Tariq Ali's Blog, page 19

Tariq Ali with Avi Lewis

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

7:00 PM

Tariq Ali will talk about U.S. foreign policy failures concerning Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, followed by an onstage conversation with Avi Lewis,  award-winning Canadian television journalist and documentary filmmaker whose productions include The Take, which followed Argentina's movement of worker-run businesses taking over operations at plants shut down after the economic collapse of 2001.

Lensic Performing Arts Center

211 West San Francisco Street

Santa Fe, NM 87501

Presented by the Lannan Foundation

This event is part of the Lannan In Pursuit of Cultural Freedom series.

Ticketing Information

Online: at Tickets Santa Fe

By phone: 505-988-1234 Lensic Box Office Hours 10:00 AM-4:00 PM Mon-Fri.

or in person, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center 10:00 AM-4:00 PM Mon-Fri.

The Arab World, People Power, and the Future of Palestine

Al-Awda San Francisco, The Palestine Right of Return Coalition, and the Midle east Children's Alliance Present:

The Arab World, People Power, and the Future of Palestine

with internationally renowned author, filmmaker, and intellectual Tariq Ali.

Tariq Ali, writer and filmmaker, has written more than two dozen books on world history and politics, seven novels (translated into over a dozen languages) as well as scripts for the stage and screen.  He is an editor of New Left Review and lives in London.

Tariq Ali will be signing his latest book, On History, after the event.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

First Congregational Church

2501 Harrison Street

Oakland, CA 94611

6 PM

$10 general / $35 front

Purchase tickets here

Revolution in the Air: The Arab Spring and a World in Motion

Ali will be launching and signing copies of

On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation

Oliver Stone and Tariq Ali

Haymarket Books

In working together on two challenging new documentaries—South of the Border and the forthcoming 13-part, 13-hour Untold History of the United States series for Showtime—filmmaker Oliver Stone engaged with author and filmmaker Tariq Ali in a probing, hard-hitting conversation on the politics of history. Their dialogue brings to light a number of forgotten—or deliberately buried—episodes of American history, from the U.S. intervention against the Russian Revolution, to the dynamic radicalism of the Wobblies, how Henry Wallace's nomination for the vice-presidency was deliberately thwarted by Democratic Party machine insiders, to the ongoing close connections between various U.S. presidents and the Saudi royal family. For Stone and Ali—two of our most insightful observers on history and popular culture—no topic is sacred, no orthodoxy goes unchallenged.

Sponsored by Haymarket Books

Funded by Lannan Foundation

Location:

Victory Gardens Biograph Theater

2433 North Lincoln Avenue | Chicago, IL 60614

Administration: 773.549.5788

Tickets: 773.871.3000

tickets@victorygardens.org

http://www.victorygardens.org/

Directions and Parking

For more information, contact:

Sarah Macaraeg

Publicity

Haymarket Books

773-583-7884 (p)

312-315-8476 (c)

sarah@haymarketbooks.org

http://www.haymarketbooks.org

'Against the Extreme Centre'

'Against the Extreme Centre' by Tariq Ali for the London Review of Books blog, September 30, 2011

After the hopeful Wisconsin flutter, might this be the beginning of an Egyptian summer in New York? Spring has absconded from the heart of political America for far too long. The frozen winters of the Reagan and Bush years didn't melt with Clinton or Obama: hollow men who rule over a hollow system where money overpowers all and the much-maligned state is used mainly to preserve the financial status quo and fund the wars of the 21st century. Discussion, serious debate, openness have virtually disappeared from mainstream political life in the United States and its more extreme versions in Europe, with Britain as the cock on the dung heap. The extreme right is small. The extreme left barely exists. It is the extreme centre that dominates political and financial life.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters are consciously or sub-consciously demonstrating against a system of despotic finance-capital; a greed-infected vampire that must suck the blood of the non-rich in order to survive. The protesters are showing their contempt for bankers, for financial speculators and for their media hirelings who continue to insist that there is no alternative. Since the Wall Street system dominates Europe, local versions of that model exist here too. The young people being pepper-sprayed by the NYPD may not have worked out what they want, but they sure to hell know what they're against and that's an important start.read more

The Arab Revolts: Results, Prospects, Lessons

Tariq Ali at the Green Academy, Vis, Croatia, August 23 2011

Tariq Ali's Hazlitt Society annual lecture: 'Is Capitalism A Threat to Democracy?'

'Is Capitalism A Threat to Democracy?' reviewed by Kate Webb for the Camden New Journal, September 22 2011

The form of capitalism we are living under today is defective and it's wrecking everything generations have achieved. If it goes on for three more decades we will be unrecognisable. Something must happen, but what?"

So said Tariq Ali on Saturday at Conway Hall as it hosted the Hazlitt Society's annual memorial lecture.

Ali was this year's speaker – at 67 one of England's grandest and yet most public-friendly intellectuals, he is usually to be found debating in town halls or bookshops, on Newsnight or Al Jazeera.

He used the occasion to ask the question now on many people's minds: as bankers and politicians frogmarch us into financial catastrophe, and armed police are turned on angry, rioting citizens: "Is Capitalism a Threat to Democracy?"

Ali was a canny choice for the lecture and not only because his question is the right one to be asking at this time. He has much in common with William Hazlitt, the early 19th-century writer of "embattled and paradoxical" essays who was also something of an outsider, neither Whig nor Tory but a restless man with strong convictions and various talents.

Like Ali, he lived by his wits, without sinecure, and the radical tradition he laid claim to – "the good old cause" he called it, meaning the dream of a democratic republic and the ongoing struggle against superstition and unthinking convention – is one the two men share.

In an introductory talk, Paul Hamilton, professor of English at Queen Mary University, delineated this tradition, rooted in the Glorious Revolution and the subversive writing of John Milton, revived again with the hopes of the French Revolution and the Romantic poets, but squashed by its failures and the European settlement after the fall of Napoleon when Europe was reconstructed under monarchies, leaving its people, Hazlitt thought, "like wretches in a slave ship".

As Hazlitt looked to history to explain the spirit of his age, so Ali argued that in order to understand the crisis now engulfing us we must consider the ideological battles that brought us here.

He began by attacking the received view that capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked, reminding us that democracy is not a by-product of the economic system but something that was hard-fought for in a struggle from below.

It took three revolutions, the English, the French and the Russian before universal suffrage was attained. Prior to this, as Hazlitt observed, monarchs ruled regardless of the people's will, with only the "authority of the skies".

After the Russian Revolution, with the rise of the trade union movement and labour and socialist parties in Europe, the elite were compelled to permit "all reforms possible" within the system for fear of revolution spreading. From 1919 to the 1970s an unprecedented series of democratic advances ensured a higher standard of living for the bulk of working people. Health and education systems were largely subsidised by the state and this social contract staved off the threat of revolt.

But in the 1980s and 1990s a counter-revolution took place. The orthodoxy became "only the discipline of the market is acceptable"; so the market was allowed to run its course unhampered by regulation.

Privatisation took place in America and in most of Europe regardless of what people wanted.

In Britain, for instance, the transfer of the railways into private hands was opposed by 75 per cent of the population.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Wall Street declared that capitalism had won the war of ideas: there was no need for further social reform, resistance now was negligible. By the time of the Iraq war disregard of the people had become "nearly universal". Despite some of the largest mass gatherings on record, with millions protesting in London, New York, Rome and Madrid, war went ahead anyway.

The effect of this was to create an overwhelming sense of demoralisation and alienation from the political process.

For a long time bitterness and cynicism was internalised in a "nothing we can do" attitude.

When the banking system collapsed in 2008 and it was bailed out to the tune of millions of dollars globally there was little organised opposition. Democracy was so whittled-down that all parties agreed on the same course of action. "Today," Ali observed wryly, "Labour behaves as if it too were in the coalition."

The scenario painted by Ali might seem like one of powerlessness and defeat but his was not a counsel of despair. Who, after all, had predicted the Arab Uprisings? "The battle for democracy is still being fought.read more

'Shimmering Prose against the Clash of Civilisations'

Night of the Golden Butterfly reviewed by Claudia Kramatschek for Qantara, June 10, 2011

Since 9/11 at the latest, every fable on the state of our world appears to follow a formula that is as cheap as it is simplifying: The dominant rhetorical model is that of a clash of civilisations, depicting one side as enlightened and therefore per se in the right, and the other as backward and caught up in the constant agony of crisis and terror.

The western media – and if nothing else the journalist and novelist Tariq Ali, who was born in Pakistan in 1943 and emigrated to London in 1963 owing to his political activities, also makes this clear in his new novel – add their own model to the mix, with the result that the word Islam automatically makes people think of bearded extremists.

Back in 1991 during the First Gulf War, Ali was disgusted at what he perceived as the one-sided reporting of western media on the Arab world. His indignation gave rise to the idea of countering the stereotypical and defamatory image of Islam with a differentiated picture of the relationship between Muslim and western-Christian civilisation in the form of an "Islam pentalogy". The first of the five volumes was published in 1993 – and "The Night of the Golden Butterfly" is the last and final part of this large-scale literary project.

Tariq Ali's Pakistani readers must have been pleased, because while the first four volumes are set in the past – either in Moorish Spain during the gruesome reconquista, or the era of the last convulsions of the Ottoman Empire – now Tariq Ali focuses on the recent history of his homeland Pakistan.

The four "cancers" of Pakistan

[image error]The novel is narrated by a certain Dara, whom the reader can assume to be the author's alter ego: born and raised in a Lahore that was still a haven for writers and thinkers, Dara was an enthusiastic Marxist as a young man. One of his closest friends was a certain Plato – a famous painter who now contacts him 45 years later to ask a favour: that Dara, who has been living in London for a long time, write Plato's life story.

Dara sets to work writing the book that we see before us, and while the narrator relates the details of Plato's (and his own) life, at the same time the author Ali describes the sad decline of his homeland: hopes for political utopias dashed; wounds such as the trauma of Partition (which Plato also suffered) left to fester; the gradual Islamisation of a nation that was characterised by an astonishing liberality and openness in the 1970s; and finally the all-pervasive corruption of the political classes.

The last painting that Plato will leave behind therefore depicts the four cancers of the Fatherland: the mullahs, the military, the nefarious influence of America, and corruption.

Elaborately narrative masquerades

These are heavyweight, compact issues. Practically every page is permeated with matters of a political nature, whether it be military operations against the Taliban in the Swat Valley, or an uprising by Muslim Chinese in the 19th century, the forefathers of the person after whom the novel is named – "Golden Butterfly" – a Chinese woman named Jindié living in Pakistan, to whom Dara lost his heart as a young man and whom he also meets again after a many long years.

[image error] Tariq Ali is a shrewd narrator and packs all this substance into a love story that is as fleet of foot as it is turbulent, spinning to and fro between London, Paris and Karachi. It is a love story with especially vibrant and wilful female characters: Jindié, the afore-mentioned golden butterfly; Zaynab, daughter of a big landowning family who suffers patriarchal subjugation at the hands of her brothers and then rebels with great determination; and Naughty Lateef, who goes to bed with generals in her homeland Pakistan before going to the West and demanding sympathy as the female victim of male repression.

In parts, the novel sounds and reads like a farce. But beneath the elaborate masquerade of this picaresque piece, which is spiked with a whiff of Stendhal and Diderot, Sufi wisdoms and verses by poet rebel Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ali reveals the cynical bigotries of both the western and the Muslim world:read more

'America's selective vigilantism will make as many enemies as friends'

'America's selective vigilantism will make as many enemies as friends' by Tariq Ali for the Guardian, September 6 2011

"Sovereign is he who decides on the exception," Carl Schmitt wrote in different times almost a century ago, when European empires and armies dominated most continents and the United States was basking beneath an isolationist sun. What the conservative theorist meant by "exception" was a state of emergency, necessitated by serious economic or political cataclysms, that required a suspension of the constitution, internal repression and war abroad.

A decade after the attentats of 9/11, the US and its European allies are trapped in a quagmire. The events of that year were simply used as a pretext to remake the world and to punish those states that did not comply. And today while the majority of Euro-American citizens flounder in a moral desert, now unhappy with the wars, now resigned, now propagandised into differentiating what is, in effect, an overarching imperial strategy into good/bad wars, the US General Petraeus (currently commanding the CIA) tells us: "You have to recognise also that I don't think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. It's a little bit like Iraq, actually… Yes, there has been enormous progress in Iraq. But there are still horrific attacks in Iraq, and you have to stay vigilant. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives." Thus speaks the voice of a sovereign power, determining in this case that the exception is the rule.

Even though I did not agree with his own answer, the German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas posed an important question: "Does the claim to universality that we connect with human rights merely conceal a particularly subtle and deceitful instrument of western domination?" "Subtle" could be deleted. The experiences in the occupied lands speak for themselves. Ten years on the war in Afghanistan continues, a bloody and brutal stalemate with a corrupt puppet regime whose president and family fill their pockets with ill-gotten gains and a US/Nato military incapable of defeating the insurgents. The latter now strike at will, assassinating Hamid Karzai's corrupt sibling, knocking off his leading collaborators and targeting key Nato intelligence personnel via suicide terrorism or helicopter-downing missiles. Meanwhile, sets of protracted behind-the-scenes negotiations between the US and the neo-Taliban have been taking place for several years. The aim reveals the desperation. Nato and Karzai are desperate to recruit the Taliban to a new national government.

Euro-American liberal and conservative politicians who form the backbone of the governing elites and claim to believe in moderation and tolerance and fighting wars to impose the same values on the re-colonised states are still blinded by their situation and fail to see the writing on the wall. Their pious renunciations of terrorist violence notwithstanding, they have no problems in defending torture, renditions, targeting and assassination of individuals, post-legal states of exception at home so that they can imprison anybody without trial indefinitely. Meanwhile the good citizens of Euro-America who opposed the wars being waged by their governments avert their gaze from the dead, wounded and orphaned citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya and Pakistan … the list continues to grow. War – jus belli – is now a legitimate instrument as long as it is used with US approval or preferably by the US itself. These days it is presented as a "humanitarian" necessity: one side is busy engaged in committing crimes, the self-styled morally superior side is simply administering necessary punishment and the state to be defeated is denied its sovereignty. Its replacement is carefully policed both with military bases and money. This 21st-century colonisation or dominance is aided by the global media networks, an essential pillar to conduct political and military operations.

Let's start with homeland security in the US. Contrary to what many liberals imagined in November 2008, the debasement of American political culture continues apace. Instead of reversing the trend, the lawyer-president and his team have deliberately accelerated the process. There have been more deportations of immigrants than under George W Bush; fewer prisoners held without trial have been released from Guantánamo, an institution that Barack Obama had promised to close down; the Patriot Act with its defining premises of what constitutes friends and enemies has been renewed; a new war begun in Libya without the approval of Congress on the flimsy basis that the bombing of a sovereign state should not be construed as a hostile act; whistleblowers are being vigorously prosecuted and so on – the list growing longer by the day.

Politics and power override all else. Liberals who still believe the Bush administration transcended the law while the Democrats are exemplars of a normative approach are blinded by political tribalism. Apart from Obama's windy rhetoric, little now divides this administration from its predecessor. Ignore, for a moment, the power of politicians and propagandists to enforce their taboos and prejudices on American society as a whole, a power often used ruthlessly and vindictively to silence opposition from all quarters – Bradley Manning, Thomas Drake (released after a huge outcry in the liberal media), Julian Assange, Stephen Kim, currently being treated as criminals and public enemies, know this better than most.

Nothing illustrates this debasement so well as the assassination of Osama bin Laden in Abbotabad. He could have been captured and put on trial, but that was never the intention. The liberal mood was reflected by the chants heard in New York on that day: "U-S-A. U-S-A. Obama got Osama. Obama got Osama. You can't beat us (clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap) You can't beat us. Fuck Bin La-den. Fuck Bin La-den." These were echoed in more diplomatic language by the leaders of Europe, junior partners in the imperial family of nations, incapable of self-determination. Cant and hypocrisy have become the coinage of political culture.read more

Tariq Ali on Question Time 9/11 special

On Thursday 8 September on BBC One, Question Time returns for a new series with a special programme - ten years on from the September 11 attacks.

Tariq Ali is on the panel, along with Defence Secretary Liam Fox, former Foreign Secretary David Miliband, the leading advocate of regime change in Iraq Richard Perle, American-born playwright Bonnie Greer and Christina Schmidt, whose husband Olaf, a British Army bomb disposal expert, was killed in Afghanistan. Chaired by David Dimbleby from London.

On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Coversation

Published by Haymarket Books, 2011

In working together on two challenging new documentaries—South of the Border and the forthcoming 13-part, 13-hour Untold History of the United States series for Showtime—filmmaker Oliver Stone engaged with author and filmmaker Tariq Ali in a probing, hard-hitting conversation on the politics of history. Their dialogue brings to light a number of forgotten—or deliberately buried—episodes of American history, from the U.S. intervention against the Russian Revolution, to the dynamic radicalism of the Wobblies, how Henry Wallace's nomination for the vice-presidency was deliberately thwarted by Democratic Party machine insiders, to the ongoing close connections between various U.S. presidents and the Saudi royal family. For Stone and Ali—two of our most insightful observers on history and popular culture—no topic is sacred, no orthodoxy goes unchallenged.

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