Tariq Ali's Blog, page 9

LRB Diary

Conversations in Cairo are punctuated by dates: 11 February (Mubarak’s fall), 24 June (Morsi’s election), 30 June (Sisi’s coup), which takes a bit of getting used to. On the street murals depicting the martyrs are defaced with black ink; barbed wire, state-constructed barricades and gates used to seal off roads remain in place. My publisher, Karem Youssef, talks me through the geography of the uprising, describing how she herself was radicalised as week followed week. It’s too soon to treat the events nostalgically since, according to some, they are not yet over. I’m not sure about that, but what is indisputable is that hope is dead.

During and after the uprising Mubarak’s name stood for amorality, cynicism, duplicity, corruption, greed and opportunism. A few months after Morsi’s triumph at the polls, the same adjectives were being used to describe his rule, and soon it was being said that he was worse than Mubarak – a grotesque overstatement. The reality is that the Muslim Brotherhood, its supreme guide and its elected president were visionless sectarians, incapable of fulfilling the central demand of the uprising: ‘an end to the regime’. Morsi had no desire to unite the country by full-blooded democratisation: his ambition was to be an Islamist Mubarak. His drawling indolence and utter indifference to the needs of the country saw his unpopularity rise by the day. It wasn’t just urban liberals who turned against him. In mosque after mosque, I was told, and not by Sisi fans, ordinary believers stood up and challenged Brotherhood preachers after Friday prayers and khutba, accusing them of hypocrisy (a very strong condemnation in Islam) and of lining their own pockets. Read more

 

How Vladimir Putin became evil

Once again, it seems that Russia and the United States are finding it difficult to agree on how to deal with their respective ambitions. This clash of interests is highlighted by the Ukrainian crisis. The provocation in this particular instance, as the leaked recording of a US diplomat, Victoria Nuland, saying “Fuck the EU” suggests, came from Washington.

Several decades ago, at the height of the cold war, George Kennan, a leading American foreign policy strategist invited to give the Reith Lectures, informed his audience: “There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentric than embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision … Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side is the centre of all virtue.”

And so it continues. Washington knows that Ukraine has always been a delicate issue for Moscow. The ultra-nationalists who fought with the Third Reich during the second world war killed 30,000 Russian soldiers and communists. They were still conducting a covert war with CIA backing as late as 1951. Pavel Sudoplatov, a Soviet intelligence chief, wrote in 1994: “The origins of the cold war are closely interwoven with western support for nationalist unrest in the Baltic areas and western Ukraine.”

When Gorbachev agreed the deal on German reunification, the cornerstone of which was that united Germany could remain in Nato, US secretary of state Baker assured him that “there would be no extension of Nato’s jurisdiction one inch to the east”. Gorbachev repeated: “Any extension of the zone of Nato is unacceptable.” Baker’s response: “I agree.” One reason Gorbachev has publicly supported Putin on the Crimea is that his trust in the west was so cruelly betrayed. Read more

Tariq Ali: The Independence Lectures

Tariq Ali discusses the upcoming referendum on Scottish independence in Glasgow.

For more information, visit the Bella Caledonia website.

Tariq Ali in Bella Caledonia

Tariq Ali, interviewed by Bella Caledonia.

 

JF:  Scottish Labour politicians claim they speak for internationalism, and often accuse independence supporters of parochialism and petty nationalism.  As an internationalist living in London, why are you supporting independence?

TA: Because I don’t accept the claims of New Labour or their coalition lookalikes that they are the internationalists.  Their internationalism essentially means subordinating the entire British state to the interests of the United States.  They have made Britain into a vassal state: on Iraq, on Afghanistan, on various other things.  This isn’t even a big secret.

So I would challenge very strongly any idea that the governments within the British state have been internationalist.  They haven’t been, for a very long time.  That is something that needs to be squashed.

 

The second point is this: an independent Scotland, a small state, has far more possibilities of real, genuine internationalism.  That means establishing direct links with many countries and peoples in the world.  The Norwegians, for instance, both in their media and in their culture, are attuned to countries all over the world.  I was in Norway last week at a conference on the Middle East, chaired by a Norwegian diplomat.  And she said she’d just come back from two years in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, and she knew all about it.  So the fact that you’re going to be small doesn’t mean you’re going to be parochial.  On the contrary, it can have exactly the opposite impact.

 

JF: Many Labour politicians will also deride the SNP as neoliberal populists, as anti-working class, and so on.  What’s your views on Scottish nationalism?

TA: The Scottish National Party has been transformed.  When it was first set up, it was small-C conservative, and a bit archaic.  But that was changed by the ’79 Group.  Although many of its members were initially expelled, including Alex Salmond, they are now in government.  Also, the SNP have been recruiting a lot of people, including Labour supporters and former members of far-Left groups.  I personally do not agree with their social and economic program, I think it’s too weak.  On many other things, I would also have criticisms.

But I think I would definitely support a Yes vote, purely for the reason that the Scottish people have a democratic right to determine their own future.  This is the first time they’ve been asked to actually vote on that.  The Union that was pushed through opportunism, corruption, and bribery in 1707 was not the result of a democratic vote, as we know full well.  Which is why they had to fight the battle of Culloden.  That was a decisive episode of Scottish history, because that defeat at Culloden imposed the Union as we know it, something totally dominated by Britain.

The SNP is now trying to break with that tradition, and effectively to ask the Scottish people to declare the independence which they once had.  And I think it would be better for Scotland, and I think it would be better for England.  New Labour have become totally corrupt, in my opinion, on every social, political, and economic front.  New Labour are the new Tartan Tories.

This doesn’t mean the SNP should not be argued with, debated with, and I’m sure people within its ranks will do that.  And the Radical Independence alliance is a massive factor in this.  I’ve been invited to speak to a Yes meeting organised by the SNP in Kirkcaldy in June, which I will do.

I’m very very strongly in favour of Scottish independence, and always have been, despite disagreements with the SNP.  The idea that one can’t disagree with the SNP if one supports independence is just absurd.
JF: Could you talk a little about the potential global implications of a break up of Britain?

TA: I think, in particular, it would be very positive for England, which has always been the dominant factor in the Union.  It will open up new political space.  It may not benefit progressives initially, but it will at least allow politics to be discussed afresh and anew.  That’s the first thing: it will be good for English democracy, which is in a very sad state.

The second thing is that it will help even the most rabid unionists in Britain to understand that the game is over, and that they have to move some way towards abandoning imperial pretensions.  Those pretensions persist even though they’re a joke in the system, and they’re only leading courtesy of the United States.  And who knows?  Maybe it may open up space for British independence again.  I mean genuine British independence, which hasn’t happened since at least 1956.


We shall see what happens, but I doubt the effects will be negative.  And I think an independent Scotland , playing an independent role in world politics and in Europe, would have an impact in Britain.

The other thing that’s worth saying is that this can only be done with the consent of the Scottish people.  No one can force it.  So there can be no argument that arms were twisted.  If anything, the campaign of fear and intimidation that has been waged by London is utterly pathetic, and I hope Scottish people will fight against it.

I remember when Tony Blair came on his last tour of Scotland, and he said, If you vote for independence, every family will lose £5,000 a year.  Who dreamed up that figure?  Some bureaucrat in Whitehall who wants something to frighten the Scots.  And then I read, just a few days ago, that Danny Alexander is repeating these absurd figures.  They do this because they want to frighten people, by saying your living standards will decline.  But there’s no reason they should decline if the economy is properly handled.

Visit  Bella Caledonia to read the interview in full.

Tariq Ali on Scottish Independence

Tariq Ali’s upcoming series of talks in Scotland on the campaign for a Yes vote in the upcoming Scottish Independence Referendum are being covered across the Scottish media.

Speaking to the Herald, Ali said “”England has been politically petrified since the Thatcher era.” Although the Tories were soundly beaten by New Labour in 1997, Blair was the heir to Thatcher, he says. “An independent Scotland could also lead to something quite new in England; but not something nutty like UKIP.”"

Read the interview in full on the Herald website.

Speaking to the Daily Record, he said “My hope is that independence will create spaces of critical thought in England as well as in Scotland because people down here are very depressed and demoralised too.”

Read his interview with the Daily Record in full on their website.

The Abbotabad Incident: A Lesson For Young Americans

Antigone: Death yearns for equal law for the dead.

Creon: Not that the good and bad draw equal shares.

Antigone: Who knows that this is holiness below?

Creon: Never the enemy, even in death, a friend.

Antigone: I cannot share in hatred, but in love.

Creon: Then go down there, if you must love, and love

the dead. No woman rules me while I live.

Antigone, Sophocles, 441 BCE  

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.

N+1 Blog, chants heard at Ground Zero, New York, May 2011

We got Voldemort, We Got Voldermort.

Chant, heard on campuses at Iowa, Stanford, and UC Davis, May 2011

 

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 Bush; fewer prisoners held without trial have been released from Gitmo, an institution that the lawyer-President had promised to close down; the Patriot Act with its defining premises of what constitutes friends and enemies has been renewed and 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 that 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.

Nothing illustrates this debasement so well as the incident at Abbotabad. 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, Julian Assange, Stephen Kim, currently being treated as criminals and public enemies, know this better than most—and examine, in its bare essentials, what took place.

To pull himself out of a slump, the President ordered an execution. Bush and posse had launched the Afghan war after 9/11 as a straightforward exercise in revenge with the stated objective of capturing Bin Laden, “dead or alive.” Subsequently, or so one is told, the Republican leaders only wanted him dead. In 2006 on my way back from Lahore I encountered an acquaintance from my youth. Shamefacedly he confessed that he was a senior intelligence officer on his way to a European conference to discuss better ways of combating terrorism. The following conversation (a lengthier version can be found in my book The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power) ensued:

‘Is OBL still alive?’

He didn’t reply.

“When you don’t reply,’ I said, ‘I’ll assume the answer is yes.”

I repeated the question. He didn’t reply.

“Do you know where he is?”

He burst out laughing.

“I don’t, and even if I did, do you think I’d tell you?’

“No, but I thought I’d ask anyway. Does anyone else know where he is?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

I insisted: “Nothing in our wonderful country [Pakistan] is ever a secret. Someone must know.”

“Three people know. Possibly four. You can guess who they are.”

I could. “And Washington?”

“They don’t want him alive.”

“And your boys can’t kill him?”

“Listen, friend, why should we kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?”

To take him alive would have meant locking him in Guantanamo till he died. Better to kill him when the time was right. Finally he was tracked down by US special agents in the field and an execution ordered. That is the official version. The truth is probably much more complicated and might never be revealed unless, in the months ahead, a friendly hacker does the decent thing. Without a well-placed network of collaborators in Pakistan (including some in high places) the operation would have been very difficult, SEALs or no SEALs.

Who ordered the assassination?

Obama obliged and some of his young supporters, numbering several hundreds rather than thousands, came out to cheer. The enemy was dead. Rejoice, rejoice was the liberal motto of the hour and they did. Maureen Dowd in the New York Times and Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, regarded by many liberals as the ultimate in political wisdom, were cheered up by the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. Their boy, whom they sometimes mocked, had scored a rare hit.

Nor were they alone. Leaders of tributary and vassal states (including Pakistan) queued on the phone to congratulate Obama, whose lean and hungry look on the screen as he watched the Navy Seals in action, suggested he was already thinking of his next term. European leaders repeated the same mantra: “His death makes the world a safer place.”

I want to leave them alone, mired in their own economic crises, blinded by their addiction to money and power and incapable of understanding that they preside over a political-economic system in decline.

I am far more interested in the generation of young Americans, still at school or college, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, an intellectually formative period in one’s life:  this generation has seen its country permanently engaged in war and conflict of one variety or another. What does it mean to be young and a citizen of the most powerful empire in world history? What impact did the Abbotabad killing have on them? The majority are confronted with the problems of everyday life:  unemployment, poverty, semi-employment, social deprivation, volunteering for the armed forces or incarceration and its corollary (the loss of the right to vote). I wonder how many of them cheered the Navy SEALs? For others, including those who can afford to pay for higher education and see their futures tied to the ideological and military successes of the Empire it matters a great deal. The number of young people who felt compelled to rush to Ground Zero or the White House was not large but  the social composition was interesting. Mostly they were the offspring of liberal arts colleges and universities who—like liberal columnists and liberal TV anchors—saw this as an Obama triumph with which they could identify.  Read more

Stuart Hall’s message to those who want change

It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. This opening sentence from Stuart Hall’s 1960 review of Lady Chatterley’s Lover belongs to DH Lawrence. The critic had unearthed it from deep inside the novel. It could serve as an epitaph for Stuart himself. His own sympathies and aversions played a huge part in determining his political makeup. It is not easy to sum up what he leaves behind in a few words. Soon, one hopes, that the conversation his colleague and friend, Bill Schwartz had been conducting with him over several years will be edited and published in book form.

He was, first and foremost, a political person. Politics mattered to him and enabled him to develop his skills as a mesmerising orator.

He was a 1956-er. The twin crises that erupted that year – the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt and the Soviet intervention in Hungary – created a dissidence that spanned Europe. In Britain this led to the emergence of the first wave New Left, which resulted in magazines, the creation of New Left Clubs all over the country, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Alongside Stuart, EP Thompson, Ralph Miliband, Raymond Williams, Doris Lessing and many others played their parts. When Stuart became the first editor of the New Left Review, with a strongly interventionist and activist approach, his message was clear. If you want change, get off your backsides and challenge the existing order, but also think, argue, debate as to best way forward. This remains an important legacy. Read more

The AAP is more confusionist than anarchist

The following is an interview with Tariq Ali conducted by the Times of India

 

How do you analyse the AAP phenomenon — is this anarchism entering politics with street protests becoming a popular mode of official expression?

AAP is one of the many parties on the globe that’s benefited from a widespread distrust of politicians and mainstream politics. People feel disenfranchised — whoever rules, their conditions remain the same. In Italy, the Five Star movement stormed into national parliament on a similar basis.

These are effectively single-issue parties. AAP is more confusionist than anarchist. As for elected governments mobilising people on the streets, why not? History is shaped by the nameless masses.

But can AAP, which shifts from leftist resistance against FDI to populist promises of subsidised water and electricity, provide a coherent economic roadmap?

It is contradictory. All such groups are — but people are so fed up with lies and false promises of other parties that they might well give it a bit more time.

Or, as is also possible, AAP will implode and fragments will move to other groups.

Speaking of which, there’s growing support for BJP’s Narendra Modi from India’s middle class compared to UPA’s Manmohan Singh — how do you view this?

The tragedy of contemporary India is that its two major political parties, just like in the US and EU, with a majority of its elites, civil servants, urban intelligentsias and media networks, share a common ideology in relation to the economy and the management of politics.

Modi’s role in Gujarat’s riots is therefore seen by many as insignificant — as long as he can run an effective authoritarian capitalist state, which is clearly beyond the capacities of both Manmohan Singh and the bird-brained remnants of a fading dynasty.

Modi-isation is viewed as modernisation which is seen by the elites as a capitalist steam-roller that should crush anything that stands in the way of profits.

 

Read more

Pakistan’s future is tied to the Taliban

Twelve years ago, a few weeks into the occupation of Afghanistan, I suggested (in these pages) that the euphoria aroused by an easy conquest was misplaced. It would be a long war and one of its side effects would be to seriously destabilise Pakistan. Unfortunately, events have not contradicted the analysis. The spillover into Pakistan has been creating havoc for years. The view that this has nothing to do with Afghanistan is too shallow to deserve serious consideration.

It’s no secret that, since 9/11, successive governments –Musharraf, Zardari and now the Sharif brothers – have agreed to US drone attacks and been aware of covert CIA operations being carried out in Pakistan. Opinion polls, however, reveal that a large majority of Pakistani citizens are opposed to US policies. The capitulation of liberal secular parties to Washington left the field wide open to armed groups of religious fundamentalists, who began to challenge the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence, presenting themselves as defenders of both Islam and the victimised Pashtuns in Pakistan. Their claims are false.

Last year alone the TTP (Pakistani Taliban Movement), the largest of the armed fundamentalist groups, carried out hundreds of attacks in different parts of the country, massacring several hundred innocents and half that number of security and military personnel. Who were the dead? Christians in Peshawar, Shias in other parts of the country, naval ratings in Karachi, intelligence operatives, and policemen and soldiers everywhere. Read more

Tariq Ali interviews John Lennon on revolution and politics

In this fascinating interview conducted for Red Mole, Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn interview John Lennon at his home, discussing Lennon’s political beliefs and ideological attitude. Tariq Ali remembered their meeting for the Guardian, 30 years after Lennon’s assassination, this week in 1980.

The day after the interview he rang me and said he had enjoyed it so much that he’d written a song for the movement, which he then proceeded to sing down the line: Power to the People. The events in Derry on Bloody Sunday angered him greatly and he subsequently suggested that he wished to march on the next Troops Out demonstration on Ireland, and did so, together with Yoko Ono, wearing Red Mole T-shirts and holding the paper high. Its headline was: “For the IRA, Against British Imperialism”.’

The full transcript of the interview can be found on Counterpunch.