maraahmed.com

Videos posted by Harper’s Magazine show the private contractor formerly known as Blackwater in Iraq running over a woman with a car, smashing into Iraqis’ cars to move them out of the way and firing a rifle into traffic. The behavior by Blackwater seen in the videos adds even more fuel to evidence that the company “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.” The videos are included in a piece by Charles Glass entitled “The Warrior Class” that looks at the rise of private security contractors. Glass had been shown the videos by a former Blackwater employee. More here.

I felt compelled to write this book because of the increasingly disturbing discourse on Pakistan in the West, both within the media and within academia. There is a mixture of incomprehension and hawkishness in this discourse which is extremely dangerous given the increasing extension of the US/NATO war in Afghanistan into Pakistan. I believe that the ease with which even anti-war liberals (and sometimes Leftists) support, explicitly or implicitly, the covert war in Pakistan has to do with the fact that Pakistan has been constructed within media and academic circles in the West as a place overrun by extremists, as a place without culture (unless we are talking about raves or fashion shows being organized by the youth belonging to the elite classes) and, crucially, as a place without a history of popular struggle.
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The Cold War played an incredibly significant role in determining the trajectory of domestic politics in Pakistan—this is not news to anyone familiar with Pakistani history. However, to the extent that people in the West do make this Cold War connection, they tend to do it with regard to the Afghan War of the 1980s. I wanted to remind people that the relationship between the Pakistani ruling establishment and the US, which was born of and sustained by the Cold War, went back to the very beginning of Pakistan’s history as a newly-independent postcolonial nation-state and influenced its political trajectory in crucial ways. I felt that it was important to highlight the link between this relationship and cultural politics within Pakistan for several reasons. First, because I felt that it was important to talk about culture in the Pakistani context, since part of what makes the discourse on Pakistan in the West so problematic is that it is seen as a place without culture, and hence, a barbaric place. Secondly, culture and politics are intimately connected, and nowhere has this been more obvious than during the Cold War.

…I wanted to show how important the Cultural Cold War was in postcolonial countries—especially postcolonial Muslim countries—such as Pakistan. The US saw newly-independent Muslim countries as crucial battlegrounds in the Cold War, because it believed political Islam—especially its conservative and reactionary forms—could be deployed as a Cold War asset, a potent weapon to neutralize the popularity of international communism in the poor nations of the world.

The Pakistani ruling establishment was itself invested in neutralizing the demands for social and economic justice made by ordinary Pakistanis. The relationship between the Pakistani establishment and the US—based on these shared vested interests—manifested itself explicitly within the cultural realm in Pakistan in the form of increasing state repression of Leftist writers, poets, and artists, and the elevation of right-wing, pro-establishment ones. (Saadia Toor)
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More here.

I’m currently conducting interviews as a follow-up to the rather acrimonious debate that erupted this week from my argument that “terrorism expertise” is not an actual discipline, but rather (like the term “terrorism” itself) just another instrument for legitimizing the violence of the U.S. and its allies, delegitimizing the violence of their Muslim adversaries, and dressing up state propaganda with the veneer of academic neutrality. (Glenn Greenwald)

More here.

v seldom r connections made between the terrible war in the congo and resource theft/exploitation by western multinationals. here is how “limited wars” can be used to divvy up and control smaller, weakened states.
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Rather than simply encouraging, facilitating or transforming war, as Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1993) discuss, info tech is based in war. Indeed the wars over the resources of cyberwar and netwar are fought in the forms of cyberwar and netwar. The information age is rooted in the bloody killing fields of low-tech territories.

The shifts in how societies come into conflict and in the waging of war, as suggested by Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1993), are perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Netwar and cyberwar have influenced the context and conduct of that war. Ironically the shift to netwar and cyberwar has itself played a part in the Congo war, informed, shaped and driven by the need for the very resources required to wage netwar and cyberwar. It reveals the extent to which Arquilla and Ronfeldt have underplayed the extreme violence of netwar.

The death toll from the war in the DRC, which began in 1998, is higher than in any other since the Second World War, with an estimated 4.7 million killed in the last four years alone (Economist, 2003: 23). The International Rescue Committee (IRC), an aid agency based in New York, reports that the mortality rate in the Congo is higher than the United Nations (UN) rates for any other country on the planet (NewsAfrica, 2003: 6). Despite these horrible facts, the crisis has gone largely unnoticed and unreported in the West.

The UN Group of Experts on Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and other forms of Wealth in the Congo concluded that resource exploitation was directly responsible for the ongoing “an economy of war” in the region. Illegal exploitation of resources had established a predatory network of elites, including army and government leaders and multinational companies. Multinational companies played the crucial roles, both direct and indirect, in this situation. Indeed without the corporations the illegal mineral trade would not be possible.

Ismi (2002: 14) details the stunning extent of economic and political interests in Africa: “Nearly 80% of the strategic minerals the U.S. requires are found in Africa, including 90% of the world’s cobalt, 90% of the platinum, 40% of the gold, 98% of the chromium, 64% of the manganese, and one-third of the uranium.” Significantly, these minerals are all indispensable components in jet engines, missiles, electronic components and iron and steel – the raw materials of imperialist tools of conquest.

Of particular importance in understanding imperialist intentions in Congo are the interests of the mining company American Mineral Fields (AMFI). Ominously the industrial enterprises set up by AMFI are also “interested in the contract for the construction of the orbital platform around the world that is destined to replace the Russian station MIR” (Baracyetse, 2000). The space platform is a centrepiece of the proposed National Missile Defence system driven by George W. Bush and his Vice President Donald Rumsfeld. Indeed, the space station cannot be built without many of the rare metals located in eastern Congo’s mineral-rich Ituri province. The National Missile Defence system is projected as a $60 billion venture.

Central in the struggles for control of strategic minerals in DRC is a little-known but highly sought after mineral called columbite-tantalite or coltan. While an extremely rare mineral it is a virtually ubiquitous part of the information society. In processed form coltan is a crucial component in the manufacture of mobile phones, jet engines, night vision goggles, fiber optics and capacitors, air bags and computer chips. All of the new technologies cited by Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1993) as impelling a military technology revolution are reliant on coltan, most from the war ravaged mineral fields of Congo.

Coltan miners work long hours in extremely hazardous mining conditions. Most miners sell their labour to one of the many rebel groups in the area, which in turn sell the ore directly to multinational mineral companies (Vick, 2001). Battles over control of the coltan mines is the direct cause for much of the fighting in areas surrounding the concessions. “It is capitalism in its purest form,” according to Robert L. Raun, prseident of US-based Eagles Wings Resources, a company that has purchased Congolese coltan for several years. The price for a ton of coltan ranges from US$100-US$200,000

Illegal resource extraction has allowed for the constitution of criminal cartels, formed or protected by military commanders, in occupied areas. The UN report warns that these cartels, connected with global networks, pose the next serious security threat in the region.

The UN report notes, significantly, that the illegal plundering of eastern Congo has been facilitated by Western companies, governments, multilateral institutions and diplomats (Ismi. 2001). As one example, coltan exports from Rwanda were carried by Sebena, the national airline of Belgium while the necessary financial transactions were carried out by Citibank (Ismi, 2001). Deals between Rwandan coltan sellers and US companies were promoted by the US Honorary Consul in eastern Congo, Ramnik Kotecha, who himself was dealing in coltan (Ismi. 2001).

Lenin identified as a key basis for imperialism the extensive networks of close ties and relationships involving even very small capitalists. Recent discussions of cyberwar have brought back a focus on the importance of networks for the working of contemporary geopolitics. The state of disorder in Congo facilitated the emergence of new networks operating in areas where the formal state was in a process of collapse (Taylor, 2003). This situation encouraged the emergence of “warlord capitalism” and a “shadow state” (or states) “which retained enough substance to negotiate with and benefit from international capital’s willingness to conduct business with such entities” (Taylor, 2003: 51). Imperialist involvement in Central Africa has given rise to and instituted a form of informal regionalism comprising a “shadow network” of states, private armies, businesses and various elites, both inside and outside of Africa. The involvement of transnational business and state networks “were neither peripheral nor determinative in the political trajectories of Uganda, the Congo, and the Great Lakes region in general. They were, and are, constitutive” (Latham, Kassimir and Callaghy, 2001: 2).

The structural context that has nurtured the particular regional processes in the Congo has been conditioned by neoliberal globalization, notably through the imposition of structural adjustment programs in Africa. Neoliberal globalization has encouraged the formation of, often illicit, cross-border networks with multinational corporate linkages. Significantly, “instead of bringing about stability and (legitimate) growth, impulses generated by globalisation have contributed to the further deepening and development of criminal networks and decidedly quasi-feudal forms of political economy” (Taylor, 2003: 52).

It seems that it is no longer necessarily the case that presidents are dedicated to a project of establishing control over a specific recognised territory, with all the bureaucratic encumbrances and requirements to maintain some form of consensual balance…Now, the informalisation of economic and political activity can counterbalance the erosion of state capacity and power. By expanding internal and external clientistic networks, elites within conflict-ridden spaces pursue what Duffield refers to as ‘adaptive patrimonialism’ (Taylor, 2003: 52).

The war in Congo exhibits the complex character of cyber war and netwar and the vastness of networks composed of extensive relations between state and non-state, local, regional and global actors. Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s suggestion that states, far from diminishing in all of this, as Van Creveld (1991) supposed, will actually be transformed by these developments is also borne out by the Congo war. In the Congo war interconnected networks on the ground (and in the air) link up with corporate and state hierarchies in the metropole.

These new processes of state formation, rather than minimizing the state as neoliberal ideologues might suggest, present transformations of the state which may in fact facilitate its centralization. Structural adjustment it has created changes in the international system impelling a transformation of the Southern sate into an ‘enabling state’, creating forms of governance suited to the era of cyberwar (Biel, 2003: 80).

Taylor (2003: 52) argues that, rather than representing an anomalous form of regional project, “the type of alliances and transboundary networks currently reconfiguring Central Africa may well offer a prophetic vision of what may be in store for vulnerable and peripheral areas of the world.” As Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1993) have stated: “The future may belong to whoever masters the network form.”

In recent years the US has looked for new means of military intervention in Africa, a process that has intensified since September 11, 2001 (Biel, 2003). The US is not necessarily looking for large-scale military base facilities since force can be deployed directly from the US (Biel, 2003). Thus much attention has been placed on increased investment in long-range deployment strategies for agile and mobile forces (Biel, 2003). This has encouraged the emergence of new forms for the relationship with military proxies. “Like military bases, direct subsidiaries of the core firm are a thing of the past, but instead the structures would be more informal. The post-September 11th discourse indeed explicitly centres upon building a network, a ‘coalition of coalitions’” (Biel, 2003: 85).

A focus on cyberwar and netwar in the Congo requires a rethinking of the notion of state collapse in Africa which has long been used to justify US intervention. In cases of “failed states” the imperialist agenda may include the reconstitution of “new state machines” which will primarily benefit rebel groups (Biel, 2003). The most prominent model is probably the promotion to power by the US of Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan. Indeed, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has openly confirmed this expectation with respect to finding “exactly those sorts of people” to play a similar role in Somalia (Biel, 2003).

In the Congo, Western imperialism has preferred informal or illicit governance structures through proxies and militias, in effect a militarization of society and governance. The imperialists’ preferred strategies are either to install obedient leaders or divide the area into minor enclaves, each led by leaders who can be influenced or intimidated to allow the mining companies to get what they want. They hope to achieve their objectives through the dismembering of Congo and its partition into a series of microstates lacking financial resources and economic infrastructure, what might be termed a form of balkanization.

Nkrumah (1965) long ago noted that neo-colonialism is the breeding ground for the “limited wars” that have marked the last half-century. Neo-colonialism undermines the formation of larger regional or continental units that would make “limited war” impossible. “Limited war” is only possible where small or weak states exist. In such cases a decisive result can be won “by landing a few thousand marines or by financing a mercenary force” (Nkrumah, 1965: xi).
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REFERENCES

Baracyetse, Pierre. 2000. “The Geopolitical Stakes of the International Mining Companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Ex-Zaire).” www.africa2000.com

Bayart, J-F, S. Ellis and B. Hibou. 1999. The Criminalisation of the State in Africa. Oxford: James Currey

Biel, Robert. 2003. “Imperialism and International Governance: The Case of US Policy towards Africa.” Review of African Political Economy. 95: 77-88

Bracking, Sarah and Graham Harrison. 2003. “Africa, Imperialism and New Forms of Accumulation.” Review of African Political Economy. 95: 5-10

Ferkiss, Victor C. 1966. Africa’s Search for Identity. Cleveland: Meridian Books

Griswold, Deirdre and Johnnie Stevens. 2001. “Bush, Clinton in the Web: Behind the Assassination of Kabila.” http://www.iacenter.org

Hartung, William D. and Dena Montague. 2001. “The Clinton Legacy: Uplifting Rhetoric, Grim Realities.” World Policy Institute. March 22

Ismi, Asad. 2001. “Congo: The Western Heart of Darkness.” Briarpatch. November.

Ismi, Asad. 2002. “The Ravaging of Africa: Western Neo-Colonialism Fuels Wars, Plundering of Resources.” The CCPA Monitor. October: 14-17

Nkrumah, Kwame. 1965. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. New York: International Publishers

Reno, W. 2001. “External Relations of Weak States and Stateless Regions in Africa.” In African Foreign Policies: Power and Process, edited by G. Khadiagala and T. Lyons. Boulder: Lynne Reinner

Taylor, Ian. 2003. “Conflict in Central Africa: Clandestine Networks and Regional/Global Configurations.” Review of African Political Economy. 95: 45-55

Vick, Karl. 2001. “Vital Ore Funds Congo’s War.” The Washington Post. March 19

Wake Forest and Salem Students, organized by Muslim peers, came together to show solidarity with Trayvonn Martin and Shaima Alawadi. Students are calling on our community leaders to condemn hate crimes and make sure our community is a safe place for everyone.

Hana Shalabi has been on hunger strike for over a month. Her condition has been deteriorating so badly that prison officials had to transfer her to a Haifa hospital (though she wasn’t admitted to the hospital).

Shalabi is protesting being held in administrative detention. These detentions are quasi-legal action through which Israel incarcerates individuals without charge or proper trial. Israel inherited this undemocratic procedure from the British mandate, which enacted it as part of the 1945 emergency regulations.

International humanitarian law frowns on this procedure and Israel was asked by the international community on numerous occasions to end this practice. Over 300 Palestinians are presently held without charge. More here.

Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice tells the stories of individuals in the United States whose rights have been abused as a result of the racist, Islamophobic backlash and the so-called War on Terror that followed the attacks of 11 September 2001. Patriot Acts is part of the non-profit Voice of Witness publishing project, which aims to “illuminate human rights through oral history,” and has published books on the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, wrongful incarceration and undocumented immigrants. Compiled and edited by Alia Malek, a civil rights lawyer turned journalist, Patriot Acts features testimony from 18 individuals who lost family to racist vigilantes, were swept up in immigration raids under the guise of national security, fired from a job, or subjected to extraordinary rendition.
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The persecution of Muslim Americans in the US court system is shown through the experience of Palestinian American Ghassan Elashi, who cofounded what was formerly the largest Islamic charity in the US, the Holy Land Foundation. He is now serving a 65-year sentence in a Communications Management Unit — special detention centers for terror convicts (this was the subject of Malek’s investigative feature”Gitmo in the Heartland” published by The Nation last year).

Elashi and four of his colleagues — dubbed the Holy Land Five — were subjected to two extraordinary trials that, amongst other court precedents, relied on testimony from an anonymous Israeli intelligence agent. The men were accused of providing material support to Hamas, a Palestinian political party declared a terrorist organization by the US State Department, by funding Islamic charitable committees in Palestine through the Holy Land Foundation.

Though the five were not accused of any violent acts, “prosecutors focused on the killing of Israeli soldiers and civilians by Palestinian elements, and specifically Hamas, as opposed to the actions of the HLF [Holy Land Foundation] or the defendants themselves”.
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More here.

The parents of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin address thousands during a march in New York on Wednesday. Trayvon was shot dead last month by a neighbourhood watch volunteer in Florida. He was wearing a hoodie at the time of his death but was unarmed. The man who shot him, George Zimmerman, has not been prosecuted. Watch video here.

George Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin, an African American teenager, reveals a history of racism in Sanford, FL that has stubbornly refused to die. Weeks after the shooting, the Sanford police department is slow to release details of the shooting and, more surprisingly, has not arrested George Zimmerman, a man who has a history of violence. We urge you to sign this petition to protect private citizens from gun violence and inept law enforcement. Florida’s Attorney General Pam Bondi must step in and provide justice for Trayvon Martin, his family, and the community. Pls sign petition here.

A group of Afghan parliamentary investigators has concluded that Bales was part of a group of 15-20 soldiers. As Outlook Afghanistan reported Monday, “The team spent two days in the province, interviewing the bereaved families, tribal elders, survivors and collecting evidences at the site in Panjwai district.” One of the parliamentarians told Pajhwok Afghan News that investigators believed 15 to 20 American soldiers carried out the killings. “I have encountered almost no Afghan who believes it could have been one person acting alone, whether they think it was a group or people back at the base somehow organizing or facilitating it,” Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network told the Guardian. (The AAN is funded by four Scandanavian governments, all of which have troops in Afghanistan). More here.

It all really goes deeper than the criticism aimed at his Enough Project, the Save Darfur campaign, or the “genocide paparazzi” satellite monitoring scheme – all of which are symptomatic of an overarching failure in US foreign policy, which promotes a black-and-white understanding of some situations, often underscored by moral superiority. After all, “Arabs are genocidally massacring blacks in the Nuba mountains” is far sexier and easier to digest than “the people of the Nuba mountains sided with the Southern People’s Liberation Movement during Sudan’s decades-long civil war between north and south, and after the secession of the south last year, a disgruntled SPLM candidate for governor lost what he believed were rigged elections and then took arms against the government in Khartoum in co-operation with the residual Nuba SPLM cadre, whose grievances had still not been addressed”.
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Rob Crilly of the Telegraph is correct when he writes: “The problem is that his campaign stems from the same misguided analysis that brought us Kony 2012. It is an analysis that reduces Africa to simple notions of good versus evil, and suggests that outsiders hold the key to finding solutions”. Sudan is a country where a plethora of issues – such as tribal grazing rights, water availability, diversity of ethnicities and border demarcations – contribute to conflict. The situation is inflamed by decades of entrenched centralisation on the part of successive governments in Khartoum that have alienated the peripheries. Rebellion flares up in and is doused regularly, with fundamental grievances never addressed.

The current government in Sudan is not a benign one, and it might appear churlish not to support an out-and-out condemnation of its actions. But identifying the true nature of the problem enables us to come up with the right solutions. I would urge Clooney to team up with and extend resources to partners in Sudan who can influence the situation internally. It is his best chance of fulfilling his wish of ending up on the “right side of history”.
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More here.

Victims and human rights activists cheered when, on January 26, a Guatemalan court charged Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt with genocide and crimes against humanity. The decision to bring the 85-year-old former dictator to trial is the latest stage in a long odyssey, stretching back to the early 1980s, when Guatemala experienced the bloodiest repression of its thirty-six-year civil war. During Ríos Montt’s rule (1982–83), soldiers under his command—many of them US-trainedand -equipped—applied a scorched-earth policy to annihilate indigenous villages in the Mayan highlands where guerrilla insurgents were based.
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The Ríos Montt case is also making the US government a little nervous. WikiLeaks cables and unclassified documents indicate that the US government had information on the abuses taking place yet still supported the regime (in 1982 President Ronald Reagan famously complained that the dictator was “getting a bum rap”). Current US Ambassador Arnold Chacon brushed off the case, telling our delegation that most people he’s spoken with would prefer to look forward. The State Department would like to see restrictions on military aid lifted as it promotes the Central American Regional Security Initiative, a counternarcotics aid plan that would significantly increase the US presence in the region.
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More here.

While it is important and strategically wise to form coalitions and build solidarity with other marginalized groups, it should be considered only when a movement is armed with a clear understanding of its own historicity based on the experience of oppression and discrimination. It is productive to have in mind the historical dialogue between different marginalized sections of people. Otherwise, there is the danger of Dalit women, their self-definition and their peculiar positioning in the society, being rendered invisible. More here.

In dealing with Arabs, the most dominant construct is religion – they are treated as Muslims first, Arabs second. In dealing with Sub Sahara Africa, the dominant construct is race; we are all “black”. This “Africa” is also an intellectual construct – there are images and symbols that people associate with Africa promoted through Western scholarship, religion, mass media, popular culture and language. For example, stories about Africa during the pre-colonial period were filled with bizarre tales of cannibalism, human sacrifice, savagery and other insane imaginations. Consequently, any mention of Africa or its people evoked feelings of sub-humans only useful as slaves. This construction was not pointless. It sought to justify one of the worst tragedies in human history – the Trans-Atlantic trade in slaves from Africa to the Americas.
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Thus, slavery required a particular intellectual picture of Africa – to use human beings as one would a horse. Capitalism and improved technology on the other hand, rendered slavery inefficient. This created a necessity for free labor from coercive conditions. Therefore, the philosophy of colonialism about Africans had to be different from the philosophy of slavery – the African as a perpetual child only able to work under the whip of colonial authority. This philosophy justified and legitimised the structure of the colonial state to its home constituencies and to the colonised.

As colonialism ended, overt racism became repugnant having been discredited by Adolf Hitler and his NAZI allies who took it to the European mainland. The claim that Hitler began genocides disregards history. The German psychopathic dictator was following in a long European tradition of mass slaughter of native peoples by European conquerors in Latin and North America and Africa. But to return to Africa, although overt racism began to decline at the end of colonial rule, the imagery of studying and reporting on Africa was not transformed, it only changed manner of presentation. Overtly racial expressions were dropped. In their place, however, particular stereotypes have been introduced that have sustained the construction of Africa and Africans as some incompetent humans in need of external emancipation – by the white man.
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Steve Biko said that the greatest weapon in the hand of an oppressor is never his armies – these are secondary. It is the mind of the oppressed. The overlord uses control of communication channels (mass media, think tanks, universities, books, education curricula, religion, philosophy etc) to create a particular world view – what Antonio Gramci called hegemony. This is a mind-frame or belief system of what is normal, regular and right – as opposed to the abnormal, irregular and wrong. In other words, the production of knowledge is an important instrument of social control.

We African intellectuals and elites know about ourselves largely (not entirely) through the writings of non-Africans. So we go to Stanford and Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge to be taught who we are, what we are, what we think, what we want, what we do, how we do it etc. Most books and research work about us is produced by someone other than ourselves. We participate in its consumption, not its production. The biases, prejudices and stereotypes generated may not be driven by deliberate racial intent. However, research into cognitive bias shows that both conscious and sub-conscious biases lead to prejudiced views and actions even when the individual does not want to do so.
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The point is that the knowledge created by western scholarship and mass media that is imparted to us shapes our self-perception. For example, there are many things our governments do as part of democratic deal-making that we claim are signs of failure of our democratic process. Yet these very same actions are seen in western democracies as costs of democratic compromise. Indeed, African elites are quick to see the specks in our societies and remain blind to the logs in western ones.

For example, elites in Africa may condemn Rwanda and Uganda occupation of DR Congo – a country with an absentee state just across the border. But they see nothing wrong with America and NATO occupation of Afghanistan some 10,000 miles away for over a decade. A few killings by an African army get so much coverage compared to hundreds of death at the hands of American and NATO aerial bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan. We are therefore active participants in processes that encourage and reproduce stereotypes against us.
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More here.

this essay by arundhati roy is exceptionally sharp. it delineates the history of corporate philanthropy (with some focus on the ford foundation) and makes connections that might shock many. i will attempt to quote some of the paragraphs i found most interesting below, but the whole article is totally worth a read.
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The era of the Privatisation of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, like any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s new mega-corporations—Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite—are those who have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth. It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.
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After three years of “low-intensity conflict” that has not managed to “flush” the rebels out of the forest, the central government has declared that it will deploy the Indian army and air force. In India, we don’t call this war. We call it “creating a good investment climate”. Thousands of soldiers have already moved in. A brigade headquarters and air bases are being readied. One of the biggest armies in the world is now preparing its Terms of Engagement to “defend” itself against the poorest, hungriest, most malnourished people in the world. We only await the declaration of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which will give the army legal immunity and the right to kill “on suspicion”. Going by the tens of thousands of unmarked graves and anonymous cremation pyres in Kashmir, Manipur and Nagaland, it has shown itself to be a very suspicious army indeed.
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The Indian army might need to go on a recruitment drive so that it’s not taken unawares when it’s ordered to deploy all over India. In preparation for its role in Central India, it publicly released its updated doctrine on Military Psychological Operations, which outlines “a planned process of conveying a message to a select target audience, to promote particular themes that result in desired attitudes and behaviour, which affect the achievement of political and military objectives of the country”. This process of “perception management”, it said, would be conducted by “using media available to the services”.
The army is experienced enough to know that coercive force alone cannot carry out or manage social engineering on the scale that is envisaged by India’s planners. War against the poor is one thing. But for the rest of us—the middle class, white-collar workers, intellectuals, “opinion-makers”—it has to be “perception management”. And for this we must turn our attention to the exquisite art of Corporate Philanthropy.
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When corporate-endowed foundations first made their appearance in the US, there was a fierce debate about their provenance, legality and lack of accountability. People suggested that if companies had so much surplus money, they should raise the wages of their workers. (People made these outrageous suggestions in those days, even in America.) The idea of these foundations, so ordinary now, was in fact a leap of the business imagination. Non-tax-paying legal entities with massive resources and an almost unlimited brief—wholly unaccountable, wholly non-transparent—what better way to parlay economic wealth into political, social and cultural capital, to turn money into power? What better way for usurers to use a minuscule percentage of their profits to run the world?
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The Ford Foundation’s declared “goals for the future of mankind” include interventions in grassroots political movements locally and internationally. In the US, it provided millions in grants and loans to support the Credit Union Movement that was pioneered by the department store owner, Edward Filene, in 1919. Filene believed in creating a mass consumption society of consumer goods by giving workers affordable access to credit—a radical idea at the time. Actually, only half of a radical idea, because the other half of what Filene believed in was the more equitable distribution of national income. Capitalists seized on the first half of Filene’s suggestion, and by disbursing “affordable” loans of tens of millions of dollars to working people, turned the US working class into people who are permanently in debt, running to catch up with their lifestyles.
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Many years later, this idea has trickled down to the impoverished countryside of Bangladesh when Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank brought microcredit to starving peasants with disastrous consequences. Microfinance companies in India are responsible for hundreds of suicides—200 people in Andhra Pradesh in 2010 alone. A national daily recently published a suicide note by an 18-year-old girl who was forced to hand over her last Rs 150, her school fees, to bullying employees of the microfinance company. The note said, “Work hard and earn money. Do not take loans.” There’s a lot of money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.
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By the 1950s, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, funding several NGOs and international educational institutions, began to work as quasi-extensions of the US government that was at the time toppling democratically elected governments in Latin America, Iran and Indonesia. (That was also around the time they made their entry into India, then non-aligned, but clearly tilting towards the Soviet Union.) The Ford Foundation established a US-style economics course at the Indonesian University. Elite Indonesian students, trained in counter-insurgency by US army officers, played a crucial part in the 1952 CIA-backed coup in Indonesia that brought General Suharto to power. Gen Suharto repaid his mentors by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Communist rebels.

Twenty years later, young Chilean students, who came to be known as the Chicago Boys, were taken to the US to be trained in neo-liberal economics by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago (endowed by J.D. Rockefeller), in preparation for the 1973 CIA-backed coup that killed Salvador Allende, and brought in General Pinochet and a reign of death squads, disappearances and terror that lasted for seventeen years. (Allende’s crime was being a democratically elected socialist and nationalising Chile’s mines.)
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Scholars of the Foundation-friendly version of economics and political science were rewarded with fellowships, research funds, grants, endowments and jobs. Those with Foundation-unfriendly views found themselves unfunded, marginalised and ghettoised, their courses discontinued. Gradually, one particular imagination—a brittle, superficial pretence of tolerance and multiculturalism (that morphs into racism, rabid nationalism, ethnic chauvinism or war-mongering Islamophobia at a moment’s notice) under the roof of a single, overarching, very unplural economic ideology—began to dominate the discourse. It did so to such an extent that it ceased to be perceived as an ideology at all. It became the default position, the natural way to be. It infiltrated normality, colonised ordinariness, and challenging it began to seem as absurd or as esoteric as challenging reality itself. From here it was a quick easy step to ‘There is No Alternative’.

It is only now, thanks to the Occupy Movement, that another language has appeared on US streets and campuses. To see students with banners that say ‘Class War’ or ‘We don’t mind you being rich, but we mind you buying our government’ is, given the odds, almost a revolution in itself.
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The transformation of the idea of justice into the industry of human rights has been a conceptual coup in which NGOs and foundations have played a crucial part. The narrow focus of human rights enables an atrocity-based analysis in which the larger picture can be blocked out and both parties in a conflict—say, for example, the Maoists and the Indian government, or the Israeli Army and Hamas—can both be admonished as Human Rights Violators. The land-grab by mining corporations or the history of the annexation of Palestinian land by the State of Israel then become footnotes with very little bearing on the discourse. This is not to suggest that human rights don’t matter. They do, but they are not a good enough prism through which to view or remotely understand the great injustices in the world we live in.
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The hiving off of the liberal feminist movement from grassroots anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist people’s movements did not begin with the evil designs of foundations. It began with those movements’ inability to adapt and accommodate the rapid radicalisation of women that took place in the ’60s and ’70s. The foundations showed genius in recognising and moving in to support and fund women’s growing impatience with the violence and patriarchy in their traditional societies as well as among even the supposedly progressive leaders of Left movements.
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In the NGO universe, which has evolved a strange anodyne language of its own, everything has become a “subject”, a separate, professionalised, special-interest issue. Community development, leadership development, human rights, health, education, reproductive rights, AIDS, orphans with AIDS—have all been hermetically sealed into their own silos with their own elaborate and precise funding brief. Funding has fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could. Poverty too, like feminism, is often framed as an identity problem. As though the poor have not been created by injustice but are a lost tribe who just happen to exist, and can be rescued in the short term by a system of grievance redressal (administered by NGOs on an individual, person to person basis), and whose long-term resurrection will come from Good Governance. Under the regime of Global Corporate Capitalism, it goes without saying. Indian poverty, after a brief period in the wilderness while India “shone”, has made a comeback as an exotic identity in the Arts, led from the front by films like Slumdog Millionaire. These stories about the poor, their amazing spirit and resilience, have no villains—except the small ones who provide narrative tension and local colour. The authors of these works are the contemporary world’s equivalent of the early anthropologists, lauded and honoured for working on “the ground”, for their brave journeys into the unknown. You rarely see the rich being examined in these ways.
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Martin Luther King Jr made the forbidden connections between Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism and the Vietnam War. As a result, after he was assassinated, even his memory became a toxic threat to public order. Foundations and Corporations worked hard to remodel his legacy to fit a market-friendly format. The Martin Luther King Junior Centre for Non-Violent Social Change, with an operational grant of $2 million, was set up by, among others, the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mobil, Western Electric, Procter & Gamble, US Steel and Monsanto. The Center maintains the King Library and Archives of the Civil Rights Movement. Among the many programmes the King Center runs have been projects that “work closely with the United States Department of Defense, the Armed Forces Chaplains Board and others”. It co-sponsored the Martin Luther King Jr Lecture Series called ‘The Free Enterprise System: An Agent for Non-violent Social Change’. Amen.
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The proletariat, as Marx saw it, has been under continuous assault. Factories have shut down, jobs have disappeared, trade unions have been disbanded. The proletariat has, over the years, been pitted against each other in every possible way. In India, it has been Hindu against Muslim, Hindu against Christian, Dalit against Adivasi, caste against caste, region against region. And yet, all over the world, it is fighting back. In China, there are countless strikes and uprisings. In India, the poorest people in the world have fought back to stop some of the richest corporations in their tracks.

Capitalism is in crisis. Trickledown failed. Now Gush-Up is in trouble too. The international financial meltdown is closing in. India’s growth rate has plummeted to 6.9 per cent. Foreign investment is pulling out. Major international corporations are sitting on huge piles of money, not sure where to invest it, not sure how the financial crisis will play out. This is a major, structural crack in the juggernaut of global capital.

Capitalism’s real “grave-diggers” may end up being its own delusional Cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises—War and Shopping—simply will not work.
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More here.

For Palestinian expatriate Edward Said, the return to his homeland amounted to a painful inquiry into his past. This program captures the interconnection between Said’s personal recollections and the shared memory of the Palestinian people. Far from ignoring the contemporary realities of the Middle East, Said’s perspective relates the ruins of history to the complacent and destructive policies of present-day governments, and delivers a powerful articulation of the weaknesses of the Oslo accords. His intellectual legacy provides valuable insight into the circumstances of the second intifada, as well as the faint steps toward peace that have followed.

In most colonial wars people are arrested, tortured at random and killed. Not even a façade of legality is considered necessary. The ‘lone’ American gunman who butchered innocents in Afghanistan in the early hours of Sunday morning was far from being an exception. For this is not the act of a deranged maniac killing schoolchildren in an American city. The ‘lone’ killer is a sergeant in the US army. He’s not the first and won’t be the last to kill like this. The French did the same in Algeria, the Belgians in the Congo, the British in Kenya and Aden, the Italians in Libya, the Germans in South West Africa, the Boers in South Africa, the Israelis in Palestine, the US in Korea, Vietnam and Central America; and their surrogates have behaved similarly against their own populations throughout South America and much of Asia. More here.

Invisible Children has an enviable ability to draw attention to itself. It should offer courses to other NGOs in social media and video editing. But that doesn’t mean IC knows the material. Until they bother to make a case to people more discerning than Gavin [filmmaker's cute toddler], I think Glenna has best captured what they’re about. More here.

there is this email campaign going on and someone forwarded this video to me. i had never heard of the hoshyar foundation before. they r a u.s based organization. personally i would feel more comfortable supporting non-profits like DIL (developments in literacy) which have a proven track record and don’t rely on the awful, propagandist approach clearly discernible in the hoshyar video. there is so much to say on this subject. if americans really want to support the women of afghanistan and pakistan they should stop the war.

this too is a little girl whose dreams were shattered, not by the taliban but by NATO bombs, watch here.

here are stories of other families affected by the war.

the major problem women and children face in afghanistan is not the taliban or the closing of schools but malnutrition. the country is staggering under the weight of a 30 yr war. that’s what needs to stop.

To a critical but scarcely exclusive sense, the Pentagon’s penchant for military toys makes an ambitious, aggressive foreign policy essential. Without enemies and conflicts, real or potential, there is no reason to spend money, and this reality often colored its definition of Soviet goals after 1947 – despite the objections of senior CIA analysts. But the Defense Department, and national security establishments in general, are immense and all kinds of constituencies exist in them: there are procurement experts who draw up budgets and go after equipment mindlessly, people who have always dominated its actions, but thinkers too. Each does their own thing and they are often very different. It has always had these contradictions.

But that those who run military establishment have technological illusions, which many ordinary people share in this and other domains of human existence, keeps immense sums of money flowing to arms manufacturers and their minions. There is a very profound consensus between the two parties on arms spending, which began under the Democrats a half-century ago and it will not go away – no matter how neglected the bridges and infrastructure, health, or the like. Arms lobbies are not only very powerful in Washington but create crucial jobs in most states and military spending keeps the economy afloat. Weapons producers make money regardless of whether the Pentagon wins or loses its wars – and making money is their only objective. It is surely a key causal factor even if it is far from being the sole explanation of why the U.S. intervenes where it shouldn’t. More here.

it’s easy to discuss the dominance of the pakistani army in every facet of pakistan’s politico-economic life and treat this phenomenon as a “third world” issue. the american military is just as much in charge of the country’s foreign policy. it gobbles up trillions of dollars and affects what happens at home. this didn’t just start with the wars in iraq and afghanistan or the war on terror in general. there is a long history of american military interventions as a way to interact with the world.

The historic achievement of Aimé Césaire’s generation was that, in the course of the anti-colonial struggle, it established the agency of the developing world and the right of its peoples to make their own choices, so much so that, today, when we read dusty texts in which the functionaries of the Raj argue for a permanent British presence by contrasting parliamentary traditions with the savagery of native custom, we recognise at once the racial dynamic at play. By contrast, the historic achievement of goodism lies in the removal of the colonial stigma from the twenty-first century’s neocolonial wars, the normalisation of violence and despotism in the name of social reform, and thus the enablement of a new kind of bigotry.
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More specifically, goodist-style contrasts between the civilised mores of the imperium and the incorrigible barbarism of the natives are as old as colonialism itself. The gunboat in the harbour always arrived for the ostensible benefit of the ‘new-caught, sullen peoples’ rather than the East India Company. Suttee in India, human sacrifice in the Americas, cannibalism in the Pacific, foot binding in China and so on: these (undeniably horrific) phenomenaon were all used, at various times, to rationalise conquest and to justify dispossession.

Césaire made the point particularly eloquently in Discours sur le colonialisme. Surveying Western accounts of the evils worked by native peoples, he wrote:

The conclusion is inescapable, compared to the cannibals, the dismemberers, and other lesser breeds, Europe and the West are the incarnation of respect for human dignity. But let us move on, and quickly, lest our thoughts wander to Algiers, Morocco, and other places where, as I write these very words, so many valiant sons of the West, in the semi-darkness of dungeons, are lavishing upon their inferior African brothers, with such tireless attention, those authentic marks of respect for human dignity which are called, in technical terms, ‘electricity,’ ‘the bathtub,’ and ‘the bottleneck.’

Today, Algiers and Morocco have been supplanted by Iraq and Afghanistan, and ‘the bathtub’ replaced by ‘the waterboard’, but the argument remains unchanged.
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In an oft-quoted passage, [Cesaire] declared:

We must study how colonisation works to decivilise the coloniser, to brutalise him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilisation acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a centre of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

To update the argument, you need only ask what political and cultural consequences you’d expect internationally from, say, the Bush administration’s normalisation of torture against Muslim detainees; the construction of Guantanamo to house Muslim prisoners indefinitely without charges or trial; the launch of a pre-emptive invasion, a war declared unlawful by most legal scholars, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them Muslim; the routinisation of assassinations and other extrajudicial killings of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen; and the persistent refusal to hold anyone accountable for any of these. Is it not likely that such measures would establish throughout the industrialised world certain ideas about Muslims and their place, certain notions about how they might be legitimately treated?

Let’s look, as Césaire suggests, to Europe.

In Holland, Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party, seems set to play kingmaker for a new government. Wilders advocates banning the Koran, prohibiting immigration from Muslim nations and forbidding the construction of mosques. In Switzerland, a historic centre of tolerance, the state has constitutionally banned the building of new minarets. In Austria, the Freedom Party (yes, it’s a popular name), which polled 17.5 per cent at the most recent election, wants to do the same, while also outlawing face veils. France has already prohibited the burqa; similar laws are mooted in Italy and Belgium. The English Defence League marshals shaven-headed hooligans to chant ‘Muslims out!’ in towns across the nation. In Germany, former finance minister Thilo Sarrazin sold, in a month, 600 000 copies of a book claiming that high fertility rates among the Muslim community have diluted the country’s collective IQ.

Crucially, this rising tide of prejudice and hatred correlates not with anything Muslims might have done but rather with what is being done against them.
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It is difficult to hear the ugly clamour of the new Islamophobia and not recall the traditional slurs against Judaism during Europe’s darkest days. Jews, said the bigots of the early twentieth century, were eternal foreigners, disloyal interlopers who bred uncontrollably and immigrated in swarms. They kept to themselves, they ate strange foods, they wore odd clothes, and their sinister religion mandated their involvement in criminality and political extremism.

Yes, today’s discourse against Islam marshals an identifiably pogromist vocabulary and, in Europe at least, it swells the ranks of groups with historic ties to the far Right or even neo-fascism. But Islamophobia also represents something new, since it deploys the ancient tropes of bigotry not in the form of blood-and-soil racialism, but in the politically correct vocabulary of contemporary liberalism.

The anti-Islam ideologues might be feminist (Ayaan Hirsi Ali), atheist (Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris) or even assertively homosexual (Pim Fortuyn famously denied being a racist on the basis of his penchant for Moroccan boys) but their formulations invariably contrast secular modernity – multicultural, tolerant of women’s rights, etc. – against Islamic backwardness and totalitarianism. Thus the group Stop the Islamisation of Europe can use as its slogan: ‘racism is the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense.’
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In a curious fashion, then, the anti-burqa feminists (we might also have mentioned Elizabeth Farrelly and Virginia Haussegger) become that which they oppose. In the name of combating a garment that, they say, silences women, treats women as objects and excludes women from the public sphere, they … silence women, treat women as objects and exclude women from the public sphere. Ostensibly championing freedom, in practice they seek to deny it.
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The connection between goodism abroad (humanitarian war) and goodism at home (burqa bans) becomes, then, clearer. The ideologues of Islamophobia are, as they repeatedly ensure us, impeccable liberals – doughty defenders of progress and enlightenment and rights for all. They are, however, liberals who have concluded that ‘free and equal discussion’ doesn’t apply to Muslims, the ‘barbarians’ of our contemporary age. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with such people, and the same immaturity of Islamic faculties that legitimises military occupation overseas also mandates coercion at home.

‘An equation,’ said Césaire. ‘Colonisation = “thing-ification”.’

You can’t tell people what clothes to wear but you can do whatever you want to things, even those in human form.
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To date, Islamophobia has not, within Australia, become the mass political force it is in Europe and, increasingly, the US. But the basis has been laid. The war in Afghanistan will not deliver liberal reforms to the people of Afghanistan. Rather, the longer it continues, the more it will foster anti-Muslim bigotry throughout the world, a bigotry promulgated under the rubric of liberalism.

From the campaign to civilise barbarism, said Césaire, comes ‘the negation of civilisation, pure and simple’. The tragedy of Afghanistan illustrates precisely what he meant.
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More here.

More than 250 Palestinian and Israeli women and men were attacked by military forces at a demonstration at the Qalandia checkpoint. Several injuries were reported, including one woman who was hospitalized after being shot with a rubber-coated bullet. “The 8th of March symbolizes an accumulated struggle for women all around the world for freedom and justice”, said Amaal Khresha of the Palestinian Women’s Working Association for Development. “For Palestinian women under the occupation, this day is a day of marking the struggle against the occupation.” Arabia Mansur of the Women’s Coalition for Peace added that occupation and militarism will never enable the development of a society that offers women a life of happiness and dignity. “We must put a stop to the sort of education which teaches children to see reality through the barrel of a gun, and women have to stop participating in such education,” said Mansur. The demonstration also focused on solidarity with administrative detainee Hana Shalabi, who is now on the 24the day of a hunger strike. As reported before here, Shalabi’s physical condition is deteriorating, and a decision in her appeal against her detention order is due beginning of next week. More here.

[The video] aims to make Kony “famous” by encouraging supporters to plaster US cities with posters, in order to make the fight against the Lord’s Resistance Army an issue of “national interest” to Washington. That, the video’s makers claim, will ensure funding for 100 US military advisors sent to train African armies to find Kony will continue. “Suggesting that the answer is more military action is just wrong,” said Javie Ssozi, an influential Ugandan blogger. “Have they thought of the consequences? Making Kony ‘famous’ could make him stronger. Arguing for more US troops could make him scared, and make him abduct more children, or go on the offensive.” Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan journalist specialising in peace and conflict reporting, said: “This paints a picture of Uganda six or seven years ago, that is totally not how it is today. It’s highly irresponsible”. More here.

Naomi Wolf: Burning a conquered people’s sacred texts sends an unmistakable message: you can do anything to these people. As Heinrich Heine put it, referring to the Spanish Inquisition’s burning of the Quran, “Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings”. Jews understand that very well: from the Inquisition to Cossack massacres to Kristallnacht, the aggressors destroyed Torahs as a logical and well-understood precursor to destroying Jews.
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The BBC collated testimony in 2010 from nine prisoners, confirming that human-rights abuses continued at Bagram. The prisoners independently described “a secret prison” inside the prison, called “the black hole”. Prisoners were still being subjected at the time to freezing temperatures, sleep deprivation and “other abuses”. One testified that a US soldier had used a rifle to knock out a row of his teeth and that he was forced to dance to music whenever he needed to use the bathroom.

Another investigation confirmed similar allegations in 2010 and last month, the BBC reported that Bagram’s prison population had reached 3,000, while an Afghan-led investigation found still more allegations of ongoing torture, including freezing temperatures and sexual humiliations.

Of course, since the US military can detain anyone in Afghanistan and hold him or her without charge in these conditions forever, the entire country lives under the shadow of torture at Bagram. The Quran burnings are a potent symbol of that systemic threat.

So, while Obama should continue to apologise for the Quran burnings, we must understand that Afghans’ rage is a response to an even deeper, rawer wound. Obama should also apologise for kidnapping Afghans; for holding them at Bagram without due process of law; for forcing them into cages, each reportedly holding up to 30 prisoners; for denying them Red Cross/Red Crescent visits; for illegally confiscating family letters; for torturing and sexually abusing them; and for casting a pall of fear over the country.

The Quran forbids that kind of injustice and cruelty. So does the Bible.
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More here.