO fought alongside one another at Cuito Cuanavale in what Nelson Mandela called "a turning point for the liberation of our continent and my people."

I don't claim expert knowledge on this. My South African friends will probably have a lot to add on this. I would stress the demands of historical conditions and how quickly those demands can change. Gandhi's approach worked because the British Empire was crippled. You couldn't say that about the South African state in 1961.

Afterthoughts: Eventually the South African state was effectively crippled through the boycott campaigns and the international sanctions imposed on the country as opposition gradually became the predominant position in the world. Once the US had given up on Apartheid the South African regime had no choice but to dismantle the system of white supremacy. The next best scenario for the Afrikaner elite in South Africa was a compromise where the black masses would be given suffrage, while overwhelming economic power would remain in the hands of the white minority. The business class realised this by the late 1980s and began meeting secretly with Oliver Tambo and others in places like Zambia. It took the political class a bit longer to reach the same conclusion. Once free Nelson Mandela and the ANC negotiated away the possibility of economic justice, possibly out of fear of what the white generals might do if the ANC opts for significant social and economic reform. In this way we might understand Nelson Mandela as a transitional figure in an unfinished revolution.

Mendieta and Misogyny.

An Earth-Body Dynamic.

 

Looking at the work of Ana Mendieta the cogs in my mind wound back four years to Lars von Trier's Antichrist. The reasons for this I will expand upon soon enough. The body of work she amassed could be taken for sanguineous and morbid if her recreation of rape scenes are misunderstood. The shock value of these pieces is appropriate as they were made in response to the rape of her fellow students. It was certainly the right time and place for a female artist to be engaging with the prevalence of sexual violence. The decline of an array of social conventions regarding the place of women in society was at its beginning in the early 1970s. It is often forgotten that what is described as the Feminist movement came about in the wake of 60s cultural revolution in reaction to its ambiguity on the question of women's liberation. So it was a ripe subject for exploration in art.

The depictions of femininity in Mendieta's work are particularly interesting in this regard. It reminds one of Antichrist where we are told nature is Satan's church, the locus of misogyny being found in suggestions of an absent autonomy: women as subjects of various natural forces outside of their own control. In ancient religion we find this is most overt in the aversion to female genitalia and the rituals imposed around the menstrual cycle. All of which feeds into the controls set on sexual conduct. This is not just the case in the monotheist tradition, it is even true of Eastern religion where, for example, we find the Buddha was born out of his mother's side. It then makes sense that Mendieta's work links together the Catholic and pre-Christian pagan traditions of Latin America with a certain conception of femininity. Not coincidentally Mendieta produced art on sexual violence as she was moving in this direction.

Death seemed to feature heavily as a theme, whether in the form of natural decay and peformative destruction in the burning of trees and killing chickens. Mendieta would later move away from performance art, which she disliked for its immediacy; and she was further exploring her Cuban heritage. Ochún (1981) was named after a water goddess in Santería - an Afro-Cuban religious movement based on a blend of folk Catholicism with Yoruba customs - who also the goddess of love, intimacy and beauty. According to Wikipedia, Ochún is said to be generous, beneficent and kind as well as capable of incredible chaos in the few occasions where she loses her temper. The extent to which she romanticised the syncretic cultural heritage of Cuba may be more of a matter of speculation at this point. Such a romanticisation may run as far as embracing this model of femininity. It would be easy to attribute this to her deracination as a Cuban-American.

Unfortunately, we will never know how her work would have developed if she had not died in 1985. Even with all of this in mind, Mendieta's work could be interpreted as a genealogy of misogynist themes. After all an earthly conception of femininity parallels what is to be taken from the traditional organic view of the family and a woman's position in said social unit. In Mother Jungle we find a portrayal of womanhood synthesised with nature comes across as much darker. The imposing dark figure with its jagged features and womb on display seems charged with angst; but this is an almost genderless depiction at the same time (aside from the emphasis on the womb). As Rachel Spence has noted, Ana Mendieta resisted attempts by American feminists to reduce her work to goddess worship. In a way the body of work she produced was far more ambiguous.

Spence notes that Mendieta claimed her work held to a particular culture and time. So it might be taken as a representation of womanhood in terms relative to a certain culture. The art made in a natural environment, carved out of rock and wood may seem to be a more warm-hearted a view of nature. Around this time Mendieta was becoming much more conscious in terms of a two-front struggle in feminism against racism and capitalism. She did describe her work as pre-industrial and situates herself in line with Neolithic paintings. If she had lived she may have become involved in the anti-globalisation movement, which shares this nostalgia for the pre-industrial past. In her work she situates humankind in relation to nature, life and death; and she condemned Robert Smithson for his brutalisation of nature in his invasive land art. Where this trajectory leaves women is another matter.

A note on the Woolwich murder.

 

On Facebook I posted the following points as a status after the hours of coverage of the attack in Woolwich and I stand by them today:
1. Your sympathy belongs with the victim and their family. It should go without saying that this is a horrible crime.
2. The perpetrators are not representatives of Islam, or immigration, they are murderous thugs and will go down for this. That's a good thing. We shouldn't let a pair of murderers change our society. No death penalty. No deportation. To be a civilised country means treating the worst people in a way which doesn't lower ourselves to their level.
3. Don't concede any ground to racists and/or neo-Nazis who are clambering over one another to exploit the death of another human being. The EDL have been quick to get down to Woolwich, they deserve no attention nor should we pretend they have any serious claim to comment on this crime.
4. This looks like a political act, if so then we have to talk about the real reasons for anger against Western governments from the Muslim world. A question that is much bigger . That means we have to address the wars that have waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the dictatorships that have been supported by Western governments for decades.

 

In the discussion that followed this post I was told that point 4 is in contradiction with the first points and that it constitutes a 'mitigation'. That's simply not the case as I was making a more subtle point than some can appreciate. The fourth point is the last of the points because I consider it to be the last of priorities under such extreme circumstances. It's a sorry fact about the world that there is no time for criticism of American and British foreign policy after the war in Iraq and the on-going occupation of Afghanistan. There isn't a causal link between the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the murder of Lee Rigby. It's plausible that there are people who could've killed even if these events hadn't taken place. But there is a sense in which certain foreign policy decisions fed the narrative of radical Islamism. That is the narrative and set of ideas the media describe as 'ideology'.

Founding a State.

The news of an outbreak of violence in Gaza with the Israeli Defence Forces was not much of a surprise for anyone. It mobilised some to protest outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington, while others joined the counter-demonstration further down the road, the vast majority of people probably languished in passive ignorance to the history of the crisis. The wars waged to establish and expand the state of Israel surprise no one with a modicum of knowledge of the history of the nation-state. Like childbirth the memory of the founding of a state is repressed precisely because it’s so traumatic. The majority of states in the world were either founded in violence or have been perpetuated through violence in some way. So it should surprise no one that the state of Israel was founded out of a theft - what Palestinians call the Nabka - in which 700,000 people were expelled from their land and their villages were destroyed to make way for a new country. And we can safely say, in retrospect of six decades, that expansionism is inherent to the state-founding project.

Expulsion from the land was the only way that the state could be established. It was necessary given that at the time Mandate Palestine consisted of a population that was 95% Muslim and Christian Arab. Today the millions of descendants of those Palestinians who were first displaced in 1948 are scattered around the world. The largest concentration outside of Israel and the occupied territories is in Jordan, where Israeli nationalists argue the Palestinians really belong. Part of the problem is the ambiguity of where Israel’s borders actually end. If the international borders are disregarded (which they are inside Israel) then the eastern frontier of the country reach across the Jordan River and that would mean Jordan can be absorbed as well. This is the irony of the nationalist line that the Palestinians should go live in Jordan. Originally the border was meant to be at the Alawi River in the middle of Lebanon. Until the borders are clarified and set at the internationally recognised limit, which is at 78% of what was once Mandate Palestine, then there won’t be peace.

The UN vote to bestow non-member observer status on Palestine demonstrates that the Palestinians are hungry for a peaceful settlement. Incidentally, Palestine now shares the same status of statehood as the Holy See. This is contrary to the picture that the Israeli Right put forward of murderous rabbles of Arabs too bloodthirsty to settle for anything less than the demise of the Jewish state. Yet it is the Israeli government that won't budge on the question of settlements and 60% of the West Bank already consists of Jewish settlements. That's a major obstacle to a two-state settlement if Palestine is meant to be constituted by 100% of the West Bank. Then there's the wall of annexation that has been extended around arable land and resources in the West Bank. This wall is called a 'defensive barrier' in Israel, which is what the Berlin Wall was called in East Germany. It gets even more absurd, in the US media the wall is called a 'fence' and it's longer than the Berlin Wall.

This is somewhat appropriate as the US was itself born out of a revolt on America's East Coast only for the colonies to expand westward into Indian territory. It isn't often discussed that there may have been as many as 18 million, possibly even 25 million, people living in North America when European settlers first arrived. The fact that the US would consist of a narrow slither of land if it weren't for genocide, war and slavery was long suppressed by historians. This denial of these origins was nothing exceptional. In the same way that the trauma of childbirth is suppressed in all of our minds, the horrors of nation-building are quickly wiped from the national memory. What follows then is the creation of a national mythology, the shibboleths of American exceptionalism were crafted by English colonists quite early on. Ronald Reagan liked to describe America as "a shining city upon a hill"; well it was Puritan colonist John Winthrop who coined that phrase in 1630 and along with it the notion that America is a nation with a divine purpose.

The new world was a venture first pursued to escape the horrors of European nationalism and in a way Israel was a similar project. Yet it would seem as though the nation-state, a European invention itself, has brought with it all the destructive tendencies of the old world with it. This isn’t just the violence inherent to the project, it’s racism as well. Not just towards Arabs, who are victims of discrimination on all fronts. In May race riots broke out in Tel Aviv a Likudnik at the Knesset commented that black immigrants are a ‘cancer’ on the Jewish state. Keep in mind the black immigrants are Sudanese refugees fleeing the slaughter in their own country. Racism is never too far from nationalism, wherever it hangs its hat. The violence of founding states pukes it up almost automatically. Now Bibi Netanyahu has made it clear he is running with Avi Lieberman – a man who believes in segregation and loyalty oaths – at the upcoming elections. We can take all of this as a sign that Israel has yet to really finish its ‘founding’, and that means this could go on for much longer.

This article was published at the Heythrop Lion on December 11th 2012.

Apartheid, Analogy and Disanalogy.

 

"Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians." - Nelson Mandela
 

The analogy between Israel and South Africa is often drawn when it comes to the question of the occupied territories and the Palestinians. There are good reasons for making this analogy, as well as serious differences between the cases that would mean the analogy is dubious. The problem of a Palestinian state is innate to Israel in the same way that racial equality is a problem innate to South Africa. The creation of nation-states out of the processes of European colonialism comes with the brutality of expansionism and war. South Africa was a principle aggressor in Southern Africa in its role as a counter-revolutionary force it slaughtered over a million people in neighbouring states in the 1980s. By comparison, Israel has been at war almost constantly for most of its existence and it serves the US as a "cop on the beat" in the Middle East. This is well demonstrated by the worrying tensions between Israel and Iran. I don't think I will be able to settle this matter in just one article, so I'm only going to go over a few points about the comparison.

The network of roadblocks and checkpoints which regulate the daily lives of Palestinians has been compared to the Apartheid rule of South Africa. Though it is worthy of condemnation even if we dismiss the comparison as a disanalogy. After all it's a system which has left pregnant women to give birth in the street only for their newborn babies to die in the heat, all in the name of Israel's national security. There is even a segregated highway system, roads on which only Jews are allowed to travel. This highway system was established on the pretext of counter-terrorism.  Actually this has nothing to do with counter-terrorism. Instead it is a part of the maintenance of the occupation of the West Bank, where the Israeli government supports (directly and indirectly) the settlements which hold 60% of the land. To this end the Israeli government are busily constructed a wall of annexation in and around the West Bank to snatch the major concentrations of resources and water from the Palestinians. This wall is called a 'defensive barrier' in Israel, which is what the Berlin Wall was called in East Germany. But the West Bank wall is longer than the Berlin Wall.

It's clear that the Israeli government is not too comfortable with the prospect of a Palestinian state. The continued encroachment into and domination of Palestinian territory has the potential to reduce the possibility of a free Palestine to a Bantustan at best. This isn't an accident of history. As Noam Chomsky would remind us Moshe Dayan's recommendation to his colleagues shortly after the 1967 conquests was that we must tell the Palestinians in the territories "You shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads". This is not the last of the ugly words spewed over Palestinian territory. Almost 30 years later the Director of Communications and Policy Planning David Bar-Illan who said in 1996 that "the Palestinians can have a state if they want, or they can call it fried chicken". And that's when the Israeli establishment talks peace. The establishment is aware of the situation on the ground, the need for a two-state settlement. It's just that there is no reason for the Israeli government to seek out peace.

It would seem that the Israeli elite are for a peaceful solution, whereas the more economically deprived and zealous Israeli citizens - particularly Mizrahi Jews and refuseniks - are much more hawkish. The ruling-class have been busily eroding the civic institutions and welfare state of Israel in recent decades. The neoliberalisation that the Israeli economy has undergone is another point of fair comparison with South Africa. Israel was once a quasi-socialist state with a significantly slim gap between the rich and the poor. Today it is one of the most unequal countries in the world. This is what comes with expanding a state by force and creating a country out of thin air. The apparent abnormality of Israel by world's standards today is exactly what makes it normal in historical standards. The very same process of aggressive expansionism was carried out in North America to a much more genocidal degree. And the founding of the American Republic provoked a desperate resistance from the likes of Geronimo.

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq." - Benjamin Netanyahu

There are good reasons to suspect that the Israeli ruling class is well aware of the consequences of their actions. In an interview with Gideon Levi Prime Minister Ehud Barak said "If I were a Palestinian at the right age, I would have joined one of the terrorist organizations at a certain stage." By the way, everyone should know that Nelson Mandela was officially listed as a 'terrorist' in the US until about 2009. This isn't to say that by analogy Hamas are the Palestinian version of the ANC. Sadly the picture is much more complicated than that. The concept of 'terrorism' really designates the use of violence to achieve goals of a political, religious or ideological nature. That would certainly include all of modern warfare. So it could be that the notion of 'terror' lacks any weight in terms of moral condemnation. When the US shoots down an Iranian civilian airliner, it's an accident and not an act of terror. So it might be better to talk about specific forms of violence. For instance, in his years as 'terrorist' leader Nelson Mandela argued against car-bombing as a tactic. This wasn't a rejection of violence, rather it was about scale.

Christopher Hitchens observed the similarity of the theological justifications of Apartheid in the dogma of the Dutch Reformed Church. The Church adhered to a variety of Calvinism that enshrined a strict separation of white and black in holy design. Its presupposition was racial inequality, for the white man shares the bodily form of Christ. The ravings at the pulpit spewed forth its own blood myth of a Boer Exodus and in what Hitchens describes as an "Afrikaner permutation of Zionism" awarded the whites exclusive rights in a promised land. It should be no surprise that the National Party had an appalling record for anti-Semitism and took the side of Hitlerism in the Second World War. The end result was a pariah state where the rights of non-whites were nonexistent, in fact the people were confined to open prisons with boundaries defined by pigmentation. The state exercised its monopoly on violence to maintain this system for as long as it could. But the justifications were not simply theological.

Apartheid justified itself further as a separation which protected African culture from being drowned in white civilisation. Earlier in the 20th Century Jan Smuts formulated a holistic philosophy to justify British colonialism. This holism took the world to be composed of wholes, each together constitute a grand system while each can sustain and stabilise themselves. The stability of the system was guaranteed by the arrangement of wholes, provided each whole remained in the right place the system could be maintained. Every whole is made up of small wholes which are evolving and will inevitably come together to form larger wholes until finally becoming part of a single unified whole. This was the beginning of what would become Apartheid. South Africa further justified its brutal methods of repression in its claim to be an outpost of freedom fighting against Communism. Although Israel does not have the same kind of racial mythology as South Africa, its government often claims that the country is an outpost against radical Islamism.

No wonder then Israel and South Africa entered into a pariah's pact in 1975 to trade in weapons of mass-destruction. The end of Apartheid might actually signal how the occupation might end and Palestine might actually be established as an independent state. It was almost inevitable that the Apartheid system would undermine the future possibility of survival of the state. So the Afrikaner business elite began meeting with the ANC in neighbouring countries in the late 1980s. By then a campaign of sanctions and boycotting had done its damage on South Africa's economy and body politic. Around this time the Priests had a 'revelation' regarding racial equality. The fate of the regime was settled before the National Party goons even knew it. South Africa had been significantly isolated in the international community by that point. It was when the US started to withdraw its support for Apartheid that the Botha government started to cave. But this came after decades of struggle in spite of extreme violence and rejectionism.

America's affinity with Israel.

 

The leading supporter of Israel in the world has long been the United States. This is somewhat appropriate as the US was born out of a revolt on America's East Coast only for the colonies to expand westward into Indian territory. It isn't often discussed that there may have been as many as 18 million, possibly even 25 million, people living in North America when European settlers first arrived. The fact that the US would consist of a narrow slither of land if it weren't for genocide, war and slavery was long suppressed by historians. This denial of these origins was nothing exceptional. In the same way that the trauma of childbirth is suppressed in all of our minds, the horrors of nation-building are quickly wiped from the national memory. What follows then is the creation of a national mythology, the shibboleths of American exceptionalism were crafted by English colonists quite early on. Ronald Reagan liked to describe America as "a shining city upon a hill", well it was John Winthrop who coined that phrase in 1630 and not surprisingly it was a Bible reference.

 

So the notion of America as a nation chosen by God to spread its ideals actually predates the Revolution. Winthrop viewed America as ordained by God and received the charter of Massachusetts Bay from King Charles I. The charter stated that the principle purpose of the plantation was to save the indigenes from a pagan fate - in other words, it was a mission civilisatrice. The humane mission of spreading Christianity amounted to a systematic programme of extirpation and extermination. John Locke viewed America as the land where the world began and defended the theft of Indian land.  The heinous nature of the policies undertaken against the indigenous population was understood well by the Founding Fathers. Even the brilliant Thomas Jefferson made the case for the Native Americans to be forced into starvation if they didn't accept an existence as free-holding farmers. Jefferson went as far as to plan to drive the tribes into Canada, only to invade Canada and ensure that the job was finished. And so, civilisation came to America.

 

This was nothing out of the norm. To the indigenous population George Washington was known as the Town-Destroyer and for good reason. By the late 1770s Washington had set out to, in his own words, extirpate the indigenes from the country in a bid to expand westward to the Mississippi. As a punishment for resisting the Iroquois tribe was forced to cede their territory to compensate the butchers. Later John Quincy Adams would lament the "hapless race of Native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty". Expansionism soon acquired the designs of self-defence. The Jackson administration would conquer Florida in order to maintain the security of the American Republic. There were repeated attempts to annex Canada, where the British held-off the Americans. Instead the US took on the Spanish empire with much more success, succeeding in stealing away half of Mexico, Puerto Rico and Guam. This allowed the US government to buy the Philippines from the Spanish.

 

This was the period of so-called American imperialism. Yet if we look closely we find that the constant expansionist aggression that the US had demonstrated since day-one, we would find that the US has been engaged in colonial violence for much longer. In much the same way that Israel seems to go to war every 3 or 4 years these days. One minute it's Lebanon, then it's Gaza, Iran next perhaps! It's bound to be the case with a highly militarised economy and an irrationally right-wing establishment. It can't be ignored anymore, with Likudniks calling black immigrants a "cancer" on the Jewish state, - and talk of Hiroshima as the model for Israeli policy on Gaza - there's a problem that has to be acknowledged. Sadly it seems unlikely that Israel has any reason to even consider a position that would change the bloody stalemate that the region has to live with. The US isn't going to withhold its veto at the UN any time soon, that's for sure. Meanwhile the next election is due in January and Bibi Netanyahu is running with Avi Lieberman, the worst of worse scenarios.

It's just a fence!

 

The news of an outbreak of violence in Gaza with the Israeli Defence Forces was not much of a surprise for anyone. It mobilised some to protest outside the Israeli embassy in London, while others joined the counter-demonstration further down the road, the vast majority of people probably languished in passive ignorance to the history of the crisis. The wars waged to establish and expand the state of Israel surprise no one with a modicum of knowledge of the history of the nation-state. Like childbirth the founding of a state is repressed precisely because it's so traumatic. The majority of states in the world were either founded in violence and have been perpetuated through violence in way or another. So it should surprise no one that the state of Israel was founded out of a theft - what Palestinians call the Nabka - in which 700,000 people were expelled from their land and their villages were destroyed to make way for a new country. And we can safely say, in retrospect of six decades, that expansionism is inherent to the state-founding project.

 

Expulsion from the land was the only way that the state could be established. It was necessary given that at the time Mandate Palestine consisted of a population that was 95% Muslim and Christian Arab. Today the millions of descendents of those Palestinians who were first displaced in 1948 are scattered around the world. The largest concentration outside of Israel and the occupied territories is in Jordan, where Israeli nationalists argue the Palestinians really belong. Part of the problem is the ambiguity of where Israel’s borders actually end. If the international borders are disregarded (which they are inside Israel) then the eastern frontier of the country reach across the Jordan River and that would mean Jordan can be absorbed as well. This is the irony of the nationalist line that the Palestinians should go live in Jordan. Originally the border was meant to be at the Alawi River in the middle of Lebanon. Until the borders are clarified and set at the internationally recognised limit, which is at 78% of what was once Mandate Palestine, then there won’t be peace.

 
 

The UN vote to bestow non-member observer status on Palestine demonstrates that the Palestinians are hungry for a peaceful settlement. Incidentally, Palestine now shares the same status of statehood as the Holy See. This is contrary to the picture that the Israeli Right put forward of murderous rabbles of Arabs too bloodthirsty to settle for anything less than the demise of the Jewish state. Yet it is the Israeli government that won't budge on the question of settlements and 60% of the West Bank already consists of Jewish settlements. That's a major obstacle to a two-state settlement if Palestine is meant to be constituted by 100% of the West Bank. Then there's the wall of annexation that has been extended around arable land and resources in the West Bank. This wall is called a 'defensive barrier' in Israel, which is what the Berlin Wall was called in East Germany. It gets even more absurd, in the US media the wall is called a 'fence' and it's longer than the Berlin Wall. I guess you must be a Nazi if you don't see an enormous concrete wall as a white picket fence.

Breivik's Living Space.

The trial and conviction, a conclusion foregone long ago, of Anders Behring Breivik has, of course, drawn the attention of the world media. Breivik has been given the maximum sentence of 21 years for the bombing of a government building before a shooting spree on Utøya island. This act of lone-wolf terrorism left 77 people dead and 319 people injured. He has to serve a minimum of 10 years before he can appeal, but this is unlikely. It's more likely that Breivik will remain inside for the rest of his life with a review every 5 years after the initial 21 year period. This seems especially likely given that Breivik fully intends to continue "the war" from his prison cell. It's obvious from what "the war" is meant to be when he writes "We, the free indigenous peoples of Europe, hereby declare a pre-emptive war on all cultural Marxist/multiculturalist elites of Western Europe." The car-bombing and subsequent spree targeted the liberal political class in Norway was just the beginning of a battle that fits into a fascist millenarianism in his thinking.

As The Guardian has observed it was an open trial in an open society, the social democratic principles of Norway have endured this assault. The Norwegians have rightly seen to it that the liberal foundations of their society will not be compromised for this monster. This was an impressive display given the appalling actrocities that took place. There are plenty of people who want to execute Breivik, but that would be to do his work for him. Breivik has much more in common with the Islamists than he likes to admit. The suicide-bombers of al-Qaeda want to destroy this world out of love for another world, just as Breivik wants to reconstruct a European Christendom the Jihadists want to establish a Caliphate. Effectively Breivik wants to destroy the liberal societies of Europe in order to deal with the threat, as he sees it, of Islam. The failure of many Western countries since 9/11 has been to abandon the liberal democratic commitment to civil liberties and human rights. Instead, we have seen the kidnapping and torture of 'terror suspects' time and time again.

 

It's scary just how the views Breivik holds of Muslims in particular are so widespread and mainstream. He repeatedly cites mainstream conservative sources such as Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes and Melanie Phillips as well as liberals like Sam Harris. It's not just Fox News, it's the BBC as well as liberal rags and even leftist outlets such as CounterPunch. It's also clear that Breivik's views are not alien to the particularly reactionary elements in the media in Britain. He railed against multiculturalism, mass-immigration and political correctness, these are the favourite targets of cultural conservatives and nationalists alike. It's no coincidence that the massacre was met, in some quarters, with the sentiment that this wouldn't have happened if it weren't for the multicultural experiment. The rightist Melanie Phillips made it clear that she won't go back on any criticism of multiculturalism, Islamic extremism and immigration because of Breivik's killing spree. In short, the real battle is outside of the courtroom and Breivik's prison cell.

We have to stand by and build on the liberal ideals of Europe. Multiculturalism is certainly a flawed doctrine, but it is worth defending from these kinds of attacks. The only true friends of the Muslim community, at this time, will be the secularists keen to preserve Europe's atheist legacy with its religious freedoms and pluralism. It's clear why the Breiviks of this world see a 'cultural communism' lurking behind liberal multiculturalism. Leftists may criticise liberal promises of equality as a veneer over deeper forms of inequality, but it has to be acknowledged that the universality of human rights and freedoms was first advocated in liberal thought. It set the ground with the rights and freedoms limited to rich white men, but then the field of bourgeois individualism could be expanded to include women and so on. The egalitarian struggle has to be fought with liberalism as a starting-point. It's this that the likes of Breivik wants to destroy and that's exactly why we must defend it.

Democracy Prevention.

Like many I have been trying to keep track of the Syrian conflict, which has gone from an uprising to a full blown civil war beyond anything seen in Libya. The conflict has raged for 18 months leaving over 20,000 dead and over 1.5 million people have fled their homes. It would seem the bat-eared Bashar is looking to outdo his father in this slaughter. I haven’t covered the conflict on my blog, until now, as I feel a tad under-informed to follow events consistently. With that in mind I have picked up on Saudi financial support (at least) for armed Islamist rebels in Syria. It seems the case that the US has ‘encouraged’ the Saudi bourgeoisie to fund and arm the rebels. No doubt the other Arab Gulf states are in on this too, given that the Saudi Kingdom leads the way in the Gulf Cooperation Council. Now the British have pledged £5 million to the rebels. There has hardly been a word about this until it became apparent that the money is probably going to Wahhabi fundamentalists in the opposition.

It was from the mouth of George Galloway that I first heard of Western support for al-Qaeda in Syria. Putting Galloway’s troublesome support for Assad aside, the case is that there are radical Islamist militants fighting in Syria with the backing of the Saudi bourgeoisie and, indirectly, the US government. Conveniently Galloway draws no distinction between the Muslim Brotherhood, radical Wahhabi elements and what's commonly called al-Qaeda - which really refers to a diffuse network of terrorists, ideologists and their financiers. It also should be emphasised that the Arab Spring has predominantly been a force for democratic reform in the region. Syria should be no exception. But there is indirect Western support for Islamic conservatism in the region at large. And it remains that Islam is a common means of association and identification in Middle Eastern politics. The alternative model of revolutionary nationalism died long ago.

Sami Ramadani has argued that the influence of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the US has been to pursue militarization of the conflict in order to block democracy in Syria. He argues that the non-violent resistance would have brought down Assad if it was not for the militarization of the conflict. There may be some truth in this given the contradictions in the Ba'ath Party and Syrian society that the army may have brushed aside Assad as the generals threw out Mubarak in Egypt. At the same time, it should be noted that the military establishment in Egypt has yet to be defeated. The systems which held these dictators in place have survived the revolt in many countries. It seems plausible that the peaceful movement for democracy in Syria may have dethroned the Assad family, but it seems less likely that the peaceful means could be used to bring down the Ba'athist regime. As inevitable as violence seems to be the only means to destroy the regime it is definitely the case that the US will do anything to prevent democracy from prevailing in the Middle East.

It should surprise no one that the Saudi Kingdom is promoting a particular version of political Islam in Syria to destroy a republican alternative. Its policy of petro-Islam has a long record of supporting Islamist militants, including the Taliban in its barbaric rule over Afghanistan. Many Syrian women are right to fear the impact of Saudi influence for this reason, just going on its appalling internal record on women's rights. But even comparatively progressive Turkey is seen as a regressive force. Remember the cries in the West that the fall of Mubarak would allow a Iranian style Islamist government to spring up and immediately go after the Jews? There are no such cries over Syria for the reason that the fall of Assad is perfectly compatible with American-Israeli strategic interests. Even if the GCC find a way to conjure a Sunni-Muslim despotism out of this chaos, it is totally within the contours of US interests. The problem is not Islamic politics, it is a particular Islamic politics.