Ceasefire Magazine » Profiles

Profile Fred Halliday: Political Journeys

hich — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 23:00:00 +0000

By David Hayes

There are some public intellectuals who simply won’t lie down. Just one measure of the prolific character of Fred Halliday’s work over more than four decades as an analyst and teacher of international politics is that almost a year after his death on 26 April 2010, his oeuvre is still expanding.

Nor are his new books compiled from half-assembled drafts full of half-worked arguments. Fred didn’t do things by halves. The three volumes published in the past year are completed works, each reflecting a particular aspect of his multifaceted talents as an engaged political scholar.

Caamaño in London: the Exile of a Latin American Revolutionary is a labour of love, a study of the revolutionary president of the Dominican Republic during the United States invasion of 1965, whose story of fortitude and tragedy – told with Fred’s characteristic mixture of scrupulous research, humane insight, and clear political judgment – also excavates a neglected chapter in the Caribbean’s modern history.

Shocked And Awed: How the War on Terror and Jihad Have Changed the English Language (IB Tauris, 2010) is a lexicon of the post-9/11 decade’s changing political terminology. Its careful record of the embedding of evasion and mystification in official discourse makes clear the connection between the extension of power and violence and the degradation of language.

Political Journeys: the openDemocracy Essays (Saqi, 2011) is the third of these posthumous works. It is a collection of forty columns, among a total of eighty-one, Fred wrote for the online journal openDemocracy between January 2004 and December 2009 (a series that ended with the onset of the illness that would prove fatal).

The political and intellectual range of these columns is remarkable. They include powerful assessments of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya; portraits of influential feminist intellectuals such as Parvin Paidar and Mai Ghoussoub (the co-founder of Saqi), and other figures Halliday admired, Isaac Deutscher, Ernest Gellner and the “marginal man”, Maxine Rodinson, among them; a balance-sheet of the Iranian revolution; explorations of the legacy of 1968 and 1989; and a survey of the relationship between “the left and the jihad”.

The angle of approach is often surprising. Few writers, for example, would think of comparing Tibet, East Timor, Palestine, and Eritrea – in the context of posing the question of why some peoples aspiring to autonomy or statehood have so far managed to achieve this while others have not. But then few would be able to embark on the voyage with anything like the learning or range of reference that Fred Halliday packs.

The example, just one of its kind (a column on the subterranean link between the Falklands/Malvinas conflict of 1982 and the Afghanistan wars since 1979 is another) suggests what makes Halliday’s approach in this collection so distinctive – perhaps unique. This is that his serious, in-depth examination of political and intellectual worlds combines elements that are rarely found together in the work of a single author.

For these political journeys exemplify Halliday’s capacity both to produce intriguing and meaningful concepts against a large canvas (“the greater west Asian crisis”, “post-colonial sequestration syndrome”, “the revolutionary spasm”, “the three dustbins theory”) and to pay subtle attention to the particularity of national and local experience (see the essays on Yemen, Armenia, and Fred’s native Ireland); the readiness both to polemicise against powerful individuals and institutions (Pope Benedict XVI, Mikheil Saakashvili, George W Bush’s attorney-general Alberto Gonzales) and to contest the left’s ingrained prejudices and blind-spots; the resources both to employ fine scholarship to illuminate long-standing problems (of Palestinians in Lebanon, or the Sunni-Shi’a divide) and to make rich personal encounters or memories the vehicle of genuine insight (the visit to Auschwitz, and the “two days with Hizbollah”, for example).

All this is enough to make Political Journeys an educative travelling companion for anyone with an interest in contemporary global politics. But there is more, as in two ways the book’s core themes and ideas anticipate the inspiring (if also increasingly troubling) events in the Arab world in the first months of 2011. The first is that Fred Halliday’s enduring commitment to universalism – as historical achievement, ground of rights, and principle of judgment – finds a resounding echo in the propulsive ideals and hopes of the “Arab spring”. The second is that a central concern throughout his life was the nature of revolution in all its complexity, and how the historical sweep of modern revolutions (France, Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, Cuba, Iran…) can contribute to an understanding of modern global politics.

The death of Fred Halliday, at the early age of 64, remains a profound sadness. Most immediately for his family, friends, colleagues and students; but also because he did not see the current flowering of democratic expression in the Arab world he loved, or come to write the many more columns and books that were in him. Yet the work he leaves, including the example and challenge it represents – above all, to think for oneself – lives on for new generations to discover.

David Hayes is deputy editor of openDemocracy

Fred Halliday was most recently Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats / Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) research professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (Barcelona Institute for International Studies / IBEI). He was from 1985-2008 professor of international relations at the London School of Economics (LSE), and subsequently professor emeritus there

Fred Halliday’s books referred to are:

Political Journeys: the openDemocracy essays (Saqi, 2011) – edited by David Hayes, with an introduction by Stephen Howe

Caamaño in London: the Exile of a Latin American Revolutionary (Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2010)

Shocked And Awed: How the War on Terror and Jihad Have Changed the English Language (IB Tauris, 2010)

Activism Tom Hurndall: Honouring a legacy

hich — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:00:24 +0000

By Libby Powell

In April 2003, Tom Hurndall, a young British photojournalist and peace worker, was shot in the head in the Gaza Strip as he carried two young Palestinian children out of the line of sniper fire. Fatally wounded, Tom died nine months later, having never recovered from a deep coma. The violence of both his death and the attempts at a cover-up by the Israeli military courts were deeply shocking and, for those of us who knew and loved him, deeply painful.

Although a conviction of the soldier who shot Tom was eventually secured, the responsibility for the orders given that day lie well beyond the range of one single sniper. In Rafah, which has borne so many years of occupation, warfare and now blockade, the spot in which he fell is still visited by Palestinian families who wish to pay respects to the young man from north London who came and never left.

Tom paid dearly for his desire to investigate one of the world’s longest conflicts. His death is one of thousands which make up the human cost of this ongoing, reckless war. Both a photographer and a writer, he took time to carefully chronicle his journey, which began in central London on 15th Feburary 2003 as millions marched against the impending Iraq invasion. Through his journal entires, emails and photos, we follow his journey from Baghdad to Amman, then the Al-Rweished refugee camp in Jordan, to Jerusalem, and finally on to the town of Rafah in southern Gaza close to the Egyptian border, where US peaceworker Rachel Corrie had been killed just weeks previously.

On April 11th, armed with just a camera and wearing an internationally recognizable orange peacekeeper jacket, he was severely wounded, never to regain consciousness. Despite initial claims that the shot had been fired close to Tom’s head as a warning, in the courts it was made clear that sniper was so close he could have shot the buttons of his jacket.

Tom’s family have spent a long time going through the writings, poems, emails and photos that Tom left behind. He wrote a great deal, often late into the night, rollie in one hand, pen in the other. Many of us remember his rows of black and red note books on his shelf, full of questions and clarity beyond his years. The decision by his family to publish the journals that follow his last days cannot have been an easy one. However, beyond the personal reflections that are charted in this book, lies a fresh and discerning view of one of the most volatile and important regions in the world.

The publishing house behind the book are a small independant organisation called Trolley Books who specialise in photojournalism. Without the substantial funds to produce a run of printed copies of Tom’s journal, his family and Trolley Books launched a ‘crowdfunding campaign’ on Indiegogo, which calls for people to pre-order a copy of the book for £22, which allows the publisher to fund the print of that copy. They need a critical mass in order for the book to be viable for print. Small donations are also welcome as all funding will goes towards the print. There are now just 20 hours left to order copies.

Tom was still in a coma when I joined Nottingham University. At that time, Ceasefire was integral in helping to promote a small peace festival that raised funds for Tom’s legal campaign. That campaign eventually led to the first ever conviction for the death of a civilian by an Israeli military figure. Today, I am calling on the readers of Ceasefire to help once again, to help make Tom’s book a reality and prove that war cannot silence those it takes away.

Please join the Facebook group and visit the website to place an order.

Libby Powell, who was a personal friend of Tom’s, is a writer and activist. She is currently working for a humanitarian organisation that runs medical aid and health development projects in Palestine.

Modern Times: Playing to Win

hich — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 23:00:35 +0000

By Corin Faife

This weekend I was fortunate enough to meet esteemed activist Michael Albert. It was October 31st, and I arrived mid way through his Ceasefire Sessions seminar with my face painted to resemble a rather haunting skull. It passed without comment, but there have certainly been more auspicious introductions.

Over the course of three hours spent fielding questions on his political philosophy, peppered with anecdotes from his personal travels in Venezuela and Argentina and years-long association with Noam Chomsky, he shared many insights from years of involvement with the activist scene. Though delivered in congenial tone with slow and considered meter, his words didn’t shy from controversy, never more so than when stating truths that are skirted for fear of drawing fire.

Truths like: the Left must pick itself up and play to win.

Play to win, not fail with style. Not smile wearily at one another as we “fight the good fight”, not take relish in throwing ourselves into defeat knowing that “at least we tried”, but really play the game to win.

Sometimes it takes a great thinker to tell you the blindingly obvious. It’s easy to forget that we can’t complete the project of building a more equitable society if we don’t have confidence in ourselves, and easy to overlook the need for reminding ourselves that it is possible, even when the odds seem overwhelming.

Of course, we’re meant to think the odds against us are overwhelming. All oppressive systems seek to preclude attempts at resistance and maintain existing structures: sometimes through formal mechanisms, legal restrictions on the right to criticise or politicial frameworks which concentrate power in the hands of the few, and sometimes through the propaganda telling us resistance is futile, that it’s all for our own good. In a society like our own, elite run and unjust but with high freedom of expression, it’s especially important to convince the population that There Is No Alternative or else somebody might just create one.

To counter, we must play on ourselves a trick of perspective. To look into an uncertain future with only a conception of how large the struggles may be is disheartening. But try to project yourself fifty, or one hundred years into the future, and can we really believe the current system will remain unchanged?

In 1987, when Margaret Thatcher was denouncing as preposterous the idea that the ANC could ever overthrow white South African rule, the task must have looked daunting for the thousands of anti-apartheid activists languishing in jail, not least a certain Nelson Mandela. For the slavery abolitionists, the suffragettes, the followers of Dr. King or Gandhi-ji, the odds must have at some stage seemed insurmountable, though for us their years of soul-searching and struggle are transmuted into a won battle, historical fact.

For us the dawning years of the 21st Century have been uncertain, but future generations will regard them in retrospect and judge that the victory of the Left was a fait accompli. Twenty years hence it might seem ‘painfully obvious’ that revolution in Venezuela would spread throughout the Americas, that the financial crisis of 2008 heralded the death of market capitalism or that the internet would enable workers’ management without the need for corporate hierarchy. We won’t know what hindsight will tell us until we get there and look back.

Now keep that in mind, and let’s play to win.

Corin Faife is a writer and activist. His ‘Modern Times’ column will appear every first Tuesday of the month.

Profile: Slavoj Žižek – The Dog’s Bollocks … at the Media Dinner Party

Paul Taylor — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 23:00:08 +0000

By Paul Taylor

There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
(Hannah Arendt – The Crisis in Culture)

As likely to talk about Homer’s Springfield as Ithaca, Žižek offers a fascinating new take on Arendt’s open question. Embodying “the Heineken effect”, he refreshes the parts other thinkers cannot reach at a time when increasingly anaemic universities have begun to act as uncritical subsidiaries of their governmental and corporate sponsors.

The motivation to write Žižek and the Media came from a desire to express exactly why he stands out so forcefully from the conventional commentariat as well as wanting to tackle head-on two frequently voiced objections to his work – the obscene humour and his refusal to provide ready-made solutions for the problems he so readily identifies.

Both po-faced distaste and an instrumentally-minded yearning for immediate answers miss two fundamental points – his jokes are philosophically important and, despite the über-pragmatic nature of our times (or perhaps more so now than ever before), the over-riding purpose of philosophy remains the asking of questions rather than the providing of answers – as Heidegger put it: “questioning is the piety of thought”.

In ancient Greece, the philosopher Diogenes (aka ‘the dog’) shocked the Athenian agora with public acts of defecation and masturbation. Although (so far) Žižek has limited himself to only talking about such acts, he can be viewed as a Diogenes for our online times. The following joke is not one that Žižek has used, but it nevertheless vividly encapsulates the paradoxically serious end of his frequently comic means.

In the middle of a vibrant middle-class dinner party, the host’s old flatulent dog staggers into the dining room, flops down, and promptly begins to enthusiastically and noisily lick its scrotum in full view of the now suddenly quiet guests. To ease the unbearable sense of embarrassment that descends upon the party, a male guest says, ‘I wish I could do that.’ This produces a round of cathartic tittering … that becomes heavy laughter when the hostess adds tartly, ‘If you give him a biscuit, you can.’

To apply this setting to today’s mediascape, the guest’s quip of ‘I wish I could do that’ is the socially acceptable level of communication that defuses otherwise disturbing situations – discourse’s equivalent of a lightning rod that channels away disruptive intrusions. By contrast, the hostess ups the traumatic ante. She extrapolates upon the guest’s interjection in order to undermine his attempt at defusing the situation. As a media theorist, Žižek provocatively mixes of the roles of the quick-thinking hostess and the pomposity-puncturing dog.

A related joke that Žižek does use himself (slightly adapted here) is set in an Eastern European bar in which a singing gypsy violin player moves between the tables. A customer is drinking whisky at the bar when, suddenly, a monkey jumps up, dances towards him, washes his testicles in the whisky glass, and then dances away again. The furious customer asks the bartender why the monkey did this, only to be told that he should ask the gypsy, who knows everything. When asked, ‘Do you know why the monkey just washed his balls in my glass?’ the gypsy replies, ‘Of, course’, and proceeds to sing a dirge, ‘Why the monkey just washed his balls in my glass. / It’s a mystery, at least it wasn’t his … .’

In Žižek’s ideological analysis, the gypsy violinist illustrates a common aspect of today’s mediascape in which substantive questions about real problems are routinely desublimated into tacky entertainment. Žižek exposes the cynicism of a Western media system in which natural disasters like Haiti’s earthquake (the monkey’s testicles in the whisky glass) are transformed into the lachrymose sentimentality of a Simon Cowell-produced ‘Everybody Hurts’ (the gypsy song) by a music industry moonlighting as a philanthropic agency. Žižek encourages us to look awry at the media spectacle.

In the case of Haiti, his parallax view helps us to reflect upon the decades of geo-political machinations that undermine poor countries’ basic infrastructures and thereby greatly (but predictably) exacerbate the human cost of disasters. Politicians meanwhile, like the gypsy singer, disingenuously re-frame human misery as implacable fate. Žižek continues the philosophical kynic tradition of exposing power’s pretensions by exposing the nether regions the powerful prefer not to think about. He acts out the Shakespearean role of Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, who barked their warning to King Lear that his authority was empty; he also shares with Brutus the sentiment that he would ‘rather be a dog, and bay the moon, / Than such a Roman’ (Julius Caesar, Act 4, Sc. iii).

The Politics of Žižek’s Tickling Shtick

A memorable TV moment that illustrates the expository power of humour occurred in the UK programme The Mrs Merton Show. The eponymous Mrs Merton (the comedian Carole Aherne playing the part of an innocent old lady in the role of a chat show host) asked Debbie McGee, the glamorous blonde wife of the distinctly unglamorous, small, thin, male-patterned bald magician/comedian Paul Daniels, “But what first, Debbie, attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”

Mrs Merton’s comedy shtick was based upon fists of iron(y) hidden within velvet gloves of faux-naivete – a finely-tuned, tense marriage of form and content in which cruelly accurate insights flourished in what only appeared to be a non-threatening environment.

Long influenced by the deceptively simple adage the medium is the message, Žižek and the Media focuses upon methods that, Mrs Merton-like, strategically combine form and content with subtle but highly effective results. Contemporary ideology works in a similar basic (albeit politically destructive) fashion. Seemingly inoffensive, banal media formats and pseudo-events disguise the true extent of the generally unacknowledged, but immensely harmful, underlying attitudes that those apparently uncontroversial media formats so efficiently service.

More than any other theorist I am aware of, Žižek’s high theory/crude humour combination sheds light on these disavowed forms of media ideology. Examples of these forms include both asinine journalistic fixations (readers can count the number of times the phrase “special relationship” is repeated in news items whenever the US President and British Prime Minister have a scheduled meeting) and pathologically hypocritical blind spots and double standards (think of the profound difference in the concern shown by the US public for compensation payments in the wake of the recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill compared to the 1984 Bhopal disaster).

The lowest common attitudinal denominator to contemporary ideology is our inability or unwillingness to take ethical responsibility for the deep damage to fellow human beings caused by the normal functioning of the capitalist system and its accompanying media. An incontinent urge to talk excessively about a “special relationship” may appear annoyingly unintelligent and predictable yet much of its truly harmful effect resides in the strength of the temptation to view such journalistic practices as essentially harmless journalistic quirks.

Misguided tolerance overlooks the way in which journalistic fixations are merely a symptom of a much deeper disease – the media systematically displaces examination of real political issues through the use of feel-good bromides with profoundly negative consequences for millions of people around the world. Far from harmless, it is the very banality of “special relationship” type discourse that creates a powerful barrier to a series of pressing, more politically pertinent, questions.

For example, the US-UK “special relationship” could be more productively reverse-engineered to interrogate the “special” way in which the British government turned a blind eye to the torture of British citizens abroad as part of the “War on Terror” (a declaration of war upon an abstract noun being decidedly “special”), the “special” nature of the UK’s entrance into an armed conflict based upon false information presented to Parliament, and so on. Although they are occasionally raised, politically radical questions, tend to sit awkwardly with the media’s standard operating procedure – a process of ethical and conceptual decaffeination designed to remove awkwardly substantive issues from close consideration.

What Goes Without Saying

Žižek’s unlikely impact in recent years is ironically due to the stubbornness with which he stays loyal to two deeply unfashionable influences – Marxism and psychoanalysis. These approaches are profoundly out-of-favour at a time when they have never had so much diagnostic accuracy and Žižek’s popularity represents a return of this otherwise largely repressed truth that capitalist media discourse rejects the lost causes of psychoanalysis and critical thought whilst still skilfully incorporating some of their keenest insights into its everyday psychopathology.

By contrast, Žižek and the Media explicitly addresses the miscellaneous forms of denial and repression used to avoid acknowledging a series of fundamental political contradictions at the heart of the capitalist project aided by such suggestive Zizekian concepts as the chocolate laxative. Based upon a product Žižek encountered in the US, the concept conveys the extent to which an element that causes a problem (chocolate-induced constipation) is frequently sold to us as the solution (the chocolate-flavoured laxative).

Peristaltically accurate or not, the underlying idea can clearly be seen today in the form of the philanthropic initiatives of Bill Gates and George Soros. Also present in TV programmes like The Secret Millionaire, our admiration for the charitable acts of people whose charitable funds came from the very system that created the need for charity in the first place is tautologically cultivated.

Žižek’s atypical appearance and sound (trademark hirsute dishevelment and a manically enthusiastic Eastern European accent-infused lisp) is perhaps what gains him entrance into a media realm into which intellectuals are only normally admitted if they are funny/larger-than-life (Stephen Fry, Žižek-the-Marx-Brother), or, in the mode of chocolate laxative media intellectuals like Alain de Botton and Simon Schama, if they flatter and massage our uncritical preconceptions in the guise of promoting deep thought.

The media’s standard mode of conceptual censorship is hidden by the unquestioned nature of its binding assumptions. Occasionally, however, as in the following Ready Steady Book online interview between Mark Thwaite (MT) and Alain de Botton (AB), the ideological operations at work come to the surface:

MT: You seem to come from a mainstream philosophical tradition (your Consolations of Philosophy has Socrates on unpopularity, Epicurus on lack of money, Seneca on frustrations, Montaigne on inadequacy etc. not, say, Baudrillard on modern life or Deleuze on watching films) whereas I find myself more drawn to so-called continental philsophy. Do you ever read ‘the continentals’?

AB: “I am very drawn to so-called continental philosophy and my work makes frequent allusions to major figures in this tradition like Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. What I welcome in continental philosophy is the engagement with themes of everyday life and personal importance. The figures you mention, Baudrillard and Deleuze, aren’t people I like to write about, but I have read some of their works with pleasure. My real influence among the modern French thinkers is Roland Barthes.

This is a clear statement in which contemporary continental philosophy is simultaneously acknowledged and dismissed from consideration. Mark Thwaite’s suggestion that more recent thinkers may have important things to say about today’s world is countered by de Botton with a redefinition of what is currently understood as continental philosophy so that the term comes to describe that thought from which we can be safely insulated by sufficient historical distance.

The attitude de Botton exhibits here is in keeping with a media environment in which, to the extent that cultural theory is present at all, it is limited in broadsheet newspapers and periodicals to esoteric essays on relatively unthreatening historical and literary topics. Despite his alleged affinity for Nietzsche, de Botton is nevertheless part of a commentariat that is instrumental in the production of an eternal recurrence of decaffeinated thought.

Few, if any, genuinely challenging or difficult philosophical ideas are presented by media intellectuals who prefer the sort of name-dropping in which philosophically-light bons mots are mined from suitably revered (if little understood) figures (e.g. Kant’s oft-cited saying that “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”) The later continental philosophers Thwaite mentions are largely absent from the Anglophone media radar.

In the UK, for example, Jean Baudrillard’s death met with limited recognition that included predictably lame observations that perhaps his death was a simulation that hadn’t really happened. Similarly, if mention is ever made of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir it is most likely to appear as biographical details of their complicated love lives rather than any sustained engagement with their philosophical projects.

Somewhat ironically given de Botton’s particular commendation of Roland Barthes who was committed to deconstructing the ideology of “what goes without saying” in everyday life, in his own life, it apparently goes without saying that a professional philosopher may read and enjoy challenging thinkers in private, but not feel obliged to explain why that enjoyment should not be shared with a philosophically-emaciated public – definitely not a fault of which one could accuse Slavoj Žižek.

Don’t Just Do It

One should take part. Whoever restricts himself to thinking but does not get involved is weak, cowardly and virtually a traitor. This hostile cliché … The trouble with this view is that it results in the prohibition of thinking. Very little is needed to turn the resistance against repression repressively against those who – little as they might wish to glorify their state of being – do not desert the standpoint that they have come to occupy … One clings to action because of the impossibility of action. (Adorno – “Resignation”)

Žižek’s preference for contemplative thought over mindless action is supported above by Adorno’s scathing interpretation of those who fail to provide theory with enough room to breathe. Humour is Žižek’s theoretical praxis to be opposed to the sort of pseudo-activity that, according to Adorno, fails to admit “… to what degree it serves as a substitute for satisfaction, thus elevating itself to an end in itself … When the doors are barricaded, it is doubly important that thought not be interrupted.”

Žižek’s filthy provocations at least provide cerebral sustenance for whatever period of time we might remain incarcerated. Like Hamlet’s Marcellus, when the situation requires it, Žižek is prepared to counsel against resorting to an uncritical and violent acting out: ‘We do it wrong, being so majestical, / To offer it the show of violence; / For it is, as the air, invulnerable, / And our vain blows malicious mockery’ (Act I, Sc. i).

More optimistically, Žižek’s scholarly analysis and media performances combine form (provocation) and content (abstract theory) in order to uncover the misleadingly obvious ways in which today’s media achieves its political effects. Ideology is at its most dangerous when it is experienced as cultural wallpaper. From Kung Fu Panda to Forrest Gump, and contra Arendt’s fears, Žižek does indeed manage to entertainingly illuminate the darker side of the superficially benign to show that whatever life’s secret ingredient really is … it is definitely not a box of chocolates.

Notwithstanding “the Marx Brother” comedy he provides along the way, Žižek is an Hegelian jester with a deadly serious political point. Like The Joker from The Dark Knight, Žižek’s ultimate political point is no laughing matter. To quote from the final Chapter of Žižek and the Media and its paraphrasing of that film’s Police Commissioner James Gordon: ‘Žižek is the theory-hero Gotham doesn’t deserve … but the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him, because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero … he’s a voluble guardian, a watchful provocateur … a dark knight of the dark night of the soul.’

Paul Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Communications Theory at the Unversity of Leeds. In addition to “Zizek and the Media”, he is the author of several books including “Critical Theories of Mass Media: Then and Now”.

Culture Fix: Robert Chrisgau, doyen of US music critics, retires

hich — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 23:13:01 +0000

By Donal Mac an Eala

Once a Village Voice music critic, he has been, in the last two years or so, working with MSN which, a month or so ago, has finally discontinued his reviews. However, he is still writing, for example he does an essay for Barnes and Noble each month and works with NPR.

It was his Consumer Guide which has definied the art of self-reflectivity in music criticism: His pithy reviews of albums (and on occasions songs) have built up and up into a body of work that spans a period of more than 40 years.

And it’s no overstatement to suggest that he has been one of the defining influences on my own musical taste, not to say that my taste shadowed his – not for him metal, or the more esoteric byways of dance, and not for me that in-depth knowledge of soul [definitely my loss] or roots or African music, but it was an influence nonetheless.

He’s been a presence in my musical life since I was 16 when the school library in Greendale Community School [Kilbarrack] gave a group of us money to purchase new books for it. One of those purchased was Christgau’s Consumer Guide of the 1970s. Eventually having had it out on permanent loan I was forced to get a copy of my own.

It’s a hefty book, and that original edition has an illustration of a set of headphones with a lightning streak running between them, but somehow that’s a muted image and therefore nowhere near as flashy as that might suggest.

It’s chastening to think that when I first read that book, in 1981, Zeppelin had broken up barely a year before, Joy Division likewise, the Rolling Stones were arguably in the earlier stages of their career (I joke, sort of), the charts were groaning under the weight of new wave and post-punk. In other words, that entire musical universe of the 1970s was so recent that the vinyl was still soft – so to speak, even if we pretended to have no interest in anything prior to 1977 (or more realistically Ska or the New wave of British Heavy Metal). And here, here was a book which took it all seriously (bar metal, always a blind spot of Christgau’s), which threw in Funkadelic and Steely Dan and the Beatles and said… it’s all valid but what’s good is good, what’s bad is bad. A useful lesson to learn.

Each little review was an often perfect synthesis of critique, wit and knowledge in a couple of hundred words or less, and the overall whole recognising that music was a spectrum. Another useful lesson to learn.

And that first Consumer Guide, despite the fact it took decades for me to hear even a quarter of its contents, pointed to the fact that there was so much out there and that even if it was in styles and genres that I might not like now, perhaps, just perhaps, I would someday

And that, too, was a hugely useful lesson to learn.

And he wasn’t even middle aged when the first book came out. Okay he was about 37… old enough in those days. He was married, over 30 and therefore effectively middle aged… and yet, oddly, so was Ian Curtis’s voice. Sure, so was almost everyone making music at that point in time. They were old, whether 21 or 31 or, God forbid, 41 (and the remarkable longevity of the current era – and that’s not necessarily a criticism – was still some way off). They were bloody well older than 16.

Revelatory about punk, but also noting that punk wasn’t a one-off, that it, too, had roots, and that there had been other movements before, that that too was part of a continuity. I also think he has had – and one hopes will continue to have – a real ability to lock in, through words, that almost mystical aspect of music, that near synesthetic quality it has where it infuses and reflects those stray moments in life.

Some quotes perhaps will demonstrate his efficacy with words…

The O’Jays Family Reunion

[Philadelphia International, 1975]
In which Jesse Jackson (or is it Reverend Ike) goes disco, proving that the words do too matter. The self-serving, pseudopolitical pap Kenny Gamble sets his boys to declaiming here underlines the way the overripeness of this vocal and production style can go mushy, which it does. Even the working-class party anthem “Livin’ for the Weekend” is ruined by the rest of the side–some play-her-like-a-violin soft-core, and the unspeakable (would it were unsingable) “I Love Music.” Moral: the rich and the superrich shit–the nouveau riche can fuck you over too. C

Boston Third Stage

[MCA, 1986]
Never again can us wiseasses call it corporate rock without thinking twice. Whatever possessed Tom Scholz to spend seven years perfecting this apparently unoccupied articulation of an art-metal thought extinct years ago, it wasn’t megaplatinum ambition. He’s more like the Archbishop of Latter-Day Arena Rock, perfecting majestic guitar sounds and angelic vocals for hockey-rink cathedrals the world over–and also, since he’s patently reluctant to venture from his studio retreat, elegiac melodies suitable to a radio ministry. If he seems more hobbyist than artist, more Trekkie than Blind Boy Grunt, that’s no reason to get snobbish. And no reason to listen, either. C

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols

[Warner Bros., 1977]
Get this straight: no matter what the chicmongers want to believe, to call this band dangerous is more than a suave existentialist compliment. They mean no good. It won’t do to pass off Rotten’s hatred and disgust as role-playing–the gusto of the performance is too convincing. Which is why this is such an impressive record. The forbidden ideas from which Rotten makes songs take on undeniable truth value, whether one is sympathetic (“Holidays in the Sun” is a hysterically frightening vision of global economics) or filled with loathing (“Bodies,” an indictment from which Rotten doesn’t altogether exclude himself, is effectively anti-abortion, anti-woman, and anti-sex). These ideas must be dealt with, and can be expected to affect the way fans think and behave. The chief limitation on their power is the music, which can get heavy occasionally, but the only real question is how many American kids might feel the way Rotten does, and where he and they will go next. I wonder–but I also worry. A

And this spot-on precis of the vastly overrated ‘Them Crooked Vultures’, from his last column…

Them Crooked Vultures: ‘Them Crooked Vultures’

(DGC/Interscope)
Grade: B MINUS

In his demure way, macho formalist Josh Homme has emerged as a post-Nirvana rock auteur to rival Jack White himself. Signature project taking a break? No prob. He’ll just hire the supposed musical glue of the heaviest aggregation of all time, wave his magic bushwhacker and turn Nirvana’s most successful member back into the drummer we wish he’d remained, and pound out what any blindfolded stoner with girlfriend problems would yell in your face was another Queens of the Stone Age album, and later for effing Eagles of Death Metal. Homme sees the humor in his formalism even if his fans don’t, and the all-star rhythm section does add fluidity. But in the end this is hard-rawk nirvana with a small “n” — a world of unusually hot sex and skull-busting drugs young guys with girlfriend problems will wish was so. I mean, that is one hell of a market share.

He also writes somewhat longer pieces, take this one on The Eagles which is notable for… well, look, people should read it for themselves.

The other aspect of this was that it was US-based, with that curious view of music from this side of the Atlantic that is reflective of the prism that is US music and media. I loved that slightly alien quality and still do. In a way, in this digital period, that dynamic has buckled somewhat. If I go to emusic I can find material from obscure indie or dance bands from Canada, or Germany or wherever. And of course it’s all available now.

I still treasure the first Consumer Guide, it’s on the bookshelves in the front room (those shelves winnowed down in recent years with many other newer books transferred to the attic) because it has genuinely become a part of my life. I was reading it as recently as the weekend, flicking through idly, fascinated by his thoughts on Prince or Springsteen or Bob Seeger, or whoever.

The next book from the 1980s was, on some levels, more and yet less fascinating because it paralleled my own musical experience more closely, but also pointed out the gaps. The 1990s one perhaps a little less so again, most likely because my own tastes tended to solidify and, also, that I was more familiar with their contents. As it happened though, and perhaps tellingly, I only purchased them in the early 2000s in a secondhand bookshop in New York. None more appropriate!

I hope that he continues to write because his is a voice that music needs now more than ever as it fragments yet further .

He’s quoted on a recent Slate Magazine Culture Gabfest podcast that discussed his retirement as saying that his Consumer Guide elaborates on…

‘My life theory of why popular music is the greatest of the arts’…

Sounds about right to me

Donal Mac an Eala works in politics, lectures in various aspects of contemporary culture and is a writer and blogger. He is also a contributor to the Cedar Lounge Revolution

[A version of this article also appears on the Cedar Lounge Revolution website.]

Remembering Mahmoud Darwish – How the revolution was written

Ahmed Masoud — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:46:45 +0000

By Ahmed Masoud

On 09 August 2008, Palestinians were distraught and shocked at the news of the departure of their beloved national poet Mahmoud Darwish. Although his health had been deteriorating for over six months, Darwish’s death was received with grief across the Palestinian nation and the Arab world. The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) declared three days of national mourning across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This article aims to explore Darwish’s contribution in building modern Palestinian literature which is considered to be at the core of post 1950 modern Arab literary movement. The focus here will be on his life in Israel between 1950 and 1971.

Born in 1942, in the village of Barwa near Acre, Darwish was one of the 800,000 Palestinians deported during the Palestinian Nakba# of 1948. He lived in Lebanon for eight years until he went back to look for the rest of his family. He discovered that his village was one of the 450 villages razed to the ground by Israelis in 1948. Darwish left Palestine in 1971 to study in the USSR for a year and decided to join the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1973, when he was banned from re-entering Israel. He lived in Cairo between 1975 and 1981where he worked for Al-Ahram newspaper. Darwish moved to Beirut in 1980 where he became the editor of the journal “Palestinian Issues” and was the director of the Palestinian Research Centre. He returned to Palestine in 1996 after the PNA was born as a result of the Oslo agreement which gave Palestinians self-rule over parts of Gaza and small parts of the West Bank.

Darwish is considered to be the founder of the literature of resistance which was born as a reaction to the loss of the Palestinian homeland and identity. The literature of resistance was developed by Palestinians who remained in Palestine after 1948. Their writing came to express their rejection of the new political climate which branded their national aspirations a form of anti-state terrorism. The enthusiasm and anger of some young poets, like Mahmoud Darwish, developed into a unified and structured literary movement which aimed to encourage resistance of the occupation. No one has described the literature of resistance clearer than Moshe Dayan (1915-1981, Israeli defense minister during the Six Day War in 1967) who said in an interview with Ma’areef newspaper (Israeli daily paper) that “only one poem of Fadwa Tuqan# is enough to create ten Palestinian terrorists” (Quoted from Al-Ayyam, 1997).

This statement was a reflection of the fact that, in the mid-twentieth century, Palestinian poets focused their anger on the Israeli government and the West, describing their countrymen as victims of history and heroes fighting to redeem their people. The main themes in the literary writings of that period, therefore, had been resistance as well as the continuous faith in victory and the right of return. Literature, particularly poetry, took a leadership position in inviting people to start a resistance movement after 1948. The nationalist movement was almost destroyed after the Nakba, Also, there was no national media to discuss national issues. All the small newspapers which operated before the establishment of the state of Israel were destroyed. This left the remaining Palestinian community, almost 200,000 people, unorganized and not represented in the new society. In this context, poetry and the spoken word started taking the lead in representing Palestinian issues.

Mahmoud Darwish is always introduced in his poetry readings as Al-Munadil (the freedom fighter). He was seen not only as a man of letters but also as a leader who was able to eloquently express what his people needed, against any attempts of cultural appropriation.

I will say myself that Palestinians are not merciful to their men of letters. This is because of their faith in the effectiveness of literature which has been to them a compensation for all the humiliations when they lost everything (referring to 1948) except words. Literature then took strength from the people to create a relationship between them and the lost home. A Palestinian writer is often asked: Are you a writer or a freedom fighter? (Kanafani, 1998)

Post 1948 Palestinians were treated as second class citizens in Israel. There were not, for example, any unions for Palestinian workers and Palestinians were not allowed to work in any other job than handy work, mainly building and construction. It is indeed his ability to draw attention to national themes while talking about ordinary human matters like love which brought fame to Mahmoud Darwish. In his first anthology Lover From Palestine (1967), he clearly talks about emotional matters which concerned any young man of his age (25), but his ability to incorporate the young man’s emotional concerns within his national outlook is what makes the anthology unique. At the time of its publication, the Israeli government imposed onerous rules on Arabic-language literary production. Publishing was limited and went through Israeli censorship channels; those who did manage to publish sometimes received funding from Zionist organizations which imposed their own ideological imperatives on the context of the writing. In fact, most publications were not allowed to talk about Palestine and the theme of homeland.

Zionist organizations also encouraged Palestinian writers who were desperate to publish their works in Arabic to promote Zionism as an acceptable social phenomenon. In this political environment, poetry was the medium to express the feelings of resentment because it could spread easier than any other printed literature.

Love poetry was a key element in creating the literature of resistance. Post 1948 Palestinians were disconnected from their own community; the majority left Palestine and the remaining minority felt fragmented because a lot of their family members were either killed or deported. Love poetry became a key element in bridging the gaps between those fragmented communities and created a feeling of security amongst those who remained in Palestine. This form of poetry came to compensate for the inability to express the feelings of oppression which were not allowed to be published. Ten years after the Nakba, love poetry was transformed into a new genre which had the aim of connecting social and national issues in one form. While writers talked about love in order to bring communities together, the sense of homeland was re-established in images, memories and most importantly, hopes of civil and national rights. Poets, then, adopted a resistance mentality whereby the enemy was challenged.

To the rest of the world, however, it still seemed that the Palestinian people did not exist, except as remote statistics. Mahmoud Darwish became the main exponent of the literature of resistance in the sixties, and was, like many fellow poets, often imprisoned by Israeli authorities. He earned international acclaim for his poetry on the Palestine experience, etching with the details of human moments rather than ideology, but constantly imbued with a drive for his people’s dignity.When his poem “A Lover from Palestine” was going to be published, he presented it to the Israeli censor, who crossed out the word `Palestine’ and replaced it with `Eretz Israel (Gabriel, 1998)

Like grass growing among the joints of a rock

We existed as strangers one day

The Spring Sky was composing a star…and a star

And I was composing a love verse

To your eyes I will sing.

Do your eyes know that I have waited very long

Like summer waiting for a bird

And I slept like an immigrant

With one eye awake and the other crying

We are two lovers until the moon falls asleep

And know that hugging and kissing

Are the food of love nights

And that morning is calling for my footsteps to continue

On the path!

We are friends, so walk next to me hand in hand

Together we make bread and songs

Why do we ask this path which fate we are facing?

Let’s just walk for ever

Why do we look for songs of crying

In an old poetry anthology?

And we ask: our love, are you going to be for ever?

I love you like Bedouin tribes love the oasis of grass and water

Like a hungry man’s love to a loaf of bread

Like grass growing among the joints of a rock

We existed as strangers one day (Darwish, 1996)

In this poem, entitled “The Most Beautiful Love”, Mahmoud Darwish is clearly writing to his beloved about his love to her and their future together. He expresses his anxiety about her concern regarding the future, claiming that lovers should not worry about what is to come. However, the political references are hidden among the lines and metaphors of this poem. The first line of the poem expresses how Palestinians have become strangers in their own land. The metaphor of the grass and rock suggests the abnormal situation Palestinians in Israel live in where one, the rock, is more aggressive and hostile and the other, the grass, is more passive and powerless. The writer shows how the birth of the state of Israel destroyed the Palestinian nation and prevented it from growing. “I slept like an immigrant” (Darwish, 1996) is another simile of the situation in Palestine at the time. Post-1948 Palestinians have not enjoyed full civil rights and lived like immigrants in their own country. After the mass deportation/exodus of Palestinians, Israeli government worked on ethnically cleansing those who remained in their homes. They delayed registering them as citizens of the new state and did not grant them residency permits which eventually led to their deportation. The majority of Palestinians after 1948 did not have such a permit and therefore had to move around their own country like immigrants. In response to this idea of the immigrant, the poet continues his poem with reference to Palestinian and Arabic culture which is deeply rooted in the land, he talks of the “old poetry anthologies” and how the Arabs used to cherish poetry and the craft of language from the pre-Islamic era. He also refers to Bedouin tribes travelling in the desert. Darwish connects love with the suffering and hunger of Palestinians when he refers to his love as a “hungry man’s love to a loaf of bread”.

Adopting resistance was not an easy choice for Mahmoud Darwish given there was a political crisis at the time in Israel which was centred on Arabs and their involvement in Israeli political life. Many Israeli parties considered Palestinians to be a dangerous enemy accusing them of not abiding by Israeli civil laws and trying to avenge what happened in 1948. This political crisis led to the creation of a new Arab party, Jabhat Al Ard (The Land Front), which evolved from the Israeli Communist Party. Al-Ard was born out of the need to defend Palestinian identity. Many Palestinians had joined the ICP after the establishment of the state of Israel due to the party’s non sectarian ideology which Palestinians thought might be key to counter the Jewish Zionist ideology. In 1959 Jabhat Al Ard published its first journal, benefiting from an Israeli law which allowed individuals to publish one journal a year. In the same year, Al-Ard published twelve more journals using different names. The last of which was after Nasser’s victory in the Suez crisis (1956). Al-Ard published details of the Israeli defeat and pictures of the Egyptian leader. This journal shocked Israeli officials who did not expect Al-Ard to find such a loophole in the Israeli law. But Israeli officials arrested Al-Ard’s writers and deported its editors.

During that time, love poetry developed to express Palestinian nationalism in a more metaphorical way. One of the important themes which developed out of the love theme was the motherhood topic and its symbolic reference to home. This celebration of land and referring to it as a mother was a necessity in Palestine in the twenty years following the Nakba; it provided an easier connection between social and national themes. This is demonstrated in one of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem Ila Ommi “To Mother”. This poem, published in the same anthology A Lover from Palestine, is considered to be a core pamphlet in the building of the literature of resistance. This is because of the writer’s ability to connect both the theme of motherhood and nationhood at times when writing about the latter could lead to imprisonment.

I yearn for my mother’s bread

My mother’s coffee,

My mother’s touch

And childhood grows inside me

Day upon breast of day

And I love my life because

If I died

I’d feel ashamed because of my mother’s tears

Take me (mother), if one day I return,

As a veil for your lashes

And cover my bones with grass

Baptised by the purity of your heel

And fasten my bonds

With a lock made of your hair

With a piece of thread that trails in the train of your dress

Maybe I’d become a god

A god I’d become

If I touched the depths of your heart

Put me, if I return,

As fuel in your cooking stove,

As a clothes line on your rooftop

For I have lost resolve

Without your daily prayer

I have grown decrepit: Give me back the stars of childhood

That I may join

The young birds

On the return route

To the nest of your waiting (Darwish, 1996)

Referring to the bread and coffee being emblematic of Palestinian daily culture, it gives a picture of a peasant woman waking up early to prepare bread for her children. Bread is eaten in almost every meal or at least for breakfast and dinner. Therefore, to start a poem talking about mothers with a reference to bread making is to highlight the existence of different people who cherish their own cultural norms, which are different from the new majority in the new Israeli state. Even coffee is more of an Arabic drink than a European one (indeed, the English word ‘coffee’ comes from the Arabic ‘Qahwa’.)

By connecting Palestinians and motherhood, Darwish was able to present Palestinian cultural identity in a way which Israelis would not be able to punish him for. The poem continues into stronger images of both motherhood and “Palestinianism” or “Arabism” when the poet talks about the beauty of the Arabic woman while veiling her face. The image of a woman veiling her face has recently been connected with extremism, however, in the Arabic culture veiling the face is a way of flirting between men and women. When a woman wants to flirt with a man in the Arab world, she often veils her face to show the beauty of her eyes. It is these images of Arabic culture that the poet is focusing on to bypass Israeli rules. “Put me as a cloth line on your roof top” is a powerful image of how children should be obedient to their mothers and tolerate their mistakes. This image brings to Palestinians their Muslim culture when highlighting the same orders of the Quran which stress the importance of obedience to one’s parents.

The more Darwish renewed the call for resistance, the wider his readership grew and spread across the Arab world. His efforts brought the attention to Palestinian suffering which started to become less important and restricted to refugees and the political divisions between Arab countries. It was in these circumstances that the Al-Hadatha# literary school was born in Palestine. Darwish along with other writers such as Emile Habebi (1992-1996) looked for a form of literature that would communicate the national struggle to a wide audience. He found that writing in traditional poetry was too vague and did not deal with the details of the Palestinian catastrophe. Traditional poetry, in the school’s opinion, focused more on the aesthetics of language and the craft of writing poetry, and did not give writers the freedom to express the changes in their new environment.

Al-Hadatha developed more in Palestine as the struggle for civil rights continued after 1948. Its development came as a result of the Israeli government imposing censorship on Arabic publications particularly on those discussing Palestine and the theme of homeland. This was not only done through close watching of publications but also through creating an uneducated Palestinian population by preventing the establishment of any Arabic school. Even in Jewish/Israeli schools the number of Arab students was restricted. Between 1955 and 1965 the number of Arab students in secondary schools was three per cent . There was only one hundred Palestinian students in higher education institutions. In this period, the Israeli government opened a few elementary schools for Palestinian students but the school curriculum was censored and restricted. The Israeli government banned anything that mentioned Palestine or its history. It also banned Islamic studies which present Jerusalem as an important part of Muslim identity – a subject highly relevant to the Zionist case for creating the state of Israel. In order to bring more Jewish immigrants from across the world, “an imagined community” idea was formulated. The Zionist narrative insisted that Jews were the legal heirs to Palestine and that they had were deported from it two thousand years ago by the Romans. It also claimed that Muslims, seen as subsequent invaders of the land, should therefore be thrown out.

In secondary schools, Palestinian students were treated with negligence. Teachers did not check whether they did their homework and reviews on the development of Arab students were not conducted. This is in addition to the fact that Palestinian students were learning in a new foreign language. About ninety per cent# of Palestinian students at the time left their studies before reaching secondary school in order to support their families and because teaching standards were low. Only the remaining ten per cent succeeded in their studies and not all of them could afford to go to University. Those who managed to reach universities were faced with serious harassment by their colleagues and teachers. Even after this very small minority graduated from university, they faced the challenges of finding a job of their interest within a government which considered them as second class citizens. This situation led to a dearth of education in Palestine and therefore a lack of literary production amongst both the intelligentsia and the public: both were more concerned about living than writing.

Darwish and other writers had to devise a form of literature which would be free of the restriction of the traditional way of writing poetry. This new form had to be easy but sophisticated enough to address the issues that the Nakba created. These issues were mainly represented in the loss of identity as Palestinians were no longer recognized as citizens of any country (to this day, most Palestinians are regarded as stateless). Therefore, Palestinian writers used Al-Hadatha to help them revive the literary movement in Palestine which allowed writers to express their views freely without following any particular method. While the literature of resistance laid down the basis of the new school, other themes became influenced by the new writing style allowing Al-Hadatha to be the dominant literary movement in the region.

In 1969 Mahmoud Darwish was the first to announce his joining of the new resistance ideology, rebelling against all Israeli censorship, when he wrote his famous poem “Write Down, I am an Arab”. This poem became a manifesto for the resistance movement for years to follow and has been read widely and sung by many generations in Palestine and the Diaspora. The strength of the poem comes from both celebrating Arabism and showing the pain involved in being an Arab.

Identity Card

I am an Arab

Card No. fifty thousand

Children, eight

The ninth will be born next summer

Are you upset?

I am an Arab

Vocation: cutting stone with comrades

Must cut bread, clothes and books

For the children, you know

I will never stand at your door a beggar

I am an Arab.

Are you angry?

I am nameless

Patient where everything boils with anger

I struck roots here

Before the olive trees and the poplars

A descendent of the plow-pushers

My ancestors, a mere peasant

No family tree

My home, a cottage of reeds

How is that for a man?

I am an Arab

Colour of hair, jet black

Eyes, brown

Distinguishing features:

A kuffia and Iqal on my head

Hands rock hard and scratchy

Favourite food: olive oil and thime

Address: a forgotten harmless village

Where streets have no names

And all men are in the fields and quarries

Is that good enough?

You have stolen my vineyard

And the land I used to till

You haven’t left anything for my children

Except the rocks

And I hear it said

That your government will expropriate

Event the rocks

Well then

I hate nobody

Neither do I steal

But when I am made hungry

Then I will eat the flesh of my oppressor

Beware of my hunger and my anger

This poem comes as a turning point in the development of the Palestinian literature of resistance. It was the first poem to announce a challenge to and a refusal of the political environment that Palestinians had been living under since 1948. The poem talked not only about Arabism as a subject to be proud of, but also ended with a strong political message that encouraged people to resist. “But when I am made hungry, then I will eat the flesh of my oppressor, beware of hunger and anger” is a line which announces that Palestinian patience had run out. The poem was celebrated in Palestine but also across the entire Arab world, mainly for its celebration of Arabism before Palestinianism – a concept cherished by Arab nationalists who stressed on the primacy of pan-Arabism over regional nationalisms. The poem celebrates Arabic culture and puts it forward as being ideal regardless of the hardships Arabs face.

While the poem celebrates Arabic traditions and love of children, it highlights the poor economic situation created by imperialism, mainly Israeli. The poem also comes to assert Arab and Palestinian identity in a state where denial of such identity was dominant. The poet does this by highlighting even the physical characteristics of Arabs/Palestinians, different from those of the European newcomers. He talks about the colour of hair and the colour of eyes, and how identity is imperishable.

You have stolen my vineyard

And the land I used to till

“You haven’t left anything for my children

Except the rocks

And I hear it said

That your government will expropriate

Even the rocks”

This stanza also brings to the surface the main reason behind Palestinian suffering, and thus an explanation of the anger. He is telling the Israeli government that they are making it difficult for Palestinians to live anymore, and that death is their only choice. Therefore, Palestinians have to choose between resisting and trying to change this situation or waiting for their death. This is why the poem ends with a warning: be careful from pushing Palestinians towards death.

The literature of resistance has been the drive of many revolutions in Palestine, the latest of which is the second intifada which broke out in 2000. As well as poetry, the literature of resistance continued to grow in other genres such as novels. With more Diaspora writers, like Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), the literature of resistance grew and spread across to become a school attended by those have suffered the Nakba and its consequences, and who believe in the right of Palestinians for national independence.

Darwish continued to develop this literature of resistance even when he moved outside of Palestine. His ability to reach all sectors of Palestinian society made him Palestine’s national poet. His poems brought more sympathy towards the Palestinian cause and people through the imagery he provided of the suffering of Palestinians. His works have been translated into several languages including English, French, Spanish and Dutch and he won many international awards. In 2001, he won the Lannan prize for cultural freedom. This prize recognizes people “whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry, and expression“. As defined by the foundation, cultural freedom is “the right of individuals and communities to define and protect valued and diverse ways of life currently threatened by globalisation”. And so, two years after his death, Mahmoud Darwish continues to be a byword for freedom, and an undying symbol of resistance, courage and sacrifice.

Ahmed Masoud is a Palestinian academic and writer. He grew up in Gaza before moving to the U.K to study for an MA and PhD in comparative literature. He is now working as an educational consultant as well as a freelance theatre director. Ahmed has published a number of articles, book chapters and journals in various academic and mainstream publications. He also directed a number of sell-out theatre productions, including the acclaimed Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea which premièred both in London and Edinburgh, and more recently Between the Fleeting Words, a tribute to Mahmoud Darwish. Masoud has also recently been commissioned to write a play for BBC Radio 4 to be broadcast in January 2011.

Notes:

1 The term Nakba means catastrophe in Arabic and it refers to the events of 1948 when 800,000 Palestinian were deported and the state of Israel was declared.

2 Palestinian poetess born in 1917, Tuqan is considered to be the founder of the Palestinian feminist nationalist movement which will be discussed in later chapters.

3 Nearest translation is modernism

4 Statistical Databases http://millenniumindicators.un.org/unsd/databases.htm

Modern Times: Osman Rasul – In Memory

hich — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 09:57:27 +0000

By Corin Faife

Ten days ago a friend of mine took his own life. His name was Osman Rasul, and he was a warm, kind, respectful man.

I first met Osman almost exactly six months ago. Sitting in a noisy bar I watched him walk in, hooded against the January cold and hat pulled low over his eyes, carrying a small rucksack with his few possessions inside. He sat with us and smiled sheepishly as another friend explained his story: how he had arrived in Nottingham with nowhere to stay, no money and no contacts to call on. How he had slept rough in the depths of winter and woken frozen almost stiff. How he had eventually found his way to a refugee support organisation and been given a place to crash temporarily, and how he was in need of a more permanent place to stay.

Looking at him I saw a face that had lived through many, many hardships, but still shone with the smile of a good person. And so, there and then, my housemates and I welcomed him to our home.

Over the three months that he lived with me I heard more stories from him: of the murder of his father and brother by a militia in Iraq, and his fear for his own life; of his journey to the UK in the hold of a ship, and his impossible struggle to prove his origin and identity when he had arrived with nothing; of his arrest and imprisonment after a false accusation, and his bitter disbelief when he was acquitted, a year later, to be thrown back out on the street with no life to go back to.

Living with Osman I saw firsthand the spirit-crushing inhumanity of the British asylum system, and how unremittingly bleak life can be for those who are left in limbo. Prohibited from working, with no access to housing or financial support after his first claim was rejected and still awaiting further documents to make a fresh claim, he was left destitute, forced to rely on the charity of others to his continual chagrin. His life was governed by an interminable waiting: for meetings with solicitors, for correspondence from the Home Office, above all for an end to the paralysing uncertainty in which he had lived for the best part of a decade. Still, he fought a daily struggle to build a life on the most uncertain of foundations, taking any odd jobs he could find to pay his own way in our household, visiting friends, growing herbs in an allotment or exploring the city by bicycle.

About a month ago we received a letter explaining that Refugee and Migrant Justice, the outstanding refugee-specific legal firm who were handling Osman’s case, had gone into administration, bankrupted by the Government’s refusal to pay for work done in a timely fashion. The thought of starting again from square one of the process, finding a new solicitor, undergoing another round of interviews, statements and still more waiting, was almost unbearable. His mental health, which had shown signs of fragility, started to decline; desperately searching for some kind of resolution he made a trip to the capital, hoping to escape the labyrinth of soulless bureaucracy and to confront the Home Office directly, to be recognised, for once, as a human being by a system constructed without humanity.

There, at the climactic moment of his journey, he was met once again with wintry indifference. And at that point the light at the end of the tunnel, which had kept him going for so long, flickered out.

——————

There is a huge political battle which must be fought for the rights of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers in Britain. Collectively they have become some of the most demonised minorities in our society, flimsy spectres that can be hauled into the public eye to provoke, and then absorb the vitriol of a populace growing ever more discontented with the status quo.

But for myself and those who knew Osman Rasul, today the bigger political picture is just the ugly backdrop to an intensely personal ritual: mourning the loss of a friend.

Further coverage of the story in the Guardian can be found here.
Support the campaign to raise money for the repatriation of Osman’s body at FriendsOfOsman.wordpress.com

Corin Faife is a writer and activist. His ‘Modern Times’ column appears in Ceasefire every other Tuesday.

Chomsky: London lectures and an 81st birthday

Musab Younis — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:14:01 +0000

Today, Noam Chomsky is 81. A few weeks ago, at his London lecture series – widely anticipated to be his last in the UK – he addressed crowds numbering in their thousands. Musab Younis covered his talks for Ceasefire.

“He should have a Nobel prize,” says the first person I speak to.

The immense Logan Hall at Bloomsbury Square is completely full and we are sitting, along with hundreds of others, in an adjoining room served by a live video link. It is the School of Oriental and African Studies’ largest ever lecture crowd and there is an air of anticipation. Noam Chomsky – linguist, philosopher, critic, polymath – is about to appear on stage. At almost 81, this is likely to be his last visit to London.

I am speaking to members of the audience at random, asking them why they have come to the lecture. The first person I have picked turns out to be a noted professor of philosophy. Has he been aware of Chomsky for a long time?

“Everyone in the world’s been aware of Chomsky for a long time,” he says, laughing, “unless they’re not literate.”

The audience is one of the most diverse I’ve ever seen. A couple of rows in front of the professor sit students Michael, Andrew and Marika, all in their twenties. “My housemate told me about this lecture,” says Michael. “I’ve only ever seen him on YouTube.”

In a three-day visit to London, entirely unadvertised except for small notices on LSE and SOAS websites, each of Chomsky’s three public talks is surrounded by huge crowds of people without tickets, desperate to get in.

Chomsky’s genius is undisputed (even by his enemies) and his astounding productivity over half a century is the stuff of legend, though often bemoaned as providing an impossible standard for others to meet: his first book, Syntactic Structures, was published a full fifty-two years ago, in 1957 – it is still in print – while his latest book, Hopes and Prospects, is scheduled for publication in 2010.

But you could still be forgiven, at first, for wondering what all the fuss is about: he speaks in a low tone, at times barely audible, with no appeal to rhetoric.

It is the substance that everyone has come for, though, and there is plenty of it. His lectures are extraordinarily wide-ranging: the Congo, Cuba, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Latin America, Britain, Iraq, the US and China are all given detailed analyses; over two hours are devoted to the Middle East. Topics range from hard-headed geopolitical analysis to a discursion into Cartesian philosophy.

In an era where politicians and the media commonly decry the “apathy” of the public, the thousands who came to listen to Chomsky demonstrated that there remains a ravenous appetite for serious political analysis. And the huge success of a lecture tour by an icon of libertarian socialism is even more impressive at a time when Britain is said to be swinging inexorably to the right,.

The main thrust of Chomsky’s message was that our current economic and political model has led us to the point where the very survival of our species is far from certain. The threefold threats of climate change, nuclear destruction and mass poverty and starvation are the results, Chomsky believes, of a worldwide politico-economic system which has privileged the wealth and power of a tiny minority above the survival of all.

To make matters worse, Obama has shown no sign of substantial change: his campaign was funded mainly by the very same large corporate institutions which are to blame for our current predicament. The US president has also escalated the ongoing onslaught along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, still intends to control Middle Eastern resources, continues the ‘extraordinary rendition’ policy of worldwide CIA kidnap, and has taken no action to stop illegal Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank.

Chomsky is so unassuming that only occasionally are you reminded of his stature. One of those moments was at his LSE lecture, when he mentioned as an aside how he had been at the LSE a full forty years ago, in 1969, delivering a lecture at the invitation of philosophical giant Karl Popper.

Another was during a small reception held after a lecture at SOAS two days earlier, when he quietly explained to a Lithuanian student the detailed history of anti-Semitism in her country which predated, contrary to her assumptions, the Nazi invasion. She looked shocked. “I bet they didn’t teach you that in school,” he said wryly.

“He is the great moral judge of this age,” says the professor in the SOAS lecture, as a hush descends in anticipation of Chomsky’s emergence, “outstanding above all others.” The thousands who gave him a standing ovation in London last month – some of them arriving six hours early to queue for front row seats – seem to agree.

For a wide selection of Chomsky’s latest articles, visit www.chomsky.info

VICE Magazine interviewed Noam Chomsky during this lecture series. The interviewer was Kate Albright-Hanna, who was Director of Video for New Media on the Obama campaign in 2008.

http://www.vbs.tv/watch/vbs-meets/vbs-meets-noam-chomsky

Interview Noam Chomsky (2008)

Hicham Yezza — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:09:41 +0000

Introduction

Hicham Yezza

Sixty books, hundreds of academic papers, thousands of lectures, interviews and talks over five continents and five decades: at 80, Noam Chomsky is an intellectual, cultural and personal phenomenon. Yet the more interesting thing about the man is probably the fact that he seems completely unfazed, when not downright irritated, at his status as the “Elvis of Academia” (as U2′s Bono calls him).

Thousands of pages have already been written about the man’s personal and intellectual journey from teenage prodigy to acclaimed scholar and the world’s foremost public intellectual. However, September 2008 is a good month to be taking a look at the man’s achievements and positions on the economy. As far back as the late 1960s, Chomsky mounted a robust attack on the economic tenets of unregulated market capitalism. In particular, he denounced the corporate habit of whining about too much government control when the economic going is good only to protest at the need for the government to “intervene” to assist (i.e. bail out) those same corporate interests when the going isn’t so good.

Those who have been observing at close range the unfolding economic disaster on Wall Street and beyond this past year have noted the powerful parallels between the Chomskyan critique of corporate greed and the predictable cries for help emanating from Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and other stalwarts of Market Capitalism.

When Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in Mid-September, straight-faced analysts and business leaders expressed shock at how the company was “allowed to fail” by the federal authorities. A peculiar formulation that you are unlikely to see used when talking about blue-collar workers “allowed” to be made redundant. The incredible assumption of course, was that the tax payer was supposedly a stakeholder (as management-speak has it) in a corporation’s survival when is in trouble but should be a mere bystander when multi-billion dollar profits are being raked in.

Chomsky’s “academic” work is now seminal and whether you agree with its tenets or not, it is undeniable that he has reshaped (indeed, fundamentally altered) the face of linguistics and cognitive theory. There is a common tendency to dismiss his non-linguistics forays into nedia criticism, political theory and foreign affairs as naïve, simple-minded and extremist. But it is precisely those efforts that have highlighted his continued relevance as a master expositor, analyst and educator. It is easy to underestimate the impact of his demystifying, no-nonsense approach as a writer and speaker on generations of activists, intellectuals and readers. But his attack on the academic disease of fetishising “language as obfuscation” has been very effective in exposing the growing tendency of academic circles to establish intellectual niches seemingly inaccessible to the layman/woman (and, as Chomsky has shown repeatedly, often deliberately so) by creating unsurmountable barriers of entry to those members of the public without the necessary qualifications or bona fides: obscure jargon, layers of intellectual meta-structures to mask simple (rather than simplistic) truisms and a taste for the convoluted and the oblique (notably his attack on certain exponents of postmodernism and literary theory).

Whether he is seen as a prophet or a charlatan, Chomsky certainly leaves very few indifferent. And it is this ability to bring out the mind of his listener out of its atrophied comfort that continues to excite and stimulate. In his interview with Ceasefire – the first of two parts – you can see the trademark rigour, intellectual honesty and genuine humility that have characterized his life and his work. His profile as the “world’s greatest intellectual” (a formulation he has incidentally denounced as meaningless) certainly shows no signs of diminishing. Whenever a major crisis erupts (9/11, The Iraq War, The Georgian War), or a major event takes place, Chomsky’s opinion on the matter is always quickly solicited (and dissected) by disciples and foes alike. This is as good a definition of “being relevant” as you’re likely to find.

Ultimately, whether as oracle or as nemesis, Chomsky’s relevance is set to continue for many decades to come. As far as we’re concerned: Amen to that!

The interview

August 18, 2008

Is a two-state solution to the Middle-East conflict still possible? Edward Said ended up supporting a binational-state position.

A two-state settlement in accord with the very broad and longstanding international consensus remains possible. An agreement along those lines was almost reached at Taba Egypt in January 2001, the one significant departure of the US and Israel from the rejectionist stand that has been primarily responsible for undermining this outcome. And though there have been changes for the worse since, they are not irreversible.

My own view, since I reached political consciousness in the 1940s, is that a binational state would be the most reasonable solution for all concerned. From 1967 to the mid-1970s, steps could have been taken towards federalism and in the longer term binationalism. I wrote and spoke about the matter quite extensively at the time. By the mid-1970s, that opportunity was lost, and the only way to approach federalism and closer integration is in stages, the first stage being a two-state settlement. It is intriguing that when the proposal was feasible, it elicited utter outrage, but now that it is not feasible (except as a late stage in a long-term project), it is welcomed within the mainstream (New York Times, New York Review, etc.). The reason, I suspect, is that the proposal is basically a gift to hard-line rejectionists, who can claim that “they want to destroy us” so we had better take all we can.

We should attend carefully to the crucial distinction between proposal and advocacy. We can propose that everyone should live in peace and harmony. It rises to the level of advocacy when we sketch a feasible path from here to there. The only advocacy of a binational state that I know of is the one I described: in stages, beginning with a two-state settlement.

Supporters of a one-state settlement often argue that if Israel takes over all of Palestine, it will face an internal struggle for civil rights resembling the anti-apartheid movement. That is an illusion, however. Israel and the US can simply persist in their current programs of incorporating whatever is of value to them within Israel, while taking no responsibility for Palestinians in the scattered fragments that remain, and leaving them to rot and turn on each other, as is happening in Gaza.

Do you think there is a real chance that anarcho-syndicalism will ever be implemented on a large scale?

Prediction in human affairs is a very uncertain enterprise. Too much depends on will and choice.

There is also little point in speculation. Those who regard these ideals as worth pursuing should do what they can to lay the basis for implementing them, whatever their (necessarily uninformed) guesses as to the likelihood of success.

Do you agree that the 21st century will be dominated by the rise of China and India? If so, would this be a positive or negative development?

Looking over a long historical stretch, China and India are now beginning to recover their leading role in the global economy up to the 18th century, before they were crushed by Western (later also Japanese) imperialism. It is highly questionable, I believe, whether they can return to anything like the status they once had. Both countries face enormous internal problems, social and environmental. As one illustration, in the latest Human Development Index China ranks 81st and India 128th (about where it was when the neoliberal reforms were initiated 15 years ago). That is only one indication of very severe problems, which it will not be easy to overcome. Any progress they make should be, on balance, a positive development, though the world is too complex for any simple judgment.

Do you think the global anti-war movement has failed to achieve a critical mass of support over the past five years?

The notion “critical mass” is not well enough defined to respond. It has registered achievements as well as failures. Take Iraq. It has failed to bring the war to an end, but it has succeeded in preventing US escalation to anything remotely like the level of Vietnam. The “why” question would require a lengthy disquisition, not a brief response.

Does the term “public intellectual” still carry any meaningful weight in the 21st century? do they have a role to play?

As much as ever.

Why proportional representation helps the BNP

Admin — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:29:36 +0000

Andrew Gibson

Proportional representation, like freedom of speech, is a chum of demagogic racism. The BNP have aimed their sights at this alien electoral system in the June EU Parliament elections and for good reason: just 9% of the vote in the North West would give them a realistic chance of winning their first ever Parliamentary seat (they polled 6.4% last time).

The BNP have been making ground in local elections, now with 56 councillors on principle local authorities. In most by-elections they have contested this year, they have significantly increased their vote share. In an deadening victory in the formerly safe Labour ward of Swanley St. Mary’s in Sevenoaks, Kent, they increased their vote share by 41.8%. It is not uncommon to see the BNP come second or third in local elections. By combining their core vote and the raspberry (or ‘Fuck You’) vote, they have been taking a similar electoral role to the Liberal Democrats. This new popularity, combined with an electoral system that rewards minority parties, lubricates their chances of gaining MEPs in June. This matters because the more power they get, the less taboo they are. This nation of quiet racists will feel less shame at the ballot box.

There are broad similarities between local and European elections in the way they are contested and the way people vote. Traditionally, the turnout is low and the anti-government vote high. Minority parties flood pliable areas with resources, to maximise their chances of getting somebody elected. This is what the BNP are doing in the North West and West Midlands. On top of an intense, repetitive canvassing and fund raising campaign, their advertising has been audacious. This includes use of mobile adverts demanding British jobs for British workers, known as ‘Truth Trucks’, and promotional stalls in every town centre in Cumbria and the Black Country. Their Fuhrer, Nick Griffin, tops their list of candidates in the North West region and their Deputy Fuhrer, Simon Darby, tops the list in the West Midlands. Though EU enlargement means less seats to go around, they still have a healthy chance; in the former region they missed a seat in the 2004 elections by 1.5% of the vote share, in the latter their shortfall was 1.7%. Mr. Griffin has stepped down from his usual duties to concentrate solely on the European elections. This has primarily involved fund raising road shows, giving speeches comparing the BNP’s electoral campaign to the 1940 Battle of Britain. He also just released a video of himself at the Whitehall Cenotaph, conflating donation to the BNP’s campaign fund with honourable sacrifice in a World War. This hallucinatory rhetoric will resonate with some.

To conclude, all it will take for the BNP to win seats at the European Parliament is for them to mobilise (already happening) and for UKIP to do less well (likely). In a sense, the d’Hondt voting system is too democratic. By compromising with minority parties, it gives the oxygen of publicity to fascists.

Ceasefire Magazine » Profiles

Profile Fred Halliday: Political Journeys

Activism Tom Hurndall: Honouring a legacy

Modern Times: Playing to Win

Michael Albert at during his Ceasefire Session, Nottingham, UK (31 Oct-01 Nov 2010) (Photo: Corin Faife)

Profile: Slavoj Žižek – The Dog’s Bollocks … at the Media Dinner Party

Culture Fix: Robert Chrisgau, doyen of US music critics, retires

Remembering Mahmoud Darwish – How the revolution was written

Modern Times: Osman Rasul – In Memory

Chomsky: London lectures and an 81st birthday

Interview Noam Chomsky (2008)

Introduction

The interview

Why proportional representation helps the BNP