avinasharavind

Who made them powerful? (WOF)

2011-04-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

Chua starts her discussion on indigenously African, market-dominant ethnicities with an in-depth look at the Kikuyu, the largest and wealthiest indigenous "tribe" in Kenya. There's some vagueness from Chua about when exactly the Kikuyu became an economically dominant force in Kenya. She notes - "Before colonization, Kikuyu territory stretched from Nairobi to the slopes of Mount Kenya" implying they had some influential power (not necessarily economic, however) prior to colonization (Chua, 105). She soon after adds, however, "as early as the 1920s, while the country was still under British rule, the Kikuyu emerged as a disproportionately urban, 'capitalist' elite among Kenya's indigenous tribes" (Chua, 105). The unclear wording ("emerged") manages to both implicate colonial rule for introducing capitalist inequalities into a pristine pre-colonial Africa (Chua shies away from overt references to "noble savages") but avoids directly blaming colonial authorities and the Kikuyu themselves for the economic inequalities.

As she moves the discussion forward into the "post"-colonial era, Chua begins overtly blaming government policies, however, showing that she will blame African politicians for inegalitarian economic policies, but not colonial governments. She specifically blames Kenya's first African president, Jomo Kenyatta, for having "adopted ethnically biased economic policies blatantly favoring the Kikuyu" most notably the "transfer to the Kikuyu large tracts of the fertile, cash-crop-producing land formerly controlled by whites to the exclusion of other groups" (Chua 105 ; Chua, 105-106). Here we have the example of a continuation of colonial period inequality continuing beyond the dismantling of the colonial state, by changing hands into a dominant economic group. Chua discusses the facts of colonial inequalities enforced by Europeans dryly, noting contested histories about which indigenous groups were most persecuted, but with minimal attention to the exact means of oppression. Her references to colonial inequalities are only understood as explanations of the origins of post-colonial inequalities. She emphasizes the failures of African-controlled states in a way she does not emphasize European-controlled ones.

In short, her discussion on the origins of indigenously African ethnicities which dominate markets largely ignores pre-colonial inequalities (which is a painful mistake given the centuries of inequality between Hutu and Tutsi, to name a better known example), perpetuates ideas that there is a colonial origin to all major facets of African society (which centers the discussion on European actors), but holds a double standard between colonial and post-colonial governments that to some extent trivializes the unfair practices of colonial administrations while harshly analyzing the inequalities administrated by indigenous African groups (which is just an overt apologetic for colonialism). She repeats nearly every major narrative about Africa that many Africans see as neo-colonial and destructive - that they had no agency or history before colonization, that African history is many about colonial activity and indigenous responses, and complaints that "post"-colonial governance is failing and needs to be regulated by outside sources.

The generic colonialism and the generic African (WOF)

2011-04-20T09:35:00.000-07:00

Chua begins her fourth chapter, "The 'Ibo of Cameroon': Market-Dominant Minorities in Africa," far from Cameroon, with brief allusion to the generic colonialism. As Chua describes-

"The problem [of communal economic inequality] is starkest in southern Africa. In country after country, a handful of whites engorged themselves on natural resources and human labor, creating enclaves of spectacular wealth and modernization, surrounded by mounting, justifiable hatred among the indigenous black majority" (Chua, 95).

It's good that Chua openly condemns the past colonial administrations in southern Africa, but she does so in a manner that's generic - equating the experiences of all "locals" with a single type of oppression. She quickly moves into examples, thankfully, to move us out of a broad and unspecific idea of "Africa". Unfortunately, in the particulars, Chua's recurrent emphasis on empowered groups. Her first case study, Angola, tracks the experiences of the Portuguese colonists - quoting an entire page from Ryszard Kapuściński's famous account of the last Portuguese huddling in an airport, preparing to leave Angola, now that it was no longer theirs. Chua helpfully adds, after the quote, the reassurance that "Most of the Portuguese go out safely" only as an afterthought also saying that the Angolans quickly saw their nation "disintegrate into a civil war of unspeakable brutality" (Chua, 96). From this description, Chua briefly touches on Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa, where she merely distinguishes that the white enclaves remained intact - with the same supposedly unfortunately conflict between the colonized and the colonizers waiting to happen.

In a new section, Chua goes into greater detail about the remaining enclaves of white colonists (or their descendants) scattered throughout southern Africa, primarily through talking about a particular Boer family she personally knows. Through this she examines the very important distinction between the Afrikaners and English whites, and even briefly mentions the somewhat enfranchised Asian and "Colored" (mixed race) minorities. A perhaps unintentional message is that the groups comparatively high within the South African racial hierarchy are diverse, defined by internal conflicts, and otherwise complex characters. The clear omission of indigenous (or less indigenous) blacks, however, seems to place them outside of such a category - they aren't market-dominant and (coincidentally?) Chua doesn't analyze them as potentially having loyalties to a different group than their "race" as constructed by outsiders. She's enabling the colonial definition of the "native".

Chua eventually progresses into closer looks at Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Namibia as well, but again, the "black" population is treated as uniform, homogeneous, and otherwise without individuality, compared to white enclaves that are contrasted with each other regularly and repeatedly defined by minute differences in original European nation and relationship with outside nations (namely the UK and US). The only example of any such comparison is a brief comment on the Herero, a tribe that the Germans nearly exterminated in putting down anti-colonial revolutions during the aptly named Herero War. Chua simply notes that, during colonial exploitation in Namibia, "Germans, who starting in the late 1890s turned the dozen or so major ethnic groups constituting black Namibia into forced labor - almost annihilating the particularly rebellious Herero tribe" (Chua, 100). The only inclusion of differentiation among what the Europeans decided were "black" Africans is in the context of a response to colonial actors - there's no sense of localized experience in Chua's initial analysis without a stronger emphasis on the distinctions between the white colonizers and the black populace. For now, Chua places the only distinguishing between black Africans in a context that obscures that with the distinguishing between colonial agents and colonial subjects.

Next week, we'll move onto Chua's section on African intermediaries - the only distinct group among black Africans she discusses in depth.

Hegemony (WOF)

2011-04-13T11:13:00.000-07:00

Chua's chapter on Russia and its (sometimes Jewish) oligarchs is perhaps her most convoluted yet. Beyond her initial point that class and ethnicity interact and sometimes become indistinguishable for certain actors, she seems determined to characterize individuals differently, depending on their race and class. We saw this written large in her previous chapter on Latin America - where white elites were largely excused from their classist and racist behavior and the poor, predominantly ex-slaves of African descent and highly marginalized indigenous peoples, became a faceless mass which Chua chided for challenging (quite calmly in most examples) ethnic and class bigotry.

That simplistic division doesn't work as well for Chua in the case of Russia, it seems. When a historically alienated ethnic group - Jews - become the elite over a white population, Chua seems more willing to explain their behavior and appearance in terms of their ethnicity, and other wise reduce them to that. Because of that, she contrasted the gentile Russian oligarch's furniture with those of his Jewish counterparts - and called the Jews tacky. As the chapter progresses, she moves from typifying the Jewish experience into discussion of the individual oligarchs, but continues to cast Jews in a negative light. She unquestioningly quotes a description of one of the businessmen, which calls him "the apotheosis of sleaziness" and "Slight and balding, with lovingly manicured hands and a fondness for larding his conversation with Latin phrases" (Chua, 87). The common antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as corrupt (sleazy), unattractive (slight, balding), unmanly (manicured hands), and soft intellectuals (fondness for Latin phrases) apparently never occurred to her as a reason to disregard that source.

In spite of this, Chua seems unable to view the oligarchs as dangerous individuals. Although willing to cast Jews as an ethnicity in a poor light, she views the oligarchs as having rightfully won a monopolistic control over Russian industry. She writes "They may have been ruthless, but they were plainly smart, unsurpassed entrepreneurs who built their empires from scratch" (90). She seems to excuse or at least tolerate the violation of consumers' trust (and in some cases Chua notes, murders necessary to avoid government regulation or taxation), viewing that as an unfortunate, but acceptable means to the end of wealth.

Likewise, concerns from the poor (gentile and Jewish alike) that approach the oligarchs as ruthless elites rather than ruthless Jews are completely lacking in Chua's analysis - a fact she doesn't seem to notice, as she doesn't comment on it. Instead, Chua focuses on the rise of neo-Nazis and other antisemitic groups using the oligarchs as a rhetorical point. She thus paints the Russian people of being incapable of separating the fact that the oligarchs are Jewish from the fact that the oligarchs are ruining many Russians lives. One has to wonder, however, if her failure to frame the argument in such a way suggests that even she can't explain the hatred of the oligarchs without thinking of them as Jews.

The result is intriguing. Attacking class inequalities is treated as synonymous with overt racism, and therefore unacceptable. More subtle racism, such as thinking of Jews in highly stereotyped ways, however, apparently flies under the radar, and escapes notice. The desire, as it seems, is to prevent Russians (or any people) from attacking the class structure in exchange for limiting the excesses of racism. This seems to be a brilliant hegemonic narrative - that we can solve classism or racism, but not both.

(Next week, we start chapter 4, "The 'Ibo of Cameroon'").

Miscellaneous Thoughts

2011-04-06T15:46:00.000-07:00

Matthew Yglesias makes an interesting point about how technological improvements change the specifics of market pressures for jobs. This is specifically pushing towards certain types of service jobs which can neither be automated or "off-shored". What's worryingly lacking from his analysis is a good look at how current aspects of state policies actively undermine large numbers of people for those type of jobs. With declining funding of vocational education as part of many nations' anti-recession "fixes" a lot of potential service-providers won't be taught the necessary skills to thrive in this economy. Likewise, with the economic problems having given nationalistic groups a political edge and already prevalent ethnic biases in service jobs, it won't be surprising to see people of color, women, and other marginalized groups as failing to proportionately take part in this new economy.

According to the Economist, multiple critics of the anti-blasphemy laws in Pakistan have been killed.

Apparently, Republicans are determining tax policies from biblical parables. Unsurprisingly, they conclude that the Bible agrees with what they already believed. What might that suggest about their use of the Bible?

Jonah Goldberg, of course, wrote something pretty clearly internally inconsistent. First he states that high crime rates are driving the black middle class away from the District of Columbia. Then he says that dropping crime rates are pulling white professionals in. And then he hilariously misunderstands how 1950s racism worked.

The Ruthlessness of Jews (WOF)

2011-03-02T11:43:00.000-08:00

Between the historical analysis of Jews throughout Eastern Europe and an examination of the actual "oligarchs" in question, Chua has a brief section titled "The Rise of the Oligarchs" which emphasizes how some Jews prospered during later Soviet shortages and eventually leveraged black market positions into membership among the post-Communist economic elite. She gets into the details with one anecdote from a Ukrainian Jew:

My uncle, for example, had one of those underground firms. He manufactured shoes on his own. Later he sold the shoes either at the weekend flea market or through an 'off-the-books' arrangement with a state-owned shoe store. What my uncle did was considered illegal. Yet everyone liked him and depended on him. There would have been no shoes on the shelves without people like my uncle (Chua, 83).

Conspicuously missing from this account (and from Chua's analysis of this account) is the role of black markets in exploiting consumers by demanding high prices for basic necessities (say, shoes) and establishing a bribery-based economy. Those impacts are far-reaching, with the former draining average consumers funds and the latter establishing an inefficient and unresponsive economic climate. This is one of the few cases were Chua curiously doesn't present Jews as (always) profiteers from economic instability. As soon as Chua takes over narration a more negative tone seems to return, as Chua explains that one of the Jewish "oligarchs"

started a ticket scalping agency while a student in the economically stagnant early eighties. Friedman [the "oligarch"] paid Moscow university students to wait in line to buy theater tickets, which could then be bartered on the black market. Although ticket scalping existed long before Friedman came on the scene, he was the first to organize it into a well-disciplined business, employing 150 scholars - on full salary if they waited overnight, or half salary if they queued up in the early morning - and 'managers' from every university department. Friedman, as a kind of controlling shareholder, would meet once a week with his managers to review their business plans (Chua, 84)

While clearly imply a coercive relationship with young employees during a time of economic hardship, the negativity is muted, strangely. This seems to play odds with Chua's politics. Her writing repeatedly suggests a thinking that Jews can't do anything but be oddly successful, but even she can't rationalize the excesses of the economic elite in post-communist Russia. She seems enamored with the idea of the black market - something raw but contained, where the Jews (and others) could reach their full potential without having it spill over into the larger society.

With that, she laments over the intrusiveness and corruption that has become a part of working for the new elite, one of which she notes "installed surveillance cameras in every office to monitor his new employees [...] one third of them weren't working hard enough, so he fired them" (Chua, 87). Where in Latin America inequalities were treated as either historical or passive (and above all, social rather than economic), in her analysis of Russia she writes of Jews that do monstrous things, but still seems enthralled by their capacity to do such things.

Faulty

2011-02-26T13:24:00.000-08:00

It's time for people to start paying attention to the methodologies behind the polls they cite, or the implications of arguments they make, because failing to do so is going to get people killed. The interim government in Egypt is making demands about the new constitution, Libya is on the verge of more violence, and the government of China has deleted all Chinese blogs that mention the word "jasmine" (referencing the various revolutions in the Islamic world). This isn't just a phenomenon distant from its American and European critics - now with calls for live ammunition to be used on the Wisconsin protesters. Being sloppy about who deserves ("Western" or UN or American or whatever) support and who doesn't is going to get people killed - and arguably already has, in the form of massive arms deals with various dictators.

There actually are people making insane, disturbing claims about these recent events. Fred Clark on Slacktivist has already done lengthy and complex responses to John MacArthur's statements in this interview, but his basic argument bares repeating here. He states-

I just think the upshot of all of this is more instability, more chaos, you can’t make a transition to democracy this way; it’s impossible. After all, who said democracy’s the best form of government? No matter what the form of government is, the Bible doesn’t advocate anything but a theocracy.

That is literally the reasoning behind many of these American and European critics of the various protests in the Middle East and elsewhere as of late. They see the Islamic world as incapable of producing anything other than an at least partially theocratic government system - which either threatens them (among the more libertarian critics) or threatens their competing theocratic systems (as with MacArthur). The inevitable conclusion of this line of thought is that secular government (even if dictatorial) is ordained as a back-up when an ideal (ie: not Islamic) theocracy is the only alternative:

I’m not saying Moammar Gadhafi is the best leader, I’m not saying that Mubarak is a great, benevolent and just leader, not when he’s got $70 billion in his own pockets at the expense of people. But what I am saying is that whatever the government would be, even if it was Caesar in the New Testament, that the believers are commanded to live orderly lives, peaceful, quiet lives, subjecting themselves to the powers that be because they’re ordained of God.

This is the best of all possible worlds, so they say. God has blessed the Muslim world with brutal dictatorship, so they say. Naturally, this argument has to admit that it doesn't care about what life is like under such circumstances, with MacArthur explaining, "I don’t think religious freedom is even an issue in the advance of the church. If you look at China, I don’t know what the numbers are, tens of millions of believers in China when it was forbidden." He not only supports dictatorships but openly acknowledges that this requires caring less about the quality of life for... well... everyone. Or rather, as I'm sure he thinks about it, it matters more what type of life you lead with relation to the next life than what type of life you lead with relation to the present. MacArthur goes beyond that though and explains that he even prefers some persecution, because he sees it as a purifying force:

Look at Japan which was open and free and you’ll search forever in any city in Japan to find one Christian. So democracy, freedom of religion or persecution, if you had to pick your poison I think you might want to pick persecution because you get a purer church.

Note the subtle allusion there - you pick your poison, choosing between persecution (of some in determinate group of people, if not everyone) and freedom of religion. Freedom of religion isn't just compared unfavorably to persecution - it's seen as something bad and without the benefit of creating zealous would-be theocracy supporters.

Beyond these ideological problems, there's been misused statistics to back-up many of these claims. Some of this is deliberate, but in some cases the fault lies with flawed analysis or explanation within supposedly impartial polls themselves.

Take the example of this series of Pew Research polls, which contains this lovely graph:

Can you spot the problems? There's an assumption that what varies between these countries is merely people, not the forms that Islam has taken in their life, let alone their political culture. Egypt and Pakistan are distant countries, but they're united by (until recently) both having an openly American-backed secular dictatorship. In those conditions, political reforms in the name of Islam are quite attractive - they're responsive to local needs, legitimize themselves with appeals to justice, and are often more democratic than the secular status quo (even if they are radically less democratic than other secular options). This contrasts with places where the secular status quo is more democratic (namely Turkey) or Islamic social movements have had distinct negative impacts on the way of life (namely Lebanon, where Islamist attacks resulting in the recent Israeli occupation). It's telling that these surveys never asked these various Muslims why they have the opinions about political Islam that they do.

But beyond those blatant flaws, there's clear methodological flaws that went into the creation of these figures. As the article explains (if you follow the asterisk!):

I suppose that might word, for those that see Islam as playing a large role (if that's bad, then it's because Islam is playing a negative role - whereas if that's good, then it's because it's doing good things). But, I don't follow the train of thought when it comes to analyzing those that see Islam as playing a small role. If Islam is playing a small role (supposedly), and that's a bad thing, how can you rule out that it playing a role at all is what respondents have a problem with? Why assume that problem with that is that Islam is playing an inadequate role? All this emphasis on the metaphorical size of Islam in certain places seems to just obscure what various Muslims see Islam as even doing.

In the end, this entire section of these polls seems framed around not actually asking the Islamic world what they want, and then inferring from what little questions were asked very broad determinations. That's irresponsible. What's more, cavalier representation like that is what's getting people killed.

Innate Jewishness (WOF)

2011-02-23T11:18:00.000-08:00

One of the most disgusting aspects of racism is how it strips its targets of agency - making them into animals, automatons, or some other mindless subhuman. Amy Chua dances uncomfortably close to that type of argument during this weeks installment of World on Fire.

This becomes apparent when she moves past a brief analysis of Jewish history into direct study of the situation in Russia using a conversation with a New York financial analyst and Jewish Russian emigrée, Sonia. Chua recounts, "But wasn't it strange, we persisted, that so many of the oligarchs should be Jewish? 'You know Jews!' Sonia laughed. 'They gravitate towards business!'" (Chua, 83). A Jewish predilection is treated as something almost biological in the conversation and throughout this section. Sonia previously explained, in contrast to her later statement, "'These oligarchs - they are 95 percent Russian and only 5 percent Jewish. They are fully assimilated, products of the Russian environment [...]'" (Chua, 83). It doesn't matter, goes this claim that Chua repeats, what degree of socialization is shared between the Jewish population and the gentile Russians - they're still driven towards business at unequal levels. Their existence as Jews somehow overrides everything else, rendering them nothing but a stereotype of a Jewish financier.

Subtler variations on this appeared throughout the proceeding section on the history of Jews (focusing almost exclusively on European Jews). It begins by noting "Jews do not appear to have been particularly economically successful during antiquity - but that's about the last time in their history that they weren't, at least when left alone to pursue their livelihoods" (Chua, 79). The effect of this is that all economic successes of Jews are cast as due to their Jewishness, while all failures are treated as the result of restrictions placed by other actors. The effect is strange, since it reduces Jews to a narrow stereotype but also excuses any economically hostile behavior on the part of the "Jewish oligarchs" since their behavior is only part of their nature.

Behind all of this is a strange lack of curiosity as to why Jews became economically successful but only in certain times and places. As Chua notes,

During the Middle Ages, despite recurrent anti-Jewish restrictions and persecutions, Jews prospered visibly and disproportionately as merchants and middlemen and eventually as international traders, particularly between Christian Europe and the Muslim lands (Chua, 79).

She does not go on to even remotely explore why Jews were well suited, or at least better suited than most Christians or Muslims, for trade. I'm not an expert on this, but I would theorize that the social networks created by the diaspora would be useful, not to mention that capacity to live as a clear ethnic minority. The lack of even a cursory analysis, however, makes the Jews into an innate force - destined for economic dominance if unfettered by restrictions. Instead of fully addressing that issue, Chua goes on to examine how the less restrictive environments of Eastern Europe allowed Jews to briefly become quite economically successful, with the notable exception of czarist Russia. On that outlier, Chua concludes,

[...] restricted to the Pale [areas of permitted Jewish settlement], subjected to economic discrimination, and victimized by recurrent anti-Jewish plundering and violence, most Russian Jews at the turn of the twentieth century lived in cruel poverty (Chua, 81).

Likewise, in the more recent Soviet era, Chua similarly states, "[...] no one (outside the Politburo) got billionaire-rich in the former Soviet Union, and Jews were no exception" (Chua, 82). In both cases, the economic power of the Jewish population is purely related by Chua to restrictions or liberties placed on the Jews by the gentile governments, making the Jewish experience essentially an expression of gentile tolerance or hostility.

If you accept this argument, its hard not to fall into the trap Chua has set for herself. She mentions, at the end of the historical analysis,

During the 1990s, seven cutthroat entrepreneurs, six of them Jewish, came to control the overwhelming part of Russia's newly privatized economy [...] they became billionaires by playing the game more ruthlessly and effectively than anybody else during Russia's free-for-all transition to capitalism (Chua, 82).

If you accept that Jews are innately ruthless, then you accept that they must be constrained. Chua's established another self-defeating argument on faulty premises - namely that Jews have one nature: brutality.

Stereotypes (WOF)

2011-02-16T12:05:00.000-08:00

Chua's introduction to this section on Russian Jews plays to a fair number of stereotypes about Jews. Undoubtedly, Chua would defend this as not projecting false qualities onto her subjects, but as honest description of what they're like. The first problem with this is the question of why some of these descriptions are precisely necessary. She decides to include seemingly unconnected details that (apparently) point out the pronounced Jewishness:

The seventh oligarch - the only "full-blooded ethnic Russian" among them - is Vladmir Potanin. ("While the other oligarchs were still decorating their offices with leopard skins and mirrors, Putanin was buying graciously battered English antiques," writes Freeland.) The six Jewish businessmen most frequently called oligarchs are: Roman Abramovich, Pyotr Aven, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Friedman, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky (Chua, 78).

Why is that middle sentence necessary? Does their choice in furniture somehow reflect on their Jewishness, validating her claims even?

She then proceeds to even describe her Jewish husband in equally over-used terms, writing, "Not all Jews, of course, react like Jerry. When I first mentioned to my husband, who is Jewish, that six out of seven of Russia's wealthiest tycoons are Jewish, he raised an eyebrow. 'Just six?' he asked calmly. 'So who's the seventh guy?'" (Chua, 78). While she's clearly giving detail and diversity in her description of the Jewish community, she automatically treats them as Jews, before mere humans. She describes even her husband in this terms, saying that he's a Jewish counterexample to another Jewish man, before saying he's just a counterexample to the man. She marks his Jewish identity before his humanity in some ways, permitting herself to say these things in such stereotyping ways, even though she loves this man.

Post Script

2011-02-11T18:47:00.001-08:00

Least any one get the wrong idea from my last post, Muslims aren't somehow fundamentally different from Christians. As a recent group of attacks in Indonesia, on three separate churches and a small group of "heretical" Muslims of the Ahmadiya sect, shows, Muslims throughout the world can indeed be motivated towards collective violence and all of the awful things many "Westerners" seem to think they're inherently inclined towards. This, however, doesn't somehow invalidate the democratic and pluralistic and egalitarian goals put forth during the Egyptian Revolution - which literally occurred on the other side of the world from these reprehensible attacks. This idea of collective guilt is repulsive, that somehow Muslims (like many other dis-empowered groups) somehow all belong to an exclusive club and are linked to the actions of all the others.

Likewise, many voices from the "West" are hypocritical in denouncing Muslims for things they haven't done or accusing them of some sort of incompatibility with the "West." If you want to go to a nice, big protest-party somewhere in the United States to show you stand with the Egyptian Revolution, check up on this page, which has a list of upcoming events of such a nature.

The Clash of Civilizations

2011-02-11T12:11:00.000-08:00

I recently had a discussion about the "Clash of Civilizations" so the issues it raises have been jumping around in my head over the past few days, and recent news certainly hasn't helped. For those who don't know, the "Clash of Civilizations" is a theory, popularized by Samuel Huntington, that basically argues that there are several major groups of people (the civilizations) founded on various values and conceptions of reality (namely religious identities) that are fundamentally incompatible with each other. His basic premise takes religious identities and then credits them with various ideological and political outcomes in areas where those identities predominate - Protestantism and (European) Catholicism apparently solely produced capitalism, while Orthodox Christianity paved the way for Stalinism, Oriental Orthodox Ethiopians established their own poverty, and Muslims are prone to violence and mindless orthodoxy.

Immediately, some problems become clear - a lot of his divisions are more strongly defined by his perceptions about ethnicity and regionalism than religion, in spite of his claims that his theory relies on religious identity and ideology. He lumps the whole of Latin America together (with the curious exceptions of Haiti, Suriname, Guyana, and French Guyana), in spite of it's overwhelmingly Catholic (and otherwise Christian) presence, and likewise treats sub-Saharan Africa (obviously subtracting Islamic North Africa and pre-Colonial Christians in Ethiopia) as some how fundamentally different from the Catholic-Protestant "West" even though there's no clear religious distinction to be drawn. More confusingly, Papua New Guinea is included with the West, while these other colonial era Christian converts are mysteriously not.

(It's also worth pointing out that his categorization of Eritrea as "Muslim" and Ethiopia as "independent" reflects that he had to explain their various conflicts and casts doubt on his use of statistics, as both have a slim plurality of Oriental Orthodox Christians. In other words, he's blatantly manipulating his categorizations to explain events.)

There are other problems, but the main driving goal of this argument seems to be a categorization of various groups within "Christendom" (that is, the Latin American, "Western," Orthodox, African, Ethiopian and Haitian civilizations) and a contrast between those groups and the Islamic world (which, tellingly is given none of the loving attention to internal schisms and muddled ethnic and religious identities that the Christian world gets). This argument is clearly ripe for demagoguery - from any angle. It's basic premise has been used by various Islamists to rationalizing violence against Christians and Hindus according to Benazir Bhutto, as much as it plays a role in promoting "Islamophobia" globally. It's constructed according to false premises, with an aim to promote conflict.

At no point has this ever been as clear to me than in the past weeks. Today, a revolution reached fruition in Egypt - Mubarak resigned. Regardless of what you've heard about this revolution, there's solid evidence that it's open to female participation in ways that blatantly contradict most Islamist demands on sex roles and it's overtly religiously pluralistic. It's a demand to reform Egypt, which hopes to restructure the country into a democracy, and with some sort of economic justice. It's a movement that violates, over and over again, what the "Clash of Civilizations" and other "just-so" explanations tell us about the entire Islamic world.

Meanwhile, the "Western" world, the civilization that is allegedly founded either on democracy, pluralism, and equality, or founded on principles that make those necessary and natural conclusions, has been rocked by a serious of responses to this revolution in Egypt and similar news regarding Muslims. In the United States, Glenn Beck denied the authentically democratic and pluralist nature of the Egyptian revolution, and argued that it was part of a global scheme, involving a rebuilt caliphate (who on earth gets to be the Caliph then?). In short, because these protests are occurring in the Muslim world, they are incapable of being actually democratic. They must be socialist (which Beck tends to use to mean authoritarian), or Islamist, or some other ideology (if not several) that are presented as alien to the "West." Why? Because these protests are in Egypt, in an Arab and Muslim country, a place supposedly not merely ideologically different but fundamentally and irreparably so. Muslims cannot produce democracy, because they are not the "West".

In the midst of this Egyptian Revolution, various European figures made alarming statements. British Prime Minister David Cameron declared state multiculturalism a failure, and while his tacit supporters are correct that he was not directly accusing any particular group of various misdeeds (including kidnapping) his suggestion is clearly aimed at British Muslims. Even as anti-immigrant groups held a protest in the same city, at the same time as his talks, he clearly was emphasizing the "shadiness" and "untrustworthy" nature of Muslims. The Economist perfectly describes his point, based on the same idiotic terms as the "Clash of Civilizations" argument, "Mr Cameron thinks multiculturalism has drifted from a tolerance of other cultures towards a tolerance of other value systems, some of them hostile to Britain." Islamic beliefs, by nature, are on some level incompatible if not hostile to "Western" states, is the claim he is making.

Meanwhile, Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, has made similar statements. What exactly she meant is somewhat confusing - is she describing the existing policies as failing (since, as she mentions, they're based on a polite fiction that immigrants will leave eventually) or is she suggesting that the very concept of multiculturalism is failing? She seems to be trying to have it both ways, since in her speech she immediately explains that some degree of openness is necessary, for trade. She doesn't apparently see human rights, however, as a workable argument like commerce. Yet she decided to give this speech in spite of the fact that alarming numbers of Germans want to restrict the practice of Islam (in addition to other opinions about targeting religious minorities). The logic seems to be similar to Cameron's or Beck's: Islam is somehow out of place in Germany, where other ideologies and religions prevail, or by some means must be made to prevail.

Whether you're English, American, or German, you need to be prepared to explain (if you think this way) why you think this way. How does this revolution, grounded in concepts that the "West" has laid exclusive claim to for centuries, somehow not what it is?

Acceptable Targets (WOF)

2011-02-09T10:51:00.001-08:00

Looking back, Chua's argument concerning Latin Americans was muddled and prone to several problems. She would write descriptions of the victimization of some groups only to mid-sentence suggest that an entirely different dynamic was going on with no introduction-

[T]he uneducated, disease-ridden, desperately poor but numerically vast Indian- or African-blooded majorities of Latin America experience little or no economic benefit from privatization and global markets while finding themselves suddenly filled with contradictory new materialistic and consumerist desires (Chua, 75).

This entirely new element to the situation - feelings of manipulation by the market and to some extent even psychological conditioning by it - wasn't previously even hinted at. It wasn't explored in detail like the violent themes Chua perceived in various populists. But at least it was mentioned, just this once.

This is also a great example of how Chua hedges the causes of communal poverty. She repeatedly writes of privatization and cruel treatment often without mentioning who is privatizing Latin American infrastructure or treating various ethnic groups with cruelty. She refers to the privileged actors as corrupt, but rarely accuses them of specific crimes (especially contemporaries).

In spite of all these problems, this chapter roughly seems to strike a workable, if biased, balance. The following chapter, "The Seventh Oligarch," on the other hand, begins with a paragraph describing Russian privatization, which contains the sentence:

Instead of dispersing ownership and creating functioning markets, these reforms had allowed a small group of greedy industrialists and bankers to plunder Russia, turning themselves overnight into the billionaire-owners of Russia's crown jewels while the country spiraled into chaos and lawlessness (Chua, 77).

A little bit further down the page, Chua discusses these tycoons with a colleague who is preparing a report on them:

Something about the ruthless, looting, self-dealing kleptocrats-turned-oligarchs described in his article had struck me, and I wanted to run it by him. It seemed to me, I said to Jerry, that most of the key players in the privatization and eventual economic takeover of Russia were Jewish. Was it possible?

"Oh, no" Jerry replied instantly, with a frown. "I don't think so."

"Are you sure?" I pressed him. "If you look at their names-"

"You can't tell anything from names," Jerry snapped impatiently, clearly not wanted to discuss the topic any further. [...] As it turns out, six-out-of-seven of Russia's wealthiest and (at least until recently) powerful oligarchs are Jewish [...] Yet Jerry, who was there in Russia, himself Jewish, and moreover writing an article meant to be provocative, wasn't willing to touch the Jewish question (Chua, 77-78).

It seems like gentiles across the South American continent who lock entire communities in poverty are merely corrupt, while a small group of Russian Jews are not only "oligarchs" but also "greedy," "ruthless," and "kleptocrats" for doing essentially the same thing. The sudden shift in tone is remarkable and disturbing, especially considering the veiled implication that other Jews, even those like her colleague who wrote an expose on the immoral opportunism, are somehow contributing to this.

Comparing Latin America (WOF)

2011-02-02T11:41:00.000-08:00

We've now reached the page-long conclusion of Chua's analysis of centuries of Latin American history. It begins -

"Obviously, Latin America differs from Southeast Asia in countless respects. Because of extensive miscegenation, ethnic and racial lines in this region are not nearly as starkly drawn, and Latin America has been able to avoid the extreme ethnic animus and violence seen in Southeast Asia" (Chua, 75).

Already we've run into familiar issues - Chua's inconsistency with known facts, Chua's inconsistency within her own analysis, and Chua's seeming self-absorption.

To argue that Latin America has been devoid of ethnic animus and violence (presumably in recent history) is demonstratively false. Governments have sponsored or tolerated genocidal campaigns against various indigenous groups, most notably in Brazil and Peru, frequently motivated by oil exploration or seizing desirable land. Before these more recent incidents, as I brought up in the last post, anti-indigenous violence went hand-in-hand with Cold War anti-communist massacres.

To argue that Latin America has been devoid of ethnic animus and violence contradicts much of Chua's statements on Latin American history. She has admitted that the creation of 'Latin America' as we know it began with conquests, gunpoint conversions, enslavement, and other hallmarks of the violent discovery of the Americas. She recalled the strict rules of desirable marriage among the European-blooded gentry and the various resentments of mistreatment by those below or beneath that socio-economic class.

To argue that Latin America has been devoid of ethnic animus and violence compared to Southeast Asia seems to refer preferentially to Chua's own experiences. Chua and other members of her elite and ethnically Chinese family have been attacked due to their ethnicity and class in the Philippines, which she seems to obliquely refer to here. That violence is real to her, unforgettably so, in a way that anti-Maya death squads somehow are not. The attacks she endured are tangible and extreme, in her view, unlike centuries of ethnic cleansing and economic debasement in Latin America. I think we're seeing (once again) an inability to feel empathy with certain groups. Chua doesn't need to think her experiences are invalid, but she does need to acknowledge minimally that others have suffered as well.

But, ignoring these issues, we've concluded the chapter on Latin America. Now we get to start next week on Russia.

And still more on Egypt

2011-01-31T08:37:00.000-08:00

Coverage is continuing much to the dismay of the Egyptian government:

In the second day of defiance of a military curfew, more than 150,000 protesters packed into Tahrir Square Sunday to call on President Hosni Mubarak to step down. The mood was celebratory and victorious. For most, it was not a question of if, but when, Mubarak would leave.
Military tanks have been stationed at entrance points around the square with soldiers forming barricades across streets and alleyways. In another departure from ordinary Cairo life, people quickly formed orderly queues to get through the army checkpoints. Soldiers frisked people and checked their identification cards. One soldier said they were making sure no one with police or state security credentials could enter.
Reports are widespread that many of the looters in Cairo are, in fact, remnants of the police and state security forces that were forced into a full retreat during Friday’s mass street revolt. In addition, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of prisoners were released from prisons in Fayyoum and Tora. Many believe it’s all part of an organized campaign by the regime to create lawlessness in the city in a last gasp attempt to maintain its grip on power. The headline of Al-Masry Al-Youm today blared: "Conspiracy by Interior Ministry to Foment Chaos."

More here.

Routine

2011-01-31T08:05:00.000-08:00

You might have lost track of some important events over the past few months that were barely covered on televised media:

December 9, 2010 - Washington Congressman receives death threats.
January 20, 2011 - Aryan Nations attempts to bomb MLK parade in Spokane.
January 25, 2011 - Trial begins for Northern Idaho militiamen who plotted to blow up local infrastructure.
January 27, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh critic receives death threats.
January 28, 2011 - Arizonan neo-Nazi's trial for an attempted bombing begins

These are no longer exceptional incidents. This has become background noise.

More on Egypt

2011-01-30T12:52:00.001-08:00

Anyone in the world who wants to protest American sales of tear gas to Mubarak's regime in Egypt, can sign this petition.

Egypt today, where tomorrow?

2011-01-29T14:15:00.000-08:00

The seemingly populist revolution in Tunisia appears to have touched a nerve in Egypt, where it's brought out an entirely different political culture than most Americans see depicted. "Western" perception of Egypt seems rooted in the Six Days War and the Nasr Presidency - with Egypt as a nation trapped in a religiously-imbued nationalist fury, typified by extremists like the Muslim Brotherhood. The existence of several notable Egyptians within contemporary international islamist organizations hasn't helped this.

But as some have pointed out, the basis of this populist uprising, at least in Egypt, is avowedly secular and what little involvement there has been by organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood has come after decades of negotiations which have largely resulted in them abandoning violent tactics. Likewise, others have suggested that recent anti-Islamist events have played an instrumental role in creating a secularized Egyptian identity. In all, I think we can be emphatic that this is not an Islamist event, at least not currently.

You'll have to weigh your conscience on this, but I signed this petition urging the US to at least get nominally involved against the government. I think there's valid concern that the US actually getting involved might damage the credibility of protesters (like in Iran), but I'm not convinced that it's quite the same situation - Iran is well known for perceiving itself as highly unique and highly victimized by American interests, in ways that I don't think Egypt can compare. Still, a gamble.

(EDIT: Live coverage from Egypt, here)

Forgotten Guatemala (WOF)

2011-01-26T08:02:00.000-08:00

Something that's been bugging me since we dove into the analysis of Chua's section on Latin America is how focused it has been on only some examples - namely Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru - in spite of her explanation that Bolivia and Peru are only two of the four Latin American countries with a majority indigenous population (what degree of indigenous ancestry that constitutes was unmentioned, just like Haiti and Brazil for being primarily non-white as well). More conspicuous than the lacking analysis of Ecuador is the omission of Guatemala - this is a state removed from the presidential campaigns in the harsh valleys of the Andes or the favelas of Brazil. It's an example in a completely different part of Latin America, which should be included and analyzed if Chua's ostensibly universal observations are in fact universal.

For reasons unrelated to this project, I started reading a collection of ethnographies, Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation which included a piece by Debra H. Rodman entitled Forgotten Guatemala which explored Guatemalans reactions to decades of massacres, civil war, and violence. Strikingly, the analysis of the conflict calls into question the supremacy of Chua's observations about the racial and economic hierarchy in Latin America. As Rodman describes it, during the nineteenth century, the Guatemalan hero Raphael Carreva "[a] Ladino [a person of mixed ancestry] from the Eastern Highlands, [...] led a conservative counter-revolution that was crucial to Guatemala's nation-building and that secured Ladino power from the white elites of Guatemala City" (Hinton, 196*). In other words, Chua is not describing a new phenomenon of various Latinos of color contesting white dominance, at least in the case of Guatemala. Instead, Ladinos, those with highly intermixed racial ancestries, have long dominated Guatemalan society. As Rodman explains, military recruitment during the Civil War followed general "policies, which included the recruitment of elite Ladinos as military officers" (Hinton, 194). In some ways, Ladinos disprove Chua's assertion that Whites constitute the market-dominant elite throughout the whole of Latin America.

In others, however, they challenge the very idea of a simple dichotomy between an elite, "market-dominant" minority (Whites, Ladinos) and a ethnically-dissimilar and impoverished majority (Indios, Mulattos, etc). In short, non-elite Ladinos exist and form an integral part of the social system. During the same periods of willing recruitment of privileged Ladinos into officer positions, Rodman catalogues "the coerced conscription of indigenous and poor Ladinos as foot soldiers" (Hinton, 194). The decades of violence in Guatemala reflect various dynamics - elite Ladino paranoia regarding potential lower class Ladino revolutionaries, anti-Maya sentiments, and at times fusions of the two. Chua's point rests on the assumption that ethnic groups throughout the world (including Latin America, and therefore Guatemala) frequently if not inherently constitute economic classes. The in-fighting within the Ladino community in Guatemala emphatically contradicts any belief that a fused economic and ethnic identity is more common, more natural, or more likely.

In light of this, you have to wonder why Chua's largely skipped over Guatemala.

(*All citations are to Forgotten Guatemala as reproduced in Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation)

Nuances (WOF)

2011-01-11T11:41:00.000-08:00

Before delving directly into a more theoretical discussion of the class and ethnic dynamics at work in both Southeast Asia and Latin America, Chua takes one last brief look at Brazil. She writes-

This [Brazilian rap] movement is openly 'un-Brazilian' in its relentless attacks on the country's racial inequality [...] Almost overnight, the hot group Racionais - which recently won a number of prestigious Brazilian MTV awards - has popularized expressions like '4P' 'poder para o povo preto' ('power for the black people') and 'preto tipo a' - literally 'class A black' but referring to blacks who are proud and fight for their rights. (Chua, 74)

Chua almost seems to suggest that criticism of racial inequality is fundamentally traitorous, although the scare quotes around the term 'un-Brazilian' lend her an air of secondhand information, that she's merely referencing how others view them. Yet, a paragraph later she again seems to imply that it's strange that a group promoting racial equality would view 'class A blacks' as those who believe that they're humans with a right to be proud. She nearly implies that it's unusual for any one to think of the best blacks are those with pride, almost as if blacks should be ashamed, of some mysterious something. Again, it's unclear who Chua is suggesting is surprised by or unaware of these developments. Does she mean that she thinks it's surprising? Or Brazilians? Which Brazilians?

Chua later notes that "A recent poll revealed that a startling 93 percent of those surveyed in Rio de Janeiro now believe that racism exists in Brazil" (Chua, 75). Why is this startling, given, as Chua herself says,

In songs like 'The Periphery Continues Bleeding,' 'Just Another Wake,' and 'Surviving in Hell,' rappers aggressively expose social injustice against blacks, emphasizing that only 2 percent of Brazil's university students are black, that three out of four people killed by the police are black, and that every four hours a black man dies violently in São Paulo. (Chua, 74)

And yet, a paragraph later, she claims that "the reality so far is that racial consciousness remains surprisingly muted in Brazil" (Chua, 75). It seems as though Chua is attempting something nuanced, but has only produced something contradictory. Part of that complexity, which Chua didn't address, was class. As she argues, "the myth of Brazilian democracy [is] still broadly defended by many Brazilians spanning different social class" (Chua, 75). Yet all of the dissenting voices claiming that a racial hierarchy pervasively controls their lives in Brazil, at least that Chua quotes, are either favela-dwelling poor or 'black' individuals born into the lower class. All of the individuals mentioned by Chua asserting that the myth, even if fractured, remains true, alternatively had some hallmark of higher class status. She mentions a graduate student (after citing how few black Brazilians are present in higher education) who argued that the popularity of these same hiphop artists with white university students suggests a more open and democratic society with regards to race. There was also the case of a dark-skinned upper class woman who refused to identify as black, largely because of her class status.

Ultimately, Chua seems very ready to push for defining this disagreement over what Brazil is and what it means to be Brazilian into racial terms, when the reality seems more nuanced. High class status clearly plays a large role, just like how race is de-emphasized in importance in upper class circles in many countries. Yet, even Chua seems to admit that racial status in Brazil often influences economic standing. This disagreement about racial hierarchy relates to placement within that hierarchy, but also seems largely mediated through class status. Honestly, Chua seems to hurry through this brief section, trying to get to the more strictly theoretical discussion, skimping on these nuances.

All at once (WOF)

2011-01-04T14:00:00.000-08:00

These past three weeks I've written about three separate problems with Amy Chua's analysis of Latin America - her personal entanglement in the conflicts, her uneven attention and detail to various groups, and her ambiguity about how present these dynamics actually are. Before we move on, I want to hammer in how interconnected these issues really are.

She identifies as coming from a wealthy ethnic minority, and has a lot of difficulty looking beyond that. Because of this her writing pushes their comparatively poor majorities into something defined primarily in opposition to those market-dominant minorities. They become a shapeless, nameless mass. In this instance, the indigenous population, the imported slaves of African descent, and the various interracial groups constitute a supposed homogeneous ethnic population defined by their either impurely European or non-white ancestry. How different indigenous groups or non-white immigrants (most notably the African-indigenous slaves) regard hardly enters the description.

This narrow viewpoint then makes it difficult for her to think of the conflicts she does analyze in terms of class, making it much more preferable to talk about ethnicity. She can't look beyond her own viewpoint, so the Marxist and New Left Latin Americans who don't seem to consider ethnicity nearly as important as class, or other political groups that don't seem to buy (either at all or as rigidly) the equation that Amy Chua does (between higher class and more "white" ancestry). She will acknowledge that her points are actively contested by many of the people she's writing about, but she won't respond and assert her view with evidence.

In short, she hasn't written an adequately detached report which has influenced her characterization of different groups, to a degree that she doesn't seem to even register their opinions or the facts when contrary to her own. Nowhere in her book is this as clear as at this point, where she transitions from background history of Latin America to contemporary analysis. Her first great example of this emerging social dynamic is Alejandro Toledo:

Peru's Amerindian Alejandro Toledo, who swept to landslide victory in the 2001 presidential elections, offers the best of examples [of a majoritarian populist politician]. 'You're one of us - win for us!' shouted thousands of wrinkled Amerindian women in bowler hats, weeping as Toledo campaigned through the streets in a truck emblazoned with the ancient Inca symbol of the sun. Reversing five hundred years of ethnic degradation, Toledo - who many insist resembles Pachacutic, the Incas' greatest ruler - highlighted his indigenous origins, wearing Indian garb, calling himself el cholo, and appealing explicitly to Peru's dark-skinned majority 'who look like I do'. [...] Alejandro Toledo's approval ratings have plummeted to 32 percent, as it has become increasingly clear that his pro-market policies will not immediately improve the lives of Peru's impoverished majority. (72-73)

Chua describes Toledo and his supporters as being "Amerindian" a term that's both (largely) out of date and highly unspecific. Chua does give us a light description of the cultures supposedly in conflict - Inca-identifying indigenous groups as symbolized by the sun symbol and the comparison to Pachacutic, but she skimps on the really important information. Where are these rallies, even one of these rallies, being held? The whole of Ecuador serves as backdrop for generic indigenous cultural rebellion, with no villages, no individuals, no quotes from these weary indigenous supporters.

Unlike the wealthy and predominately white Bolivians and Uruguayans mentioned, sometimes very briefly, by Chua, these supporters are given absolutely no identifying features that don't relate to their ethnicity - their bowler hats, their political allegiance. The only one unconnected to that, their wrinkles, seems to imply class status as much as age. The others were given hair colors (the blond millionaire from Uruguay) or professions (the lawyer from Bolivia) or even names.

This lack of detail seems to suggest some distance between Chua and these subjects. Unlike the economic elites she personally interacted with, she appears to have not actually been at these rallies, or have attended but with little interaction. There's no attributed quotes or biographical details, just brief and impersonal description.

This potent mixture of ignorance and confusion seems fertile ground for nebulous conclusions. On page 72, Chua treats Toledo as the epitome of the trend she sees developing in Latin America (and throughout the world) but a mere page later, on 73, she mentions him as a counterexample, without comment on how her argument still stands. She admits that in spite of his populist rhetoric with regards to ethnicity, she catered to the economic elite, against his base's economic interests. There seem to be multiple problems with the raw description Chua uses, but furthermore her use of the description to develop an argument frankly doesn't convincingly work.

Contraindications (WOF)

2010-12-28T14:22:00.000-08:00

As previously hinted at, Amy Chua doesn’t deny that Latin Americans have historically intermingled across racial and ethnic boundaries to an unusual extent. In fact, she mentions one Bolivian who stated “everyone [in Bolivia] is mestizo, everyone has some Indian blood” (71). Her first real case study of the market-dominant minority that she brings up has such serious holes in it, that she can’t help but quote people claiming that the very dynamics she sees are unfounded, impossible, and dependent on a different social reality than the one in Latin America.

Even Chua herself draws conclusions contradicting her bold claims, like:

Political, even populist movements have been organized around class, almost never ethnic, lines. And because in election after election, despite coup after coup, political and economic power always remained in the same light-skinned, ‘illustrious-blooded’ hands, ‘apathy and fatalism’ among the indigenous populations spread and deepened (72).

Chua can reasonably analyze contradictory evidence, and especially if she wants to make claims about global facts, she needs to do so. Yet, she makes these statements without explaining how her arguments stand in spite of these antithetical testimonies about reality. Initially, the various colonists had superior weaponry to compensate for their smaller numbers. They had better technology for organizing conquests and mass enslavement. Soon, however, they had shifted to using social institutions, most notably the Catholic Church, as an agent of control. Now, however, class seems to be their only remaining weapon against the indigenous populations, who have revolutionized the Church and redressed technological inequalities. The endless question is how, how have these large majorities of indigenous, mulatto, mestizo, or otherwise non-white ethnic groups failed to threaten these colonial or neo-colonial powers until now?

Instead of looking into that, she attempts to claim her arguments are predictive, hinting at a shift only beginning now. She blames the decline of class-centered Marxist thinking with the end of the Cold War (failing to predict the surge of the New Left in Latin America a few years later) and the new information age media (and increasingly access to televised broadcasts) for reducing class consciousness. In its place, an ethnic consciousness has arisen, according to Chua. She says-

Latin America’s poor masses are being ethnicized, increasingly through radio, television, and most recently the Web. They are being reminded […] that they are Aymaras, pardos, Indians, cholos, whatever identity best mobilizes great numbers of frustrated, long degraded, dark-skinned masses (72).

Aside from the weird equivalency given to indigenous identities, whatever indigenous identities, (that came up last week) there’s an admission there that even the social groups in conflict are defined by ethnicity, their clashing is defined by class. This may be Chua’s point, but she doesn’t really address why anyone should care about a shift that seems mainly rhetorical.

Fully human (WOF)

2010-12-21T08:59:00.000-08:00

One of the first things you learn about humanity is that we’re not equal. Or, rather, that we’re not treated like we’re equal. The supposedly more desirable positions in the hierarchy are called many things – expressions of privilege, dominance, power – but they’re all fundamentally inegalitarian and undemocratic. This inequality forms a social system (again that goes by many names, hegemony, kyriarchy, patriarchy) which infects almost every corner of life, even the smallest most meaningless minutia.

There’s a variety of ways people get sorted into acceptable or unacceptable camps, more than I can really list, but it’s important to remember that these constructed categories of “good people” and “bad” are forced definitions. They’re not reality, but a social system that has contorted our perceptions, and ultimately even ourselves. That’s one of the most essential parts of these seemingly ubiquitous systems, they majorly impact perceptions. They determine which groups of people are perceived as having individualities, having identities, having a claim to humanity.

Many discussions fall victim to this thinking, inside and outside of academia. This is visible in evangelical discussions about how evangelicals won’t be raptured because they have the unifying trait of being saved, but that those left behind are a single, cohesive category – those outside, beneath, below them. Chua, unfortunately, seems to have similar difficulties fully characterizing one group (at least in this chapter), and surprise, it’s the poor!

Having argued that class categories are excellent predictors for ethnic categories, Chua seems to then spend a great amount of time in this Latin American section detailing the complexities of which specific ethnicities get included in the larger, almost racial category of “white”. She stresses that even in colonial times the colonial forces had various ethnic old world origins:

That the Spaniards were supposed to be ‘pure-blooded’ is, to say the least, ironic. Among the numerous groups that, by the Middle Ages, had inhabited and commingled with each other on Iberian soil were Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Jews, Arabs, Berbers, and Gypsies (58).

Furthermore, there’s family history’s influence on how securely “white” a particular lineage was considered. In effect, within a few centuries of colonization, pure-blood Spaniards were distinguished based on whether they had been born to white Latin Americans or white Europeans:

And throughout Latin America, landowners preferred their daughters to marry penniless peninsulares (arrivals from new Spain) rather than wealthy criollos (American-born Spaniards). The fact of being born in the Old World was supposedly good proof of being ‘pure white’ (59).

As Chua describes it, later immigrants from various locations (not just Spain) profited from their lack of Native American ancestry, and managed to install themselves securely within the “white” category. She uses the example of Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico:

Needless to say, Slim has no Amerindian ancestors. As elsewhere in the world, the Lebanese community in Mexico is very tight: Slim’s late wife was also Christian Lebanese, and, reportedly, most members of Slim’s extended family have married other Christian Lebanese; virtually all are extremely wealthy (63).

In short, Chua describes in detail the intricate facets of several white communities in Latin America, providing specific immigration histories and detailed genealogical descriptions. She gives them specific, historical identities. She makes them people. Her writing on the various other racial categories in Latin America could not be more different – they are an amorphous, non-descript mass. She describes perceived white intellectual and cultural superiority in opposition to various, briefly undefined others:

In Mexico, mixed-blooded mestizos were for years prohibited from owning land or joining the army or clergy. In Peru, even intellectuals believed that ‘the Indian is not now, nor can he ever be, anything but a machine.’ […] In Argentina, a popular writer wrote in 1903 that mestizos and mulattos were both ‘impure, atavistically anti-Christian; they are like the two heads of a fabulous hydra that surrounds, constricts and strangles with its giant spiral a beautiful, pale virgin, Spanish America’ (58-59).

Intermediary categories like mestizo and mulatto are equated with pure-blood Native Americans, to say nothing about how an entire category of (unwilling) immigrants – slaves of African origin and their descendents, mulatto and “negro” alike – are outside of the category of ‘white’ while quite clearly not indigenous inhabitants to the region. It’s perfectly reasonable to define them as a broad social category of those that survived white rule rather than lived under it, but that doesn’t warrant writing virtually nothing of their internal identities. The few cases where Chua does this always reflect another facet of white dominance, rather than actual issues of identity negotiated between these two groups. She writes-

Not surprisingly, according to Mexican writer Enrique Krauze, Indian women desire to have children with mestizos – ‘not to betray their race but out of a desire to spare their progeny a bleak future’ (59-60).

Essentially the only time that relations between two non-white groups are discussed, it naturally relates in total to the white hegemony. In this book, there’s little description of what these groups think or how they see things, and the little we see overwhelmingly concerns the white hegemony, white categorization. Her writing denies them a self.

At the bare minimum, she outlines three separate groupings (mestizo, mulatto, and indigenous) but seldom draws the kind of sharp distinctions between them that she described within the white community. Instead, as per her previous quoting of Krauze, she highlights how these groups converged, even as she stresses the diversity within the “white” community. Even more damning, in my opinion, is how Chua extremely rarely mentions any indigenous group by name:

Mexico’s roughly 9 to 10 million indigenous peoples, about one-tenth of the population, have the highest rates of illiteracy and disease in the country. In the states of Chiapas, just thirty-five years ago, Amerindians were forbidden to walk on sidewalks or look lighter-skinned Mexicans in the eye (59).

Or, more blatantly,

The psychological effects of the Spanish Conquest were crushing and lasting. ‘The death of the sun – the strangulation of the Inca,’ writes sociologist Magnus Mörner, was a ‘profound shock, reinforced later on by the beheading of Tupac Amaru.’ Contemporary indigenous dances still reflect the profound ‘Trauma of Conquest’ (64).

The few specifics are quotation, and introduced without context. The effect that this has on this section is incredible. It’s as if indigenous peoples were before European contact unbelievably monolithic, and to a large extent remain so, according to Chua. They don’t have specific identities, competing languages and ideological conceptions of reality. There aren’t Quechua-speaking Incas and Aymara-speaking Carangas who have battled and negotiated and co-operated and conflicted for centuries (and to some extent, continue to do so). There’s only a drab, generic, grey mass of indigenous peoples who exist below the colonial government, beyond the social category of white. She seems to buy into this narrative that they’re unknowable, anti-Christian, shadows of humans defined merely by what they aren’t – white.

Personal Boundaries (WOF)

2010-12-14T21:44:00.000-08:00

When we last heard from Amy Chua (so long ago, so long ago), she had just jumped headfirst into description of the socio-economic hierarchy that dominates in most of Latin America. This was a sudden turn from previous emphasis of more commonplace examples of ethnic conflict – the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland – and Chua’s personal experiences as a member of the “market minority” in the Philippines.

Chua pretty quickly establishes Bolivia as the focus of this section, as the last couple pages of analysis showed. She abruptly pulls away from Bolivia after a scant five and half pages of analysis, replacing it with more general description of Latin America. Reasonably, the section on Bolivia sets up a transition to broader statements, explaining “Bolivia is one of only four countries – the others are Peru, Guatemala, and Ecuador – in which Amerindians still constitute a majority or near-majority of the population” (56). In the next section, she applies a similar framework elsewhere though. She moves the focus to conflicts between large populations of mestizos (or similar groups of mixed ethnic background) and white Latinos, specifically dealing with dynamics in Mexico.

This starts another movement into the “biting off more than you can chew” territory that Chua seems just unable to avoid. Considering Chua has already equated the basic dynamics at play in the Philippines today, the former Yugoslavia during the early 1990s, and Northern Ireland during the Troubles, her adding ethnic-tinged economic conflicts in Bolivia and Mexico at the same time is just a small part of the bigger problem. There’s an element of reductionism here that seems outright dangerous – claiming that ethnic conflict is so predictable seems foolish and hubristic. The price for failing to accurately or even completely describe ethnic conflict, when you’ve made such claims and have been widely accepted as correct, is that warning signs get missed. Preparations, negotiations, and so on begin late. People unnecessarily die, because the conditions were judged as not likely to produce conflict, at least of this nature.

In any case, what honestly seems to motivate Chua’s movement of the focus away from Bolivia and towards Mexico, is her personal experiences. Nearly every social science around has trouble with the issue of working out the proper roles for the scientific observers in the mechanics they analyze, and there’s something to be said for involving yourself in what you study. That said, Chua previously defended ethnic Chinese Filipinos, like herself, not just as people with a right to exist, but with a degree of ambiguity regarding criticism of their behavior towards less fortunate communities. Although she pointedly mentioned her discomfort with accepting the poverty of other ethnic groups, she doesn’t seem to clearly draw the line between ethnic cleansing and economic egalitarianism. After all, that seems to be the whole point of her book – that they’re difficult to untangle, but she seems to accept that, in spite of her reservations, rather than protest it. Instead she seems to condone the behavior, almost as if the book is more a rationalization of her own inaction than an academic or political argument.

Where before Chua largely defended her family, showing how invested she was in her own analysis, Chua now, with the case study of Latin America, doesn’t break out of that personal bubble. Most of her analysis concerns Mexican friends of hers, similar to how her description of Bolivia centered on her connections in the country. She introduces some of the white-dominated plutocracy, beginning with one, Alejandro Duclaud Gonzalez de Castilla, who she met while both worked at the privatized Mexican telephone company, Telmex. This all seems to indicate similar issues of conflict of interest, which Chua seems to confirm. She first presents the allegations of corruption against de Castilla (who she refers to by his first name) as dubious, then normalizes them, calling insider “profiteering” business as usual in the “developing world”. She admits that she and others are “viewing emerging market privatization through a rose-colored lens” but she continues to believe that this project, for which she worked, “was on balance a good thing for the Mexican people” (60). Clearly, she’s the best person to ask about these issues.

Next Time: the Latin American examples reveal yet another problem with Chua’s arguments.

"The Siege of Mecca" is a mixed bag, but necessary read

2010-07-07T20:39:00.000-07:00

I've disappeared for quite a while, because I've been preparing a couple of new things for this blog. First and foremost, I've been reading through The Siege of Mecca: the 1979 Uprising at Islam's Holiest Shrine by Yaroslav Trofimov.

It's an engaging and, in my opinion, essential guide to how Islamism has evolved in recent decades. At it's core, it revolves around the massive importance and implications of a brief hostage situation in the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979 (as the title suggests). This act of terrorism occurs in a context seemingly disconnected to the modern War on Terror - the location seems somewhat unusual, but odder still are the players. The leader of rebels was Juhayman, a Bedouin with only informal Islamic training who held a grudge against the Saudi state because of its betrayal of his parent's generation of Bedouin. Ignited by fanatical claims of the Mahdi's return (a pseudo-messianic aspect of Sunni Islam), he led a band along with a man believed to be the Mahdi into the spiritual center of the Islamic world, to take it hostage in the first shot of what was supposed to be an apocalyptic war against the Saudi state.

Ultimately, the real power of this work lies in how it describes the shifting alliances of political forces in the Islamic world. Until this act of terrorism, however, Islamist ideals clearly wanted to reform states, rather than demolish them. Saudi Arabia and other governments in the Arab world that placated Islamist interests with favors extended to Muslims and even in some cases incorporated aspects of Islamic religious law into conduct laws were previously safe. They were model states, even if none had quite reached the state idealized by Islamist groups - the substitution of virtually all political power for merely a circuit directing and focusing Islamic legal ideas. Raised in an environment of contempt for the Saudi government, Juhayman was already distrustful of the state, but his botched revolution would eventually begin a process of severing Islamism from state intentions, as many of the pseudo-Islamist policies were slowly revealed to be merely staged attempts at gaining legitimacy.

Initially, Juhayman attempted to bring the alleged Mahdi to Saudi-backed ulama (Islamic clerics some of which are given positions of great importance by states such as Saudi Arabia), but ultimately the resistance of the ulama to declare the chosen man to be the Mahdi cemented biases against them among the more extreme Islamist factions. Western fashions had begun prevailing among certain groups and minorities of Shiites continued to live (uncomfortably, but still) on the Arabian Peninsula, about which the Saudi-backed ulama had failed to act, according to the growing extremist forces. The failure to recognize the Mahdi, out of fear of sharing greater power with Juhayman and upsetting the delicate balance the Saudis had attempted to create established a clearer understanding of their motivations for Juhayman and other Islamists in Saudi Arabia.

In short, the Saudi-backed ulama had become part of the government, and with their authority delivered from the state, they sought to maintain its security, even at the cost of perceived Islamic ideals. The gradual shift of government into an increasingly theocratic structure had to an extent backfired, with religious authorities becoming more political, rather than politicians becoming more religious. Essentially, existing state authorities could never be purified, only replaced. Even a state as unbelievably theocratic (in that religion is a clear driving force in its authority and legal system) as Saudi Arabia is not theocratic enough, as it has been tainted by a monarchy with worldly aims, such as maintenance of the house of Saud's political power.

As a result, the history of Islamic movements is cleft in two - between those that pre-existed Juhayman's startling rebellion against mere pseudo-theocracy (such as the current government of Iran, which is quite friendly with the idea of theocracy negotiating with politics) and those that follow (such as the Taliban, Al-Qaida, and other familiar names, which larger oppose all known governments). Likewise, Juhayman's radical breaking from theocracy-light has been largely confined to the Sunni Islamic world, while the Iran-dominated Shiites have not need of his political philosophies, as they had already achieved some degree of Islamist government prior to his conquest of the mosque.

In any case, the illuminating aspects of this book are counterbalanced by its failure to understand the nuances of anti-Americanism. Islamism is largely fueled by a reaction to American dominance and abuse of power, but to leave the issue there is somewhat simplistic. In its political context, Islamism frequently depends on a coalition of related counter-American groups. The Islamic Revolution in Iran succeeded because of a fusion of both liberal and conservative elements directed against the Shah (and it was only after his ousting that the leftist communists and socialists were massacred by the Islamists who then exercised total control of the future government). In many ways, this was an additional change among the Islamists during Juhayman's failed revolution - dissatisfied anti-colonial youth even with leftist leanings became attracted to their positions. In this highly non-nationalistic context, leftist youths' contempt for the American government for both perceived slights and factual pseudo-colonial wrongs goes unbalanced against concern to separate this from contempt for the American people or for modern culture, because the latter are understood as completely distinct from the former (or at the least adequately distinct).

The section of Trofimov's book I found most illuminating in this regard concerned an anecdote about the American embassy in Tripoli, Libya, after it had been raided by Islamists and Islamists-inspired youths:

The following day, just after embassy personel managed to reattach the dislodged front door, a young Libyan man arrived and started pounding at the entrance. One of the rioters who attacked the building the previous day, he surveyed the damage with glee, proud of a job well done. Then he told McCavitt [the American ambassador] he needed a visa to return to a college he was attending in upstate New York. Once McCavitt slammed the door with a curse, the flustered Libyan started screaming in English: "You can't do this to me!"

The implications that Trofimov seems to be trying to draw are that this behavior is laughable, because the young man was simultaneously an active participant in an almost violent protest against perceived and real American militarism and a student embedded in American culture and educational institutions. On closer examination, this reveals at least as much about Trofimov as the student.

The student clearly saw less of a contradiction, as he opposed the American government's actions, but not the American people and his interactions with them in terms of education, if not also financially. This seems to be the part of a classic Muslim left-wing youth's political life, as they are drawn into co-ordination with Islamists in the very limited situations where both hold contempt for the American government. Alternatively, the fact that Trofimov sees this as ridiculous shows that he equates the two - the American people are the American government, a surprisingly nationalistic thought.

More importantly, Trofimov's writing shows that he can not entertain the idea that some Muslims might not make this mental equation of government and entire society, which, as I've explained before, is a key aspect of how Islamists have garnered even remotely enough support to exert the control they have in the Islamic world and the world at large. In short, this misunderstanding of the intentions of Islamists' political allies by Trofimov and his ilk (such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, I suspect) has led to a situation where many American policy-makers simply can not figure out a method of defusing the Islamist bloc. Without any ideas, they turn to what they know best which is usually war, which in the end only gives the Islamists more support.

In short, we need a new generation of leaders who can see the flaws in Trofimov's and others' seemingly rational analysis of the Islamist bloc, if we want a lasting solution to the problem of one of the big three.

Rand Paul's White Privilege

2010-05-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

I am white and I admit that I have experienced privilege.

I say this because not enough white people say it. Not enough whites want to learn from the advantages that they have had and at least attempt to peer into the shoes of some one whose great-grandparents may have been slaves, or whose grandparents were banned from immigrating to the US, or who is mistakenly or not-so-mistakenly branded as something less than human and merely illegal.

My ancestors were "pig-in-the-parlor" Irish, dissident Alsatians, poor Southern Whites with Cherokee aunts, and other square pegs to eighteenth century America's round wholes. They did not have it easy in the least. But they did not have to deal with the sheer amount of discrimination, hostility, and overt inequality, which for millions of others were daily reminders of their irreversible identity as people of color. For them, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a breath of fresh air, which has since been stifled by the right wing's return to coded talk of states' rights and increasingly overt returns to Jim Crow policies, if Arizona's SB 1070 is any indication.

Now, a challenger to the Republican Party Machine in Kentucky, thinks he is leading us into a new era of freedom by "questioning" the impacts of the Civil Rights Act and similar legislation. Dr. Rand Paul has never had to think about how life would be if he lived under the provisions he envisions as expansive and libertarian - for people of color and to a lesser extent all other minorities this constitutes a massive loss. If the private sphere no longer must serve all Americans, then mobility becomes a nightmare, since there's no guarantee that a restaurant will serve you or that a store will let you use its facilities. Confined much more tightly to present neighborhoods, ghettos, and self-segregated areas, minorities could easily be reduced to much lower living standards. There's no guarantee that a bank will give any of them a loan, or that business associations will allow them into their little clubs.

Ironically, Paul's answer to these questions is that the public institutions, meanwhile, under this ideal version of the Civil Rights Act, would have been integrated and filled the role of sustaining the economic strength and social incorporation of minority communities. No should trust him in saying this, because, as his libertarian background suggests, he cannot even commit to support of basic universal measures that guarantee such egalitarianism - such as a minimum wage.

This is becoming the new face of the right in American politics as Republicans are purged from the Republican party - a new front for the reinstatement of Jim Crow.

The "Bloodless" Coup

2010-05-21T14:06:00.000-07:00

When the Zelaya Administration of Honduras fell to a corporate junta, the newly installed neo-liberal Obama Administration gently condemned the perpetrators and as no violence (allegedly) occurred or continued, the issue quietly disappeared from public concern.

Looking back, nothing could have been further from the truth.

Scattered reports surfaced at the time of violence by the military and police, suggesting that political murders happened before brief return of ousted President Zelaya and have continued in growing numbers since his second exile. While the vast majority of the violence has taken the more overt route in targeting anti-brutality activists, anti-neo-colonial and environmental protesters were among some of targets, including one of the most horrendous murders yet:

Dora Alicia was a member of the Cabañas Environmental Committee, and had been active in opposing the mine. She was eight months pregnant when she was shot dead, and her two year old son was also wounded in the attack.

If we have any decency, we would be on the street protesting.

Supreme Court Insanity

2010-04-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

For years now, the nationalist right has approached political issues surrounding the Supreme Court with an utter detachment from sanity, which has only grown worse with time. Because the court appointees essentially serve for life, maintaining a degree of control over the court is central to any political movement. During the Great Depression, the Supreme Court was packed with appointees from various earlier presidents, whose efforts reduced the efficacy of the New Deal. Similar limitations have been placed on the Obama Presidency's reforms by the Bush-appointee Chief Justice, John Roberts. Lasting change in the United States requires a prevention of any strategies to undermine Obama's placements to the court or limit his options in that regard.

The people who want to change this country with the President, to usher in an age of responsibility, compassion, and justice (in other words, precisely what was lacking under our previous President) need to take on a hateful subculture which prayed for sitting justices in a still recent court to die and continues to use bigoted tactics in its "war" for America.

Given the speculation that President Obama might attempt to nominate a lesbian or gay justice to fill the coming vacancy, the American Family Association immediately stepped up an offensive against the potential nomination of the first sexual minority to the court. Earlier this week an AFA correspondent wrote:

Sen. John Cornyn has regrettably opened the door to the possibility of an openly gay Supreme Court justice, saying he'd "have to think about" it, and adding, "As long as it doesn't interfere with their job, it's not a particular issue."

The problem with Cornyn's position is that a gay judge's sexual preference will, without any question whatsoever, "interfere with their job." It's not possible for it to be otherwise.

The commentary in the second paragraph is surprisingly insightful. This AFA correspondent is so insulated (from the larger, secular, sexually-pluralistic culture that has come to dominate the United States in the past two decades) that he cannot conceive of a gay or lesbian or bisexual or otherwise sexually atypical judge having a political career and ideology outside of their sexuality and the perceived cultural trappings of it. He thinks that any of us Americans who register as less than a Kinsey one live entire lives oriented around that sexual difference. This is a degree of "othering" so profound that it's patently ridiculous.

Even more shocking is the emphasis placed on sexuality as an ultimate litmus test for a nomination to the Supreme Court. This religious arm of the larger surge of American nationalism has made a name for itself as moral arbiters who seek to return America to a purer, safer, better time. But this reveals that this branch of the nationalists unsurprisingly thinks of morality in exclusively sexual terms. Thus, the actual job (according to the AFA) of any Supreme Court Justice is not to rule on constitutionality and illegality but morality. "Immoral" laws are to be struck down. "Moral" provisions are to be prescribed. All of this pseudo-theocratic judgment occurs only regarding the issues the AFA concerns itself with (the rights of historical scapegoats of theocracies, women and sexual minorities) making a natural alignment between anti-populist economic groups (the Republican Party donors) and one-issue socially conservative voters (the Republican base).

The article continues on past this revealing bit of hopeful wishing for theocracy to the dreadful idea of retroactively reinstalling Sodomy bans:

If we elevate an open homosexual to the Supreme Court, we will be elevating someone who freely admits that he (generic use) engages routinely in behavior that was still a felony in every state in the Union as recently as 1962 and a felony in the other 49 states until 1972.

Or, if we're playing a numbers game, 14 states in 2002. Funny how it going for more recent data suddenly makes the AFA look like it's out of touch with the majority of state laws.

Meanwhile the article plugs onward into oblivion:

Sodomy is still a felony in the criminal code of about a dozen states. The Lawrence decision of 2003, an egregious act of judicial activism, prohibited enforcement of these laws, but the fact remains that 25% of the states in the Union still regard it as criminal behavior.

Those laws are still in the criminal code in the same sense that Jim Crow is still on the books where it was struck down by Brown v. Board of Education. Similarly, womens' suffrage is not extended in all states. The proponent of this argument either does understand how federalism works, or actively seeks to undermine how it works.

The rest of the article (about the remaining half) dumps these previous arguments in favor of a bitter argument in favor of

A fundamental requirement of a judge is impartiality. He is to be as impartial as an umpire or a referee. His responsibility is to take rules written by others (including and above all the Constitution) and faithfully and neutrally apply them without bias or favoritism, and without changing the rules in the middle of the game to give the advantage to the team he happens to like best.

Tim Donaghy, an experienced NBA referee, was recently banned for life when it was revealed that he placed bets on games he himself officiated. He eventually plead guilty to federal conspiracy charges and is in prison as we speak. You just can't have a referee - or a judge - who has a built-in bias towards one team or the other.

In short, straight people have no biases, unlike those gays.

Targeting Weapons Not Ideas

2010-01-04T14:03:00.000-08:00

The unsurprising reaction to the Christmas Day (attempted) bombing has been more restrictions on travel, more troops in a relatively innocent Middle Eastern country, and generally more of the same. Obama, how you've failed us.

Since this marks now the third attempted terrorist attack on a plane since 9/11 which managed to only be thwarted by passengers, people are asking once again how can the TSA prevent would-be terrorists from bringing various explosives on board. There's quite a precedent for this sort of recoiling in the face of an utter failure of a terrorist act - the Shoe Bomber nearly caused matches and lighters to be more strictly controlled, and the London-based cell that attempted to create a lethal chemicals in the lavatory famously caused the ban on liquids (with varying forms, from either all liquids being banned as in parts of Europe, to the lighter American ban that restricts passengers to only three ounce containers). So what exactly are the recommended changes this time around? Well, according to one expert:

There are two machines that might -- and I say might -- have revealed the old bomb in the underwear ploy. One is the machine, which we encountered in the airport in Paris and is in a few airports in the US, that puffs air at you and analyzes the atmosphere for chemical residue. The other one is the X-ray machine, which was very controversial in the US for the prudish reason that it showed the faint outline of genitalia.

Are we honestly reaching the point where essentially strip-searching people is being debated? Both are fairly invasive procedures, and yes I've been subjected to both while flying in the United States. The ultimate irony is that the paragraph a few lines above this intense search for methods to prevent terrorist suspects from bringing dangerous chemicals or devices onto planes, the same expert mentioned that:

And yet, what we have so far is incredibly expensive and cumbersome security procedures that can be easily circumvented by your average Joe Terrorist. I have always wondered, for example, how metal detectors would respond to explosives made of plastic. Answer? They don't. I have also wondered why, since it is well known that one must remove one's shoes at airport, any terrorist would put explosives in his or her shoe. Answer? They don't: they sew the bomb in their underwear.

Truly what we have here is a failure of the imagination with this expert specifically and on almost every party in this debate generally - humans solve puzzles naturally, what we need to target is the motivation, not the ultimate action. That isn't to suggest that we resort to criminalizing the idea of terrorism (to an extent that's already happened, it seems), but that we should attempt preventative measures that start before people board planes - that start with addressing why such a large percentage of the Muslim world is so angry at Americans and the West. This isn't, as that expert says, "cooperation and meekness in the face of jihadi fanaticism," this is actually addressing the problem instead of ignoring the conflict and preventing it from affecting Americans outside of airport security.

Obama's landmark speech earlier this year to the Islamic world seemed to be the end of a long violent campaign against Muslim nations, and the beginning of a dialogue and a constructive solution. Hopefully this single failed attack won't break the nascent reconciliation and boost the chances of a war in Yemen.

Inflated Sense of Self-Importance?

2009-12-22T18:48:00.000-08:00

Since the tea party protests the entire conservative wing of the American political a clear sense of entitlement has become not just a common theme in rightist circles, but the predominant basis of post-tea-party politics. In fact, the tea parties, often seen as a massive tantrum of sorts against the victory of the emerging Democratic coalition, Obama, the rise of a leftwing voting generation replacing a conservative base, in short a society-wide rejection the conservative ideology which had dominated for the past several decades.

The largest symptom of this is a vicious denial of their nature as a minority, and violent assertions that they are "fighting" for a populist cause, not a shrinking section of the population motivated primarily by bigotry. In spite of all electoral trends, polling data, and other evidence that suggests a slow but steady decline of the current Republican alliance between social conservatives, libertarian neo-liberals, and imperialist neo-conservatives, the emerging new right wing order imagines itself as the champion of the people. Why else do conservatives feel empowered to threaten centrist Blue Dogs? As the New York Times has printed:

So Michael Steele, Republican Party chairman, and Dick Armey, former House Republican majority leader, have already shifted their focus to the 2010 mid-term elections and beyond, hoping to use the health bill to galvanize their base and fill campaign coffers.

An admirable strategy, if they hadn't pulled out every last gimmick in the last election trying to stem the tide of the anti-Republican backlash. They have drained every iota of the potentially-republican-voting angry conservative base, and in the process decimated the political landscape in much of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains - all of the conservative third parties have disappeared into a reliable Republican fold already. Beyond having mined their ideological base to exhaustion, they have become so reliant on reactionaries that they have alienated a huge section of the centrist vote and irreparably lost an entire generation. Roughly two thirds of the voters my age support same-sex marriage, and that's not including those that support or prefer a watered down civil union compromise. Beyond even more entrenched openness that Republicans shy away from on issues of race, gender, or sexuality, the coming political battle over the legal definition of marriage shows a Republican policy that will lose any significant support from the growing "millennial" demographic.

Beyond all of these more detailed concerns over how such an electoral strategy is doomed to abysmal failure, the majority of Americans want health care. Every poll in the past ten years has shown this issue as a growing concern, and now, with a majority supporting a public option and the Obama administration leading congressional Republicans by 15% (and growing) on this issue, the Republicans think they can claim exclusive rights to a popular movement.

Moreover, this older ideological frame the Republicans have returned to embracing, that of a persecuted minority against the liberal establishment, loses all its credibility with this newer argument - that Republicans are the true Americans. Republicans are casting themselves as the majority and sole legitimate heir apparent of American political thought, and at the same time, a hated group hunted by the dark shadowy liberal conspiracy (as if we were that organized). It harkens back to the same inconsistency slacktivist points out time and time again - that America is the shining (Christian) city on a hill and yet also Babylon, only instead of the religious dualism of America as Christian example to all and fallen nation, it occupies a nationalistic frame of mind, where America is righteous and courageous against the evils of the world and yet poisoned from within by traitors of various stripes, false Americans all.

While the Republicans are clearly burning their bridges now, they still have considerable power - enough to disrupt almost any legislation in the Senate, a nearly packed Supreme Court, a surprisingly passive Democratic counterbalance in the White House and to a lesser extent the Congress, and a shocking hold on the media. This is the Republican party at its most dangerous, because they have just begun their fall from power, and they still have the potential to strike back. The perfect motives have arisen just as a palingenic and ultranationalist strain (read: pseudo-fascist) ideology has moved from the background into the forefront of their dreams of an American future. The next few years are going to be the hardest and most dangerous, and while the Republicans are down and are losing face, this may be their dangerous, for that precise reason.

EDIT: Yes, I know, this. Is any one really surprised that the Dixiecrats are angry at the Democrats? Angry enough to not vote with them on anything of consequence? Angry enough to leave the party? This is just the last of the fallout of the party realignment started with the Southern Strategy during the Nixon administration. As in, nearly forty years ago.

Additionally, the data about popular support for a public option is from here.

Alternate Reality

2009-11-11T08:28:00.000-08:00

In the wake of the tragedy at Fort Hood, the right in America has spent hours deconstructing the event, largely because it both undermines their assumptions about the world and also confirms their fantasies about Islamic Extremism. How it operates in the latter fashion is clear - a Muslim man shot several soldiers in an army camp in Texas, killing many of them. And yet, there's a clear element of disbelief and incomprehension, strewn amidst the calls for mandatory debriefings of Muslim soldiers and the increasingly too familiar demands for identification and surveillance of the entire Muslim American community.

Major Nadil Malik Hasan was a native-born American citizen. Fox News returned to that point several times, unable to reconcile it with his actions. Why can't they accept that an American who had faced relatively constant attacks on his character because of his religion become angry with this country? Why can't they accept that though his course of action was truly disgusting and deserving all the reprimand in the world, that his politics had a basis in an utterly human response to their cultural bigotry?

This goes beyond their forced blindness to their enemies' perception of the United States and resultant political opposition. To its core, islamophobic reaction to 9/11 in America has built its base over nativist and anti-immigrant sentiment, casting undocumented immigrants, even non-Muslims from Haïti, as security threats. Within a matter of weeks of that terrorist attack, the legal immigration status of the actual perpetrators of that attack was forgotten, and hundreds of undocumented Muslims were being rounded up because of their religion.

The status of terrorist and Muslim becoming the same fit into a larger narrative of both being foreign. The Bush era undermining of attempts to study domestic terrorism and explanation of the Iraq War as a fight against "them" over there so "they" don't fight us here all contributed to a perception of Islamism as not only an ideology introduced from far away countries, but tied to foreigners and outsiders, never members of American society. This reconciled with an equation of terrorism and Islam by an overarching xenophobia, casting all of these weakly related ideologies and statuses as inherently linked and inherently outside of the American experience.

Already, however, the far right has continued to build up this illusion of utter foreignness of Islamism. Leading Republicans have pronounced this a sign of how thoroughly the American military has been "infiltrated", infected with Muslims as the subtext to this statement. Considering Hasan joined the army in 1995, long before the War on Terror, and was a native-born American, this talk of ideological contamination rings false. He didn't arrive from a distant shore bringing harsh words for the American military. He found himself rejected and trapped within the military and turned to violence as a solution.

In response to the various parts of the case which contradict a narrative of Islamism in favor of a more complex interaction between anti-military sentiment, instability, and a religious justification, various pundits have labeled this as an act purely driven by religion. Retired General Barry McCaffrey has already claimed that murders as a response to an unwilling redeployment. In spite of serving in the Vietnam War, the killing of fellow military servicemen as a desperate attempt to avoid deployment seems a completely foreign attitude for him.

As per usual, the right wing perception of the event has a limited basis in reality and largely ignores evidence contradictory to a larger worldview with xenophobia as a central pillar of their understanding of the universe. They're living in an alternate reality, where the political correctness of the American military is making them too nice to Muslims.

The 2010 Census: Watershed of Neo-Nativism

2009-10-22T21:21:00.000-07:00

The census is a natural outlet for nativist fears and related anxiety over the cultural and racial identity of the United States – it quite literally is the federal government’s analysis of who Americans are and what that information means. Those complex issues have overwhelmingly dominated the political environment following Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in the midst of one of the strongest rightwing radicalizations in American history. Like the unstoppable force and immovable object, the most symbolic affront to any ideology invested in White leadership of the United States ever has coincided with the culmination of a backlash brewing since the Civil Rights Movement. Floating in and out of the debate, the 2010 census has the potential to be the flashpoint which ignites any number of powder kegs of ethnic identity politics in America.

As the tide of anti-tax and anti-government protests began to rise over the summer of 2009, one of the early voices of alleged warning that sparked this populist explosion was Michelle Bachmann, a Representative of Minnesota. Already famous for dramatically conservative positions, Bachmann had previously become relatively well-known for her statements that a committee should be formed to evaluate the patriotism of every member of Congress. On June 17, her comments during an interview with the Washington Times, however, crossed the line from blatant partisan demagoguery into a clear attempt to transform present paranoia into potentially violent action. This interview combined the various conservative fears surrounding the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN), particularly highlighting Obama’s connections with that organization (referring to him as “a former employee of ACORN now occupying the White House”), but furthermore suggesting that ACORN and related groups (and the infiltrated federal government) intended to gather large amounts of information using the census – presumably for nefarious ends. The congresswoman then advised her interviewers and the audience to follow her supposed example and refuse to answer any of the questions on the census except the number of people in the residence – an act alone that is considered a federal crime.

The paranoia in that encounter is tangible, but pales in comparison to her statements eight days later. On Fox News, she argued that her worries about the 2010 Census have historical precedent in that:

“between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that's how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps […] I'm not saying that that's what the Administration is planning to do, but I am saying that private personal information that was given to the Census Bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up, in a violation of their constitutional rights, and put the Japanese in internment camps”

No longer ending with a vague fear of loss of privacy, Bachmann’s train of thought abruptly jumps from typical census data in the modern day to Gestapo-esque utter violations of any sort of due process. The four months following that and similar comments from the various heads of the Republican Party seemed an almost unthinkable acceptance of this paranoia by the right and a bizarre fascination with this strange pseudo-populist movement by the left. This continues into the very current political situation, visible for instance in a newly produced survivalist strategy game involving militias (the role the player takes) killing the remains of the Obama Administration and ACORN “shock troops” following a coup.

At this immediate time, however, the transmission of fears surrounding the census from the libertarian far right to the authoritarian cultural conservatives has radically altered the right’s overall perception of the census, transforming it from utter paranoia to attempted manipulation of the program. To a limited extent, this was clear even during the earliest roots of the census paranoia. Bachmann suggests that her followers fill out one specific question only on the census – that concerning the number of residents. Often, racial minorities are dramatically undercounted while the census frequently overestimates the number of Whites – giving states with less diversity a subtle advantage, as the census determines the number of Representatives and thereby electoral votes a state should have. It remains unclear what motivated Bachmann’s various claims about the census, but her clarity that residents should respond question which directly determines the strength of a location’s political voice suggests that she attempted a nuanced position, which discredited the would-be reformers of the census (ACORN, Obama), legitimized the views of her base (that the Obama Administration was intent on tyrannical government), but left her base’s geographic standing intact (by filling in their answers to that particular question).

That stance has fallen away, as the Republican Party has realized the extent to which it can still legislate policy. Bachmann’s radical tone, the political equivalent of a scorched-earth retreat, has yielded to a new consensus among Republican congressmen to mold the census into a political arm for their current objective – revenge against the demographic widely considered the cause of their downfall and through the silencing of this group the potential of preventing further losses. They hope to use the census to target the Latino community.

The desire for revenge against, or failing that, structural undermining of the politicized Latino community has been the Republican response to the 2008 Presidential Election, which conservatives overwhelmingly perceived as being the decisive transition of the Latino voting bloc from an independent group to a member of the Democratic coalition. As Newsweek reported in the aftermath of Obama’s stunning election:

“Hispanic voters didn't just leave their mark on this year's presidential election. They decided it. Four states with sizable Hispanic populations that went for Bush in 2004—Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada—all turned blue this time around, adding 46 crucial electoral votes to the Democratic candidate's winning tally”

The transition from treating the census as inherently suspect to viewing it as a tool for systematically undermining Latino vote, however, was shockingly sudden. As the summer of 2009 came to an end, the paranoia surrounding the census had reached a fever pitch, resulting in the brutal murder of a volunteer census working in Kentucky. Found in late September, “hanged from a tree near a Kentucky cemetery had the word ‘fed’ scrawled on his chest,” the death of Bill Sparkman seemed an ominous warning of impending violence towards census workers until the completion of the census in 2010. A matter of weeks later on October 7th, however, "Republican [Senators] David Vitter of Louisiana and Bob Bennett of Utah" had proposed an “amendment [which] would exclude illegal immigrants from the population count used to allocate congressional seats [using] the 2010 Census". Senator Vitter explained his reasoning arguing “[i]llegal aliens should not be included for the purposes of determining representation in Congress, and that's the bottom line here”. Unfortunately ignored by the Senators, the impact of this proposal on the political system would not be a glowing restitution of American democracy, but rather a variety a change from one unpalatable choice to another. Instead of illegal aliens’ presence increasing the count of individuals to be represented in a given area or state (the current situation), under the provisions envisioned as stemming from this addition to the census, the concept of one-man-one-vote would be restored at the price of a completely politically voiceless class being created. This amendment brings to the surface the unsavory realities of illegal immigration: at its core the fact that without amnesty and naturalization, undocumented immigrants represent a group inherently deprived either in part or in total of true political representation.

Beyond these more abstract political concerns a variety of more concrete issues seem largely ignored by this Republican amendment. In pragmatic terms, “[a]bout 425 million forms have already been printed” without any questions on citizenship, a new requirement to receive any further funds. In addition to cancelling the current ad campaign based on the ten questions on those millions of forms, adding “questions would require designing new forms” which is “operationally impossible” according to the director of the program. Furthermore, the idea that individuals would willingly reveal their legal status in the country, especially to a state clearly influenced by a growing neo-nativist movement, is quite laughable. Fearing an undesirable response to census questions on residency could be part of the recent trend of more dramatic anti-immigrant policy, “some [Arizonan] immigration advocates are threatening to tell undocumented immigrants to boycott the census”. Appearing to be almost a last act of desperation, such a protest would harm immigrants as much or more than others, as the data from the census not only determines (distant seeming) political districting, but also “would deny recession-starved cities and towns much-needed federal tax dollars, which are allocated based on population” as determined by the census. States like Arizona with strong immigrant communities “could lose millions of dollars in federal funding for roads, schools, redevelopment and other projects if large numbers of people are overlooked”. Even in states traditionally off the beaten path of immigrants, like North Carolina, have realized that the “challenge looms large for census [workers]” interested in accurately counting a community subjected to “raids in which people were taken from their homes at night” by the state conducting the census. Moreover, the constitutionality of the proposed restructuring of the census is quite questionable, as existing law overwhelmingly uses citizenship-neutral language, calling for a counting of “inhabitants” or “persons”. Plagued by so many practical obstacles, it seems unrealistic to expect many to support the Republican amendment.

In spite of its general detachment from reality, the far right, originally terrified of the alleged potential abuse of the census, has primarily rallied around a remodeling of the census as an instrument for excluding certain individuals from the country on an even deeper institutional level. Glenn Beck, a rightwing pundit who used the nationalistic mood of the summer of 2009 to amass a disturbing amount of political power, very quickly endorsed the Republican amendment. On October 11th, a few days after the initial introduction of the change, Beck devoted a section of his broadcast to a nationalistic skewering of opponents to the proposed addition – comparing them repeatedly to those who advocated the three fifths compromise. Beck opines,

“When it comes to immigration laws are we getting best what’s for America [sic] or what’s best for SEIU [a medical workers’ union] who has more immigrant workers than any other union and funded the May Day rallies […] wasn’t that a communist thing?”.

Having fused resurgent neo-McCarthyism, neo-Nativism, and anti-union populism, Beck then hides this repugnant intolerance in an alleged stance of opposition to the modern slavery of undocumented immigrants, declaring in a strange fashion, that his opposition to the irregular political position of all non-citizen residents equates to liberation of undocumented aliens from substandard labor. In short, Beck has claimed that ignoring the problem is the same as solving it. If Glenn Beck is any indication, the populist neo-nativist conservatives of America have quickly forgotten their qualms about Obama’s census and seized a political opportunity, not only regardless of the cost to immigrant communities, but in part because of it.

Moving the Goal Posts (p 49 - 51)

2009-10-03T17:37:00.000-07:00

Starting the first chapter of her book to deal with something more specific than the general functions of her theory, Amy Chua seems to be trying to kill two birds with one stone - hushing her critics as naysayers ignoring a coming revolution and fleshing out her theory with specific examples.

She starts with Bolivia:

In the fall of 1999 a graduate student from Bolivia named Augusto Delgado raised his hand in my Law and Development seminar. Always frank and incisive, and one of the best students I have ever had, Augusto said: "I believe, Professor Chua, that my country is a perfect counterexample to your thesis. In Bolivia, we have all of the conditions you mention. A very small light-skinned minority dominates the economy, while 65 percent of the population are impoverished Aymara and Quechua Indians. But in Bolivia today there would never be an ethnic movement against the market-dominant minority. The reason for this is because ethnicity has no appeal in Bolivia. No Indian would ever want to identify himself as an Indian. They are willing to think of themselves as campesinos, or peasants, but as indios - no."

Predictably, a poor ethnic majority which has been fed racist propaganda vilifying their own culture which has finally reached a point where identification with their own group has become an almost unthinkable admission of worthlessness is in fact not an easily pacified group and revolts against these terms the wealthy minority has set for them (that is, being peasantry and ashamed of your own ethnicity and cultural traditions).

Less than two years later, when Augusto was back in La Paz working as a corporate lawyer, he contacted me by e-mail. He explained that he was writing to take back his earlier words. At that very moment, angry indigenous coca peasants were marching on La Paz, protesting the government's decision to eradicate coca - for Bolivians, a "sacred plant"widely used in legal, nonaddictive forms; for the U.S.-sponsored anti-drug campaign, the source of cocaine. Calling for a constitutional assembly to organize a new "majority-based" government, the peasants had set up roadblocks, paralyzing the country's major cities.

If we return to the 65 percent figure that Chua was ready to accept a mere page earlier, even if only 8 out of every ten indigenous Bolivians opposed a ban, a low number for a sacred rite, that would be a majority of the population. Her tone seems diplomatic, but clearly suggests her opinion is that these actions were not acceptable, especially the scare quotes around "majority-based" since that's a perfectly reasonable description of what they were protesting in the name of.

She goes on to describe Felipe Quispe, an Aymara "terrorist", quoting a Bolivian minister who attacks Quispe and other indigenous rights activists as operating under a mindset triggered 400 years ago. If their people face a society run for the benefit of a select few who are radically opposed to any sort of victory for the indigenous population, such attitudes aren't antiquated and it's remarkable that Evo Morales's peaceful reform party easily defeated Felipe Quispe's more radical party. Tellingly, Chua omits any references to Evo Morales, although it is unclear whether she wished to ignore a pro-reform pro-indigenous politician who refused to use violence because it failed to fit into her narrow dichotomy of angry poor majorities and blissfully unaware wealthy minorities, or because he wasn't quite the name he was when she originally wrote this book. I will say nothing except that she wrote this book originally in 2003 and Morales's victory in 2002 triggered the crisis her student wrote to her about.

She begins the next section with a description of La Paz: "Despite its stark beauty, La Pax attracts relatively few tourists, in part because its eleven-thousand-foot altitude leaves the unaccustomed with headaches and even the locals with low energy".

One of the most common uses of the coca leaf is to reduce the effects of altitude sickness.

A War Against Itself

2009-09-21T19:38:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the First World War, Europe was a mess. Millions had died both directly from the war and indirectly from the Spanish Flu which had massacred the civilian population and the military alike, their resistance weakened by food and supply shortages.

What truly left Europe so devastated, however, was the shift from "traditional" means of warfare that had slowly accumulated over centuries into modern warfare, complete with machines that could kill with the press of a cliché button. Death had become automated and that had destabilized the complex power balances that had kept things running slowly before the war.

Something similar has happened in the American Media.

Instead of "traditional" censorship, where governments would flood the media with propaganda, out-competing alternative viewpoints, and threaten often at gunpoint those who had broken through the government's control.

Now we have something more automated. A censorship based on quiet omissions and a slow choking off of information, leaving what little information seeps through undecipherable, without context. While the mechanization of war roared into a European continent which had enjoyed a previously quite peaceful century and became inescapable as the horrors of the Great War embedded themselves in the politics and arts of the twenties, the subtle gaining of these means of censorship have gone largely unnoticed.

We are in the worst kind of danger. The kind you cannot see coming.

We should have known when it was England the reported more heavily on our own 2000 election and the following controversy. We should have realized what was happening when our media differed so radically from the rest of the world's total lack of the steady drumbeat into the Iraq War. We should have acted when the Pentagon irradiated entire Iraqi cities and the Gap bought members of congress to keep it's caged workers on Saipan working for scarily low wages.

What happens when the media starts refusing to cover bombs being built here, instead of just them going off over there?

(World on Fire coming by Friday, I swear!)

Third Parties

2009-09-15T09:49:00.000-07:00

In short, the more things change the more they stay the same. We now have confirmed the link between the School of the Americas specifically and the US generally, and the coup in Honduras.

The left wing in the US has been ignored in favor of corporatist (and more recently, growing right wing populist) policy. Obama has no reason to change, and has shown no indication of movement on this subject, in spite of unusually strong complaints from the usually grateful left-center base.

The instability in Honduras at this point, buried by the American media, is the direct consequence of the complete isolation of the left from the American political scene. The entire country of Honduras has been functionally shut down by our actions and inability to correct our failed policies. Our broken system is breaking their system.

If the American Public wants to take a stand against our legitimizing and financing of military coups and resultant dictatorships, we need a protest vote we can turn to. Buchanan, Barr, and Nader have wrecked havoc transforming the Reform, Libertarian, and Green parties into organizations primarily focused on advancing their leaders careers, not actual reform.

There seems to be no avenue to actually repairing our system. For decades now, millions of Americans haven't voted, and tellingly, no mainstream attempts have been made to correct this. Dissatisfaction producing apathy is in the interest of those who don't want the United States to have a democracy, or at least a democracy that actually represents popular opinion.

Japan has given us hope, however.

Where a coalition of centrist, corporatist parties ruled for decades on end, financed by wealthy backers both foreign and domestic, a populist democratic seed took root and seems committed to rebuilding the nation.

Let's hope that they don't get another false promise, another Obama.

The old one-two

2009-08-10T16:41:00.000-07:00

I've written before in depth about the split among the loose "bundle" of bottom-up anti-democratic movements throughout North America, particularly the United States, but a clear shift appears to be happening: the race-based communalists are facing growing heat from the mainstream, a very reasonable result given their overt violence and general disregard for their appearance within the media, and perhaps more fundamentally their inability to radically differentiate themselves from earlier race-based politics (Classical Fascism, any one?).

So, I think we can consider the Birthers and their even more radical splinters that haven't seen as much media exposure as in retreat. The partial media blackout on right wing terrorism has kept many of the less savory events involving them outside of the public eye or reduced their impact (most notably, James F. Lindsay's insanity, Richard Poplawski's rampage, the James von Brunn attack, and the mess surrounding James G. Cummings).

Alternatively, we have to wonder if we're too late to stall even this movement. Our own government is now party to this, specifically the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), which has essentially transformed sections of our border with Mexico into a police state. A culture where being non-white, speaking a language other than English in public, and similar racially-charged non-criminal acts have become suspect, sparking a complex spectrum spanning from the ICE, official government agents ignoring our own laws, into non-governmental organizations involved in this mess and rouge individuals attempting to appease both groups resorting to unspeakable acts.

Nonetheless, the mainstream seems to be catching on, albeit slowly, to the kind of insanity going on here. PACs aiming at reform of this situation are developing, in a large part because of the spots of this movement that are showing through the media giants' mysterious silence.

Meanwhile, something entirely different appears to be happening to the religious counterparts. Coverage of the Dominionists and the Dispensationalists has been practically nonexistent on the major stations since the election last November (and it only came up then in relation to Sarah Palin's ties to the Assemblies of God and Robert Muthee, and that was incredibly spotty in coverage). An optimist might conclude that this is because the religious communalists aren't as violent or well-organized or widespread; that we've lucked out with one branch of this macro-movement self-destructing while the other never took off.

Realists, however, will notice a similar pattern of individuals within the movement radicalized into violence (as the Tiller Murder and others as recently as less than a week ago), a similar development of cult-like phenomena en masse, ridiculous visions of their own in-group's infallibility, and the same transmission of fringe ideology into the mainstream. In spite of all this, where is the equivalent media attention on these self-proclaimed defenders of virtue?

And yes, just as coverage began to surface of the ICE's routine abuses, Eric Prince, founder and head of XE, originally called Blackwater, has been found to have given out orders, which were followed, to murder members of the organization suspected of acting as informants to the federal government about official misconduct. Incited by Prince, a number of murders of Iraqi civilians drive soldiers, trapped between a failing public system and corrupt private system, to tell the government of the wrongs done by themselves or their company. This only prompted Prince to push XE into a deadly spiral of growing body counts.

Who would have thought? A mercenary organization permeated with a neo-crusader mentality developing murderous intent and becoming corruptly dangerous.

We need to bring the second movement out of the shadows, because it's just as big and just as dangerous as its more illuminated cousin.

Power (pages 12-13)

2009-08-03T12:15:00.000-07:00

When we last read from Amy Chua, she had just dropped a rather shocking conclusion:

[M]arkets and democracy were among the causes of both the Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocides. (12)

That's a rather inflammatory statement. Similar to "Obama is a super secret Muslim Socialist plant", it clearly clashes with mainstream understanding of the facts. In other words, you have to make a case.

Chua's first instinct seem to be argumentum ad hominem, rather than alternative presentation:

Essentially, the anti-globalization movement asks for one thing: more democracy. (12)

Oh, no...?

Thus Noam Chomsky, one of the movement's high priests... (12)

Setting aside the clearly embedded insult, Chua seems to be falling prey to the typical human fallacy of "you're either with me or united against me." She speaks of the anti-globalization movement as monolithic in organization, unified behind certain leaders, like Chomsky. Ironically, a paragraph earlier she had eloquently described the complex coalition that makes up the modern American anti-globalization movement-

Joining [Thomas] Frank in his criticism of "the almighty market" is a host of strange bedfellows: American farmers and factory workers opposed to NAFTA, environmentalists, the AFL-CIO, human rights activists, Third World activists, and sundry other groups... (12)

Note how Chua associates opposition to the "market" with an improper response to the inequalities it creates but seems overwhelmingly hesitant to delver nearly as deep into opposition to democracy, although she freely admits that those responses also exist. In fact, her earlier statements that seemed like attempts to give these two alternatives equal time quickly disappear around the ten page mark, and she starts outright conflating democracy with populist communalism:

Given the ethnic dynamics of the developing world, and in particular the phenomenon of market-dominant minorities, merely "empowering the poor majorities of the world" is not enough. Empowering the Hutu majority in Rwanda did not produce desirable consequences. Nor did empowering the Serbian majority in Serbia. (13).

So much baggage so little time.

Again, we see a theme that started to show its head in the last section - Chua's treatment of the the Rwandan and Serbian genocides as equivalent and nearly interchangeable, an attitude just skirting between forgivable ignorance and obnoxious dehumanization of massive human tragedies into a prop for Chua's political ideas. Fundamentally, this comparison fails with even a simple glance. The market-dominant minority and primary target of the Rwandan genocide were the Tutsi, yes, but the market-dominant minority, according to Chua, among the Serbs was the Croat community, a group that fought with the Serbs on a scale and in a form much more similar to a war, bloody and localized and with little concern for civilian suffering or deaths. The Serbian genocide, instead, involved a primary target of the Muslim minorities in the region, above all else the Albanians, who faced a steadily advancing encroachment on their property, then their homes, then their bodies, eerily reminiscent of the genocidal prototype of Nazi Germany.

Back to this specific statement, however, there's a lot of inaccuracy crammed into those two sentences. In the case of Serbia, Serbs were somewhat politically dominant and took the course of actions they did because they feared loosing that dominance. Croats had a history of brief spells of extreme political and economic dominance, often based on external support. As Yugoslavia collapsed into a patchwork of local governments based on local nationalism, Serbians sought to maintain control over the majority of the country, and because Croatian ascendancy threatened to leave them landlocked or nearly landlocked, the Serbian-dominated government responded with extreme violence. In short, semi-democratic rule reduced Serbian dominance instead of increasing it. Self-determination by the various ethnic minorities had begun shattering the Serbs' Yugoslavia, and prompted them into action, instead of giving them a new capacity to act on a mysteriously derived ethnic hatred.

On the other hand, Rwanda at least gives off the appearance of the minority-majority dynamics Chua has described. Again, details contradict her larger statements, most strikingly how the centrists have been silenced, attacked, and killed by Hutu extremists in Rwanda and Tutsi extremists in Burundi.

Retreating to the general statement, it clearly suggests an unnamed external force which empowered the majorities and determines whether the results are "desirable". Chua's context of the statement more than suggests a very specific identity:

Similarly, at the 2002 World Social Forum in Brazil, Lori Wallach of Public Citizen rejected the label "anti-globalization," explaining that "our movement, really, is globally for democracy, equality, diversity, justice, and quality of life." Wallach has also warned that the WTO must "either bend to the will of the people worldwide or it will break." Echoing these voices are literally dozens of NGOs who call for "democratically empowering the poor majorities of the world." Given the ethnic dynamics of the developing world, and in particular the phenomenon of the market-dominant minorities, merely "empowering the poor majorities of the world" is not enough. Empowering the Hutu majority of Rwanda did not produce desirable consequences. Nor did empowering the Serbian majority in Serbia. (13)

Chua is clearly insinuating that the anti-globalization movement should share in the culpability for the two major genocides of the post-WWII era. The fact that the major external powers in these two events were radically in favor of globalization seems to have not appeared to her - the rabidly pro-globalization Clinton administration, the EC (parent of the EU), the UN, NATO, and in opposition the changing remains of the Soviet bloc essentially drove the ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and to a lesser extent throughout the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Rwanda's record of foreign intervention is even more explicitly colonial, with the concept of Tutsi and Hutu only solidifying under extreme pressure from colonial Belgium and later Belgian and French corporations which funded the genocide drew heavily from the same colonial handbook on divide-and-conquer tactics. In short, the lengthy histories of foreign involvement in both cases involves entirely different movements - in fact, ones that the anti-globalization movement uses specifically as semi-strawman counterpoints to their movements.

She's absolving the powers at be that permitted these atrocities to occur, ignoring the role of the actual perpetrators of these genocides, and demonizing those who opposed both. At the core, she's ignoring the whole of contemporary understanding of the context of these events, but basing her entire argument on what she imagines the contexts to be, all the while filtering it through her personal experiences.

And this is what has to come to represent neo-liberal political thought and Harvard University?

Counting Down

2009-07-22T19:52:00.000-07:00

Things are getting even worse - we have Fox News having guests that outright compare interracial marriage to inter-species "marriage". Elsewhere, the media attack is reaching a fever pitch, with the "Birthers" receiving more attention than they ever dreamed of.

Away from the prying cameras of mainstream news channels, we're seeing widespread military war games by civilian minutemen groups in Northern Idaho. South, towards the border, we have threats of massacres of illegal immigrants (this from a group with ties to murderer who misidentified legal immigrants with no connections with drugs or gangs with illegal immigrants running a gang financed by drug running) now approaching routine, but still fresh enough that they retain an elaborate flavor. Miles of landmines, they say; gunning down children, they say.

Is any one taking the Department of Homeland Security Memo seriously yet? They're plotting something, and you know it.

Not quite

2009-07-22T19:22:00.000-07:00

There's one passage of Rachel Carson's brilliant Silent Spring that always struck me particularly strongly:

Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good? Such thinking, in the words of the ecologist Paul Shepard "idealizes life with only its head out of the water, inches above the limits of toleration of the corruption of its own environment... Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world that is just not quite fatal?" (12)

Something similar seems to be at work here. The Economist, as a passionate (some might say rabid) defender of libertarian economics, naturally can't fault Texas's strategy of leaving the poor to fend for themselves. As well educated writers, however, they seem incapable of ignoring the resultant poverty that seems poised to swallow the state - even more unthinkably low educational standards, even higher pollution, less wealth in every corner of life, except for a small super-rich upper class. Their ideological solution? Texas is apparently not quite fatal, which is good enough.

Seems like this line of thought is becoming pervasive, especially on economic issues:

With U.S. unemployment at a 20-year high, some Americans are working for free while looking for a job, but experts are split over whether it is a sign of dedication or desperation.

Experts can't decide if pseudo-slavery is good or bad? Not quite fatal so far seems to be the verdict? Dear God, who appointed these people "experts"?

Showcasing

2009-07-19T17:09:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the delay, for that you get both of the remaining alleged results of a market-dominated minorities' dominance.

After a comparatively lengthy description of the so-called horrors the black Zimbabwean population has committed against the white minority (tellingly, Chua has omitted the atrocities the Zimbabwean leadership under Mugabe has brought to both whites' and blacks' doors), Chua gives us the mirror-opposite, the shocking knowledge that, yes, wealthy minorities are often undemocratic. She writes-

In the contest between an economically powerful ethnic minority and a numerically powerful impoverished majority, the majority does not always prevail. Instead of a backlash against the market, another likely outcome is a backlash against democracy, favoring the market-dominant minority at the expense of majority will. Examples of this dynamic are extremely common. Indeed, this book will show that the world's most notorious cases of "crony capitalism" all involve a market-dominant ethnic minority--from Ferdinand Marcos's Chinese-protective dictatorship in the Philippines to President Siaka Stevens's shadow alliance with five Lebanese diamond dealers in Sierra Leone to President Daniel Arap Moi's "business arrangements" with Indian tycoons in Kenya today.

That's all she wrote. The basis of an entire suite of despotism apparently only deserves a paragraph made into anything more than a four sentence description with egregious name-dropping. The populist-uprising result she mentioned yesterday, on the other hand, supposedly deserves a multi-paragraph explanation with in depth description of the regime headed by Mugabe.

To be fair to Chua, Ferdinand Marcos and Siaka Stevens are such common household names that they don't need introduction, unlike Robert Mugabe, a completely unknown individual for the primarily American audience that Chua was addressing.

More seriously, the inclusion of this paragraph feels slightly like the now famous liberal showcasing people feel they have to include for the mysterious PC police (who never seem to be around when I'm with them...). I've seen Crash. I know how hard some minorities have had it. I've read all about this. I'm not racist. And we're all supposed to nod knowingly to the speaker while still exchanging nervous glances and pained looks.

Worst yet, Chua seems to have embedded this apologetic sidestepping in between two more obviously questionable arguments. She returns those immediately:

The third and most ferocious kind of backlash is majority-supported violence aimed as eliminating a market-dominant minority. Two recent examples are the mass slaughter of Tutsi in Rwanda and, to a lesser extent, the ethnic cleansing of Croats in former Yugoslavia.

Two sentences in, Chua has already pulled all sorts of red flags. Within the first sentence alone, her parallel wording in the first two potential reactions makes this final one appear odd - the first two were defined by their origin and their opponents, and out of nowhere we see majority-led genocide, without the parallel capacity (minority-led genocide) addressed, or even dismissed.

Furthermore, the examples she selects have particularly complex histories which contradict the picture she seems to be painting, with a lot of general description (the impoverished majority attacks the elite minority with intent to eradicate) supplemented with name dropping, not actual descriptions. In fact, the only explanation she gives fails to even differentiate between the two examples:

In both cases a resented and disproportionately prosperous ethnic minority was attacked by members of a relatively impoverished majority, incited by an ethnonationalist government. In other words, markets and democracy were among the causes of both the Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocides.

Except massive differences between that description and the realities of those horrific atrocities. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, a patchwork of religious, ethnic, and political fault lines lined up in a perfect storm, resulting in a dangerous de facto war between three primary blocs - the muslim Albanians, who had become an elite proxy under Turkish rule; the catholic Croats, who had originally risen to prominence as proxies for the Nazi government but had very effectively refashioned themselves as proxies for the West, building on historical ties between Croats and Italians, Austrians, and other "westerners"; and the Serbs, historically the greatest beneficiaries under pan-slavism and similar "eastern" nationalism, most notably under communism. The opening of the former Yugoslavia threated the Serbs' rule, and ultimately, the Serbs snapped and attacked those they perceived as their greatest historical enemies - the muslims, especially the Albanian Muslims, and the Croats. Ironically, the alleged market-dominant minority very effectively defended itself and avoided in large the Serbs' attacks, at least in its rich sections - countless impoverished Croat villages found all their women raped and their men killed. Ultimately, the violence proved to be undone by the economics, and continued on in purely ethnic terms. Alternatively, the Albanians were massacred much more uniformally. The situation is complex and could be studied for decades without acheiving a proper summary. Chua's very quick analysis seems to have been delivered in good faith, but could easily be interpreted as insensitive.

Alternatively, Rwanda displays a much more complex political event - the first attacks were on moderate Hutu, an preemptive attempt at weakening a potential retaliation of centrist Hutu and Tutsi against Hutu attacks. Combined with continual brutality of the Tutsi minority over the Hutu majority in neighboring Burundi, extensive European meddling, and constant influx of radicals from Uganda, this clearly is a much more complicated situation than Chua seems to be willing to give it credit for.

Next Friday, we'll see Chua finally give her critics a bit of credit.

Where certainty ends and zealotry begins (page 10)

2009-07-17T16:28:00.000-07:00

Amy Chua isn't just writing about a process that can occur. She's, allegedly, talking about something inevitable:

Introducing democracy in these circumstances does not tranform voters into open-minded cocitizens in a national community...

Wait, I thought the point of your book was the combination of laissez-faire capitalism and democracy radicalizing and created ethnic tensions, not drawing from them? Maybe I'm picking at something that's not here, but it seems like Chua is writing from personal experience, the situation of the Phillipines, where lack of regulation and the rise of a Chinese economic elite proceeded later democratization. Getting back to the main point:

Introducing democracy in these circumstances does not tranform voters into open-minded cocitizens in a national community. Rather, the competition for votes fosters the emergence of demagogues who scapegoat the resented minority and foment active ethnonationalist movements demanding that the country's wealth and identity be reclaimed by the "true owners of the nation". (10)

Look at that language - "fosters" not "can foster". Not only is this strangely absolute (and if there's one absolute that holds firm it's that absolutes rarely stand the test of time), but she seems to be making herself bizzarely vulnerable. A single counterexample can destroy her entire statement here, and thereby damage the credibility of the rest of her thesis-meets-book. One, sole, singular example of, Catholics (the rich minority) and Protestants (the not-so-rich majority) in the Netherlands over the past few centuries not killing each other or much of anything on par with Chua's predictions. Before she or any one else complains, she uses other primarily religious shifts as examples several times - the Catholic-Protestant splits in Ireland and the Balkans most memorably and pertinent to this issue.

A few sentences later, however, she's backtracted some:

When free market democracy is pursued in the presence of a market-dominant minority, the almost invariable result is backlash. (10)

Ok, so it's only 99.9% of the time. That's even harder to prove, since the existance of examples or counter-examples means nothing. Now we need ratios. Why didn't Amy Chua look into this, instead of using backdoors like "almost invariable result", or better yet, not have gone down the road of absolute certainty in the first place?

Meanwhile, back in her slightly more calmly worded paragraph:

When free market democracy is pursued in the presence of a market-dominant minority, the almost invariable result is backlash. This backlash typically takes one of three forms. The first is a backlash against markets, targeting the market-dominated minority's wealth. (10)

Hold up a second, isn't that the preferable response? Isn't that what should happen? Or are you suggesting that disproportionate levels of wealth should be encouraged? She goes on to give us the first in depth example since her autobiographical one concerning the Phillipines:

Zimbabwe today is a vivid illustration of the first kind of backlash-- an ethnically targeted anti-market backlash. For several years now President Robert Mugabe has encouraged the violent seizure of 10 million acres of white-owned commercial farmland. As one Zimbabwean explained, "The land belongs to us. The foreigners should not own and here. There is no black Zimbabwean who owns land in England. Why should any European own land here?" Mugabe himself was more explicit: "Strike fear in the heart of the white man, our real enemy!" Most of the country's white "foreigners" are third-generation Zimbabweans. Just 1 percent of the population, they have for generations controlled 70 percent of the country's best land, largely in the form of highly productive three-thousand-acre tobacco and sugar farms. (10-11)

(Lest any one get the wrong idea, I don't support Mugabe. But I don't agree with the position presented here either - welcome to a non-Manichean worldview!)

Frankly, Mrs. Chua, I don't give a damn. The transformation of most of the third world's agricultural fields into commodity plantations (virtually always with either non-edible products or not terribly useful foodstuffs like tea, sugar, coffee, and the like) was the basis of colonialism. This is eighth grade world history, honestly. I'm sure with a degree from Harvard you could grasp at this much better than I -- but what I'm trying to say here is that those plantations (and thereby their owners) were not only symbolic of the brutal colonial regime, but of the continuation of the economic conditions which typified that regime. I know you bring up Latin America collectively as an example later on, so let's get this out of the way, so I don't have to define this when we delve into it: Land redistribution isn't inherently bad. Just say it over and over. Some slacktivist might help make it make sense.

Fundamentally, I don't think Chua sees the disconnect. 1% of the population controlling 70% of the land isn't democracy. And given that they've controlled it over generations, that's also not a free market it any sane definition of it. That's an enormous amount of power undemocratically (and for that matter against the principles of the free market) stolen, yes nearly a century ago, but still stolen. Worse yet, the small group that stole that source of enormous wealth and used it to create a racially-based supremacy over the majority for much of that past century. Now that the majority has turned on that small, violently despotic minority, the rest of the world has withdrawn anything that could be perceived as tacit support, out of misplaced loyalty with that small upper class.

Mugabe is thug and a fool, but ultimately his success comes from over a century of brutal misrule by foreign powers and their descendents - who let Zimbabwe tear itself apart rather than accept that their reign was undemocratic, unprincipled and unfair.

This is the second time Chua has failed to adequately explain the very situation she has decided to write a book about.

(You get to find out the other two "forms of backlash against market-dominant minorities" are tomorrow.)

Some catch-up

2009-07-13T08:42:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm a little behind on World on Fire, sorry. I'm switching to Friday, since hopefully that will make updating a bit easier. In the meantime, however, I'll go through with a mini-post on one of the earlier passages in the book that caught my eye. Jumping in,

For globalization enthusiasts, the cure for group hatred and ethnic violence around the world is straightforward: more markets and more democracy. (9)

I wouldn't consider myself a globalization enthusiast, especially given my opinions on protectionism, but I really can't see what she's trying to say here - it seems almost universally accepted that true democratic representation is a key component in reducing terrorism and violent extremism. For example, Islamism, a popular example of both, has thrived in the least democratic areas of the Muslim world, and has only seen stunted growth in more democratic areas. Where there is some level of democratic representation, as in Morocco or Turkey or the United Arab Emirates, a lengthy battles continues between the democracy and the Islamist forces. This goes further than correlations, as countless politicians from that region have remarked on how the rule of secular, pro-Western despots have steadily radicalized the population, often making them vulnerable to Islamist revolutionaries. As Benazir Bhutto once said, she found herself stonewalled in trying to expand educational and economic opportunities in Pakistan, often by the remains of the dictatorship or the grounds on which the later dictatorial governments were built. Nonetheless, she wanted aid to reach the poor through the semi-secular government without coming through a mosque, which in many cases bred a religiously-defined identity, which first stoked sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni populations, precisely what Chua claims to want to prevent through lesser democracy - what stunted the necessary aid in the first place.

Alternatively, the statement about markets, on the other hand, seems nonsensical. More markets? Does that mean more goods and more products or more exchanges and more buyers? What are we talking about here? Globalization advocates clearly favor opened markets, a lack of national trade barriers, and other means to restructuring markets, not increasing their size (whatever that translates to). Nonetheless, globalization is only one of several alleged solutions to promoting economic as well as political equality; what of us anti-globalization advocates? To put it simply, we try to point out that the correlation of extremism and anti-democratic oppression is dwarfed by a triple correlation between extremism, lack or deficiency of democracy, and poverty. Yet, apparently we neither matter nor exist for Chua, who only describes a pro-globalization position:

Thus after September 11 attacks, Friedman published an op-ed piece pointing to India and Bangladesh as good "role models" for the Middle East and arguing that the solution to terrorism and militant Islam is: "Hello? Hello? There's a message here. It's democracy, stupid!" -- "[m]ulti-ethnic, pluralistic, free market democracy." (9)

I'm just surprised there's any one who takes Thomas Friedman (or for that matter Globalization) seriously. Even stranger though, is that Chua seems to present this as the only alternative to her muddy position, despite the fact that she's characterized this Friedman alternative as consisting of multiple political opinions - pro-democracy, pro-"free market", and pro-Globalization - without discussing alternatives to the alternative that can switch off one or two of those opinions.

At first she seems to lay down a comparatively reasonable conclusion:

Because markets and democracy benefit different ethnic groups in such societies, the pursuit of free market democracy produces highly unstable and combustible conditions. (9)

I'm unclear on how democracy fits into this. Dictatorships actually destabilize countries, often because they pit different ethnic groups against each other with the intention of dividing and conquering. More fundamentally, dictatorships often pit patriotism against rationality, love of country against love of equality and freedom. It's quite difficult for patriotism to stand in the face of outright political violence of that sort, and so, again returning to theoretical impacts, fanaticism on ethnic identity is often a necessary basis for a patriotism strong enough to withstand human decency. We can see this in Sri Lanka, in a situation quite similar to Amy Chua's, but in one regard. The Sinhalese majority attacked the politically and economically influential Tamil minority in a ruthless manner, targeting, in an eery way reminiscent of Rwanda, Sinhalese moderates who opposed the massacre of their compatriots. The only difference? The Sri Lankan government was a transparently failing democracy, not a state keeping up the appearance of democracy despite clear violations of minorities' rights and even basic rule of law. Chua has given some arguments explaining why a "free market" (again carefully examine what that term even means) can be a necessary component to extreme ethnic competition, but nothing concerning democracy, and now she should deal with an obvious counterexample that precisely what she wants to discuss can occur without democratic assistance.

Yet Chua seems unconcerned with whether addressing this, instead continuing and letting a thin piece of her actual opinions peek through:

Markets concentrate enormous wealth in the hands of an "outsider" minority, fomenting ethnic envy [...] (9)

Envy? Ignoring issues with mechanics, that we'll start with on Friday, wanting equality with a newly emerging upper class is envy? As others have said, wanting equality is justice if you're hungry but envy if you're well-fed. Chua had persisted on how unfairly the lower class Filipino servants of her family were treated, but in this moment she let her guard down and showed us her unmediated thoughts, and we saw how little concern she actually has for the situation of the poor. She clearly cares enough about something to write a book, and it's becoming increasingly clear that it's not the horror of the inequality, but maintaining the status quo.

Again, I think we're seeing all the reasons Chua shouldn't have written this book on parade, the most visible being her inability to separate herself from the issue and report on it objectively. Instead of picking apart the violent revolutions and finding a complex interaction of ethnicity and economics, and perhaps finding the ability to criticize her own community in addition to others - faulting both, the elites for their lack of empathy and the majorities for their ends-justify-the-means insanity within most of her examples. And her injection of democracy into it deserves some examination as well. But Chua seems determined on each and every page to look away and fault every one else (recall it was other members of her community, not her family, and especially not her than had supposedly provoked the nativist response) for the anger, sometimes justified anger, directed at her.

Burqa Logic

2009-07-10T14:37:00.000-07:00

They don't want to talk about those people. They don't want to think about those people. So of course they don't want to see those people.

From El Paso to Philadelphia, from one of the most repressive corners of America to a place of supposed "brotherly love" things are getting ugly.

Two things we can draw from this is how willingly the police let both groups discriminate and how suddenly events that sound like they crawled out of the seventies or sixties are popping up in the news.

Both of these minorities, naturally, are unfortunately used to strange coincidences and even the occasional outright bitter hate-rant, unlike most of the rest of us. Remember the Jena 6? Or a certain other case in Louisiana?

Is there more to come though?

One step forward...

2009-07-10T11:36:00.000-07:00

Last month, I wrote on the democratic elections in Iran, India, and the US, and how the popular responses all hinted at broad coalitions forming in response to third different authoritarian ideologies that quite literally, want to watch the world burn.

Perhaps, I spoke too soon. Since then, we've seen some serious set backs in a number of places.

Early in the morning hours of June 28, 2009, the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was dragged from his house still in his pajamas, and put on a plane to Costa Rica. For the past three days, he had had an arrest warrant placed on him by his Attorney General.

The leaders of this coup, most notably the interim president Roberto Micheletti, have already framed this event in the context of Zelaya's "corruption" - that he had supported a non-binding plebiscite concerning the possibility of a constitution convention to address the radical disparities in wealth between the Honduran upper and lower classes and other issues. Only, of course, the media outlets owned by the wannabe banana corporations and the upper-class dominated officers of the military who together led the coup have claimed that he wanted to... get rid of term extensions. A coup, in response, to that? Huh?

The fact that Zelaya had more and more consistently attacked the anti-labor factions of the government and hinted at radically changing Honduran policy to the benefit of labor unions, which threaten the semi-feudalistic caste system in Honduras which in turn supports those same wannabe banana-republic-leading-corporations and military-dominant upper class, of course had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the coup. Right.

Meanwhile, in the US, Palin apparently feels comfortably leaving her post in Alaska with six months left on her term, because of her fan base in the rest of the country. In other words, she's going national. Many have pronounced this political suicide, and perhaps quite rightly, but keep in mind that many authoritarian movements have no real memory - their leaders and policies can change, but they still claim a constancy and unchanging truth. Her base, clearly, doesn't see this as a failure, and thankfully, she needs to convince more people than her fan club of her potential - for the moment.

"For the moment" is the real thin line protecting us there. What happens if voter turnout lowers? What happens if there's another cataclysmic event that she can effectively spin? What happens when the Democrats blow it? We need certainty and stability, not low possibility.

She probably feels so comfortable due to the far right's increasingly distorted perception of the tea parties. They expected giant crowds and massive publicity for their second series of rallies, planned for Independence Day. Instead, they got a few small groups and rather spotty media coverage, because insane and inane rants are only entertaining the first time. Watching reruns of those are rarely captivating.

Nonetheless, "secular" authoritarian extremists have skillfully transformed these failed revolutionary rallies into recruitment camps. The "secular" white supremacists and neo-Nazis have managed to incorporate huge numbers of previously free radicals into their own authoritarian structures. We're seeing a solidification of a minor, radical right wing block, centered on the "secular" aspects of that political landscape.

I say "secular" because the Dominionist and Dominionist-leaning right have so far stayed their distance, even though many have participated in the same tea party rallies and similar events, and there's been an alarming degree of continuity between the conspiracy theories within the Dominionist circles and those in other extremist right wing groups. The anti-Semitic neo-Nazi subgroup and the fanatically pro-Zionist Dominionists have clear ideological rifts that could easily be exploited to divide them. If any one interested in opposing this "loose-bundle" movement actually means it, we need to use this fracture to our advantage.

This is the primary distinction between the modern Western ultra-nationalist palingenic movement and those occurring in the Hindu and Islamic worlds - the Western variant has largely lagged behind the other two (who have already become major political forces in several countries instead of minor influences on larger coalitions as in the US) in part because this split has kept the more violent race-based nationalism from the more widespread and organized faith-based nationalism.

Similar splits existed decades ago in the Middle East and in India - Arab nationalists such as the Baath party in Iraq and Nasser's Arab Union led from Egypt were bitter enemies of various early Islamist groups like the Iranian and Saudi governments and the now national Hindutva movement began as a number of small, local movements as angry at each other as they were at left wing and centrist opponents. Islamists waited out the gradual collapse of Arab nationalism and now dominate much of the Middle East, although the Sunni-Shia split still haunts them. At least three local right wing movements - Shiv Sena in Gujarat, the early Uttar Pradesh movement surrounding the Babri Masjid, and the increasingly alienated upper middle class Brahmins stung by land reforms scattered through out central India - which were frequently in opposition to each other were the base out of which the modern Hindutva movement grew. A parallel movement developed in South India, and the split between these two twin authoritarian groups has been maintained, but it stands that these countless small basic groups merged until two major powers and forced allies remained.

Something similar is brewing in the US. When the splinter radicals build significant alliances, we go from run-of-the-mill extremists into a political force, which all three of these major groups have seen. The two others, however, went further, melding these small angry pockets into sizeable broad movements. That's when India transitioned from panderers to the Hindutva running the legislature to actual Hindutva believers controlling the government. That's when the Islamic world found itself plunging from a variety of horrific despotic governments into a dangerous international Islamist movement.

I don't want that here.

Latin American Troubles

2009-06-29T22:03:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of months, we've been seeing countless examples of violence towards Native groups in Latin America. Most strikingly on June Eighth:

D ozens of people are estimated to have been killed in clashes between police and indigenous activists protesting oil and mining projects in the northern Peruvian Amazonian province of Bagua. Peruvian authorities have declared a military curfew, and troops are patrolling towns in the Amazon jungle. Authorities say up to twenty-two policemen have been killed, and two remain missing. The indigenous community says at least forty people, including three children, were killed by the police this weekend.

Latin American politics seem to work along a highly predictable dichotomy - a loose liberal coalition of radicalized populists and Indigenous groups, and the militant neoconservative-leaning oligarchy. Something similar happened on Sunday in Honduras:

Naturally, the remaining democratic leaders of Latin America immediately suspected American involvement, since American meddling perhaps even defines the region and moreover, a recent American attempt was made against Hugo Chavez. The Obama Administration, however, seems to be adopting the same approach here as in Iran:

Honestly, this makes so sense at all. Those protesting the anti-democratic events in Iran are seen as weak against the threat of the Americans, so endorsing them would only undermine them. Those protesting the illegal actions of the Honduran military see the US as the cause of this or historically of very similar events, and therefore endorsing them would mark a radical shift in American policies and potentially undermine their opposition. Alternatively, Obama might want a counter-American-Intervention streak to their protests since that could very effectively rally the masses.

Nonetheless, things are getting interesting down there.

Obama's Ugly Speech

2009-06-23T23:46:00.000-07:00

Naturally the right wing has been in a fury since Obama's inauguration if not since his election to the presidency, but a surprising amount of flack has been thrown at him from the left as well. Hardly the cult idol that he is often painted as being among the left wing, a significant block of the left outright sees him as little more than another George Bush. While not even close to the largest Obama fan, I take some offense to this, but since Obama's overwhelming insistence on co-operation with the grand old psychotic warmongering party had tainted my opinion of him, I felt rather ambivalent about the whole issue.

Until his speech during his Middle East tour. Naturally, many on the left saw it as just more platitudes little more than what Bush might spout off and more or less came back and back again to a certain refrain:

the point here is that pretty speeches mean nothing

Or rather, that Obama said what Bush said, and that there's neither a difference in their rhetoric nor in the effective it could have.

I can't sit back and let this be said. It's categorically wrong. The collection of Bush quotes masqueraded as lines from Obama's speech don't even cut to the meat of the matter. Obama went further than Bush's lip service ever dared to consider. Please, just read for a moment what Obama apologized for or admitted to an American role in:

More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.

He just admitted American culpability in virtually every anti-democratic state in the Muslim world since the fifties. If that's not monumental, you don't know what is. In the case of Iran, one of the pillars of the Muslim world, and to a lesser extent, Pakistan, another major Muslim country, this is the major point of contention with the US - our support for a bloodthirsty tyrant out of fear of an imagined communist threat.

But I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, "Be conscious of God and speak always the truth."

Again, the left often shrieks that Bush said virtually the same thing - praising the Koran and speaking positively of the Muslim faith, yet he never actually quoted from the Koran when asking for a free and open dialogue between Western and Islamic societies. Obama just showed the Islamic world his willingness to speak to them while acknowledging their beliefs and understanding of the world in way the Bush never managed. The Islamic world called Bush on his bluff and he did nothing. Obama's laying his cards down on the table and showing them at least a few jacks.

It was Islam - at places like Al-Azhar University - that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.It was Islam - at places like Al-Azhar University - that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.

In one long paragraph, Obama acknowledged in depth the debt of Western society owes to various Islamic cultures which reigned supreme as the intellectual center of the world for its inventions. Another major issue for would-be Islamists is the apparent lack of respect that much of the modern world shows for Islamic societies all the while living within situations made possible by the advances under Islamic learning. Just as before he's deflating their argument - forcing a necessary change both in terms of American policy and (hopefully) Islamic perception of the United States.

Moreover, freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one's religion. That is why there is a mosque in every state of our union, and over 1,200 mosques within our borders. That is why the U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it.

Or, the shorter version, the US isn't France - we respect the religious rights of Muslims, neither hiding behind a false claim to secularism nor outright attacks on a religious minority, but respect the Muslims in our lands. These few words alone undermine much of the Islamist boogie-man perception of America with excellent skill, explaining that our customs are not their customs, but that we respect their individual rights to continue those practices with minimal interference to others within our borders.

We also know that military power alone is not going to solve the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That is why we plan to invest $1.5 billion each year over the next five years to partner with Pakistanis to build schools and hospitals, roads and businesses, and hundreds of millions to help those who have been displaced. And that is why we are providing more than $2.8 billion to help Afghans develop their economy and deliver services that people depend upon.

The antagonistic invasive empire will... rebuild hospitals? Again with the Islamist narrative destroying.

The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.

Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society. And just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel's security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank. Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress.

Yes, he says in the abstract, but a direct call from the US President to cease building Israeli settlements and for Israel to actively assist development in Palestine is not just words. It's a clear challenge to decades of Israeli-American policies that ignore or actively attack Palestinian sovereignty, legitimacy, solidarity, and equality. That's not nothing.

In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government.

Holy crap! He just outright said exactly what every one in the Middle East has been saying for years - that the US played a central role in violent anti-democratic suppression of Muslim-majority countries, that we killed Iran's nascent democracy and led them down a road of brutal dictatorship. There are people out there claiming that this is nothing important? Imagine, if you will, China not only refusing to admit the clear suppression and illegitimacy of its rule in Tibet but moreover that every major official in China refused to speak on the role of their government in Tibet, to even acknowledge the existence of a previously independent Tibet. Now imagine such a policy existing for generations, in ever medium - educational, administrative, economic, etc, no one acknowledged that Tibet had at one point been an independent state, not that it was justified in being such an entity, but that it even was. Imagine that even non-state-associated media goes along with a total gag order. Unsurprisingly, after more than forty years, the entire population has guessed, based on the total vacuum of information that the entire populace of the country would largely be ignorant of this simple fact. (This isn't terribly different from the real situation, but the insanity's been cranked up to US-on-Mossadeq level.)

China wouldn't be the laughing stock of the international community but outright feared and hated. They weren't just oppressing people, refusing to acknowledge their role, but refusing to acknowledge the existence of the oppression, and on an extensive scale.

That is why there were and still often are rallies filled with chants of "Death to America" in Iran. They hate us. They hate us more than most people can possibly understand, because until a few weeks ago the average American knew nothing of Iran except that they hurt us by taking hostages and that they're presided over by a despotic theocracy. Mossadeq? Reza Pahlavi Shah? Savak Secret Police? Those meant nothing to the average American.

And Iranians knew it. We didn't look away, but explained that the existence of a car with our license plate in their living room was coincidental.

In short, that is why they hate us. And to suggest that a brave speech addressing precisely these issues is indistinguishable from "they hate us for our freedom" or any other example of Bush-esque rhetoric is to fail to understand the impact the lack of self-criticism America has shown has had on the world.

It wasn't a pretty speech. It was ugly. And both the Islamic world and America needed that exact speech at that exact moment.

Fighting Back

2009-06-15T09:15:00.000-07:00

I haven't said this yet on this blog, but we can prioritize. There are three major bottom-up movements that merit special attention, largely because each has been successful at building major, international coalitions and all three have at least briefly run major nations' governments. These are the Islamist movement, the Hindutva movement (a Hindu mirror to Islam-based extremism with heavy anti-immigrant rhetoric added for effect), and a loose bundle of Western Hemisphere organizations (with both "secular" and religious branches, the Minutemen who have operations in countless states in the US; the Assemblies of God which has major contingents in virtually all American countries, South Korea, the Philippines, and has had significant growth in Africa; Operation Rescue; etc). All of these major movements thankfully have significant splits that manage to divide them, quite effectively at times. Alternatively, we have to view victories over any piece of these movements as hindering only a small section of said movement.

Nonetheless, the past year has done well showing how limited in appeal these incredibly anti-democratic movements truly are. Last November, McCain, the presidential candidate who most explicitly linked himself to that "loose movement" and chose a member of the Assemblies of God as his vice presidential candidate, lost in one of the most pronounced electoral decisions in recent American history.

Indian national elections in the middle of May showed a similar contempt for the Hindutva Movement's coalition, the BJP. The circumstances of this victory, however, suggest something slightly different, and hopefully a stronger reason to hope. In the wake of the Mumbai attacks in late 2008, anti-Muslim sentiments reached a boiling point and rallies across India convinced Muslims that they were living in an increasingly hostile environment. This past election, they block voted for Muslim-centered third parties for the first time in Indian history. In spite of this and the massive economic meltdown the Congress Party, BJP's major competitor, won nation-wide nearly twice as many seats them, and gained the ability to form the next government. This is equivalent of the Democrats winning by a two-to-one margin in 2010 with the hispanic and black communities voting for a Green candidate. High voter turnout among South Indians probably played the largest role in preventing another BJP-based government (the latest one was Congress-based, but several shorter ones earlier in the decade were BJP-based), but could the high voter turnout be masking true feelings? South Indians can still feel sympathy for their variant of the Hindutva, while voting against the North Indian Hindutva's front of the BJP by voting for the Congress Party. The relative collapse of the Communist Party of India's base, however, suggests otherwise - that the left and center in South India combined and voted for the Congress Party to prevent the BJP from winning.

Finally, over the past weekend, the obviously fraudulent re-election of Ahmadinejad ignited the powderkeg of Iran, where a sizeable section of the populace seems to have more or less regretted the Islamic Revolution since the eighties. Iran is acting like Burma, shutting down internet portals and cell phone towers in an attempt to silence the protests. Already there are reports of secret police and militias firing on unarmed civilians, and there's been at least one death.

To be fair, Iran's predominately shiite population shouldn't be used as representative of the entire Islamic world, but it can easily be seen as increasing hostility towards shiite Islamists from shiite moderates. Unlike the recent elections in the US and India, however, this isn't the undermining of a major anti-democratic movement within its supposed base, but of the significantly smaller of two branches of a major anti-democratic movement in one of its moderately important bases. The Iranian government's role in terrorism and anti-democratic activities on a global scale is completely dwarfed by the largesse of wahhabi Saudi Arabia or the extensive network known as Al Qaeda. It's not quite the same thing, and not just because their government didn't have the decency to honor the actual election. Nonetheless, we're either going to see the Iranian government have to crack down on a soviet scale, or Iran will free itself. I certainly hope that the Ayatollah chooses wisely.

Stepping back from the details of each of these cases, there clearly is something hopeful going on here. We're seeing people fighting back for the first time in a long while.

Moving to what's national news for me, there are two more cases of attempted domestic terrorism. In Maine, a man attempting to build two dirty bombs in his garage, a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi, described by virtually every one they've interviewed so far as abusive, was shot by his wife. In all honesty, my first thoughts were "give her a damn big medal". Right-wing survivalists, of course, are criticizing her:

The fact that the government hasn’t released this information makes me suspect that they think a larger game is afoot. The fact that his wife didn’t tell anyone about his activity prior to deciding to off him makes me think she was at the very least O.K. with whatever he was planning. But for his degenerate character pushing his wife to the limit, we may have seen a major terror incident on our soil not directly connected to Islam.

No, pretty much every report I've read on this suggest that he had her completely terrified, so this little speculation is not only unfounded by idle. Having actually lived in an abusive situation, I can say that certain people will (pardon my French) scare the shit out of you and fuck with you until you are completely paralyzed and think there's only three options: suicide, murder, or slavery. But leaving behind the blame-the-victim games that the rightwing and para-rightwing (which this blog claimes not to be), what was that last part?

But for his degenerate character pushing his wife to the limit, we may have seen a major terror incident on our soil not directly connected to Islam.

Not only is this old, old, old, news given that since this article came out the Holocaust Museum was shot up, Tiller was murdered, and somewhere around twenty other people were shot by various anti-immigration crazies, but more importantly, how is this not directly connected with Islam. As near as I can tell, this is not connected with Islam.

I say not directly because the various neo-Nazi groups in America have been quietly aligning themselves with Marxist and Islamist groups for the past few years at least. There are confirmed reports that neo-Nazis were at many of the “pro-Palestine” marches held recently(such as this one in Toronto) and the NSM has woven leftist anti-Zionist talking points into their own platform. Their own website promotes this New York Times Op-Ed by Islamist Rashid Khalidi which is some of the vilest anti-Israel propaganda published by the MSM. Neo-Nazis are not a threat separate from the various domestic terror groups operating in America, but just the frayed edge of a tapestry of violent anti-Americanism that has festered here for too long.

Except, Cummings wasn't even a member of any Neo-Nazi organization; he was applying for membership when his wife shot him. Not directly connected doesn't mean what you think it means. Half of those sites don't mention Islamism at all, at least anymore, and for that matter, they paint a picture of allying with Islamists over a single issue: the rabid anti-Semitism that both groups often share. Also, if Rashid Khalidi is an anti-Semite, so are a good number of Jews. He is critical of Israel and has made some rather dubious statements in the past, but calling him an Islamist because of that weakens the word to simply mean "Muslim (or even Muslim-looking) that I disagree with". Throughout his speeches, Khalidi has insisted on the illegality of killing civilians, a clear condemnation of both Palestineans and Israelis. His mother is a Lebanese Christian. Consider for a moment that the people squacking about this are the same as those that raised all the fuss over Bill Ayers. What has he said or done that actually threatens Israel?

Ultimately, this seems like a freakish new variant of an old, dumb argument.

Nonetheless, a second recent attack falls into a similar pattern. In southern Arizona, two people, a father and child, were killed by two Minutemen, not because of their race or politics, but in a theft. Why would those who claim to be upholding the law at great personal cost break the law, you may ask:

Their motive was financial, Dupnik said.
"The husband who was murdered has a history of being involved in narcotics and there was an anticipation that there would be a considerable amount of cash at this location as well as the possibility of drugs," Dupnik said.
[...]

Dupnik said Forde continued working through Friday to raise a large amount of money to make her anti-illegal immigrant operation more sophisticated.

The mother and wife got a hold of one of their guns. God bless her, I hope she didn't wait a single second before firing. Early reports indicate that she was seriously wounded during the attack. Once again, big shiny medal.

Apologetics for Despotism

2009-06-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

Before we start the book, I want to lay down the basics: who is Amy Chua, what is the point of this book, and how does any of this have anything to do with a threat to our democracy?

Chua is a professor at Yale Law School, ethnically Chinese, but with a family widely scattered through out Asia and the Americas (with several relatives in rather well-to-do positions in the Philippines and Indonesia among other nations). Above all she comes across as highly conflicted, in the way modern upper-classes only can - she enjoys the wealth of her family, but she seems to fear the negative repercussions it may create, and, she argues, has already created.

Feeling divided and ambivalent is perfectly fine. Some might even call it the human condition. Chua's thesis, however, seems less ambiguous and more about having her cake and eating it too. In the wake of the Iraq War, however, a new edition of her book was released, with a new epilogue, wherein Chua finally gave us a succinct explanation of her message, her reasoning, and what she wished to convey as she wrote the book:

A final clarification. This book is not about blame, but about unintended consequences. My own view, for example, is that the results of democratization in Indonesia have been disastrous. But if forced to place the blame somewhere, I would point to thirty years of plundering autocracy and crony capitalism by Suharto. Similarly, in Iraq, overnight elections might well bring undesirable results. But that is not democracy's fault. On the contrary, if anything, the blame rests with the cruelly repressive regime of Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, this doesn't take away from the reality that given the conditions that actually exist now in many postcolonial countries - conditions created by history, colonialism, divide-and-conquer policies, corruption, autocracy - the combination of laissez-faire capitalism and unrestrained majority rule may well have catastrophic consequences. (293-294)

There's the mechanics for being an apologetic of Chua's stripes; denigrate democratic government so that despotism is potentially an acceptable alternative. But towards the end of this explanation, Chua touches on the truth - she's using democracy as a short hand for unrestrained majority rule, and as any fourth grader should be able to tell you if our education system wasn't in complete and total disintegration, minority rights need to be not only protected in democracies, but are a vital aspect of every functional democracy. Chua nearly admits to having used, perhaps even unconsciously, a bit of slight of hand. The lack of minority rights should be a signal of undemocratic practices and a frail and failing democracy, not an inherent aspect of democracy.

Her sudden use of the longer term "laissez-faire capitalism" indicates a similar switching between multiple imprecisely identical terms. Throughout most of her book, Chua uses the terms "democracy" and the "free market" as the deadly components of the process she sees, only to exchange those for "unrestrained majority rule" and "laissez-faire capitalism" haltingly in this section of the epilogue. None of these terms is ever truly defined, but a passing examination seems to suggest that she uses both "free market" and "laissez-faire" in their colloquial, not their technical, senses. The economic situation she wants to talk about is an absence of the government from the economic sphere, with the major exception of maintenance of "order", whatever that can mean.

At its core, that is the most dangerous political issue of our time - how a new meaning of "free market" has evolved, having shed its concerns that a wide variety of consumers and producers must be in the given market, that entrance into the market must be easy for both consumers and producers, that exiting the market be easy for both consumers and producers, that consumers be completely informed about the products being sold to them, and so on. The new "free market" has some how managed to carry the connotation of all the benefits those bring, while only meaning the absence of overt government interference in the market - the aspect of Adam Smith's theory most directly tied to the era he formulated that brilliant idea in, and an obvious swipe at chartered corporations, the ancestors of modern non-chartered conglomerates, who now advocate for total lack of government oversight.

Alternatively, "laissez-faire" has been similarly shifted, now including government oversight within specific circumstances, usually designed to maintain the status quo - in other words removing the ability of "true" laissez-faire systems to theoretically allow the system to heal itself, while maintaining its ability to harm the system.

In short, from its inception, a loose use of terms damages Amy Chua's World on Fire. Before we even address the validity of her thesis, we're trapped with two constantly shifting definitions. Before we can even explore her various examples, we need to take an elaborate detour, explaining how the "free market" "democracies" that worry her are neither "free markets" nor "democracies" if they behave the way she claims they behave.

We're in for a long review here, folks.

Derailed

2009-06-10T23:12:00.000-07:00

I'm afraid I forgot to mention the secondary purpose of this blog in my first post. The threats on democracy go far beyond a book which scarcely circulated outside of a few private circles. No, that is merely the threat we face from above - from a ruling class that increasingly fears their ability to keep us duped. A dry, secular fear of angry peasants who might resort to violence has bred affection for anti-democratic means on an international scale, but oppression is like Baskin-Robins, it comes in many flavors.

A second grave danger comes from outside of those private circles, rather from a different set of exclusive clubs, the fringes of culture, seeing themselves as most pure, most sacrosanct and most awesome.

Over the past few weeks, there have been four events which stand in my mind.

18 days ago, four Muslim men were arrested for plotting to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and then attack an Air National Guard base in New York, all in retaliation for civilian deaths in Afghanistan.

11 days ago, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad opened fire on military recruiters in Arkansas, killing one soldier and critically wounding another, clearly a response to the military actions in the Middle East.

10 days ago, George Tiller was shot, in a church no less, by Scott Roeder, who was also linked to vandalism against a Kansas City clinic. His intentions were made clear within a matter of days as he recorded a manifesto from within his prison - denouncing Tiller as a "baby-killer".

This morning, Stephen T. Johns, a security guard at the National Holocaust Museum, prevented lone gunman James von Brunn from killing multiple civilians, but paid the ultimate price.

The last is most disturbing. It combines the virulent anti-Semitism of the first, the clear aggression against the state's legitimacy of the second, and the increasingly terrifying pattern of right wing violence of the third.

Further, there's no goal, no veneer of sanity or rational. Just hatred. And bullets.

More than anything, this blog needs to catalog these actions and call them what they are - threats to democracy. The United States and the other countries of the world can overcome the sporadic yet overwhelming violence of extremist. But if our elites lead us away from democratic government, how can we expect to defend ourselves against this sort of thing?

Look to the Shah's Iran. Look to Musharraf's Pakistan. Look to Indira Gandhi's India. The destruction of democracy leaves people crippled and defenseless. Extremists convert by extorting weaknesses, transforming people who have lost everything into people who have everything to lose. Those who do not submit, are crushed, with no means of escape or self-defense. That is the fate we could easily face in my country if we don't turn back two tides: cultural extremism and crony anti-democratic politics. Ultimately, this is one battle, but with two fronts.

Good night and good luck, because we need it.

Greetings!

2009-06-07T23:05:00.000-07:00

I suppose I should christen this blog before it sets sail in the blogosphere.

Its name is actually two, avinash and aravind, both from Sanskrit. Scholars often translate avinash as indestructible, but that buries the connotations it evokes all but completely. It comes from vinaaze, meaning not only destruction, but decay, ruin, or dissolution. In short, it means preservable, salvageable, something that can or perhaps even will avoid the unfortunate consequences of the laws of thermodynamics. Something that can continue indefinitely.

Aravind is a much less complex translation but an even richer meaning. On its face, it means lotus, but leaving the meaning there is quite inadequate, as the lotus occupied a role of importance within ancient Indian culture more central than roses, lillies, carnations, and daisies combined for Western Civilization, and rivalled only by the obsession of certain East Asia countries for cherry blossums. Brahmanical India had mistakenly concluded that the landmasses of the world followed the lead set by the Indian subcontinent and were arranged in an alternating pattern of peninsula and gulf, in the manner of a lotus blossum. The lotus was more than a symoblic epitome of natural beauty, but also the pivot of the earth's very shape. It was believed that eating the lotus' root would embark great wisedom, from ingesting the base of the plan of the universe. Aravind was both beauty and basis of existance, as well as the physical manifestation of worldly knowledge.

Neither personal taste nor random decision fully dictated the choice of the name avinasharavind. The first project on this blog will examine the modern era's avinasharavind, democracy, that which must not perish and forms both the pinnacle of human acheivement and the source of structure without our modern world. A recounting of democracy's founding is not necessary at this time, but rather defense of its worth. Throughout the world, the past decades have seen the rapid growth of despotic movements, from the establishment of Islamic, Christian, and Hindu hegemons to the continual abuse of human rights at the hands of secular dictatorships sprinkled across the world. Democracy is avinash, it will rise again, like a phoenix, from the ashes of oppression, but we have the choice of deciding if it must fall only to slowly rebuild or whether it can continue its reign without interruption.

Therefore, in the manner of the Slacktivist for the Left Behind franchise, and Cleolinda on Twilight and its sequels, I hope to pick apart Amy Chua's World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability page by page, hoping not to refute her experiences and her studies, but to address her fear of democracy decaying into mob rule. Her novel has enjoyed limited popularity outside of politico insiders in the United States. Still, as the right wing in that leader of the "free" world increasingly entrench themselves in bitter identity politics, often using her work as justification, we need to examine her work with an open mind, less mocking and condemning than my two predecessors. After all, her thesis gives us a choice between democracy or a "free market economy", leaving us with several choices, only one of which is a rejection of democracy. My intention is to enrich her work, addressing both the validity of her thesis as well as the various topics it touches on.

So, please join me next Saturday for the first installment of this dissection of Amy Chua's World on Fire.