Tariq Ali's Blog, page 24

Power to People? CrossTalk on Egypt with Tariq Ali

'La Révolution Démocratique'

La Révolution Démocratique

'An Arab 1848: Despots Totter and Fall'

'An Arab 1848: Despots Totter and Fall' by Tariq Ali for Counterpunch, February 2 2011

He can't stay any longer because the military has declared that they will not shoot their own people. This excludes a Tiananmen Square option. Were the Generals (who have so far sustained this regime) to go back on their word it would divide the army, opening up a vista of civil war. Nobody wants that at the moment, not even the Israelis who would like their American friends to keep their point man in Cairo for as long as possible. But this, too, is impossible.

So, will Mubarak go this weekend or the next? Washington wants an 'orderly transition', but the hands of Suleiman the Spook (or Sheikh Al-Torture as some of his victims refer to him), the Vice-President they have forced Mubarak to accept, are also stained with blood. To replace one corrupt torturer with another is no longer acceptable. The Egyptian masses want a total regime change, not a Pakistan-style operation where a civilian crook replaces a uniformed dictator and nothing changes.

The Tunis infection has spread much more rapidly than anyone imagined. After a long sleep induced by defeats—military, political moral—the Arab nation is reawakening. Tunis impacted immediately on neighboring Algeria and the mood then crossed over to Jordan and reached Cairo a week later. What we are witnessing are a wave of national-democratic uprisings, reminiscent more of the 1848 upheavals — against Tsar and Emperor and those who collaborated with them — fthat swept Europe and were the harbingers of subsequent turbulence. This is the Arab 1848. The Tsar-Emperor today is the President in the White House. That is what differentiates these proto-revolutions from the 1989 business: That and the fact that with few exceptions, the masses did not mobilize themselves to the same degree. The Eastern Europeans lay down before the West, seeing in it a happy future and singing 'Take Us, Take Us. We're Yours Now.'

The Arab masses want to break from the ugly embrace. The US-EU has supported the dictators they're getting rid off. These are revolts against the universe of permanent misery: an elite blinded by its own wealth, corruption, mass unemployment, torture and subjugation by the West. The rediscovery of Arab solidarity against the repellent dictatorships and those who sustain them is a new turning point in the Middle East. It is renewing the historical memory of the Arab nation that was brutally destroyed soon after the 1967 war. Here the contrast in leadership could not be more glaring. Gamal Abdel Nasser, despite his many weaknesses and mistakes, saw the defeat of 1967 as something for which he had to accept responsibility. He resigned. Over a million Egyptians poured into the heart of Cairo to plead with him to stay in power. And changed his mind. He died in office a few years later, broken-hearted and with no money. His successors surrendered the country to Washington and Tel Aviv for a mess of pottage.

The events of the last month mark the first real revival of the Arab world since the defeat of 1967. All the weathercocks ever-alert so as never to be on the wrong side of history, thus always avoiding any experience of defeat, were caught unawares by these uprisings. They forget that revolts and revolutions, shaped by existing circumstances, happen when the masses, the crowd, the citizenry—call it what you will— decide that life is so unbearable and they will be stifled no longer. For them a poor childhood and injustice are as natural as a kick in the head on the street or a brutal interrogation in prison. They have experienced this, but when the same conditions are still present and they are now adults, then the fear of death recedes. When this stage is reached a single spark can light a prairie fire. In this case literally as the tragedy of the stallholder in Tunis who set himself on fire demonstrates.read more

'Bernard-Henri Lévy Indicted!'

'Bernard-Henri Lévy Indicted!' by Tariq Ali for Counterpunch, January 27 2011

On January 28, activists belonging to the PIR (Parti des Indigènes de la République) are organizing a trial of Bernard-Henri Lévy in the old PCF/CGT stronghold of Saint Denis. Norman Finkelstein and myself are the only non-French who are giving evidence against BHL.  The trial will commence at 6.30pm at the Bourse du Travail de St-Denis. 9-11 rue Génin, Saint Denis. Metro  13 – Porte de Paris.

More of my views on Bernard-Henri Lévy may be found below, but first, the Indictment:

"Order for the  indictment of Bernard-Henri Lévy before the Assize Court, and for  his arrest:

We have determined that whereas investigation has established the following facts concerning the accused:

- His unrelenting promotion of imperialism and Zionism,

- His intellectual fakery, symptom of philosophical nullity amid the accumulation of capital and power,

- His leveling of false accusations and calumnies against Iran,

- His warmongering and advocacy of "humanitarian imperialism,"

- His aiding in the creation and promotion of SOS Racisme to smother autonomous immigration movements,

- His dissemination of false news likely to sow social and eligious discord between Christians and Muslims.

For these reasons, we rule that  there is sufficient evidence against Bernard-Henri Lévy that he  committed such acts, punishable under the Criminal Code, in regard to Articles 175, 176, 181, 183 and 184. We order the indictment of Bernard-Henri Lévy, to be lodged at the Court of Assizes of the department of Seine- Saint-Denis to be tried according to law."

Executed in Chambers, December 18, 2010."

I've always regarded BHL as a comic figure. On the two occasions — in Berlin and New York– that I've shared a platform to debate him he reminded me of a puffed up peacock in heat (hence, I thought, the permanently unbuttonedshirt). In France, however, more than a few citizens find him more sinister than comic. He is the Republic's most visible and most vain mediatic intellectual. A veritable Tintin no less. Ready for adventures whenever he's needed to strike a pose. Kabul falls to NATO. Off goes Tintin and returns to inform us that in order to help the Afghans he has launched a new magazine in Kabul.  Its name?Nouvelle Kabul. Of course. How could it be anything else. This was in 2002, but every Afghan I've asked swears on the Koran that no such magazine exists, not even in Kabul's fortified green zone. Was it pure fantasy? Possible. The dividing line between reality and non-reality is never clear when Tintin is involved. I got a strong whiff of this when I reviewed his appalling book on the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl that was largely fantastical. I wrote at the time:

"He has written a strange hybrid of a book about his adventures in Pakistan, a country whose language he doesn't speak and whose people he seems to hate, despite the last-page invocation of a 'gentle Islam', firmly placed in the medieval period and counterposed to the 'madmen of Peshawar'… Half fiction, a quarter speculation, one-eighth film script (with BHL as himself?) and one-eighth regurgitated newspaper articles, this book gives narcissism a bad name. Is there anything of value in it? I searched in vain, hoping that his 'diplomatic connections' might have helped out with some previously unknown facts. Nothing. Given the absence of real content, style becomes all; and it is pure pastiche. At times, 'my dear Sartre' is invoked for no apparent reason, except to make it clear that Lévy is the only true heir. At another point, he is reminded of his old tutor at the Ecole Normale:

'Latent homosexuality. Or, if not, perhaps no sexuality at all, pleasure is a sin, the purpose of relations with a woman is to procreate. Omar [Pearl's assassin] . . . has probably never slept with a woman . . . he is a 29-year-old virgin. Is this the key to the psychology of Omar? . . . Asexuality, and the will to purity that goes with it, as possible sources of the moral standards of the religion of fundamentalist crime? . . . But I remember, I cannot help but remember, a great French philosopher, Louis Althusser, still a virgin at 30 and who . . . No. Out of bounds, precisely. Because truly blasphemous. And too flattering to Omar.'"

There is nobody quite like him in the States or elsewhere in Europe. Hitchens, in healthier times, could have come close to this status had he been provided a regular column in the NYT and a book show on one of the networks. CH would have had many an advantage, since unlike BHL he can both write and read, though ill-health, sadly, has meant a confused imagination such as detecting a 'moral core' in Tony Blair and flattering Ben Ali, the toppled despot of Tunis.read more

'Total Capitulation'

'Total Capitulation' by Tariq Ali for the London Review of Books, January 24, 2011

The 'Palestine Papers' being published this week by al-Jazeera confirm in every detail what many Palestinians have suspected for a long time: their leaders have been collaborating in the most shameful fashion with Israel and the United States. Their grovelling is described in grim detail. The process, though few accepted it at the time, began with the much-trumpeted Oslo Accords, described by Edward Said in the LRB at the time as a 'Palestinian Versailles'. Even he would have been taken aback by the sheer scale of what the PLO leadership agreed to surrender: virtually everything except their own salaries. Their weaknesses, inadequacies and cravenness are now in the public domain.

Now we know that the capitulation was total, but still the Israeli overlords of the PLO refused to sign a deal and their friends in the press blamed the Palestinians for being too difficult. They wanted Palestine to be crushed before they would agree to underwrite a few moth-eaten protectorates that they would supervise indefinitely. They wanted Hamas destroyed. The PLO agreed. The recent assault on Gaza was carried out with the approval of Abbas and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, not to mention Washington and its EU. The PLO sold out in a literal sense. They were bought with money and treated like servants. There is TV footage of Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton at Camp David playfully tugging at Arafat's headgear to stop him leaving. All three are laughing. Many PLO supporters in Palestine must be weeping as they watch al-Jazeera and take in the scale of the betrayal and the utter cynicism of their leaders. Now we know why the Israel/US/EU nexus was so keen to disregard the outcome of the Palestinian elections and try to destroy Hamas militarily.

The two-state solution is now dead and buried by Israel and the PLO. Impossible for anyone (even the BBC) to pretend that there can be an independent Palestinian state.read more

'Salman Taseer Remembered'

'Salman Taseer Remembered' by Tariq Ali for the London Review of Books, January 20, 2011

Qadri is on his way to becoming a national hero. On his first appearance in court, he was showered with flowers by admiring Islamabad lawyers who have offered to defend him free of charge. On his way back to prison, the police allowed him to address his supporters and wave to the TV cameras. The funeral of his victim was sparsely attended: a couple of thousand mourners at most. A frightened President Zardari and numerous other politicians didn't show up. A group of mullahs had declared that anyone attending the funeral would be regarded as guilty of blasphemy. No mullah (that includes those on the state payroll) was prepared to lead the funeral prayers. The federal minister for the interior, Rehman Malik, a creature of Zardari's, has declared that anyone trying to tamper with or amend the blasphemy laws will be dealt with severely. In the New York Times version he said he would shoot any blasphemer himself.

Taseer's spirited defence of Asiya Bibi, a 45-year-old Punjabi Christian peasant, falsely charged with blasphemy after an argument with two women who accused her of polluting their water by drinking out of the same receptacle, provoked an angry response from religious groups. Many in his own party felt that Taseer's initiative was mistimed, but in Pakistan the time is never right for such campaigns. Bibi had already spent 18 months in jail. Her plight had been highlighted by the media, women had taken to the streets to defend her and Taseer and another senior politician from the Pakistan Peoples Party, Sherry Rehman, had demanded amendments to the blasphemy laws. Thirty-eight other women have been imprisoned under the same law in recent years and soon after a friendly meeting between Yousaf Gillani, the prime minister, and the leader of the supposedly moderate Jamaat-e-Islami, a member of the latter offered a reward of ten thousand dollars to whoever manages to kill Bibi.

Taseer's decision to take up Bibi's case was not made on a whim. He had cleared the campaign with Zardari, much to the annoyance of the law minister, Babar Awan, a televangelist and former militant of the Jamaat-e-Islami. He told journalists he didn't want the socio-cultural agenda to be hijacked by 'lunatic mullahs', raged against governments that had refused to take on fanaticism, and brushed aside threats to his life with disdain. He visited the prison where Bibi was detained – the first time in the history of the Punjab that a governor has gone inside a district jail – and at a press conference declared his solidarity with her. 'She is a woman who has been incarcerated for a year and a half on a charge trumped up against her five days after an incident where people who gave evidence against her were not even present,' he told an interviewer. He wanted, he said, 'to take a mercy petition to the president, and he agreed, saying he would pardon Asiya Bibi if there had indeed been a miscarriage of justice'.

Two weeks after this visit Taseer was dead. I never much cared for his business practices or his political affiliations and had not spoken to him for 20 years, but he was one of my closest friends at school and university and the two of us and the late Shahid Rehman – a gifted and witty lawyer who drank himself to death many moons ago – were inseparable. Some joyful memories came back when I saw his face on TV.

It's 1960. The country is under a pro-US military dictatorship. All opposition is banned. My parents are away. The three of us – we are 17 years old – are at my place and we decide that something has to be done. We buy some red paint and at about 2 a.m. drive to the Cantonment bridge and carefully paint 'Yankee Go Home' on the beautiful whitewashed wall. The next morning we scrub the car clean of all traces of paint. For the next few weeks the city is agog. The story doesn't appear in the press but everyone is talking about it. In Karachi and Dhaka, where they regard Lahore as politically dead, our city's stock rises. At college our fellow students discuss nothing else. The police are busy searching for the culprits. We smile and enjoy the fun. Finally they track us down, but as Taseer notes with an edge of bitterness, Shahid's father is a Supreme Court judge and one of my aunts is married to a general who's also the minister of the interior, so naturally we all get off with a warning. At the time I almost felt that physical torture might be preferable to being greeted regularly by the general with 'Hello, Mr Yankee Go Home.'read more

'What is imperialism?': The Equality Movement

Tariq Ali, introduced by host Logic as "a brother you can't mess with," spoke at 'What is imperialism?', a meeting to launch The Equality Movement with Seumas Milne, Jody McIntyre, Lizzie Cocker and Dr. Hanan Chehata.

The Obama Syndrome reviewed in the Kathmandu Post

The Obama Syndrome reviewed by Anthony Wentzel for the Kathmandu Post, December 24 2010

Normally, I wouldn't recommend judging a book by its cover. But in the case of Tariq Ali's latest release The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad, the image on the cover speaks volumes about the ideas contained within. A surreal picture stares back at the viewer: the face of US President Barack Obama, but with a fragment missing. Where the missing fragment of Obama's face should be is an all too familiar grin, that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Ali's thesis is established even before the first page is flipped: Obama does not signal a departure from the status quo of American politics, but instead represents a continuation of the policies of those who ruled before him. For readers familiar with Tariq Ali, this idea should come as no surprise. Ali often offers scathing critiques of most world leaders, and does so firmly from the radical left of the political spectrum. The Obama Syndrome is no exception.

According to Ali, The Obama Syndrome is meant to be "a preliminary report on the first 1,000 days of the Obama presidency." The book is divided into three parts, each dealing with a specific aspect of Obama's presidency. An Unprecedented Historical Event describes the time leading up to Obama's election. The President of Cant, describes Obama's foreign policy agenda. And Surrender at Home: A One-Dimensional Politician outlines the President's achievements (or lack thereof) in domestic matters.

In An Unprecedented Historical Event, Ali briefly details the previous 28 years of the American presidency, starting with Ronald Reagan and ending with George W. Bush. Ali describes this as a time where American policy moved steadily rightward, culminating in the eight years of George W. Bush, and his neo-conservative hijacking of democracy. Ali uses this background to establish the context of the 2008 presidential elections, portraying the US as a nation yearning to emerge out of the clutches of eight years of retrogressive, ultra-conservative rule. Ali describes the rise the of the Obama Syndrome: the maniacal way in which his supporters responded to the campaign, projecting onto the president-to-be the qualities of a saviour, ready to usher in the next great Progressive era in the United States. Grand visions of the next "New Deal," or "Great Society" circulated through the mass of mobilised Obamamaniacs. Everywhere, there was a sense of renaissance, that a new, more liberal and less aggressive America was waiting to be born. But as Ali bluntly states, "forty acres and a mule at home and peace abroad were, of course, never on the agenda, and to be fair, Obama did not pledge anything remotely resembling such a project . . . ."

In The President of Cant, Ali dissects various aspects of Obama's foreign policy agenda. Included are the Israel/Palestine conflict, the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the promises to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, withdrawal from Iraq, and the prospects for the expansion of American aggression in the Middle East. In each case, Ali criticises the President's handling of the situation, calling into question the wisdom in Obama's policies. In Israel/Palestine, Ali sees Obama as maintaining the current course, departing from the status quo in rhetoric alone. In regards US' war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ali asserts that the current strategy is hopeless, completely out of touch with the reality of the situation. Ali describes what is needed for the US to achieve victory in "Af-Pak" as being so far out of the realm of possibility that it might as well be considered absurd, including the necessity for a quarter of a million troops to occupy the "porous" Durand line separating the two countries. Guantanamo Bay and Iraq amount to empty campaign promises. And the prospects for future US aggression in the Middle East, including such targets as Yemen and Iran, are as high as ever. According to Ali, the only change in US foreign policy under Obama will be an escalation of militarism, a far cry from the hopes of a more pacifistic US.

In Surrender at Home: A One-Dimensional Politician, Ali criticises the President for kowtowing to conservatives. Ali argues that Obama has come to master the "sympathetic gesture," offering nothing but compromises in his proposals for legislation, and consequently failing in efforts at reform. For example, Ali characterises Obama's healthcare legislation as basically being a piece of "conservative legislation" which will fails to amend a broken system in any way, but instead strengthens the insurance and pharmaceutical lobby's stranglehold on health care policy. Furthermore, according to Ali, Obama's stances on education, national defense, and financial regulation will likely meet the same fate as his failed efforts at healthcare reform: better alternatives will be ignored, compromises will be presented, and the right-wing will get their way. According to Ali, this signifies Obama as a president intent on upholding the conservative status quo, and his "inbuilt pragmatism and brazen opportunism" will continue to move American politics towards the right.

The Obama Syndrome is primarily a left-wing critique of a pseudo-progressive president. Much like the book's cover, Ali works to dismantle the façade Obama created during his campaign, to disperse the fog of the hope and to illustrate the uninspiring realities of the Obama Administration. In presenting his evidence, Ali makes a persuasive case that Obama's primary goal is not to usher in a rebirth of American progressivism, but instead to strengthen the conservative chokehold on American politics. Corporate control of American political enterprise will not end with Obama, but will instead find new momentum as the country's trajectory towards the radical right will not be disrupted by the hope/change president. And the American Imperial machine will not be "put into reverse," but will instead continue on its present course, ultimately resulting in further US aggression. For those skeptical that this could occur on Obama's watch, Ali's book should serve as a wake-up call, as he uses ample detail to characterise the president as just another link in the conservative chain that binds America together.read more

'What happened next? Student protests'

'What happened next? Student protests' by Tariq Ali for the Guardian, December 27 2010

A friend in France, watching the London student demos on an English website, emails ". . . unlike France, there's no tribal, institutionalised memory of struggle where you are marching. Does that make this moment in Britain more fiery and unpredictable? I thought, watching the website, that maybe it might." There's no memory of revolution in modern Britain, but there is a historical memory of what the students did in 1968, a memory kept alive by images, songs and books and there is the memory of the anti-poll tax rebellion that did for Thatcher.

Mixing old wines with new (Château Thatcher 1979, with the 1997 Nouveau Blair or the plastic-bottled Cameron-Clegg 2010) is always a mistake. Wisdoms old and young, however, mix admirably well. That is what we experienced on 8 December 2010. There is a new mood in the air, an anger that melts the snow. All hail the new, young student Decembrists who challenged a complacent government and simultaneously fired a few shots across the bows of an opposition and its toadies in the media, all still recovering from a paralytic hangover, a consequence of imbibing too much Nouveau Blair.

The Decembrists occupied, they sang, they blogged, Facebooked, tweeted and marched to show their contempt for the politicians who lied. The Prince of Wales and his consort saw all this from closeup, a far cry from the sycophancy to which they have become accustomed. It was this movement that gave a majority of Clegg's and Cable's Lib-Dem parliamentarians the courage to vote against, abstain or absent themselves from the Commons on this fateful day. The fires lit in Parliament Square to keep the kettled Decembrists warm were also symbolic, turning the heat on a rotting coalition that might not last the full term so joyfully imagined. The hard-faced Cameron can no longer boast to his European counterparts that this country is a politico-economic Guantánamo where everything goes. No longer.

The tuition fees were approved, but it is the Decembrists who have established themselves morally and politically on the higher ground. What happens next? The political establishment will be hoping that Christmas cheer and getting further into debt via easy bank overdrafts permanently on offer might sap the energy of the students. My experience of speaking at a few occupations and engaging in street talk tells me otherwise. I sense a steely resolve on the part of many school and university students who have suddenly realised that they're part of a much bigger picture. In fighting for themselves they are fighting for the interests of society as a whole, a society that has had enough of privatisations and deregulation with the public services chained to PFIs, a rail system where the fares are permanently reaching for the sky, a society where profit is king, regardless of what it costs the country.read more

'The Nobel War Prize'

'The Nobel War Prize' by Tariq Ali for the London Review of Books Blog, December 11, 2010

Last year's recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize escalated the war in Afghanistan a few weeks after receiving the prize. The award surprised even Obama. This year the Chinese government were foolish to make a martyr of the president of Chinese PEN and neo-con Liu Xiaobo. He should never have been arrested, but the Norwegian politicians who comprise the committee, led by Thorbjørn Jagland, a former Labour prime minister, wanted to teach China a lesson. And so they ignored their hero's views. Or perhaps they didn't, given that their own views are not dissimilar. The committee thought about giving Bush and Blair a joint peace prize for invading Iraq but a public outcry forced a retreat.

For the record, Liu Xiaobo has stated publicly that in his view:

(a) China's tragedy is that it wasn't colonised for at least 300 years by a Western power or Japan. This would apparently have civilised it for ever;

(b) The Korean and Vietnam wars fought by the US were wars against totalitarianism and enhanced Washington's 'moral credibility';

(c) Bush was right to go to war in Iraq and Senator Kerry's criticisms were 'slander-mongering';

(d) Afghanistan? No surprises here: Full support for Nato's war.

He has a right to these opinions, but should they get a peace prize?

The Norwegian jurist Fredrik Heffermehl argues that the committee is in breach of the will and testament left behind by the inventor of dynamite whose bequests fund the prizes: 'The Nobel committee has not received prize money for free use, but was entrusted with money to give to the pivotal element in creating peace, breaking the vicious circle of arms races and military power games. From this point of view the 2010 Nobel is again an illegitimate prize awarded by an illegitimate committee.'read more