Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 598

Gaddafi's African Mercenaries

"A terrible failure," is what Danie Odendaal calls Gaddafi's thwarted escape attempt from his last stronghold, Sirte. And he probably knows. From a Libyan hospital bed, Odendaal informed South African Sunday paper Rapport he was one of some twenty, mostly white, South Africans contracted to get Gaddafi out of town, and into neighboring Niger. It turned into "a gruesome, gruesome orgy." But Libyan rebels also appeared sympathetic towards foreigners, careful "not to shoot them." More: they helped him escape. On Monday, a middle-man trying to fly the surviving South African men out of Libya (two of them died), "gave assurances that these men were not involved in anything illegal. He said they were contracted by Nato, and that Nato and the UN would pay for the flight" (News24). Prior to Gaddafi's killing on Thursday, another "team of South African mercenaries helped Muammar Gaddafi's family out of the war zone of Tripoli (…) to hide out in Algeria." South African newspaper The New Age has the full story.

In other words: not only did Gaddafi rely on experienced South African farmers to get his olive fields growing, word also spread to Libya there are some skilled and eager mercenaries ('all ex-police officers') to be found in South Africa.

It puts the story about Libya's African mercenaries in a different perspective.

[image error] [image error]

'The Internationale'

The always reliable Billy Bragg live on the streets of Dublin this past weekend.

Eating Staten Island Crow

New Orleans-based historian Thomas J. Adams on Occupy Wall Street:

"We are the 99% [the slogan of OWS protesters] sounds nice and I suspect has been a catchy chant below 14th St. The problem lies in the fact that it puts a very large cart ahead of a very small horse. Through virtually all of human history where there has been oppression, there has not been resistance, at least of the variety that has a modicum of hope of actually changing the political, economic, legal, or social imperatives of the oppression. "We are the 99%" as a message assumes otherwise. It assumes, sans historical or contemporary evidence, and without an organizational mechanism to change this fact, that the rest of the 99% will, like our sanitized image of Rosa Parks and those Columbia students mistaken for revolutionary proletarians, organically throw off their yokes in service of real and substantive historical transformation.

By claiming to represent the interests of, or worse, speak for the 99%, the protesters in lower Manhattan and across the country fully replicate the deus ex machina trope of historical change. As a result of this, protest on Wall St and virtually everywhere else in modern America has become more about bearing witness and venting anger than any effective or sustained challenge to the institutions and classes that control our politics, economy, and society. Protest becomes an end in itself, not a small, if dramatic weapon in the arsenal of radical transformation. Furthermore, when protest takes this form, unmoored from a sustained and mass-based politics and grounded in the dreamy assumption that oppression will eventually lead the oppressed to resist, it frequently serves to encourage political demobilization. Progressive politics becomes neither about convincing the 99% of their shared interests in any meaningful way, nor about establishing mass-based organizations that can begin to have a hope of contesting economic, political, and social power. Rather, it becomes politics waiting for god and his machine to descend down from the heavens, indeed, the hope that a panty raid is a revolution.

Am I glad that a group of young people are angry at the American economic system? Absolutely. Would I happily eat the stinkiest crow in a Staten Island landfill if a sustained movement arose out of Occupy Wall St. to actually challenge neoliberalism and the ever-increasing dominance of capital over politics, society, and everyday life? Absolutely. Do I have a sliver of hope that crow is going to be on my dinner menu anytime soon? Absolutely not.

[image error] [image error]

Gaddafi is dead, V

A (very well-coached) 4 year old in France gives her opinion on the execution of Gaddafi.

Translation by my French-Algerian connection:

I don't agree with what they've done to Gaddafi. They should have had a legal Libyan process. It's not because he was a dictator that he had to be killed this way. If we practice barbarism we are barbarians. Gaddafi wasn't nice but he didn't deserve this. We don't kill a man, not even a dictator. We should not have images like that on TV. What those journalists (reporters) who show anything on TV? Seeing Gaddafi like that is horrible. We, children, don't want to have this…

For the adults, here is Human Rights Watch's Peter Bouckaert.

[image error] [image error]

Political theater

Judith Stein in Dissent:

Despite its apparent permanence, OWS is mostly composed of part-time participants, who stay a few nights. There is a core of permanent campers, possibly those who run the general assemblies, the key OWS institution. The problem is that if they simply stay in parks, they prove their staying power but nothing else. They must move out. But where? If they continue street demonstrations, they risk conflict with the police. (And the value of street demonstrations and protests may be more limited in the United States than in countries like Egypt.) If they try to hone a message then they become one more voice among many, and a smaller voice than the labor movement or the NAACP. In short, political theater can capture the imagination at a time when politics seem bankrupt, but it cannot solve political problems or short-circuit political organizing.

[image error]

The Assault on Patriarchy in Tunisia

[image error]

By Dan Moshenberg

Tunisians went to the polls on Sunday, October 23, 2011. Remember the date, because it's historic. It's the first free elections of the Arab Spring, which is, in large part, an African Spring. Tunisia. Egypt. Libya. Maybe Algeria next, maybe Morocco. Who knows? Maybe Zimbabwe. If the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe can declare that gay rights should be included in the new Constitution … anything can happen. Anything can happen, that is, when people organize and push.

When Mubarak left office, in February, the Western press described the event as Mubarak stepping down. Mubarak didn't step down. He was pushed … by Egyptian women in league with many others. When Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his crew fled the country, again, it was women who pushed … and have kept on pushing.

The Jasmine Revolution, from its inception, was more than "just" the eviction of a dictator. It was an assault on patriarchy, one that emerged from and as part of a decades long process of women and youth organizing. Women like Munira Thibia, a young homeless activist who mobilized and organized. Women like Saida Garrachi of the Association of Democratic Women, women who have made a democracy by acting democratically. Women writers and bloggers like Amira Yahyaoui and Imen Braham, both candidates for office in Sunday's elections, young women who sought more than an end to censorship, more than freedom of expression. They sought and seek freedom itself, in action. Or Lina Ben Mhenni, another young woman blogger, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, who boycotted the election rather than endorse the illusion of democracy. The struggle, and the work of re-invention, continues.

Visual artists, like Faten Chouba Skhiri, performance artists and actors, like Swanseen Maalej, filmmakers, like Nadia al Fani and Selma Baccar, committed their arts to the struggle for an end to censorship and now find themselves, as artists, engaged in creating and sustaining a new landscape, a new imagination, a new horizon of possibilities.

Women participated in all parties, and prominently so, including the party of the undecided and the party of those boycotting the election. Wherever they sat, wherever they organized, they pushed for equality and for parity, as women have done in Tunisia for decades and beyond. In households, community halls, mosques, trade union halls, schools, offices, wherever. Not only since the 1956 inception of the independent nation state but during the national liberation struggles as well. The French didn't leave. They were pushed, by Tunisian women, who immediately organized the Union Nationale de Femmes Tunisiennes. Feministe? You betcha. And so are their great granddaughters, women like Aida Fehri, who continue to push.

Reports suggest that more than 90 percent of eligible voters turned out, stood in seemingly endless lines, waited for seemingly endless hours, and then shouted: "La Tunisie vote!" "La Tunisie a déjà gagné!" "Today, Tunisia chose for itself."

The young won, and so did the elders. Women like Khaddouja who woke up early and ran to the polling station. Why? "It's unbelievable! It's freedom. Freedom! Before, the walls had ears; we couldn't do anything. Now, today, here, we are free!"

We are free … even to mourn. Manoubia Bouazizi is the mother of Mohamed Bouazizi, the fruit vendor who set himself on fire and, literally, sparked the Jasmine Revolution. She knows what the elections mean, it means her son:

"He is a man who changed the world, not just Tunisia."

"He is no longer the son of Tunisia, he is the son of the whole world."

Mohamed Bouaziz is the son of the whole world. That would make him … your brother. That would make Manoubia Bouazizi your mother. Listen to the mothers, sisters, daughters, aunts, cousins, friends, associates. Listen to the women as they offer you something new, "`Meshmoum,' she said, and again more urgently, `Meshmoum', offering the bunch to my nose. Jasmine!" Jasmine … urgently!

[image error] [image error] [image error] [image error]

Independence day in Zambia

That's today. Other than Chiluba's shoes, Sata's anti-China rants (he's stopped for now), Alexandra Fuller's books about her family, the South African soaps on TV and fundamental Christianity, there is dance-hall by Petersen:

…R&B by Roberto:

[image error]

A cross-over of those two by MrVezzy:

Hip hop by Zone Fam:

Swagg walk by Princess Mwamba:

And some folk by Clement Maimbolwa:

We can celebrate.

[image error]

Mr Balotelli

The estranged son of Ghanaian immigrants reared in Brescia wreaks havoc in Manchester:

"Why always me?" read the slogan on Mario Balotelli's vest. Because, Mario, you're clearly more than a little bit eccentric. But you do know how to score goals and, as long as that is the case, City will forgive him for whatever controversies come their way bearing his fingerprints. City's own firestarter lit the fuse, put a rocket up United, set the game ablaze and every other firework pun going. You wouldn't want to be his neighbour and it will be one hell of an autobiography one day, but that's six goals in five games. The good outweighs the bad even if it is a close-run thing at times. And maybe he is learning: the old Mario would surely have lifted his shirt for his second goal, too, and collected a second card for his troubles.

Source and Photo Credit.  See also here.

[image error]

Photography. Nico Krijno

[image error]

South African photographer whose "works deal with the tensions related to human sexuality and the relation between the human body and our surroundings." Much of his work focuses on his girlfriend and muse (below). You will also recognize his profile shots of Spoek Mathambo.

His Tumblr blog.

[image error]

The teacher from South Africa

Back when the British weren't using "their" Indians as a tourist attraction, or as a means of portraying the infamously insular island as "multicultural" (because people like curry houses and Bhangra pop), a pompous arse got in a lift with my  second generation Pakistani-Brit friend (then a teenager) and a tea-and-scones lady. In the characteristic understatement that his people are known for (and for which Americans continue to idolise the Brits), the Pomp turned to Tea and Scones and said, "Bit dark in here, isn't it?"

When the lift doors opened, my friend shouted, "This man's a racist!" But that's all he could do.

While I was in grad school, our director of the graduate teaching assistants – a lovely woman whom I honestly believe meant well–regularly mixed up my name (Neelika) with that of the other person of South Asian descent (Shamim) in the programme. We did not look alike, sound alike (due to our different origins/countries in which we grew up), nor even study the same specialisation. So I looked at the Director and said, "Dr. X, are you mixing up your natives?" She reacted as expected: "Why Neelika," she said, "what a terrible thing to say!" and looked back at me with shock and hurt. So: I was the guilty party for having pointed out, to a nice, older white professor – one who was a committed lecturer on US Civil Rights history – that though it is easy to mix up unfamiliar and 'exotic' names, she may be perpetuating some of the same problematic ways of interacting with the Other: errors she preached against.

But hooray: nowadays, kids in the Bronx don't take that kind of shit lightly. The New York Times begins by staking pedigree: "perhaps few schools in the nation with as progressive a pedigree as Ethical Culture Fieldston School, where students are not only expected to live the values of tolerance and inclusion, but also to make the world more tolerant and inclusive." So when a "popular but controversial" teacher at Fieldston reportedly said to two black students, "I hope I can tell you two apart," they made an official complaint. The teacher, a 58-year old white man, was eventually dismissed from his position. And there's more. The teacher, Barry Sirmon, is from South Africa; he has been teaching at this school for 11 years.  "He is a very anti-P.C. guy in a very P.C. school," said one mother, who maintained that she was "not a prude," but that "words matter."

But Mr. Sirmon insists that he was taken out of context:

In an interview, Mr. Sirmon said that that was "the gist" but not the exact words, and that his intent had been misinterpreted. "It was an attempt to show how lame and stupid these 'isms' are, racism and anti-Semitism," he said. "The claims were horrible; what they claim, I dispute vehemently."

Although Sirmon declined to repeat what exactly he said, because "the case is in arbitration," he remains adamant that his words were not only taken out of context, but that he was attempting to be funny on Sept. 9, a Friday, when, "at my peak level of making jokes to try and make people comfortable…exactly the opposite happened."

I'm genuinely sorry you lost your job so close to retirement, Mr. S. That is a terrible blow, and an indication of how weighty words are. Before someone starts shouting about how "too PC" America is, and how this is going to "put a chill" on free speech, consider this: language and power are intimately tied. When powerful people are used to using certain terms to demean the less powerful (and thereby keep them "in their place"), the ability to control language/use language without consciousness is a heady rush of power. However, when that less-powerful group slowly gains some means of self-representation, and begins to negotiate how language can or should be used – especially terms/phrases used to signal their "lower" status, the powerful group inevitably reacts badly. Like cattle who've had access to swathes of unlimited pastureland (at the expense of others' grazing rights), we hate being told to share . It's hard to lose unilateral control, especially over language.

Next time someone mistakenly imagines that lame jokes about mixing up black people because they look alike, or the next time white people use black people's bodies as the butt of jokes to "make people comfortable," it might also be advisable to consider that the most offensive part is that speaker thinks boring race-related innuendo passes for "risqué" humour. I might as well start announcing that I can't tell the blondes in my classes apart – and indeed, it is difficult, since many are trying hard to look like some version of the girls on "The Hills".

Mr. S. certainly took a risk – and now, it looks like he risked too much.  I hope he's not going to bring up his anti-apartheid credentials (famous ones like: "I was even dating black girls in those days, and it was our maid who didn't want them in the house!" and "I used to drive the black football team from the township to their games") as a means of golden-halo-ing himself. Using black bodies to deflect tension (and thereby create laughter), or to protect yourself (I was so good I helped them) are both no-nos, Mr. Sirmon.

[image error] [image error]