Month: July 2013

Budour Hassan: Exceedingly Immersed in their fight against fascism and tyranny in Spain, the revolutionaries ignored Spain’s colonialism, fascism and tyranny across the Mediterranean. The level of dehumanisation toward the “Other” was so high that, according to most pro-revolution narratives, the only role colonised Moroccans were given to play was one of mercenaries brought in by General Franco to crush the Popular Front. Much pro-revolution sentiment would go as far as referring to Moroccans in a racist manner. While it is difficult to argue that mutual solidarity between Spanish revolutionaries and colonised Moroccans could have changed the outcome of the War, it is also difficult to know whether this kind of solidarity was ever feasible in the first place. As the late American historian Howard Zinn puts it: “In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.” On the other hand, anarchism, in its essence, means rejecting and fighting against any form of authority and subjugation, including colonialism and occupation. To be truly anti-authoritarian, therefore, any struggle against fascism and dictatorship at home should be internationalist and cannot be separated from the struggle against fascism and tyranny abroad, in its role as a colonial power. Returning to the Spanish revolution is fitting as we mark its 77th anniversary, because it seems that many anarchists have yet to internalise one of its key lessons. Exceptions notwithstanding, Western anarchist movements continue to be overwhelmingly white, unwittingly (or perhaps knowingly) orientalist, West-centric, even elitist, and unwelcoming of people who do not look like them. Thus, anti-authoritarian struggles in the Middle East, Africa and Asia are usually glossed over. It should be made clear, however, that anarchists of colour undoubtedly bear a large chunk of the responsibility for their relative lack of documentation. Maia Ramnath’s excellent book Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle and Ilham Khury Makdissi’s The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914, are among few attempts to offer an alternative history of anti-authoritarianism in regions that get little attention. More here.

Why would President Obama want to keep a Yemeni journalist in prison? Well, reporter Jeremy Scahill explains it this way: “This is a man who was put in prison because he had the audacity to expose a U.S. cruise missile attack that killed three dozen women and children. And the United States had tried to cover it up. … That’s the side that the White House is on right now. Not on the side of press freedom around the world.” Scahill praises Shaye’s reporting: “I would put forward that Abdulelah Haider Shaye asked more critical questions of figures within the al-Qaeda organization in Yemen than a single member of the caviar correspondents association in the United States, those jokers who sit in the front row and pretend to play journalist on television.” More here.

HEATHER HORN: At the heart of Said’s critique of Western treatment of the “Orient” is the observation that even romanticizing something is a way of diminishing it, rendering it two-dimensional. “Orientalism,” according to the postcolonialists, is about emphasizing the differences between East and West, exoticizing them, seeing one, for example, as spiritual and the other as material: “By the time she sat down, the harmony of angels had vanquished the tinny background music from every corporate space on the planet.” Or seeing one as ancient and the other as modern: “her brown eyes were pools of empathy evolved through a thousand generations of what was good and decent in the history of the human race.” In fact, Said was particularly cognizant of the way these trends manifested in Western perceptions of Eastern, Muslim women, in part because he felt the sexualization of the Orient was vital to Western justification for imperialism: the East was a female sex object ready for Western male penetration–the veil was made to be removed. Completely unintentionally, this paragraph, with its joint focus on Abedin’s beauty and her otherness, is a classic of the genre. More here.

Omair Ahmed: I know that it is a moral failing, but I have never been able to summon any sympathy for the ignorant. In this day and age there are so many ways and means of getting information that it takes a great deal of effort to stay ignorant. Those who stay without knowledge in today’s world are those who have made an effort not to know, and it is difficult to sympathise with this.

One example of such wilful ignorance is the increasing use of the term ‘Allah hafez’ among South Asian Muslims. This is a twisting of the Farsi term ‘Khudahafez’, which translates as ‘May God take care of you’ and is used as goodbye. In fact, ‘goodbye’ is itself a contraction of the old English term ‘God be with ye’, so it’s an almost exact translation. But for some people, ‘khudahafez’ no longer suffices, and instead of ‘May God take care of you’, they prefer to say, ‘May Allah take care of you’.

It is a distinction without a difference. ‘Khuda’ is Farsi for ‘God’ and the Arabic term ‘Allah’ is a contraction of the words ‘al ilah’—or ‘the god’. Insisting on ‘Allah, not khuda’, thus, is the equivalent of insisting on ‘God, not God’. At best, it signals a preference for Arabic instead of Farsi. What sounds silly is when an Arabic term ‘Allah’ is forced into a Farsi phrase, leaving it neither Farsi nor Arabic but a mockery of both.

[…] Such idiocy is not peculiar to a single set of people. Across North India, another visible effort is the trend of renaming old Urdu Bazaar areas of small cities ‘Hindi Bazaar’. Unfortunately for these rewriters, the ‘Urdu’ in Urdu Bazaar has nothing to do with language. In Turkish, the word for military is ‘ordu/urdu’. These Urdu Bazaars were cantonment markets set up during the Sultanate and Mughal eras. Their civilian equivalents were the Sadar Bazaars. As far as I can tell, the British continued this tradition with their cantonment markets and Civil Lines, which we still follow.

[…] The history of Urdu as a language is a history of indigenisation, of the way Indians taught the haughty Mughal Darbaar some humility. Instead of understanding this history, some would like to paint over the name ‘Urdu’ and write ‘Hindi’ in its stead much the same way that some Muslims, turning towards the Arab world, would like to replace Farsi with Arabic.

Maybe it feels empowering to say, ‘Our way is best, and we will overwrite history in our name.’ Yet, in trying to overwrite history, we lose out so much that is our own. In rejecting a mixed legacy, we only reject a part of our own inheritance, leaving all of us poorer in the process. More here.

The imperialist wars and vigilantes at home have more in common than widely accepted as they are both fragments of a system that is as destructive as it is discriminatory; and a system that is built by the privileged will only support the privileged, will only side with the privileged and will only sympathise with the privileged. It is a system that incessantly demands calm of its victims. For them to calmly accept that they will be stopped and frisked, because after-all, they argue, the innocent have nothing to fear. When their hands impose and prod and leave unseen marks on our souls we are to calmly acquiesce. One must calmly disallow their tongue from releasing words in a native language, so as not to bring upon themselves an invasion of eyes glaring and lips mocking every word. Calmly throw your hands above your head, spread your legs and accept this methodical damnation. More here.

“Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.”

Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”

MONIKA JOHNSON HOSTLER: And so, what we are calling for is not just how this is handled in Steubenville, Ohio, but really asking America to take a hard look at ourselves in how we are—handle sexual violence and rape in our country. I think we’ve been able to point our fingers and turn our heads to rapes that have happened in other countries and not held ourselves accountable as Americans to say that we absolutely still have a culture of rape, where women and girls are still degraded and dehumanized, and rape is in the fabric of this country. And unfortunately, I would think, centuries later, that we would be further along in terms of our response, but yet we still see Americans blaming victims. So, in terms of our overall response, we’re calling for America to take a hard look at itself and really think about the culture that we’re raising our kids in and the things that we are allowing to happen by not acknowledging, as a community, as a society, the importance of supporting the rape victim.

And I do want to go back briefly to something you asked Kristie earlier about the rape victim recalling her story or what happened. And what I’d like to point out to your listeners and viewers is, oftentimes rape victims don’t consider what happened to them rape. Just as Kristie described, in this case, she was intoxicated, inebriated, that she wasn’t able to actually recall what happened, which is often the case that we hear with drug-facilitated or alcohol-facilitated rapes. So I think it’s important for people to understand, before we begin to blame the victim, when a victim recalls their story in pieces, it is often because of cases like this where it’s difficult to recall the incidents that happen, especially when they’re intoxicated or inebriated. More here.

Journalist Barrett Brown spent his 300th day behind bars this week on a range of charges filed after he used information obtained by the hacker group Anonymous to report on the operations of private intelligence firms. Brown faces 17 charges ranging from threatening an FBI agent to credit card fraud for posting a link online to a document that contained stolen credit card data. But according to his supporters, Brown is being unfairly targeted for daring to investigate the highly secretive world of private intelligence and military contractors. Using information Anonymous took from the firm HBGary Federal, Brown helped discover a secret plan to tarnish the reputations of WikiLeaks and journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian. Brown similarly analyzed and wrote about the millions of internal company emails from Stratfor Global Intelligence that were leaked in 2011. We speak to Peter Ludlow, professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, whose article “The Strange Case of Barrett Brown” recently appeared in The Nation. “Considering that the person who carried out the actual Stratfor hack had several priors and is facing a maximum of 10 years, the inescapable conclusion is that the problem is not with the hack itself but with Brown’s journalism,” Ludlow argues. He adds that the case against Brown could suggest criminality “to even link to something or share a link with someone.” More here.