Tariq Ali's Blog, page 15

Tariq Ali talks to Russia Today about a prospective Saudi Arabian-Bahrain union

Following speculation in the Middle-East concerning discussions of a potential political union between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Tariq Ali spoke to Russia Today about the proposals, suggesting that Iranian concerns were not unfounded.

“What Iranians say is not paranoid or far-fetched at all. Bahrain itself is a US naval base. They could easily, if they so desired, have a democratic regime there. But the problem with allowing democracy is that a democratic government could then tell the US to get out. So it suits the United States to have this tiny little despotism and a larger despotism in Saudi Arabia.”

Visit Russia Today to read the article in full.

Tariq Ali in Montenegro

Speaking in Montenegro, Tariq Ali talks on the current global political situation, the Arab Spring and what constitutes a vision for socialism today.

Tariq Ali and Ann Wright discuss Obama’s visit to Afghanistan

On a surprise visit to Afghanistan, President Obama marked the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Osama bin Laden and announced the signing of a long-term strategic partnership with the Afghan government. In a speech to the U.S. public, Obama said the agreement heralds, “a future in which the war ends, and a new chapter begins.” Democracy Now are joined by writer Tariq Ali and former U.S. diplomat Ann Wright, who helped reopen the U.S. embassy in Kabul in 2001.

‘Most Pakistanis Don’t Want The Army In Politics’

Tariq Ali interviewed by Bharat Bhushan for Outlook India, April 23, 2012

When you look at your original homeland, Pakistan, what thoughts come to your mind?

A congregation of pain – to quote from Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s great poem Aaj ke naam – in Urdu, “dard ki anjuman”. The country has gone from bad to worse. You feel sometimes that things can’t get worse and they do. We first had the effect of military dictatorships on social political life in the country and now we have got a civilian government which is probably the most corrupt government in the entire history of the country. What staggers me is that Zardari is so shameless. On his face you do not read any regret for what he has done and he will carry on doing it till the United States keep him in power. That is the situation in the country today.

You have often said that Pakistan has mostly been ruled by governments which have been US puppets. How and when will Pakistan be government by and for Pakistanis?

The young people want to get a government elected by the people and for the people. Whether Imran Khan will pull it off or not – I do not know. The planks of his programme are friendly, but independent, relations with the United States and moving away from puppet status. He actually says that in his campaigns – about 70 per cent of the population sees the US as its enemy. It used to be India, but now it is the United States.

Your support for Imran Khan has baffled many in Pakistan and elsewhere. What did you mean by writing in the London Review of Books — almost lamenting that there was only one Imran Khan in Pakistan?

Well, what I meant was there is nothing else at the moment as far as politics is concerned. That this guy after working 15 years for building his party, when everyone was laughing at him, is beginning to draw huge support mostly from people who are alienated from politics. So I think one has to react positively. It is not as if he will give Pakistan what I want – fully fledged socialism – but at least he is fighting on the right issues and people are fed up of being ruled by two competing sets of criminals — corporate criminals. Whether it is the Sharif brothers or Zardari – they are both in politics to make money. They do very little else.

But what do you think of Imran Khan’s support for the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan and obscurantism of all kinds?

Well, he has denied all that sharply in interviews that I have seen with him. He has said that he is not a supporter of the Taliban or the Tehreek-e-Taliban. He feels that the American war in Afghanistan and the drone attacks in Pakistan are increasing support for these people. And he wants to end it. Essentially, he is an enlightened Muslim – probably much more liberal minded than the people who are in power in Egypt and Tunisia today.

What do you say about the Punjabi hegemony in politics and in the military in Pakistan? What does it do to the dream of a federal Pakistan?

That dream died with the formation of Bangladesh after the breakup of Pakistan in 1970-71. That was the end of federal Pakistan. What was left was a country heavily dominated by Punjab by virtue of its population, if nothing else. It is a fact of life. There is nothing we can do about it. The country is now very mixed. Karachi is a city which has Punjabis, Sindhis, the Pushtuns, and descendents of the refugees who went from India. The social composition of the big cities is changing. You see the same thing in Sindh and Balochistan – you have lots of people who are not ethnically from that region. And this happens all over the world. You cannot keep to the ethnic purity which some nationalists seem to demand.

Do you see the stranglehold of the army on Pakistan politics and foreign policy diminishing in the near future?

I think there is very little doubt that most people in Pakistan don’t want the army to intervene in politics. They are fed up of it. They know perfectly well what happens at the top; that the process which was started off decades ago of corruption among the top layers of the armed services (has continued) and when they come to power they become even more corrupt. They get rake offs from deals to buy arms and the top military officials get huge amounts of money officially and legally from the State. They have become the part of the elite. But people don’t like them being in power. I think most people would prefer elected governments though there are times when there is an elected government like the current one, when some people again start saying that perhaps the army was better. But the majority wants elected governments.

You say the people are fed up of the army, but is the army fed up of politics?

The army is not fed up of politics – this is absolutely true because of the role it has played. It sees itself like the Turkish army used to do for a long long time—not just “in the last analysis”, saviour of the country if it was attacked, but as the only force in the country which was organised and disciplined enough to run the country. That is how the many top brass see it and they have run the country. But every time they have done it, it has been a mess. Ayub’s dictatorship led to the breakup of Pakistan. General Zia’s dictatorship saw the country become obscurantist; saw the emergence of jihadi groups funded and supported from the top and we are still trying to deal with the mess that was created. And then we had Musharraf who started off with promises but then picked up a huge fight with the judiciary and had to go out ignominiously having lost the fight to destroy a Chief justice.read more

‘The notion that democracy and capitalism are interlinked is nonsense’

Tariq Ali interviewed by the Indian Express.

The 1960s were heady days — cultural and political revolutions, the death of Che Guevara and a raging Vietnam war. In the midst of all this was Tariq Ali, a young man in his 20s who had just arrived in Oxford from Lahore, and who ended up as one of the most prominent anti-American voices. After graduating, Ali led the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign against the war and has spent much of the life denouncing America and “neoliberal economic policies”. Ali has authored several books, but it’s his Street Fighting Years that became a cult read. Ali, now 68, is an editor of the New Left Review and lives in London. He was in India this week to deliver a Faiz memorial lecture. In this interview, Ali talks to Uma Vishnu about the Indian Left, Pakistan and the Chinese model.

As someone who looks at India from the outside, what do you think has changed?

What has changed dramatically is the shift in India’s position in the world. It has become a major player, but at the same time the old India, which was genuinely independent in relation to the big powers, is now very closely aligned to the US. The US wants to have India as a permanent ally, largely as a counterbalance against China, whereas I think China and India have a lot in common and they should be working together rather than being manipulated by the US. And then the whole triumphalism that followed globalisation and the whole thing about “Shining India”. The moral presence of India, which was very strong in the ’50s as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, has gone… this government is on its knees before the Israelis and the Americans. It’s unnecessary. India is a big power, it doesn’t have to be on its knees.

You often talk of the “crisis of the extreme centre” in relation to Europe and the US. Would that apply to India too?

No, essentially this is a crisis of political vision. When I said “crisis of the extreme centre”, I was saying that you have a democratic deficit in all these advanced capitalist countries, where it doesn’t matter whether you are (Barack) Obama or (George W.) Bush, you do the same thing. The difference here is, when the BJP is in power, they carry out a lot of cultural atrocities and it encourages actions like (Narendra) Modi’s. Whereas when you have the Congress in power, at least on that level things are marginally better. But in terms of policies and political prescriptions, it’s the same.

You believe reinstating the state is the answer?

The abdication of the state creates huge crises — it encourages communalism and casteism and encourages people to think in very narrow terms about economic gains. The Chinese model, for instance, has its problems. China’s political elite is pushing through measures to enrich themselves. China is a more combustible country in some ways and there will be enormous resistance developing to this in the years ahead. China is today a country with the highest wage differentials in the world. Okay, they have redeployed and rebuilt their economy, but now what?

At the recent CPM party congress in Kerala, there was confusion over China as a role model.

The West Bengal CPM tried to ape the Chinese model and was kicked out of office, so that should be a lesson to them that the Chinese model can’t be copied at the level of states here. The process in China is out of control, which is why you have these disputes in the Chinese politburo. So what the Chinese model also shows is that you don’t have to have democracy in order to sustain a very dynamic capitalism. The notion that democracy and capitalism are interlinked is nonsense.

So where do you think the Indian Left can look for inspiration?

The Indian Left shouldn’t think in religious terms, it’s not divine rule. They have to map out and chart a course for India, given what exists in India. The Left should come up with concrete alternatives for what needs to be done, not just criticise all the time. But apart from the CPM, there are social movements and then the Maoists. The fact that the Maoists have come to the fore again is a terrible indictment of this state, which has not been able to do anything for the marginal population.

Please visit the Indian Express to read the interview in full.

Tariq Ali on Indian TV

Tariq Ali on the ‘disgusting attacks on Gunter Grass’

The German writer Gunter Grass (The Tin Drum) had already predicted the response to his poem in SdZ. There is no reason to be surprised, but there is every reason to be disgusted. Within Germany both the elite and a layer of the population by their words and actions appear to have accepted the disgraceful Goldhagen thesis whereby all German were guilty for the crimes of the Third Reich. This thesis has now been developed further: all Germans are guilty for eternity for the crimes of the Third Reich.

Behind this thinking is the Zionist and Zionophile argument that the crime against the Jews of Europe was unique in the annals of history. This was true as far as the method of extermination was concerned, but not in any other way. The Belgians massacred the Congolese in greater numbers: over 10 million according to the historian Adam Hochschild. The killing of Armenians during the First World War was systematic and we could go on and discuss the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but comparing one massacre or genocide to another is a futile exercise. Raul Hilberg the most authoritative historian of the Judeocide was angered by the uses that were being made of that crime today.

Some members of the extreme-right government and Lieberman in particular, that rules Israel today have used proto-fascist language against the Palestinian Arabs. Are we not allowed to point that out? That the Israeli government pushed the Bush administration to make war on Iraq is hardly a secret. Nor is the statement of the Israeli Ambassador to the US the day after the fall of Baghdad: “Don’t stop. Move on to Damascus and Teheran.’ Are we not allowed to rebuke him? The targeting and killing of young Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere is fine, is it?

Gunter Grass was very mild in his criticisms. He concentrated on Israeli warmongering in relation to Iran. He could have said a lot more. The fact that it needs political courage to say even what he did in Germany or France is a sad reflection on the political culture of both these countries. As for the attacks on Grass for his wartime activities, these are beneath contempt. The Israelis were delighted when the former Italian minister, Gianfranco Fini, whose party is in lineal descent from Mussolini, went to Israel and praised the Wall. He was forgiven his party’s past. So the past only matters if a person is critical of Israel. The former Nazis in various positions in the postwar Federal republic who pushed through reparations and backed Israel, they were never criticized either.

German citizens should ponder the following: it was not the Palestinians who were responsible for the murder of millions of Jews during the Second World War. Yet they, the Palestinians, have become the indirect victims of the Judeocide. Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return to others. So why no sympathy for the Palestinians?

Please visit Counterpunch to read the article in full.

Night of the Golden Butterfly wins French literary prize

Night of the Golden Butterfly, the last volume of the Islam Quintet by Tariq Ali, has been awarded the 2012 Cercle Interallié literary prize for foreign language novels. The French edition was published in October 2011 by Sabine Wespieser Publishers.

The Inerallié Prize was established on December 3, 1930 by a group of around thirty journalists who were members of the Cercle de l'Union Inerallié. The latter is a private Parisian club founded in 1917, which aimed to bring material and moral resources to officers and other representatives of the nations of the Triple Entente. Today, its members are politicians, diplomats, lawyers, CEOs, journalists.

Although not comprising of any financial reward, each year the Prize gives honour to a novel, usually written by a journalist. The jury itself is made up of ten journalists, joined by the previous year's winner.

‘George Galloway’s Respect could help Britain to break the political impasse’

‘George Galloway’s Respect could help Britain to break the political impasse’ by Tariq Ali for the Guardian, March 30, 2012

George Galloway’s stunning electoral triumph in the Bradford by-election has shaken the petrified world of English politics. It was unexpected, and for that reason the Respect campaign was treated by much of the media (Helen Pidd of the Guardian being an honourable exception) as a loony fringe show. A BBC toady, an obviously partisan compere on a local TV election show, who tried to mock and insult Galloway, should be made to eat his excremental words. The Bradford seat, a Labour fiefdom since 1973, was considered safe and the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, had been planning a celebratory visit to the city till the news seeped through at 2 am. He is now once again focused on his own future. Labour has paid the price for its failure to act as an opposition, having imagined that all it had to do was wait and the prize would come its way. Scottish politics should have forced a rethink. Perhaps the latest development in English politics now will, though I doubt it. Galloway has effectively urinated on all three parties. The Lib Dems and Tories explain their decline by the fact that too many people voted!

Thousands of young people infected with apathy, contempt, despair and a disgust with mainstream politics were dynamised by the Respect campaign. Galloway is tireless on these occasions. Nobody else in the political field comes even close to competing with him – not simply because he is an effective orator, though this skill should not be underestimated. It comes almost as a shock these days to a generation used to the bland untruths that are mouthed every day by government and opposition politicians. It was the political content of the campaign that galvanised the youth: Respect campaigners and their candidate stressed the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan. Galloway demanded that Blair be tried as a war criminal, and that British troops be withdrawn from Afghanistan without further delay. He lambasted the Government and the Labour party for the austerity measures targeting the less well off, the poor and the infirm, and the new privatisations of education, health and the Post Office. It was all this that gave him a majority of 10,000.

How did we get here? Following the collapse of communism in 1991, Edmund Burke’s notion that “In all societies, consisting of different classes, certain classes must necessarily be uppermost,” and that “The apostles of equality only change and pervert the natural order of things,” became the commonsense wisdom of the age. Money corrupted politics, and big money corrupted it absolutely. Throughout the heartlands of capital, we witnessed the emergence of effective coalitions: as ever, the Republicans and Democrats in the United States; New Labour and Tories in the vassal state of Britain; socialists and conservatives in France; the German coalitions of one variety or another, with the greens differentiating themselves largely as ultra-Atlanticists; and the Scandinavian centre-right and centre-left with few differences, competing in cravenness before the empire. In virtually every case the two- or three-party system morphed into an effective national government. A new market extremism came into play. The entry of capital into the most hallowed domains of social provision was regarded as a necessary reform. Private financial initiatives that punished the public sector became the norm and countries (such as France and Germany) that were seen as not proceeding fast enough in the direction of the neoliberal paradise were regularly denounced in the Economist and the Financial Times.

To question this turn, to defend the public sector, to argue in favour of state ownership of utilities or to challenge the fire sale of public housing was to be regarded as a dinosaur.

British politics has been governed by the consensus established by Margaret Thatcher during the locust decades of the 80s and 90s, since New Labour accepted the basic tenets of Thatcherism (its model was the New Democrats’ embrace of Reaganism). Those were the roots of the extreme centre, which encompasses both centre-left and centre-right and exercises power, promoting austerity measures that privilege the wealthy, and backing wars and occupations abroad. President Obama is far from isolated within the Euro-American political sphere. New movements are now springing up at home, challenging political orthodoxies without offering one of their own. They’re little more than a scream for help.read more

'George Galloway's Respect could help Britain to break the political impasse'

'George Galloway's Respect could help Britain to break the political impasse' by Tariq Ali for the Guardian, March 30, 2012

George Galloway's stunning electoral triumph in the Bradford by-election has shaken the petrified world of English politics. It was unexpected, and for that reason the Respect campaign was treated by much of the media (Helen Pidd of the Guardian being an honourable exception) as a loony fringe show. A BBC toady, an obviously partisan compere on a local TV election show, who tried to mock and insult Galloway, should be made to eat his excremental words. The Bradford seat, a Labour fiefdom since 1973, was considered safe and the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, had been planning a celebratory visit to the city till the news seeped through at 2 am. He is now once again focused on his own future. Labour has paid the price for its failure to act as an opposition, having imagined that all it had to do was wait and the prize would come its way. Scottish politics should have forced a rethink. Perhaps the latest development in English politics now will, though I doubt it. Galloway has effectively urinated on all three parties. The Lib Dems and Tories explain their decline by the fact that too many people voted!

Thousands of young people infected with apathy, contempt, despair and a disgust with mainstream politics were dynamised by the Respect campaign. Galloway is tireless on these occasions. Nobody else in the political field comes even close to competing with him – not simply because he is an effective orator, though this skill should not be underestimated. It comes almost as a shock these days to a generation used to the bland untruths that are mouthed every day by government and opposition politicians. It was the political content of the campaign that galvanised the youth: Respect campaigners and their candidate stressed the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan. Galloway demanded that Blair be tried as a war criminal, and that British troops be withdrawn from Afghanistan without further delay. He lambasted the Government and the Labour party for the austerity measures targeting the less well off, the poor and the infirm, and the new privatisations of education, health and the Post Office. It was all this that gave him a majority of 10,000.

How did we get here? Following the collapse of communism in 1991, Edmund Burke's notion that "In all societies, consisting of different classes, certain classes must necessarily be uppermost," and that "The apostles of equality only change and pervert the natural order of things," became the commonsense wisdom of the age. Money corrupted politics, and big money corrupted it absolutely. Throughout the heartlands of capital, we witnessed the emergence of effective coalitions: as ever, the Republicans and Democrats in the United States; New Labour and Tories in the vassal state of Britain; socialists and conservatives in France; the German coalitions of one variety or another, with the greens differentiating themselves largely as ultra-Atlanticists; and the Scandinavian centre-right and centre-left with few differences, competing in cravenness before the empire. In virtually every case the two- or three-party system morphed into an effective national government. A new market extremism came into play. The entry of capital into the most hallowed domains of social provision was regarded as a necessary reform. Private financial initiatives that punished the public sector became the norm and countries (such as France and Germany) that were seen as not proceeding fast enough in the direction of the neoliberal paradise were regularly denounced in the Economist and the Financial Times.

To question this turn, to defend the public sector, to argue in favour of state ownership of utilities or to challenge the fire sale of public housing was to be regarded as a dinosaur.

British politics has been governed by the consensus established by Margaret Thatcher during the locust decades of the 80s and 90s, since New Labour accepted the basic tenets of Thatcherism (its model was the New Democrats' embrace of Reaganism). Those were the roots of the extreme centre, which encompasses both centre-left and centre-right and exercises power, promoting austerity measures that privilege the wealthy, and backing wars and occupations abroad. President Obama is far from isolated within the Euro-American political sphere. New movements are now springing up at home, challenging political orthodoxies without offering one of their own. They're little more than a scream for help.read more