Shunya's Notes

Dabashi on Obama in Cairo

Professor Hamid Dabashi's response to Obama's historic speech at Al-Azhar university on 4th June 09 mirrors my own:

Much hasty praise and considerable legitimate criticism has already been made about the president's speech, especially about the distance between its floral eloquence and the scarcity of its specific policies, which would push the speech towards hallowed, however soothing, vacuity. But the fact is that the world is so deeply wounded and it is in such dire need of truth and reconciliation with itself that President Obama's words, coming from the person that he is, an African-American descendent of an African Muslim, were like drops of merciful rain on an arid desert...

All legitimate criticisms notwithstanding, it is only at the symbolic, suggestive, or oratorical plane that the speech must be appraised. The most important problem with the president's speech -- healing and soothing as it was -- is not its lack of specificity, but in fact its general contour, its symbolic trajectory, entirely trapped as it is in a readily received and never questioned binary between "Islam and the West".

More here.

The Rise and Fall of the LTTE

Here is a short but insightful interview from Himal Southasian, recorded weeks before the defeat of the LTTE and the death of their leader Prabhakaran on May 18, 2009. In it, two former LTTE members explain the factors behind the rise and fall of Tamil militancy in Sri Lanka. In the excerpt below, they tackle the rise of the movement; read the interview for their reasons behind its fall. (Registration may be required but is well worth the effort.)

What followed from the 1950s onwards was the burgeoning of a virulent form of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, and the passing of a series of discriminatory legislation against minorities and Tamils in particular. The Sinhala Only Act was passed in 1956; the Republican Constitution was adopted in 1972, giving Buddhism a place of privilege in the constitution while removing the protection that was afforded minorities in the previous constitution; and immediately afterwards, the infamous policy of standardisation of marks for university admissions was also implemented in 1972, which Tamils found to be discriminatory. This came alongside colonisation attempts that had begun in the 1950s in the Eastern Province, where a lot of Tamils lived, radically altering the local demography and reducing Tamil and Muslim representation in Parliament. Non-violent protests by Tamil parliamentarians and their supporters were responded to with periodic violence by the state, throughout this period.

In my opinion, the minority leadership did not quite understand the forces driving this Sinhala nationalism. Therefore, rather than build a strong grassroots democratic movement, the minority leaders felt that their problems could be fixed by going into deals with the political leadership at the Centre, thereby securing concessions for their communities. The standard official narrative of Tamil nationalism will always tell us that the Tamil leadership waged a decades-long democratic struggle against the Sri Lankan state before giving way to the militant movement. I believe this to be incorrect.

The militarisation of the movement started not as a result of exhausting methods of protracted democratic struggle, but as a response to the 1972 standardisation of marks referred to earlier. This affected a miniscule percentage (about 0.01 percent) of the Sri Lankan population – the Jaffna and Colombo Tamil middle-class and upper-class youth. Years of poor economic conditions during the 1960s and 1970s prompted the first JVP [Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna] insurrection of mostly poor and rural Sinhala youth. Following its merciless putdown by the then government, the policy of standardisation was set forth to placate anti-government sentiment in the south. This policy required Tamils to have higher marks for acceptance into university, which marginalised Tamil youths who looked to university education as a means to secure employment in the state sector. The perceived discrimination catalysed the taking-up of arms by select middle- and lower-middle-class Tamil youth of Jaffna, initially.

Recruitment of people from the poorer sections of the Tamil community into the militant movement happened afterwards. Because of the narrow class composition of the movement’s leadership, many marginalised groups – Muslims, Up-country Tamils, Dalits, Tamils who hailed from the Eastern Province and the Vanni – were alienated and excluded from the so-called ‘Tamil nation’. While the ‘bourgeois’ struggle waged on, Sinhala Buddhist nationalism responded with violence, through periodic government-instigated pogroms against the Tamils. It was after the Black July killings of 1983 that Tamil militancy mushroomed.

China's Final Frontier

Prospect Magazine has an interesting article by Parag Khanna, who "visits China's remote, rebellious western provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang—and sees how China's government is today bending central Asia to its will." (Thanks, Peony.)

Both Tibet and Xinjiang have the geographic misfortune of lying either on top of resources China wants, or on the path to resources it needs. Texas-sized Xinjiang has the country’s largest oil, gas, coal, uranium and gold deposits, while Tibet has timber, uranium and gold.... Since most of the ethnically dominant Han Chinese are in the east, and most of China’s resources are in the west, this ongoing westward march [of the Han Chinese] is inevitable. And it has meant the wholesale, systematic repression of the indigenous inhabitants by a mix of military, economic and, above all, demographic means. Like the native Americans, the Tibetans and Uighurs have been cornered, corralled and relocated under a system which condescends and harasses at every level. Han Chinese have been taught to think of Tibetans and Uighurs as barbarians, viewing their mission civilatrice today the way American settlers did: they are bringing development and modernity to people and places that have always lacked them.

Rawls vs. Confucius

Here is a thought-provoking study by Erin Cline that compares the political philosophies of John Rawls and Confucius (Kongzi):

Over the past two decades, a number of studies comparing Chinese and Western views of political philosophy have painted a picture of radically different approaches and theories. Some authors argue that while modern liberal Western theories are focused on rights, justice, equality, and freedom, Chinese Confucians are largely unconcerned with the received topics of Western political philosophy.... They also tend to argue that, while the assumption of atomistic individualism represents a fatal flaw in liberal theory, the Confucian view offers us a superior alternative partly because it takes seriously the view that family and community relationships constitute our identity. These studies have helped to highlight the way that philosophical traditions can provide insight into different cultural and historical concerns, as well as the need to take seriously the role of the family in the basic structure of society. However, some of these studies have neglected the diversity of views represented in both the Confucian and Western liberal traditions. They also tend to leave those who do not think the liberal tradition is fatally flawed wondering what can be gained from comparative studies of Chinese and Western sources.

In this article I aim to show that there is much more to be said about political philosophy in the Confucian and Western liberal traditions, especially when it comes to moral psychology and the development of political virtues.

More HERE. If you think the essay is too long, at least read the two concluding paragraphs below.

Nandy on Indian Elections

The social scientist Ashis Nandy's take on the recently concluded Indian elections:

In our society, we live with radical diversities — diversity that is not based on tamed forms of difference. The US is a perfect example of tamed diversity. You get every kind of food and dress and cultural activity in America. You think you are very cosmopolitan if you can distinguish Huaiyang food from Schezwan food, or South Korean ballet from Beijing opera, or Ming dynasty china from Han dynasty china in a museum. This is diversity that is permissible, legitimate, tamed.

Radical diversity is when you tolerate and live with people who challenge some of the very basic axioms of your political life. Like most of South Asia, Indians have an old capacity to live with such diversity. A powerful example is Sajjad Lone contesting the election this year. Nobody objected that a secessionist wants to take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution. Everyone spoke of it glowingly. I consider that a tolerance for radical diversity. In such a society, all excesses are ultimately checkmated.

In India, we live in a country where the gods are imperfect and the demons are never fully demonic. I call this an ‘epic culture’ because an epic is not complete without either the gods or the demons. They make the story together. This is a part of our consciousness, and ultimately, I think it influences our public life. People go up to a point with their grievance, then get tired of it. They realise that to go further is a dangerous thing because it destroys the basic algorithm of your life. They say, enough is enough, let us go back to a normal life. This election represents something of that consciousness. We probably need this kind of interregnum in politics. They have a soothing effect on our public life. This is what most Indians feel.

The second underlying theme is that people were searching for a sort of minimum decency. Negative campaigns, excessively personal attacks, hostile slogans — all of this seemed to upset the voter. When the BJP and the Left targeted Manmohan Singh, making him the butt of jokes and accusations, Singh became a hero for the very qualities people joked about. His weakness, his absence of a political base, his susceptibility to pressures of the Congress high command — instead of looking like liabilities, these things suddenly began to look like a marker of a genteel type of politics. I think that paid dividends.

More here. (Also check out Prof. Bidyut Chakraborty's analysis.)

The Dance of Democracy

Professor Bidyut Chakrabarty provides a brief survey of the tangled coalition politics in the general election now underway in India:

The results of the last two consecutive Lok Sabha polls confirmed the decline of pan-Indian parties and their inability to form governments at the Centre without support from regional and state-based parties. Both the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and United Progressive Alliance (UPA) are illustrative of coalitions that are not ideology-inspired, but formed by parties clustered around two major parties, the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for specific political gains with regard to the constituencies they represent. By forming alliances with well-entrenched regional parties, both these national parties are guided by calculations of electoral victory. The smaller regional parties form alliances with leading national parties for a federal presence while the former agree to join hands with the latter to capture office.

More here.

And below a few election season cartoons from the English-language media:

America, the Cold War, and the Taliban

(Cross-posted as my fourth column on 3QuarksDaily)

The US pulled out of Vietnam (video) in 1975 after more than a decade and a humiliating defeat. The war had been expensive, the draft unpopular, and too many white boys had come home in body bags. A strong antiwar mood had set in amidst the public and the Congress. Most Americans now believed it was never their war to fight. The Nixon Doctrine held that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars.”[1] At least in the short term, direct military engagement in the third world seemed politically unviable for any US administration.

Besides Vietnam, the US had fought and lost another war in Indochina – in Laos – but rather differently. This was a proxy war, sponsored by the US but led by Hmong mercenaries on the ground. It was waged in relative secrecy, far from “congressional oversight, public scrutiny, and conventional diplomacy.” The advantages of such a war were soon evident: “Even at the end of the war, few Americans knew that in Laos, the USAF had fought ‘the largest air war in military history ... dropping 2.1 million tons of bombs over this small, impoverished nation — the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan during WWII.’”[2]

In the 60s and 70s, anti-colonial and nationalistic struggles were cropping up in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Blinded by its anti-commie paranoia, the US saw even popular movements for social and economic justice as precursors to communism, their leaders as Soviet proxies, and was determined to combat and crush them. But, given the unviability of direct military engagement on so many fronts, proxy war was the only military option left to the US. There was one minor obstacle though: how to finance all these proxy wars? Many Congressmen asked awkward questions, especially after the disaster in Indochina. When they agreed to fund, they wanted debates and oversight. The idea of a new, recurring source of money — bypassing the Congress — gripped the minds of many.

Vietnam: American Holocaust

I came across this 2008 documentary film made by Clay Claiborne and narrated by Martin Sheen, Vietnam: American Holocaust. Below is a short excerpt (9 mins); the entire film (87 mins) is online here. It contains some of the most horrifying and disturbing war footage I have ever seen. The oddly persistent idea that the United States was/is a "benevolent hegemon" seems utterly depraved in light of this. While at it, also check out this archival footage of a Napalm air attack on a Vietnam village. Be warned: you may need a stiff drink afterwards.

State of Emergency

Moni Mohsin's brief but compelling history of modern Pakistan:

Pakistan’s problems are not new. Established in 1947 as a homeland for the Muslims of the Subcontinent, its Islamic and secular identities have been in conflict ever since. In Pakistan’s sixty–year history, a corrupt, self–serving ruling class of land owners; a crooked bureaucracy; a boom–and–bust economy; long–simmering tensions with India over Kashmir; and a huge, powerful army that regularly enlists in coups have repeatedly thwarted progress. I do not recall a sustained period of peace, stability, and prosperity during my lifetime.

More here. (via 3QD)

Free Market Prisons

Ever heard of the Corrections Corporation of America, "the nation’s industry leader of privately-managed corrections solutions for federal, state and local government"? Traded on the NY Stock Exchange, it runs "more than 64 correctional facilities and detention centers from coast to coast, in small cities, metropolitan areas and destinations in between" in 21 states. As one might guess, the interests of its shareholders are singularly aligned with — you guessed it — growth in the number of prisoners. Each quarter, its financial results report key metrics like the growth of inmate populations and the number of new beds placed into service. If these numbers fall, the stock price falls. That's no good for a corporation, is it?

The land of the free already incarcerates 2.2 million people, or 1% of its adult population (the highest rate in the world; five times higher than in W. Europe and twice as high as in Singapore, which is infamous for its spartan legal system). British columnist George Monbiot describes what tends to happen when the prison industry becomes part of the free market system:

It’s a staggering case; more staggering still that it has scarcely been mentioned on this side of the ocean. Last week two judges in Pennsylvania were convicted of jailing some 2000 children in exchange for bribes from private prison companies.

Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan sent children to jail for offences so trivial that some of them weren’t even crimes. A 15 year-old called Hillary Transue got three months for creating a spoof web page ridiculing her school’s assistant principal. Mr Ciavarella sent Shane Bly, then 13, to boot camp for trespassing in a vacant building. He gave a 14 year-old, Jamie Quinn, 11 months in prison for slapping a friend during an argument, after the friend slapped her. The judges were paid $2.6 million by companies belonging to the Mid Atlantic Youth Services Corp for helping to fill its jails. This is what happens when public services are run for profit.

It’s an extreme example, but it hints at the wider consequences of the trade in human lives created by private prisons. In the US and the UK they have a powerful incentive to ensure that the number of prisoners keeps rising.

More here.